DEAR SIR,--I received this morning your favor of the 5th, and as I can never let a sheet of yours rest, I sit down immediately to acknowledge it.
Whenever Mr. Reeves, of whom I have heard nothing, shall arrive, he shall receive all the cordial civilities in my power.
I am sometimes afraid that my "machine" will not "surcease motion" soon enough; for I dread nothing so much as "dying at top," and expiring like Dean Swift, "a driveler and a show;" or like Sam Adams, a grief and distress to his family, a weeping helpless object of compassion for years.
I am bold to say, that neither you nor I will live to see the course which the "wonders of the times" will take. Many years, and perhaps centuries must pass, before the current will acquire a settled direction. If the Christian religion, as I understand it, or as you understand it, should maintain its ground, as I believe it will, yet Platonic, Pythagonic, Hindoo, Cabalistical Christianity, which is Catholic Christianity, and which has prevailed for 1,500 years, has received a mortal wound of which the monster must finally die; yet so strong is his constitution, that he may endure for centuries before he expires.
Government has never been much studied by mankind, but their attention has been drawn to it in the latter part of the last century, and the beginning of this, more than at any former period; and the vast variety of experiments that have been made of constitutions in America, in France, in Holland, in Geneva, in Switzerland, and even in Spain and South America, can never be forgotten. They will be catastrophes noted. The result, in time, will be improvements; and I have no doubt that the honors we have experienced for the last forty years, will ultimately terminate in the advancement of civil and religious liberty, and ameliorations in the condition of mankind; for I am a believer in the probable improvability and improvement, the ameliorability and amelioration in human affairs; though I never could understand the doctrine of the perfectability of the human mind. This has always appeared to me like the philosophy, or theology of the Gentoos, viz., that a Brachman, by certain studies, for a certain time pursued, and by certain ceremonies, a certain number of times repeated, becomes omniscient and almighty.