H. M. to H. G. A.

I do not like to say anything after your last letter. I do not like to touch it, or the state of mind it produces in me. Yet it is right to tell you that it does so work upon any one mind as it does upon mine.— What an emancipation it is,—to have escaped from the little enclosure of dogma, and to stand,—far indeed from being wise,—but free to learn! How I wonder at myself now for having held (and very confidently held forth upon it, I am ashamed to say) that at all events it was safe to believe dogma: that for instance, whether there was a future state or not, it was safe and comfortable to believe it:—that if, even, there was no God, serving as a model to Man,—the original of the image,—it was safe and tranquillizing to take for granted that there was. The enormity of this mistake was not fully apparent to me till last year, when a young man destined for the church, but not satisfied about all its doctrines, and in a state of fluctuation about his duty altogether, laid down as the one certain thing in his own and every other case, that at all events it was safe to take for granted what the Church prescribed. The very first step he took from this position was to conclude that his difficulties about a leading doctrine arose from personal sinfulness, and must be resolutely put down.