Apostolic Succession, Sacramental Grace, and the rest of it, are very pretty, but are they facts?  Is it a fact that any special mysterious power is communicated by a Bishop’s hands?  Is it a fact that a child’s nature is changed by water and words—­or that the bread when it is broken ceases to be bread?  We cannot tell that it is not so, you say.  But can we tell that it is so? and we ought to be able to tell before we believe it.  All that fell away from me when I came in contact with the Cleavers and their friends.  Their views never commended themselves to me wholly; but at least they were spiritual and not material.  And election is a fact, although they express it oddly—­and so is reprobation—­and so is what they say of free will, and so is conversion.  It is true that we bring natures into the world which are moulded by circumstances and by their own tendencies, as clay in the hands of the potter.  Look round you and see that some are made for honour and some for dishonour.  So far I agree with the Evangelicals still, and I agree too with them that if what they call faith—­that is, a distinct conviction of sin, a resolution to say to oneself “Sammy, my boy, this won’t do,"* a perception and love for what is right and good, and a loathing of the old self—­can be put into one, and by the grace of God we see that it can be and is—­the whole nature is changed, is what we call regenerated.  This is certain—­and it is to me certain also that the world and we who live in it, with all these mysterious conditions of our being, are no creation of accident or blind law.  We were created for purposes unknown to us by Almighty God, who is using us and training us for His own objects—­objects wholly unconceivable by us, but nevertheless which we know to exist, for Intelligence never works but for an end.

—­ * The reference is to Thackeray’s story of a hairdresser named Samuel, who remarked, “Mr. Thackeray, there comes a time in the life of every man when he says to himself, ‘Sammy, my boy, this won’t do.’” The story was an especial favourite of Froude’s. —­

“Of other things which are popularly called religion, I have my opinion positive and negative.  But religion to me is not opinion it is certainty.  I cannot govern my actions or guide my deepest convictions by probabilities.  The laws which we are to obey and the obligations to obey them are part of my being of which I am as sure as that I am alive.  The things to argue about are by their nature uncertain, and therefore it is to me inconceivable that in them can lie Religion.  I cannot tell whether these thoughts will be of any help to you.  But it is better, in my judgment, to remain a proselyte of the gate—­resolute to remain there till one receives a genuine conviction of some truths beyond—­than for imagined relief from the pain of suspense to take up by an act of will a complete system of belief, Catholic or Calvinistic, and insist to one’s own soul that it is, was, and shall be the whole and