ght--during the time of which I have just been
speaking--in which he shunned the subject in conversation; but I have
reason to believe from the books he read, and from two or three
letters to his friend, the curate of whom I have been speaking, that
he was thinking deeply upon revealed religion.

It must, however, be remembered that he never went through that
period of agonized uprooting of venerated and cherished sentiment
that many whose faith has been very keen and integral in their lives
pass through, the dark valley of doubt. His religion had not intwined
itself into his life; it was not shrined among his sacred memories or
laid away in secret storehouses of thought.

"I have never felt the agony of a dying faith," he wrote to a friend
who was sorely troubled, "so you will forgive me if I do not seem to
sympathize very delicately with you, or if I seem not to understand
the darkness you are in. But I have been in deep waters myself,
though of another kind. I have seen an old ideal foully shattered in
a moment, and a hope that I had held and that had consecrated my life
for many years, not only crushed in an instant--that would have been
bad enough--but its place filled by an image of despair ... so you
will see that I _can_ feel for you, as I _do_.

"Leading to the light is a sad, terribly sad, and wearying process; I
have not won it yet, but I have seen glimpses which have dispelled a
gloom which I thought was hopeless. My dear friend, I _know_ that God
will bring you out into a place of liberty, as He has brought me; in
the day when you come and tell me that He has done so, the smile that
will be on your face will be no sort of symbol, I know, of the
unutterable content within. _Expertus novi_, you have my thoughts and
hopes."

The letters I shall now quote are taken out of a considerable period,
and give a fair picture of what he believed. Tolerance was his great
characteristic.

Below all principles of his own was a deep resolve not to interfere
in any way with the principles of others, however erroneous he deemed
them.

With his definition of sincerity that comes out in the following
extracts I have myself often found fault in conversation and by
letter, but I never produced any change. I thought, and still think,
that it is sophistical in tone, and tampers with one of the most
sacred of our instincts. It never in his case, I think, made any
difference to his presentment of the truth, but it is a princ