Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child
John Greenleaf Whittier, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Winslow Sewall, Ed.

[92] As for “come-outerism,” I assure you that if I could only find a church, I would nestle into it as gladly as a bird ever nestled into her covert in a storm. I have staved away from meeting, because one offered me petrifactions, and another gas, when I was hungry for bread. I have an unfortunate sincerity, which demands living realities, and will not be put off with respectable shams. I sometimes wish it were otherwise; there is such a plenty of respectable shams to be had without the seeking. Another thing that I really feel the want of is one or two sympathizing friends with a sufficient degree of culture to make intercourse easy and mutually agreeable. I am well aware that it is not good to live so much alone as I do; but I see no help for it. Better to be forever alone than to have an indiscriminate inrush of the world into one's sanctum. I find the problem of useful and agreeable social intercourse a very hard one to solve. If our minister, Mr. Sears, were near by, I should scarcely feel the need of any other society; for his mind and heart are full to overflowing. But unfortunately he lives two miles off, on an out-of-the-way road, and it is a job to get to him. He has lately been preaching a series of beautiful sermons on the immortality of the soul. The one last Sunday was on entering upon immortality through the long pathway of old age. It was excellent in itself, and interested me so much by its association with my good old father that I borrowed it, and made copious extracts. To me there is a peculiar charm in Mr. Sears' preaching ; for a kind of lunar-halo of Swedenborgianism surrounds it. My first and deepest religious experience came to me through that medium and such an experience is never entirely forgotten by