the ready instrument of a great deal of evil. But the Lord is ever faithful and comes in in goodness and does good. As to yourself, my brother had a strong feeling as to some judgment you expressed as to the affair of his daughter’s marriage. I am thankful to hear of Dublin getting on happily. It is hard for the Irish to be firm in plain questions of right and wrong. They have other good qualities but not that. But the Lord is very gracious in bearing when there is no bad conscience in it; Bellett was anything but firm in this he owned it on his death bed and there is truth in the saying, or its converse, like people, like priest. I want no narrowness, I dread it, but simple faithfulness of testimony is what we must seek. Narrowness is not a testimony, but a hindrance to it, but with looseness as to the truth we have nothing to testify to. But then we must make the difference of wisdom and of a law, and of want of clear knowledge of position and a bad conscience. Going about to hear preachers, I believe, is very unprofitable, a positively injurious thing, but you could not make it a term of communion, unless it were subversive of Christianity, but souls never make progress who do so. They hear what is inconsistent with truths they know, or a path they are bound to by God, and they lose their hold on truth instead of going on to more. It ends in uncertainty of what truth is, and more or less in indifference to it.