It was an open secret—­his attachment to a lady, who had been his pupil, and was now generally understood to be his fiancee.  She was far younger than he; but at fifty-three he was not an old man; and the friends who fully knew and understood the affair favoured his intentions and joined in the hope, and in auguries for the happiness for which he had been so long waiting.  But now that it came to the point the lady finally decided that it was impossible.  He was not at one with her in religious matters.  He could speak lightly of her evangelical creed—­it seemed he scoffed in “Fors” at her faith.  She could not be unequally yoked with an unbeliever.  To her, the alternative was plain; the choice was terrible:  yet, having once seen her path, she turned resolutely away.[28]

[Footnote 28:  In former editions the following sentence was added:  “Three years after, as she lay dying, he begged to see her once more.  She sent to ask whether he could yet say that he loved God better than he loved her; and when he said ‘No,’ her door was closed upon him for ever.”  The statement was suggested by information from Ruskin in later days.  I must, however, have misrepresented the facts, as the lady’s mother has left it in writing that no such incident occurred.]

Meanwhile, in the bitterest despair he sought refuge as he had done before, in his work.  He accepted the lesson, though he, too, could not recant; still he tried to correct his apparent levity in the renewed seriousness and more earnest tone of “Fors,” speaking more plainly and more simply, but without concession.  He wrote on the next Christmas Eve to an Aberdeen Bible-class teacher: 

“If you care to give your class a word directly from me, say to them that they will find it well, throughout life, never to trouble themselves about what they ought not to do, but about what they ought to do.  The condemnation given from the Judgment Throne—­most solemnly described—­is all for the undones and not for the dones.  People are perpetually afraid of doing wrong; but unless they are doing its reverse energetically, they do it all day long, and the degree does not matter.  Make your young hearers resolve to be honest in their work in this life.  Heaven will take care of them for the other.”

That was all he could say:  he did not know there was another life:  he hoped there was:  and yet, if he were not a saint or a Christian, was there any man in the world who was nearer to the kingdom of Heaven than this stubborn heretic?

His heretical attitude was singular.  He was just as far removed from adopting the easy antagonism of science to religion as from siding with religion against science.  In a paper singularly interesting—­and in his biography important—­on the “Nature and Authority of Miracle,” read to the Metaphysical Society (February 11, 1873), he tried to clear up his position and to state a qualified belief in the supernatural.