I trust you will give me due credit for sincerity when I assure you that after a long interruption of our familiarity, your communication gave me cordial pleasure. It brought to my mind the very many hours of social and friendly enjoyment I passed with one whom I shall ever be glad to see or but to hear from—dum spiritus hos regit artus. I have read throughout what you sent for my perusal, and much of it has given me pleasure, as being a convincing proof to me that you have expended much of your money, and employed much of your time and meditations, on very serious and interesting subjects, doubtless with the most commendable views and intentions imaginable, though I fear but little to any good effect, or benefit to the welfare of our distressed country. Long have I for my own part declined and relinquished all political study, for which I was never properly qualified or much inclined; from an utter despair of its being in the power of any one in my level, or indeed of any individual in what station soever, by any exertion of thought or publication, to meliorate the deplorable state of the publick, any otherwise than by self-reformation and amendment of whatever I could discover wrong or defective or imperfect in myself. After my utmost consideration on state affairs, with which I felt no great inclination, or any great call to intermeddle, it appears to me that the only wise and practicable course by which any individual in my rank of life, however ingenious or intelligent, can be of any effectual benefit to a country sadly reduced, I venture not to say how, or by whom, or by what means, to a very melancholy and bad state, with still worse and more melancholy prospects, very imminent, and seemingly hardly unavoidable, any otherwise than by forwarding a new and better aera in beginning to relinquish whatever is inimical to it, and establish whatever is conducive to its furtherance in himself. Few there are who in some way or other have not been more or less instrumental, by lamentable neglects or unjustifiable practices, to the bringing the public state into this deplorable and tremendous condition. Nor is there any man so bad over all the British Dominions who may not be very serviceable to the best interests of the publick, and the happiest melioration of the state, by sincere study and endeavours to atone for his past guilt and injuries both to himself and his country, and the share he has had in bringing on himself and it, all the ills we feel or fear, by the thorough amendment and improvement and reformation of himself. By every individual’s hearty engagement in this blissful study and endeavour, the only new aera of all the good and happiness for which God made us, here or hereafter, would very quickly commence, and our nation and every individual belonging to it, would soon very sensibly perceive that this course persevered in would not only bring on us, not merely a millenium of happiness, but an eternity of ‘fullness of joy, and pleasures for evermore.’

“Very bad, and portentous of worse as all things appear to be, over all this earth, and as we of the British Dominions more especially grievously feel, and fear them to be, yet this world, and the universe is still the world, and the universe of God, whose goodness is everlasting and unchangeable, and whose wisdom and power are infinite and omnipotent. He is the creator, preserver, and ruler of all; by Him all things consist, and all things serve Him. His ways are not as our ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts. Intricate are the measures of his unerring Providence, far beyond our ken, and past finding out by our finite faculties, still the shortest-sighted of our kind can see enough to convince us that the Sovereign of all is ever busy without toil, and ever working without weariness, to make all his creatures rejoice, and all his rational offspring wise and good in order to their being happy here, and happier hereafter for ever. Wonderful are the dispensations of His adorable wisdom by which he brings order out of confusion, and good out of evil!”