“I have often puzzled over this:  Why in the Gospels did Christ say nothing about the whole fabric of nature which in His capacity as Creator (’through whom He made all things’) He must have had the moulding of?  All His teaching was personal and individual, dealing with man alone, an infinitesimal part of His creation ... for compare the shred, the span of being which man’s existence represents with the countless aeons of animal and vegetable life which have preceded, and surround, and will in all probability succeed it—­and not a word of all this from the Being who gave and supported their life, calling it out of the abyss for inscrutable and useless ends—­to minister, as the theologians tell us, to the wants and animal cravings of pitiful mankind.

“Why is it that He there takes no cognizance of the whole frame of things of which I am a part, but only deals with human feelings and emotions as if they were the end of all these gigantic works—­the Milky Way, the blazing sun, the teeming earth—­only to raise thoughts of reverence in the heart of this pitiful being, and failing too, so hopelessly, so constantly to do so?...

“‘I will accept Christ,’ said Herbert, ’as my superior, yes! as my master, yes! but not as my God.’” One sees, I think, where the difficulty lies; it must be felt by any man whose idea of God is very high, whose belief in humanity very low.

And again—­

“I believe in a revelation which is coming, which may be among us now, though we do not suspect it, in the words and deeds of some simple-minded heroic man.

“No one who preceded the Christian revelation could possibly, from the fabric of the world as it then was, have anticipated the form it was about to take.  This revelation, too, will be as unexpected as it will be new—­it will come in the night as a thief; the ‘quo modo’ I can not even attempt to guess, except that it will take the form of some vast simplification of the myriad and complicated issues of human life.”

But such entries as these were left to his diaries and most private correspondence; he never attempted a crusade against ordinary forms of belief, mistaken though he deemed them, often putting a strong constraint upon himself in conversation.  If he was pressed to give an account of his religious principles he used smilingly to say that he belonged to the great Johnsonian sect, who practised the religion of all sensible men, and who kept what it was to themselves.

There were two views of life with which he had no patience only—­the men who preached the open confession of agnosticism, “if you have anything to tell us for goodness sake let us have it, but if you have not, hold your tongue; you are like a clock that has gone wrong, but insists on chiming to show everybody that it hasn’t the least idea of the time;” and secondly, the men who “took no interest” in the problems of religion and morals; for a deliberate avoidance of them he had some respect, but for a professional moralist who took everything for granted, and for feeble materialists who did not “trouble their head” about such things, he had a profound contempt.