wise and good and powerful, absolutely impossible.  If one said to him that he believed thousands of things he had never himself known, he answered he did so upon testimony.  If one rejoined that here too we have testimony, he replied it was not credible testimony, but founded on such experiences as he was justified in considering imaginary, seeing they were like none he had ever had himself.  When he was asked whether, while he yet believed there was such a being as his mother told him of, he had ever set himself to act upon that belief, he asserted himself fortunate in the omission of what might have riveted on him the fetters of a degrading faith.  For years he had turned his face toward all speculation favoring the non-existence of a creating Will, his back toward all tending to show that such a one might be.  Argument on the latter side he set down as born of prejudice, and appealing to weakness; on the other, as springing from courage, and appealing to honesty.  He had never put it to himself which would be the worse deception—­to believe there was a God when there was none; or to believe there was no God when there was one.

He had, however, a large share of the lower but equally indispensable half of religion—­that, namely, which has respect to one’s fellows.  Not a man in Glaston was readier, by day or by night, to run to the help of another, and that not merely in his professional capacity, but as a neighbor, whatever the sort of help was needed.

Thomas Wingfold, the curate, had a great respect for him.  Having himself passed through many phases of serious, and therefore painful doubt, he was not as much shocked by the surgeon’s unbelief as some whose real faith was even less than Faber’s; but he seldom laid himself out to answer his objections.  He sought rather, but as yet apparently in vain, to cause the roots of those very objections to strike into, and thus disclose to the man himself, the deeper strata of his being.  This might indeed at first only render him the more earnest in his denials, but at length it would probably rouse in him that spiritual nature to which alone such questions really belong, and which alone is capable of coping with them.  The first notable result, however, of the surgeon’s intercourse with the curate was, that, whereas he had till then kept his opinions to himself in the presence of those who did not sympathize with them, he now uttered his disbelief with such plainness as I have shown him using toward the rector.  This did not come of aggravated antagonism, but of admiration of the curate’s openness in the presentment of truths which must be unacceptable to the majority of his congregation.