“If I prosecute the profession, I pray God to fortify me against its temptations.  To the wind I dismiss those light hopes of eminence which ambition inspired and vanity fostered.  To be ‘honest, to be capable, to be faithful’ to my client and my conscience, I earnestly hope will be my first endeavor.”

How exceedingly astonished would these affectionate young friends have been, if they could have looked forward forty years, and seen the timid law-student Secretary of State, and his ardent young comrade a clerk in his department.  They seemed equals in 1802; in 1845, they had grown so far apart, that the excellent Bingham writes to Webster as to a demigod.

In these pleasant early letters of Daniel Webster there are a thousand evidences of a good heart and of virtuous habits, but not one of a superior understanding.  The total absence of the sceptical spirit marks the secondary mind.  For a hundred and fifty years, no young man of a truly eminent intellect has accepted his father’s creeds without having first called them into question; and this must be so in periods of transition.  The glorious light which has been coming upon Christendom for the last two hundred years, and which is now beginning to pervade the remotest provinces of it, never illumined the mind of Daniel Webster.  Upon coming of age, he joined the Congregational Church, and was accustomed to open his school with an extempore prayer.  He used the word “Deist” as a term of reproach; he deemed it “criminal” in Gibbon to write his fifteenth and sixteenth chapters, and spoke of that author as a “learned, proud, ingenious, foppish, vain, self-deceived man,” who “from Protestant connections deserted to the Church of Rome, and thence to the faith of Tom Paine.”  And he never delivered himself from this narrowness and ignorance.  In the time of his celebrity, he preferred what Sir Walter Scott called “the genteeler religion of the two,” the Episcopal.  In his old age, his idea of a proper sermon was incredibly narrow and provincial.  He is reported to have said, late in life:—­

“Many of the ministers of the present day take their text from St. Paul, and preach from the newspapers.  When they do so, I prefer to enjoy my own thoughts rather than to listen.  I want my pastor to come to me in the spirit of the Gospel, saying, ’You are mortal! your probation is brief; your work must be done speedily; you are immortal too.  You are hastening to the bar of God; the Judge standeth before the door.’  When I am thus admonished, I have no disposition to muse or to sleep.”

This does not accord with what is usually observed in our churches, where sermons of the kind which Mr. Webster extolled dispose many persons to sleep, though not to muse.