Like all men who have become shining marks in the annals of history, Morse could not hope to escape calumny, and in later years he was accused of actions, and motives were imputed to him, which it becomes the duty of his biographer to disprove on the broad ground of moral impossibility.

Among his letters and papers are many rough drafts of thoughts and observations on many subjects, interlined and annotated.  Some were afterwards elaborated into letters, articles, or lectures; others seem to have been the thought of the moment, which he yet deemed worth writing down, and which, perhaps better than anything else, reveal the true character of the man.

The following was written by him in pencil on Sunday, September 6, 1829, at Cooperstown, New York:—­

“That temptations surround us at every moment is too evident to require proof.  If they cease from without they still act upon us from within ourselves, and our most secret thoughts may as surely be drawn from the path of duty by secret temptation, by the admission of evil suggestions, and they will affect our characters as injuriously as those more palpable and tangible temptations that attack our sense.

“This life is a state of discipline; a school in which to form character.  There is not an event that comes to our knowledge, not a sentence that we read, not a person with whom we converse, not an act of our lives, in short, not a thought which we conceive, but is acting upon and moulding that character into a shape of good or evil; and, however unconscious we may be of the fact, a thought, casually conceived in the solitariness and silence and darkness of midnight, may so modify and change the current of our future conduct that a blessing or a curse to millions may flow from it.

“All our thoughts are mysteriously connected with good or evil.  Their very habits, too, like the habits of our actions, are strengthened by indulgence, and, according as we indulge the evil or the good, our characters will partake of the moral character of each.  But actions proceed from thoughts; we act as we think.  Why should we, then, so cautiously guard our actions from impropriety while we give a loose rein to our thoughts, which so certainly, sooner or later, produce their fruits in our actions?

“God in his wisdom has separated at various distances sin and the consequence of sin.  In some instances we see a sin instantly followed by its fruits, as of revenge by murder.  In others we see weeks and months and years, aye, and ages, too, elapse before the fruits of a single act, the result, perhaps, of a single thought, are seen in all their varieties of evil.

“How long ere the fruits of one sin in Paradise will cease to be visible in the moral universe?

“If this reasoning is correct, I shall but cheat myself in preserving a good moral outward appearance to others if every thought of the heart, in the most secret retirement, is not carefully watched and checked and guarded from evil; since the casual indulgence of a single evil thought in secret may be followed, long after that thought is forgotten by me, and when, perhaps, least expected, by overt acts of evil.