I make the following extract:--
* * * * *
"My Dear Sir: It is quite time that I made an answer to your
proposition that I should venture into your new community. The design
appears to me noble and generous, proceeding as I plainly see, from
nothing covert or selfish or ambitious, but from a manly heart and
mind. So it makes all men its friends and debtors. It becomes a matter
to entertain it in a friendly spirit, and examine what it has for us.
"I have decided not to join it, yet very slowly, and I may almost say
with penitence. I am greatly relieved by learning that your coadjutors
are now so many that you will no longer attach that importance to the
defection of individuals which you hinted, in your letter to me, I or
others might possess--the painful power, I mean, of preventing the
execution of the plan."
* * * * *
Rev. Theodore Parker, the noted liberal Unitarian preacher, of whose
close personal relations with Mr. Ripley much might be said, lived two
miles away, at West Roxbury, where he preached in the village church,
and his afternoon walk every few days was over to the Farm and back for
exercise, and to meet and converse with Mr.
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