My best love to Mrs. White, and to Lotty, and to Clara.
Ever, my dear White, affectionately yours.
Mr. Frank Stone, A.R.A.
Tavistock House, Tavistock Square, London, W.C.,
Monday, Dec. 13th, 1858.
My dear Stone,
Many thanks for these discourses. They are very good, I think, as expressing what many men have felt and thought; otherwise not specially remarkable. They have one fatal mistake, which is a canker at the foot of their ever being widely useful. Half the misery and hypocrisy of the Christian world arises (as I take it) from a stubborn determination to refuse the New Testament as a sufficient guide in itself, and to force the Old Testament into alliance with it—whereof comes all manner of camel-swallowing and of gnat-straining. But so to resent this miserable error, or to (by any implication) depreciate the divine goodness and beauty of the New Testament, is to commit even a worse error. And to class Jesus Christ with Mahomet is simply audacity and folly. I might as well hoist myself on to a high platform, to inform my disciples that the lives of King George the Fourth and of King Alfred the Great belonged to one and the same category.
Ever affectionately.
Mr. B. W. Procter.
Tavistock House, Sunday, Dec. 18th, 1858.
My dear Procter,