The following is an extract from a letter which the author wrote to a friend of Professor Stowe, more than a year before this sermon was prepared, which shows his views at that time: "All your reasoning in favor of Professor Stowe's better adaptation for New-England than for the West is founded in a great and injurious mistake concerning the character and condition of the West. It is a mistake, that the talents and acquirements of Mr. S. would not be as highly and as justly appreciated here as in New-England. A full proportion of the minds that are filling up the new states of the West, are of the first order of intellectual vigor, and often of taste and learning, and intellectual action; and a large portion of the people who are not educated, are persons of shrewd mind, and quick discernment to perceive the empty pretensions of men to learning and talents, and will respond respectfully, yea, gladly, to the touch of real talent. But Ohio is not a frontier state, or Cincinnati a new settlement, or the work demanded here that of a pioneer. On the contrary, Cincinnati is as really a literary emporium as Boston, and is rapidly rising to an honorable competition. Indeed, at the present time, I firmly believe that there is, according to the number of her inhabitants, as much intellectual and literary activity here as in Boston, constituting an atmosphere which he would breathe with great pleasure, and in which his literary attainments would not pass undiscovered or unappreciated."