don't see what right people have to expect what they have been used to."

"There is just this advantage," said my father, "in having been used to
nice things, that it ought to be easier to keep from sinking into the
sordid, however straitened the new circumstances may be, compared with the
old."

On the evening before the wedding, my father took me into the octagon room,
and there knelt down with me and my mother, and prayed for me in such a
wonderful way that I was perfectly astonished and overcome. I had never
known him to do any thing of the kind before. He was not favorable to
extempore prayer in public, or even in the family, and indeed had often
seemed willing to omit prayers for what I could not always count sufficient
reason: he had a horror at their getting to be a matter of course, and a
form; for then, he said, they ceased to be worship at all, and were a mere
pagan rite, better far left alone. I remember also he said, that those,
however good they might be, who urged attention to the forms of religion,
such as going to church and saying prayers, were, however innocently, just
the prophets of Pharisaism; that what men had to be stirred up to was to
lay hold upon God, and then they would not fail to find out what religious
forms they ought to cherish. "The spirit first, and then the flesh,"
he would say. To put the latter before the former was a falsehood, and
therefore a frightful danger, being at the root of all declensions in
the Church, and making ever-recurring earthquakes and persecutions and
repentances and reformations needful. I find what my father used to say
coming back so often now that I hear so little of it,--especially as he
talks much less, accusing himself of having always talked too much,--and
I understand it so much better now, that I shall be always in danger
of interrupting my narrative to say something that he said. But when I
commence the next chapter, I shall get on faster, I hope. My story is like