LECTURES. 



59 



note, I was cramming for some lectures I am giving at the 

 Mechanics', on mammalia, illustrated by the magic lantern. 

 These are once a week, and take me oceans of time.* Next 

 week we give our annual teetotal party. We shall have about 

 sixty in two nights, which will fill our kitchen. Then, at 

 Christmas, there will be a regular round of tea-parties. We 

 celebrate the jubilee of our Sunday School Teetotal Society 

 (fifty members) with a magic lantern exhibition." This he 

 repeated at the New Jerusalem School ; he had much sympathy 

 with the minister there, the Rev. James Boys, and with Dr. 

 Bayley, then of Accrington. Some of the principles of the 

 New Church were very congenial to him, especially in later life. 



He wrote me a very long and interesting letter for my birth- 

 day, in which he again dwells on the evils arising from a solitary 

 life : " The little habits one gets into by being by one's self seem 

 of no consequence, and yet insensibly affect the mind. I don't 

 say that there is not a danger of the same thing in company, 

 but it is more easy to fight against it. People's minds differ : 

 I can only say, for myself, that I made very little spiritual 

 progress while I brooded about myself; I have certainly made 

 much more, on the whole, since I tried to get into the other 

 plan. Travers says the same ; and ever since I have known 

 him and watched the development of his mind and my own, I 

 have found that, though young in judgment, he has always been 

 in advance of me in spiritual things. ... I believe that the 

 brooding and the self-condemning are a necessary part of our 

 earlier discipline; but they are a part of the slavery of fear, which 

 perfect love must cast out. . . . What is called meditation is 

 to me the most difficult thing of any. It is extremely difficult 

 for me to keep my mind on the stretch on any one subject for 

 long together ; whereas I can go about calling, hour after hour, 

 and be scarcely tired. You all seem to err greatly in consider- 

 ing me over-active. It is one of the evils that bad habits at 

 college have entailed on me, that I have not the sprightliness of 



* He tells me that, as he is " horribly ignorant about beasts," his 

 lectures require a good deal of preparation. " It's all very well for a change ; 

 and, of course, I like it very much, as I do whatever I undertake." 



