enters into a difficulty, a temptation, a disappointment, a grief; he
goes into the different turns and incidental, unconscious symptoms of
a case, with notions which come into the head and go out again, and
are forgotten, till some chance recalls them.... To take the first
instance that happens to occur to us ... we have often been struck by
the keen way in which he enters into a regular tradesman's
vice--avarice, fortune-getting, amassing capital, and so on. This is
not a temper to which we can imagine Mr. Newman ever having felt in
his own mind even the temptation; but he understands it, and the
temptation to it, as perfectly as any merchant could. No man of
business could express it more naturally, more pungently, more _ex
animo_.... So with the view that worldly men take of religion, in a
certain sense, he quite enters into it, and the world's point of view:
he sees, with a regular worldly man's eye, religion vanishing into
nothing, and becoming an unreality, while the visible system of life
and facts, politics and society, gets more and more solid and grows
upon him. The whole influence of the world on the imagination; the
weight of example; the force of repetition; the way in which maxims,
rules, sentiments, by being simply sounded in the ear from day to day,
seem to prove themselves, and make themselves believed by being often
heard,--every part of the easy, natural, passive process by which a
man becomes a man of the world is entered into, as if the preacher
were going to justify or excuse him, rather than condemn him. Nay, he
enters deeply into what even scepticism has to say for itself; he puts
himself into the infidel's state of mind, in which the world, as a
great fact, seems to give the lie to all religions, converting them
into phenomena which counterbalance and negative each other, and he
goes down into that lowest abyss and bottom of things, at which the
intellect undercuts spiritual truth altogether. He enters into the
ordinary common states of mind just in the same way. He is most
consoling, most sympathetic. He sets before persons their own feelings
with such truth of detail, such natural expressive touches, that they
seem not to be ordinary states of mind which everybody has, but very
peculiar ones; for he and the reader seem to be the only two persons
in the world that have them in common. Here is the point. Persons look
into Mr.