numerous. Her heart did not remain
uninterested, but she was never in earnest sufficiently to discover what
a thing of beggarly elements the system was, and how incapable of
satisfying any childlike soul. She never questioned the truth of what
she heard, and became skilled in its idioms and arguments and forms of
thought. But the more familiar one becomes with any religious system,
while yet the conscience and will are unawakened and obedience has not
begun, the harder is it to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Such
familiarity is a soul-killing experience, and great will be the excuse
for some of those sons of religious parents who have gone further
toward hell than many born and bred thieves and sinners.

When Juliet came to understand clearly that her new friend did mean
thorough-going unbelief, the rejection of _all_ the doctrines she had
been taught by him whose memory she revered, she was altogether shocked,
and for a day and a night regarded him as a monster of wickedness. But
her horror was mainly the reflex of that with which her father would
have regarded him, and all that was needed to moderate horror to
disapproval, was familiarity with his doctrines in the light of his
agreeable presence and undeniable good qualities. Thoroughly acquainted
as she believed herself with "the plan of salvation," Jesus of Nazareth
was to her but the vague shadow of something that was more than a man,
yet no man at all. I had nearly said that what He came to reveal had
become to her yet more vague from her nebulous notion of Him who was its
revelation. Her religion was, as a matter of course, as dusky and
uncertain, as the object-center of it was obscure and unrealized. Since
her father's death and her comparative isolation, she had read and
thought a good deal; some of my readers may even think she had read and
thought to tolerable purposes judging from her answers to Faber in the
first serious conversation they had; but her religion had lain as before
in a state of dull quiescence, until her late experience, realizing to
her the idea of the special care of which she stood so much in need,
awoke in her a keen sense of delight, and if not a sense of gratitude as
well, yet a dull desire to be grateful.

The next day, as she sat pondering what had passed between them,
altogether unaware of her own weakness, she was suddenly seized with the
ambition--in its inward relations the same as his--of converting him to
her belief. The pur