SHEFFIELD, Nov. 26, 1847. MY DEAR FRIEND,—I have thought much of what you said the other morning; and though I expect to see you gain in a fortnight, I cannot let the interval pass without a few words. The new interest in your mind, as far is it is spiritual, and the new measures you propose to adopt in your church, so far as I understand them, have my entire sympathy. But I demur to your manner of stating the speculative grounds of this change in your feeling and view. Certainly my mind is, and has been or a long time, running in a direction contrary to your present leanings. I cannot think that human nature is o low and helpless as you seem to think, nor that the gospel is so entirely the one and exclusive remedy. And yet I agree, too, with much (in its practical bearing) of what you say, in the direction that your mind is taking. I have often insisted in the pulpit that the people do not yet understand Christianity; its spiritual nature, however, rather than its positive facts, its simple love and disinterestedness rather than its supernaturalism, were to me the points where they have failed. . . . fully admit, too, the need of progress in our denomination, but I do not believe in any grand new era to be [197] introduced into its history by the views you urge, or any other views. All good progress must be gradual. If there is a revolution in your mind, does it follow that that must be the measure for others, for your brethren, for the denomination, in past or present time?
Your sympathies are wide; the tendency to outward action is strong in you; your generous nature opens the doors of your mind to light from every quarter; need is, to carry on a strong discriminating work in a mind like yours. With your nature, so utterly opposed to everything sluggish and narrow, you have need of a large and well-considered philosophy, "looking before and after," and settling all things in their right places, and questioning every new-coming thought with singular caution, lest it push you from your propriety or consistency. In truth, you quite mistake me when you say that I have not studied your mind. I have watched its workings with the greatest interest, often with admiration, and sometimes—may I say?—with anxiety. There was a time when I greatly feared that you would go the lengths of Parker. The turn in your mind to what I deem healthier views took place about the time I went abroad; and the relief your letters gave me while I was in Europe, you can hardly have suspected. Now, it seems to me, you are liable to go to the opposite extreme. The truth is, your intellectual insight seems to me greater than your breadth of view, your penetration greater than your comprehension; and the consequence has been a course of thought, as I believe you are aware, somewhat zigzag.
Have I not thought of you, my dear fellow? I guess I have; and among other things I have so thought of you that I now entirely confide in the magnanimity of [198] your mind to receive with candor all this, and more if I should say it,—saying it, as I do, in the truest love and cherishing of you.
My love to E. and all the phalanstery.
As ever, yours,
ORVILLE DEWEY.
P. S. I read this letter to my wife last evening, and I told her of your criticism on the sermon at Providence. She made the very rejoinder that I made to you,—"The power to cast one's self on the great Christian resource, to put one's self in relation with God the Father and with spiritual help, is the very power which he denies to human nature, and the very thing that Mr. H. contended for." Nor yet do I like your mode of statement, for Christianity does not represent itself to me as a sort of Noah's Ark, and human nature as in stormy waters,—to be saved if it can get its foot on that plank, and not otherwise. I prefer my figure of the shower specially sent on the feeble and half-withered plant. All the divines of every school have always said that there is light enough in nature, if with true docility and love men would follow it. Christ came to shed more light on our path, not the only light; to lift up the lame man, not to create limbs for him or to be limbs for him.
And I confess, too, that I do not like another aspect in the state of your mind; and that is, that your newly wakened zeal should fasten, as it seems to do, upon the positive facts and the supernaturalism of Christianity. Not, as I think, that I undervalue them. I do not know if any rational and thinking man that lays more stress on them in their place than I do. But certainly there is something beyond to which they point; and that is, the [199] deep spiritualism of the Gospel, the deep heart's repose and sufficiency in things divine and infinite. If your mind had fastened upon this as the newly found treasure in the Gospel, I should have been better satisfied. I am writing very frankly to you, as you are wont to write to me (and I believe that you and I can bear these terms, and bless them too), and therefore I will add that my greatest distrust of your spiritual nature turns to this very point: whether you have, in the same measure as you have other things, that deep heart's rest, that quiet, profound, all-sufficing satisfaction in the infinite resource, in the all-enbosoming love of the All-Good, in silent and solitary communion with God, settling and sinking the soul, as into the still waters and the ocean depths. Your nature runs to social communions, to visible movements, to outwardness, in short, more than to the central depths within. The defects in your preaching, which I have heard pointed out by the discerning, are the want of consistency,—of one six months with another six months,—and the want of spiritual depth and vitality; of that calm, deep tone of thought and feeling that goes to the depths of the heart.
God knows that I do very humbly attempt to criticise another's religion and preaching, being inexpressibly concerned about the defects of my own. And, dear friend, I speak to you as modestly as I do frankly. I may be wrong, or I may be only partly right. But in this crisis I think that I ought to say plainly what I feel and fear. I cannot bear, for every reason,—for your sake and for the sake of the church, in which, for your age, you are rooting yourself so deeply,—that you should make any misstep on the ground upon which you seem to be entering.
[200] To Rev. William Ware.