4–10 June 1838

Everybody, I think, has sublime thoughts sometimes. At times they lie parallel with the world, or the axes coincide so that you can see through them the great laws. Then be of their side. Let your influence be so true and simple as to bring them into these frames.

I wish a church to worship in, where all the people are better than I am, and not spotted souls. Nothing shows more plainly the bad state of society than the difficulty or impossibility of representing to the mind any fit church or cultus.

A good deal of character in our abused age. The rights of woman, the antislavery-, temper- ance-, peace-, health-, and money-movements ; female speakers, mobs and martyrs, the para- doxes, the antagonism of old and new, the anomalous church, the daring mysticism and the plain prose, the uneasy relation of domes- tics, the struggling toward better household arrangements, — all indicate life at the heart, not yet justly organized at the surface.