since he was fifteen years old. He seldom went to church but because it
was the fashion, and, when there, seldom spared a thought from his own
temporal concerns, to a future state and a governing Deity. All those
expansions of soul produced by meditation on the power and goodness of our
Maker, and those raptures that flow from accommodating all our actions to
his will, and from consciousness of his approbation and presence, you
discovered to be strangers to his breast, and therefore you scrupled to
unite your fate with his.

It was not enough that this man had never been seduced into disbelief;
that his faith was steadfast and rational without producing those
fervours, and reveries, and rhapsodies, which unfit us for the mixed
scenes of human life, and breed in us absurd and fantastic notions of our
duty or our happiness; that his religion had produced all its practical
effects, in honest, regular, sober, and consistent conduct.

You wanted a zealot; a sectary; one that should enter into all the
trifling distinctions and minute subtleties that make one Christian the
mortal foe of another, while, in their social conduct, there is no
difference to be found between them.

I do not repeat these things to upbraid you for what you then were, but
merely to remind you of the inconsistency of these notions with your
subsequent conduct. You then, at the instance of your father and at my
instance, gave them up; and that compliance, supposing your scruples to
have been undissembled, gave you a still greater interest in our
affections.

You never gave me reason to suppose that you repented of this
compliance. I never saw you after your engagement, but you wore a cheerful