H. N. COLERIDGE, Esq., 1, New Court, Lincoln's Inn.
MY DEAR MISS LAWRENCE,--You and _dear, dear_ Mrs. Crompton are among the few sunshiny images that endear my past life to me, and I never think of you without heartfelt esteem, without affection, and a _yearning_ of my better being toward you. I have for more than eighteen months been on the brink of the grave, the object of my wishes, and only not of my prayers, because I commit myself, poor dark creature, to an Omniscient and All-merciful, in whom are the issues of life and death,--content, yea, most thankful, if only His Grace will preserve within me the blessed faith that He _is_ and is a God that heareth prayers, abundant in forgiveness, and _therefore_ to be feared, no _fate_, no God as imagined by the Unitarians, a sort of, I know not what _law-giving_ Law of Gravitation, to whom prayer would be as idle as to the law of gravity, if an undermined wall were falling upon me; but "a God that made the eye, and therefore shall _He_ not see? who made the ear, and shall He not hear?" who made the heart of man to love Him, and shall He not love the creature whose ultimate end is to love Him?--a God who _seeketh_ that which was lost, who calleth back that which had gone astray; who calleth through His own Name; Word, Son, from everlasting the Way and the _Truth_; and who became man that for poor fallen mankind he might _be_ (not merely announced but _be_) the _Resurrection_ and the _Life_,--"Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy-laden, and _I_ will give you rest!" Oh, my dear Miss Lawrence! prize above all earthly things the faith. I trust that no sophistry of shallow infra-socinians has quenched it within you,--that God is a God that heareth prayers. If varied learning, if the assiduous cultivation of the reasoning powers, if an accurate and minute acquaintance with all the arguments of controversial writers; if an intimacy with the doctrines of the Unitarians, which can only be obtained by one who for a year or two in his early life had been a convert to them, yea, a zealous and by themselves deemed powerful supporter of their opinions; lastly, if the utter absence of any imaginable worldly interest that could sway or warp the mind and affections,--if all these combined can give any weight or authority to the opinion of a fellow-creature, they will give weight to my adjuration, sent from my sickbed to you in kind love. O trust, O trust, in your Redeemer! in the coeternal _Word_, the Only-begotten, the living _Name_ of the Eternal I AM, Jehovah, Jesus!