original--that they
were the fruit of his own experience, and of independent reflection.
Most of us are so much the product of our surroundings that we accept
without a question the ordinary formulae which we yet hold so lightly
that the principles which nominally govern serve only to excuse our
spontaneous instincts. The stronger nature comes into collision with
the world, disputes even the most current commonplaces, and so becomes
conscious of its own idiosyncrasies, and accepts only what is actually
forced upon it by stress of facts and hard logic. The process gives to
the doctrines which, with others, represent nothing but phrases,
something of the freshness and vividness of personal discoveries.
Probably ninety-nine men in a hundred assume without conscious
inconsistency the validity both of the moral code propounded in the
Sermon on the Mount, and of the code which regulates the actual struggle
for life. They profess to be at once gentlemen and Christians, and when
the two codes come into conflict, take the one which happens to sanction
their wishes. They do not even observe that there is any conflict.
Fitzjames could not take things so lightly. Even in his infancy he had
argued the first principles of ethics, and worked out his conclusions by
conflicts with schoolboy bullies. It is intelligible, therefore, that,
as Mr. Davies reports, the Sermon on the Mount should be his great
difficulty in accepting Christianity. Its spirit might be, in a sense,
beautiful; but it would not fit the facts of life. So, he observes, in
his autobiographical fragment, that one of his difficulties was his want
of sympathy for the kind of personal enthusiasm with which his father
would speak of Jesus Christ. He tried hard to cultivate the same
feelings, but could not do so with perfect sincerity.

A man with such distinct and vivid convictions in the place of mere
conventional formulae was naturally minded to utter them. He was
constantly provoked by the popular acceptance of what appeared to him
shallow and insincere theories, and desired to expose the prevailing
errors. But the 'little preacher' of three years old had discovered at
one and twenty that the pulpit of the ordinary kind was not congenial
to him. His force of mind did not facilitate a quick and instinctive
appreciation of other people's sentiments. When he came into contact
with a man whose impressions of the world were opposed to his own, he
was inclined to abandon even