Your letter is so interesting and raises so many serious thoughts that I should like to answer it as it deserves, but can’t do so to-day as I am obliged to go to London on business, and have hardly a moment.  The kind of “gigantic brains” which you mention are, I agree with you, often repulsive—­there is a harshness of dissent from all that mankind most values, all that has raised them above this earth, which cannot be right—­which is the result of deficiency in some part of their minds or hearts or both, and not of excess of intellect or any other good thing.  If they are right in their contempt of Christian faith and hope, or of all other spiritual faith and hope, they ought to be “of all men most miserable”; but they are apt to reject Christian charity too, and to dance on the ruins of all that has hitherto sustained their fellow-creatures in a world of sin and sorrow.  That they are not right, but wofully wrong, I firmly believe, and happily many and many a noble intellect and great heart, which have not shrunk from searching into the mysteries of life and death with all the powers and all the love of truth given them by God to be used, not to lie dormant or merely receive what other men teach, have risen from the search with a firmer faith than before in Christ and in the immortality which he brought to light.  I believe that many of those who deem themselves sceptics or atheists retain, after all, enough of the divine element within them practically to refute their own words.

    Lady Russell to Lady Dunfermline

    PEMBROKE LODGE, January 4, 1871

I wonder whether the solemn thoughts which must belong to the end of a year, and the solemn services by which it has been celebrated both by Germans and French, will lead them to ask themselves in all earnestness whether it is really duty, really what they believe to be God’s will, which guides them in the continuance of a fearful war—­whether earthly passions, earthly point of honour, do not mingle with their determination.  If they do ask themselves such questions, what will be the answers?  I, too, am often tempted to wish peace at any price, yet neither you nor I would act upon the wish were we the people to act.  It was the peace at any price doctrine that forced us into the Russian war.

    Lady Russell to Lady Dunfermline

    PEMBROKE LODGE, January 25, 1871

Hopes of peace at last, thank God!  I can think of little else—­the increasing and accumulating horrors, miseries, and desolation of this wicked war have been enough to make one despair of mankind.  France alone was in the wrong at first, but both have been wrong ever since Sedan, so at least I think, but it is too long a matter to discuss in a letter.  If the new Emperor [81] does not grant most honourable terms to Paris, I shall give him up altogether as a self-seeking, hard-hearted old man of fire and sword.  I dare