“Assuredly, if self in the goodness, and not the goodness itself be the object,” assented Wingfold.  “When a duty lies before one, self ought to have no part in the gaze we fix upon it; but when thought reverts upon himself, who would avoid the wish to be a better man?  The man who will not do a thing for duty, will never get so far as to derive any help from the hope of goodness.  But duty itself is only a stage toward something better.  It is but the impulse, God-given I believe, toward a far more vital contact with the truth.  We shall one day forget all about duty, and do every thing from the love of the loveliness of it, the satisfaction of the rightness of it.  What would you say to a man who ministered to the wants of his wife and family only from duty?  Of course you wish heartily that the man who neglects them would do it from any cause, even were it fear of the whip; but the strongest and most operative sense of duty would not satisfy you in such a relation.  There are depths within depths of righteousness.  Duty is the only path to freedom, but that freedom is the love that is beyond and prevents duty.”

“But,” said Faber, “I have heard you say that to take from you your belief in a God would be to render you incapable of action.  Now, the man—­I don’t mean myself, but the sort of a man for whom I stand up—­does act, does his duty, without the strength of that belief:  is he not then the stronger?—­Let us drop the word noble.”

“In the case supposed, he would be the stronger—­for a time at least,” replied the curate.  “But you must remember that to take from me the joy and glory of my life, namely the belief that I am the child of God, an heir of the Infinite, with the hope of being made perfectly righteous, loving like God Himself, would be something more than merely reducing me to the level of a man who had never loved God, or seen in the possibility of Him any thing to draw him.  I should have lost the mighty dream of the universe; he would be what and where he chose to be, and might well be the more capable.  Were I to be convinced there is no God, and to recover by the mere force of animal life from the prostration into which the conviction cast me, I should, I hope, try to do what duty was left me, for I too should be filled, for a time at least, with an endless pity for my fellows; but all would be so dreary, that I should be almost paralyzed for serving them, and should long for death to do them and myself the only good service.  The thought of the generations doomed to be born into a sunless present, would almost make me join any conspiracy to put a stop to the race.  I should agree with Hamlet that the whole thing had better come to an end.  Would it necessarily indicate a lower nature, or condition, or habit of thought, that, having cherished such hopes, I should, when I lost them, be more troubled than one who never had had them?”

“Still,” said Faber, “I ask you to allow that a nature which can do without help is greater than a nature which can not.”