It will amuse your friends to read this letter and the thirty-fifth Psalm to them. Read it to your father and Mr. Wibird. I wonder what our Braintree Churchmen will think of this! Mr. Duché is one of the most ingenious men, and best characters, and greatest orators in the Episcopal order, upon this continent. Yet a zealous friend of Liberty and his country.[55]
I long to see my dear family. God bless, preserve, and prosper it. Adieu.
FOOTNOTES:
[54] Dr. Samuel Cooper, well known as a zealous patriot and pastor of the church in Brattle Square. The edifice, at that time esteemed the finest interior in Boston, and yet much admired, had been completed about a year. It has now gone the way of all old structures in Boston. Mr. Adams had become a proprietor and a worshipper at this church.
[55] He held out tolerably well for two years. But the apparent preponderance of British power on the one side, and his sectarian prejudices against the Independents of New England on the other, finally got the better of him, so far as to dictate the appeal to General Washington, in the gloomiest period of the war, which forever forfeited for him all claim to the commendation above bestowed.
20. John Adams.
Philadelphia, 18 September, 1774.
In your last you inquire tenderly after my health, and how we found the people upon our journey, and how we were treated.
I have enjoyed as good health as usual, and much more than I know how to account for, when I consider the extreme heat of the weather and the incessant feasting I have endured ever since I left Boston.