the table with him to say:  ’Sir, you are considerably mistaken.’  He was not only mistaken, you see, but so stupid and self-willed in his mistake, so determined to make a system of it, but he was too disreputable to set right.  Also of the tendency of one’s writings one’s readers are the best judges.  I don’t profess to write a religious commentary on my writings.  I am content to stand by the obvious meaning of what I have written, according to the common sense of the general reader.

The tendency of my writings to Swedenborgianism has been observed by others, though I had read Swedenborg, when I wrote most of them, as little as the American editor of ‘Robert Hall’ can have done, and less can’t be certainly.  Otherwise, the said editor would have known that the central doctrine of Swedenborgianism being the Godhead of Jesus Christ, no Unitarian, liberal or unliberal, could have produced works Swedenborgian in character, and that William and Mary Howitt being Unitarian (which I believe they are) couldn’t have a tendency at the same time to Swedenborgianism, unless it should be possible for them to be bolt upright with a leaning to the floor.  I speak to a wise man.  Judge what I say.  For my own part I have thought freely on most subjects, and upon the state of the Churches among others, but never at any point of my life, and now, thank God, least of all, have I felt myself drawn towards Unitarian opinions.  I should throw up revelation altogether if I ceased to recognise Christ as divine.  Sectarianism I do not like, even in the form of a State Church, and the Athanasian way of stating opinions, between a scholastic paradox and a curse, is particularly distasteful to me.  But I hold to Christ’s invisible Church as referred to in Scripture, and to the Saviour’s humanity and divinity as they seem to me conspicuous in Scripture, and so you have done me justice and the American has done me injustice....

Well, I have seen your Mrs. Brotherton, only once, though, because she can’t come to see me at all, and lives too far for me to go in the winter weather.  I shall see more of her presently, I hope, and in the meantime she is very generous to me, and sends me violets, and notes that are better, and we have a great sympathy on the spiritual subjects which set you so in a passion.  What do I say?  She sends me Greek (of which she does not know a single character), written by her, or rather through her; mystical Greek, from a spirit-world, produced by her hands, she herself not knowing what she writes.  The character is beautifully written, and the separate words are generally correct—­such words as ‘Christ,’ ‘God,’ ‘tears,’ ‘blood,’ ‘tempest,’ ‘sea,’ ‘thunder,’ ‘calm,’ ‘morning,’ ‘sun,’ ‘joy.’  No grammatical construction hitherto, but a significant sort of grouping of the separate words, as if the meaning were struggling out into coherence.  My idea is that she is being exercised in the language, in the character, in order to fuller expression hereafter.  Well,