1–7 December 1834

The age of puberty is a crisis in the life of the man worth studying. It is the passage from the Unconscious to the Conscious ; from the sleep of the Passions to their rage ; from careless re- ceiving to cunning providing; from beauty to use ; from omnivorous curiosity to anxious stew- ardship ; from faith to doubt ; from maternal Reason to hard, short-sighted Understanding; from unity to disunion ; the progressive influ- ences of poetry, eloquence, love, regeneration, character, truth, sorrow, and of search for an Aim, and the contest for property.

Do you imagine that because I do not say Luther's creed, all his works are an offence to me ? Far otherwise. I can animate them all that they shall live to me. I can worship in that temple as well as in any other. I have only to translate a few of the leading phrases into their equivalent verities, to adjust his almanack to my meridian, and all the conclusions, all the predic- tions shall be strictly true. Such is the everlast- ing advantage of truth. Let a man work after a pattern he really sees, and every man shall be able to find a correspondence between these works and his own and to turn them to some account in Rome, London, or Japan, from the first to the hundredth Century.