A Letter To Richard Healy – February 25th, 1858
My dear Richard Healy.
I was glad to receive a few lines from you, and still more pleased to learn that you were once more enabled to set up your Ebenezer to the love and faithfulness of a covenant God. Amid all our miserable departures and wanderings from the only real Object of our soul’s desire, and amid all our temptations and trials, He remains still “the same yesterday, today, and forever.” When we get into a low place, and think over our dreadful backslidings, we expect stroke after stroke of chastisement; but the Lord’s thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor His ways as our ways. Hart says — “I expected hell, he brought me heaven”.
And so when the poor, guilty, self-condemned soul looks for a stripe—comes a kiss; and for a frown—a smile. But it is this undeserved mercy, this unlooked-for and almost unhoped-for grace, that so melts the soul into penitence, love, and obedience. Oh what poor nothings are we; how devoid of all power, and sometimes of all will, to look unto our best, our only Friend — the blessed Jesus, whom we do love with all our heart and soul, and yet can and do so basely and foully forsake! Oh how I have sinned against and before His blessed Majesty! It makes me weep sometimes to feel how I have sinned in His holy and pure eyes; but all I can do, and that only by His grace, is to look again and again to His atoning blood—that precious blood which cleanses from all sin. I believe you, as Mr. Huntington says, have passed the line; you will no more taste the gall and wormwood of unpardoned sin, but will doubtless have your measure of trials, temptations, sorrows, and afflictions. Without these your soul would soon cleave to the dust, and would seek its home and happiness here in this world.
We were all much pleased to hear of your dear wife’s safe deliverance. It is a most trying time for a husband. I can well enter into your trials and exercises about it. We know what we deserve, and feel if the Lord took away the wife, or sent a deformed child, we only have received what we fully merited. But He is better to us than all our fears; He deals not with us after our sins, nor rewards us according to our iniquities. May our desire be to live more to His praise and glory. I hope I am slowly mending, but only slowly. I feel the cross and the separation from the friends. So much illness is a heavy trial and depresses my mind, but I hope I am learning some lessons in the furnace.
Yours affectionately,
J. C. P.
Jesus is LORD! 
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