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Letter fragment. Marriott is glad to hear from Chase after a long silence, and regrets that he has also taken so long to reply himself. Lord Kenyon donated a sum of money to Chase in honor of his late daughter, Margaret. Marriott also apologizes for the anxiety that Mr. West has caused Chase, but assures him that everything will work out between them.
Date
4-29-1829
Keywords
Mr. West, Margaret Emma Langham, Lloyd Kenyon, Lord Kenyon, Rosse Chapel, Queen Square, Quebec, millennial doctrine, Lewis Way
Recommended Citation
Marriott, G.W., "Letter to Philander Chase" (1829). Philander Chase Letters. 789.
https://digital.kenyon.edu/chase_letters/789
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[fragment]
Queen-Square
29th April 1829
My very dear and venerated Bishop
After so long a silence on your part, your late letters were inexpressible valuable. I should be little inclined to incur another delay, even if an important communication, which I am privileged to make, from our dear and munificent friend Lord Kenyon did not make a simple day’s loss culpable. His sympathy with you in the difficulties which your letters detail led to an immediate consideration how he might be God’s instrument to remove them. And I am authorized to desire you will draw on me for £500 Sterling. He wishes it, however, to be given as from “The Hon:ble Margaret Emma Langham (late Kenyon),” and I am sure you will take care that in her blessed name the gift shall be registered. I should also be wanting in regard to his earnest wish, if I neglected to tell you that, on his proposing this christian dedication of the above sum to his inestimable Son Lloyd, he instantly begged it might be given, saying “I am sure there could have been no other way of disposing of it which dear Sister would have liked so much.”
My life is as ceaselessly occupied as your own. Otherwise I should not have permitted four or five days to elapse before I acknowledged your last. I am equally sure that our dear friend would have been at least as early with his pen, but or his sadly afflicted and broken state of spirits. To the severest private trial I have ever lived to witness (those connected with wilful and unrepented sin always expected) has immediately succeeded the destruction of our Protestant in State as a public calamity. Those unremitted exertions, however, of which you saw no small token in the published letters you allude to, prove that he was of the faithful few who strove to the last “tantum non meruisse malum,” and strive still, in its’ baleful consequences “avertere pestom.” And as the protestant Church is still left to the united Kingdom, and a condition of apparent danger is often times favorable to spiritual growth in collective bodies of Christians as well as Individuals, I am sometimes cheered with the hope that God will be pleased to draw good out of evil, and that, in these days of inquiry, discussion, distribution of scripture, and universally awakened zeal, Popery may at last be caught in her own wiles, and lose more than she has gained by obtaining the long sought amalgamation. But if this unmerited goodness is extended to our Country (which almost universally evinced protestant principle) I shall ever attribute it to that religious attachment to our Constitution in Church & State, which in legislative restriction is (alas! alas!) for ever lost. Too possible, if not probable, is an opposite result of indifference, terminating in general infidelity. This I would never cease to dread, but, I thank God, my hopes preponderate.
I am grieved that you have experienced so much of anxiety respecting Mr West, but am most thankful to be able to think that all will be well at last, & that you will find him an invaluable Coadjutor. He writes both too hastily & too briefly, but of the two expressions in his letter which annoyed you I can thoroughly explain one, & am sure the other has no important meaning. By “his own Church” he meant, I know, Rosse Chapel. When I see him, as I hope to do soon, I shall be able to give you an account of the other—“not hold myself officially responsible.” I have written to beg him to come to Town, & to arrange for the earliest departure to his post in Ohio, in Lord Kenyon’s name and my own. The non-arrival of any letter from him confirms my expectation that he will personally answer me. Lord K. is going, for the purpose of restoring the broken hearts of his surviving daughters, to the Continent for three months. This leads me to wish you may not “pop in at Queen-Square” before the middle of August, unless you come very soon. The idea of your visiting England once more delights us beyond expression.
You ask whether the millennial doctrine spreads in this Country. I am disposed to answer that, according to the very little I know on the subject, in its’ details of precise periods for the second appearing of our Saviour, and other [ministries], it does not. To me it appears that enough is revealed to justly enquiry on the subject in those who have leisure from more urgent & necessary duties, and with you I have a strong inclination to it. Of the work I sent you by Lewis Way, I heard that he had since himself doubted of the theory. I, therefore, went to his publisher, and was assured that there was no foundation whatever for the assertion, which had arisen out of his failure to follow up the treatise with sequels he had promised in print, but which was really attributable to his deplorable state of bodily and mental health.
I have omitted to state that the non-arrival of your letters was very distressing to Mr West, and raised in his mind apprehensions that further calumnies from Quebec or elsewhere had alienated you from him till they should receive contradiction. I am bound to add that it is impossible for Lord Kenyon or myself to doubt for a moment the genuine excellence of his character, or his thorough fidelity to you. He has advocated the cause of Ohio with great effect both in Ireland, and in the Dioceses of York and Chester, and you will receive from me