 | | to Him by definitions and by logic; one might as well make love to a lady by the first book of Euclid. ''He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" That throb of protecting, all-embracing love which thrilled through your heart for this child taught you more of God than father's whole library. "He that loveth not knoweth not God." The old Bible is philosophical, and eminent for its common sense. Of course this child will make a fool of you. Never mind; the follies of love are remedial.
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| | As to a system of education, it will be an amusement for you to get that up. Every human being likes to undertake to dictate for some other one. Go at it with good cheer. But, whatever you do, don't teach her
French.
Give her a good Saxon-English education; and, if she needs a pasture-land of foreign languages, let her learn Latin, and, more than that, Greek. Greek is the morning-land of languages, and has the freshness of early dew in it which will never exhale.
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| | The French helped us in our late war: for that I thank them; but from French philosophy and French democracy, may the good Lord deliver us. They slew their Puritans in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the nation ever since has been without a moral sense. French literature is like an eagle with one broken wing. What the Puritans did for us English people, in bringing in civil liberty, they lacked. Our revolutions have been gradual. I predict that theirs will come by and by with an explosion.
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| | Meanwhile, our young men who follow after French literature become rakes and profligates. Their first step in liberty is to repeal the ten commandments, especially the seventh. Therefore I consider a young woman in our day misses nothing who does not read French. Decorous French literature is stupid, and bright French literature is too wicked for anything. So let French alone.
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| | She threatens to be pretty, does she? So much the worse for you and her. If she makes you too much trouble by and by, send her up to my academy, and I will drill her, and make a Spartan of her.
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| | As to what you say about religion, and the ministry, and the schoolmaster, what can I say on this sheet of paper? Briefly then. No, I am
not
in any sense an unbeliever in the
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