My dear Sophy,
I left Brighton on Friday with something of a heavy heart. I saw I had grieved you where I had really no intention of doing so: that was painful to me and I must regret it. I express to you my strong regrets. But oh! tenthousandfold deeper was the sad conviction forced upon me, that the advance you have made,—shall I vex you if I say honestly and openly,—Romewards, since I last saw you was very great. I believe you are as yet unconscious of your own tendency. I told you so at Lyng. But in honesty I must tell you, my dear Sophy, I tremble for you. It is such awfully slippery ground. It is such a pleasant accommodation of religion to our fallen nature. It so feeds our impulsiveness and fortifies our natural religionism.
Will you forgive me if, with a cousin’s, I hope more than that, anxious love I beseech you to ‘consider your ways,’ and bring your soul before God in this matter. Pray don’t starve your soul on gilded husks while bread lies at your feet in your Father’s house.
I know more than one amiable creature who began as you have done, and has landed in Rome....
Dear Sophy, don’t trust your head, much less your heart, much less any fallen man or imperfect church under the sun. Trust Jesus, Jesus only, Jesus wholly, Jesus exclusively.
I trust this note will not make you wrath against me.... Be sure of one thing, I banter no more, where feeling is evidently so deep. Henceforth I will try and pray fervently for your poor soul’s conversion to God.”
“March 14th./60.
My dear ...
If I do not say that you have written me a most ridiculous letter, it will be more from respect to its motive than its matter,—or purport. I know people can work themselves up to any exaggerated view of things, yet I can hardly believe that, if you have half the sense people say you have, you can on sober reconsideration really believe that there was the smallest ground for your tirade in my objection to hear a Church—a house of God at least, spoken of and criticised as if it were a right thing to visit it as you would a theatre, and remain a looker-on while others were worshipping. ‘Seeking occasion against’ men was not the characteristic of the followers of the Jesus whose name you reiterate so often. I believe this was the whole feeling with which I spoke, exactly as I should have done if it had been a Baptist Meeting-house you were commenting on,—as I believe you would not have commented on a Baptist Meeting-house.
You may, if you please, take my word for it that I am not going over to Rome, among whose partisans, however, I must say that I have never—no, nor I think from any other denomination under the sun—heard the same virulent abuse of those who have at least ‘one Lord,’ if not ‘one faith and one baptism,’—that I have from the Puritan portion of our own Church: and I am sure no God and no Church was ever served by the one or the other....