“You think that I ought to be very happy and contented, and useful in the sphere in which I move; and regard me, I know, as a weak hypochondriac.  Beulah, physicians told me, long ago, that I lived upon the very brink of the grave; that I might die at any moment, without warning.  My grandmother and one of my uncles died suddenly with this disease of the heart, and the shadow of death seems continually around me; it will not be dispelled—­it haunts me forever.  ‘Boast not thyself of to-morrow,’ said the preacher; but I cannot even boast of to-day, or this hour.  The world knows nothing of this; it has been carefully concealed by my parents; but I know it! and, Beulah, I feel as did that miserable, doomed prisoner of Poe’s ‘Pit and Pendulum,’ who saw the pendulum, slowly but surely, sweeping down upon him.  My life has been a great unfulfilled promise.  With what are generally considered elements of happiness in my home, I have always been solitary and unsatisfied.  Conscious of my feeble tenure on life, I early set out to anchor myself in a calm faith which would secure me a happy lot in eternity.  My nature was strongly religious, and I longed to find hope and consolation in some of our churches.  My parents always had a pew in the fashionable church in this city.  You need not smile—­I speak advisedly when I say ‘fashionable’ church; for, assuredly, fashion has crept into religion also, nowadays.  From my childhood I was regularly dressed and taken to church; but I soon began to question the sincerity of the pastor and the consistency of the members.  Sunday after Sunday I saw them in their pews, and week after week listened to their gossiping, slanderous chit-chat.  Prominent members busied themselves about charitable associations, and headed subscription lists, and all the while set examples of frivolity, heartlessness, and what is softly termed ‘fashionable excesses,’ which shocked my ideas of Christian propriety and disgusted me with the mockery their lives presented.  I watched the minister in his social relations, and, instead of reverencing him as a meek and holy man of God, I could not forbear looking with utter contempt upon his pompous, self-sufficient demeanor toward the mass of his flock; while to the most opulent and influential members he bowed down, with a servile, fawning sycophancy absolutely disgusting.  I attended various churches, listening to sermons, and watching the conduct of the prominent professing Christians of each.  Many gave most liberally to so-called religious causes and institutions, and made amends by heavily draining the purses of widows and orphans.  Some affected an ascetical simplicity of dress, and yet hugged their purses where their Bibles should have been.  It was all Mammon worship; some grossly palpable, some adroitly cloaked under solemn faces and severe observance of the outward ceremonials.  The clergy, as a class, I found strangely unlike what I had expected.  Instead of earnest zeal for the promotion of Christianity,