“Your letter, my dear Sir, affects me greatly. It represents a state of mind into which I also should have fallen, had it not been for that support which you are not disposed to think necessary for the soul of man.
“I, too, identified my own hopes with hopes for mankind, and at the price of any self-sacrifice would have promoted the good of my fellow-creatures. I too have been disappointed in being undeceived; but having learnt to temper hope with patience, and when I lift up my spirit to its Creator and Redeemer, to say, not with the lips alone, but with the heart also, ‘Thy will be done,’ I feel that whatever afflictions I have endured, have been dispensed to me in mercy, and am deeply and devoutly thankful for what I am, and what I hope to be when I shall burst my shell.
“O Sir! Religion is the one thing needful. With-
* My father’s first letter to —— has not been preserved. |
| 12 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 46. |
“That the natural world, by its perfect order, displays
evident marks of design, I think you would admit, for it is so palpable that it
can only be disputed from perverseness or affectation. Is it not reasonable to
suppose that the moral order of things should in like manner be coherent and
harmonious? It is so if there be a state of retribution after death. If that be
proved, everything becomes intelligible, just, beautiful, good. Would you not,
from the sense of fitness and of justice, wish that it should be so? And is
there not enough of wisdom and power apparent in creation to authorise us in
inferring, that
| Ætat. 46. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 13 |
“Pursue this feeling, and it will lead you to the cross of Christ.
“I never fear to avow my belief that warnings from the other world are sometimes communicated to us in this; and that, absurd as the stories of apparitions generally are, they are not always false; but that the spirits of the dead have sometimes been permitted to appear. I believe this, because I cannot refuse my assent to the evidence which exists of such things, and to the universal consent of all men who have not learnt to think otherwise. Perhaps you will not despise this as a mere superstition, when I say that Kant, the profoundest thinker of modern ages, came, by the severest reasoning, to the same conclusion.
“But if these things are, then there is a state after death; and if there be a state after death, it is reasonable to presume that such things should be.
“You will receive this as it is meant. It is hastily and earnestly written, in perfect sincerity, in the fulness of my heart. Would to God that it might find its way to yours. In case of your recovery, it would reconcile you to life, and open to you sources of happiness to which you are a stranger.
“But whether your lot be for life or death, dear Sir, God bless you!
