“I have never felt the agony of a dying faith,” he wrote to a friend who was sorely troubled, “so you will forgive me if I do not seem to sympathize very delicately with you, or if I seem not to understand the darkness you are in.  But I have been in deep waters myself, though of another kind.  I have seen an old ideal foully shattered in a moment, and a hope that I had held and that had consecrated my life for many years, not only crushed in an instant—­that would have been bad enough—­but its place filled by an image of despair ... so you will see that I can feel for you, as I do.

“Leading to the light is a sad, terribly sad, and wearying process; I have not won it yet, but I have seen glimpses which have dispelled a gloom which I thought was hopeless.  My dear friend, I know that God will bring you out into a place of liberty, as He has brought me; in the day when you come and tell me that He has done so, the smile that will be on your face will be no sort of symbol, I know, of the unutterable content within. Expertus novi, you have my thoughts and hopes.”

The letters I shall now quote are taken out of a considerable period, and give a fair picture of what he believed.  Tolerance was his great characteristic.

Below all principles of his own was a deep resolve not to interfere in any way with the principles of others, however erroneous he deemed them.

With his definition of sincerity that comes out in the following extracts I have myself often found fault in conversation and by letter, but I never produced any change.  I thought, and still think, that it is sophistical in tone, and tampers with one of the most sacred of our instincts.  It never in his case, I think, made any difference to his presentment of the truth, but it is a principle that I should not dare to advocate; however, it was so integral a part of his faith that in this delineation, which shall be as accurate as I can make it, I dare not omit it.

His convictions were then a steady accumulation, not the shreds of one system worked into the fabric by the overmastering new impulse communicated by another, as is so often the case.  He writes: 

“The strong man’s house entered by the stronger, and his goods despoiled, is a parable more frequently true of the conversion of a ‘believer’ into a sceptic than vice versa.  The habit of firm adherence to principle, the capacity for trust, the adaptation of intellectual resources to uphold a theory—­all these go to swell the new emotion; no man is so effective a sceptic as the man who has been a fervent believer.

“But in the rare cases of the conversion of an intellectual man from scepticism into belief (like Augustine and a very few others) the spirit suffers by the change.  A great deal of cultivation, of logical readiness, of eloquence, seem to be essentially secular, to belong essentially to the old life, and to need imperatively putting away together with the garment spotted by the flesh.  Augustine suffered less perhaps than others; but some diminution of force seems an inevitable result.