“more than they that watch for the morning”?  Alas that I am so versatile!  Christian and worldling within a day.  Oh for a deeper sense that I am not my own,—­that I have no right to disturb the sanctuary of my own spirit when God has made it such,—­that there is no other way than whole-hearted and honest-hearted Christianity to attain the heavenly kingdom!

  9th Mo. 9th.  Letter to M.B.

* * * Our wily foe finds every thing which produces strong emotion and commotion of mind a good opportunity for trying new temptations, and, at any rate, tries hard to keep us from committing all to a better hand than ours.  I feel quite ashamed of the measure of his success with me; but surely we want a new sanctification every day,—­a new recurrence to the grace that will set “all dislocated bones,” as J. Fletcher calls unsanctified feelings and affections.  I was much pleased with this comparison, which I found in his life the other day.  I think it is an admirable exemplification of the uneasiness and pain of mind they cause.  But how very uncertain our frames of feeling are; sometimes thinking there is but one thing which we have not quite given up to God, and sometimes, with perhaps correcter judgment, lamenting, “all my bones are out of joint.”  May we, my dear M., encourage each other in seeking help of Him who received and healed all that had need of healing.

9th Mo. 20th.  Finished most interesting review of John Foster’s life. * * * Foster was a very deep thinker.  He thought the boundary of the knowable wider than the generality do.  This may be; but I fancy he does not always admit sufficient weight in his arguments to the manifest relations and actings of the unknown upon the known.  He was Calvinistic; this, joined to a strong view of the moral perfection and benevolence of God, led him to the natural result of denying eternal punishments.  Could he have seen more of the essence of a human spirit, as he doubtless now sees it, I venture to think that that mysterious personality, by virtue of which man may be said to choose his destiny, i.e. to embrace destruction, or to submit to be saved by the Saviour in his own way, that the perception of this personal image of God in man might vindicate the Divine perfection and benevolence, and make it evident that our “salvation is of God, and our destruction is of ourselves.”

10th Mo. 2d.  Oh to be permitted any taste of that grace which is free—­ever free; which brings a serene reliance on eternal love; which imprints its own reflection on the soul!  Oh, be that reflection unbroken by restless disquiets of mind; be that image watchfully prized, and waited for, and waited in.

  10th Mo. 5th.  Some sweetness in thinking how
  much akin is “having nothing” to “possessing all
  things.”