Nevertheless, from contact with this excellent person I learned how much tenderness of spirit a Unitarian may have; and it pleasantly enlarged my charity, although I continued to feel much repugnance for his doctrine, and was anxious and constrained in the presence of Unitarians.  From the same collision with him, I gained a fresh insight into a part of my own mind.  I had always regarded the Gospels (at least the three first) to be to the Epistles nearly as Law to Gospel; that is, the three gospels dealt chiefly in precept, the epistles in motives which act on the affections.  This did not appear to me dishonourable to the teaching of Christ; for I supposed it to be a pre-determined development.  But I now discovered that there was a deeper distaste in me for the details of the human life of Christ, than I was previously conscious of—­a distaste which I found out, by a reaction from the minute interest felt in such details by my new friend.  For several years more, I did not fully understand how and why this was; viz. that my religion had always been Pauline.  Christ was to me the ideal of glorified human nature:  but I needed some dimness in the portrait to give play to my imagination:  if drawn too sharply historical, it sank into something not superhuman, and caused a revulsion of feeling.  As all paintings of the miraculous used to displease and even disgust me from a boy by the unbelief which they inspired; so if any one dwelt on the special proofs of tenderness and love exhibited in certain words or actions of Jesus, it was apt to call out in me a sense, that from day to day equal kindness might often be met.  The imbecility of preachers, who would dwell on such words as “Weep not,” as if nobody else ever uttered such,—­had always annoyed me.  I felt it impossible to obtain a worthy idea of Christ from studying any of the details reported concerning him.  If I dwelt too much on these, I got a finite object; but I yearned for an infinite one:  hence my preference for John’s mysterious Jesus.  Thus my Christ was not the figure accurately painted in the narrative, but one kindled in my imagination by the allusions and (as it were) poetry of the New Testament.  I did not wish for vivid historical realisation:  relics I could never have valued:  pilgrimages to Jerusalem had always excited in me more of scorn than of sympathy;—­and I make no doubt such was fundamentally Paul’s[4] feeling.  On the contrary, it began to appear to me (and I believe not unjustly) that the Unitarian mind revelled peculiarly in “Christ after the flesh,” whom Paul resolved not to know.  Possibly in this circumstance will be found to lie the strong and the weak points of the Unitarian religious character, as contrasted with that of the Evangelical, far more truly than in the doctrine of the Atonement.  I can testify that the Atonement may be dropt out of Pauline religion without affecting its quality; so may Christ be spiritualized into God, and identified with the Father:  but I suspect that a Pauline faith could not, without much violence and convulsion, be changed into devout admiration of a clearly drawn historical character; as though any full and unsurpassable embodiment of God’s moral perfections could be exhibited with ink and pen.