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Amherst Feb. 12 1852

Mr N Kendall Dear Sir.

        It was with a pleasure mingled with sadness that I rec'd your letter of the 29of Jan. last  I little thought as I bid your Mother adieu on the eve. I was at your house was doing so for the last time. Allow me, my dear Sir, to offer you my deepest sympathy worthless & unavailing as it may be. Ah! I know very well what a mother's love is. I know very well what meaning there is in the expression " a mother's tenderness, a mother's watchfulness". I know too what an aching void is left in your bosom when such a mother, so good a mother as your own, is is torn from your embrace. Yet what is your earthly loss I trust is her eternal gain, & that while weeping friends moan her departure, she is singing the song of redeeming grace & dying love. -- Perhaps I ought to offer an apology for intruding on your time & affection. So long a letter, on questions of theological controversy, yet I have none to offer except that I feel that a candid expression of ones views & feeling & the reasons for those view may be of incalculable advantage. The subject you treated of in your last letter was the divinity of Christ in connection with the divinity & to those 2 topics I will endeavor to confine myself in this letter. Allow me to say however by way of correcting my self, that it seemed to me that in your letter you have not endeavored to prove that Christ was not divine, but rather that he was not identical with the Father. Now I would not for a moment be understood as saying that Christ was literally & identically the same with the Father, & if that were all you were endeavoring to disprove in your letter, then I agree with you at once. Very likely I despeched the subject too hastily in my January letter. Still I was sorry you did not allude to one of the other papages & which I resend it inasmuch as you did not, they remain unnumbered. In a subject like this we must receive without hesitation the assertions of the Bible, although we ought to use our reason to determine what the scripture means, yet when it is once determined, we should believe with perfect confidence. We should be Careful about setting that down as ridiculous or about which we cannot understand, remembering that while with me things are impossible with God all things are possible. I said in my former letter that Christ was equal with God, by no means that he was identical with God the Father. If I remember right I only said that Christ was equal to God, although it would seem that the Evangelist John goes still farther when he says "& the logos was was God." Allow me to state then as clearly as I am able what I do believe on the subject. In the first place that there are three persons in the trinity. Not that there are three Gods, but three person in the Godhead. I admit that there are mysteries