Excerpt from Letter to a Friend
Taking advantage of the unfavorable feeling which exists in our community respecting a withdrawal from the clerical profession, and presuming that, in a matter so delicate and private, I should be unwilling to make explanations, they have not shrunk from using the grossest freedom in their inquisition into my earlier course.
In the year 1831, after thirteen years service in the parochial ministry in Boston, I accepted a Professorship in the Theological Department of the University, and removed to Cambridge. My partial friends in the religious society with which I had been connected objected to my taking that step, and urged that it was not wise. But no doubt of its being taken under a disinterested sense of duty ever reached me from any quarter. My position had been every thing that heart could desire, and never more attractive, to say the least, than when I relinquished it. Separating myself from relatives and friends, I left it for a place, - to be retained, as I supposed, for the rest of my life, - where I was to have more labor, less leisure, less compensation, and social position and advantages certainly not superior to what I left behind. Except that I was not in ill health, I took the step under the same circumstances as the same step had been taken just before by the late Rev. Dr. Ware, jr., and I never heard that he was charged with being prompted by political, or any other worldly ambition.
After four years, with a view to add to my pecuniary means, which proved unequal to the wants of an increased family, I became editor of the North American Review. I am ashamed to write of matters of such purely personal concern, but the impudent and false constructions put upon them by those who have felt justified in criticizing so distant a period of my life, compel me to the unwelcome task. At the end of four years more, namely, in 1839, my situation was this: During five days and a half of every week of the College terms, I was doing harder and more exhausting work, in the lecture-room, and in preparation for it, than I have ever done in any other way. I was one of the three preachers in the University Chapel; and during my turn of duty, in what remained of Saturday after the week"s lecturing was done, I had to prepare for the religious service which I conducted on Sunday. As Dean (or executive officer) of the Theological Faculty, I was charged with affairs of administration in that department of the University. As editor of the North American Review, I was under obligation to lay before the public two hundred and fifty or more closely printed octavo pages every quarter. I had in press a work, of some extent and labor, on the Hebrew Scriptures. And (imprudently, perhaps, but for apparently sufficient cause) I had engaged to deliver and print courses of lectures for the Lowell Institute, which accordingly I did deliver in 1839-40, and the two following winters.
These things united made a task too great for the health and strength of most men. At all events, it was too great for mine. Plain indications showed that I must have some relief, or be crushed, body and mind. My permanent engagements were the professorship in the University, and the editorship of the Review. In the Review was embarked a large capital (for me); and to dissolve my connection with it, until there should be an opportunity for an advantageous sale, was not to be thought of, because this would have been to put it out of my power to reimburse the friends to whom I was indebted for the investment. I did not desire to resign my professorship. Nor did I yet contemplate such a movement.
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