“The consequence is, that I can’t bring myself to use these words except in societies where I know I shall not be misunderstood.

“Influence, the indestructibility of matter, aspiration—­those are what Grace, the Resurrection of the Body, the Holy Spirit mean to me now; great and living and integral parts of my creed, which I not only glow to reflect about, but which surround and penetrate my life daily and hourly with ever-increasing thankfulness.

“Yet, on the other hand, some people depend so much on tradition:  they never have a reconstruction of ideas; memories and associations are all in all to them.  They are the ‘Bands’ people of my former classification.

“And so I want to give Edward both.  I take him to church.  When he asks me questions I will answer them, but I am glad to say he does not at present.  I send him out before the sermon:  that is responsible for a good deal of harm.  ‘Ye shall call upon him to avoid sermons’ should be in the rubric of my baptismal service.

“Then we read some of the Old Testament history as ’history of the Jews,’ and Job and Isaiah and the Psalms as poetry—­and I am glad to say he is very fond of them; and parts of the Gospels in Greek, as the life and character of a hero.  It is the greatest mistake to impose them upon children as authoritative and divine all at once.  It at once diminishes their interest:  we ought to work slowly up through the human side.

“The Pauline Epistles I have given him to read in extracts.  I believe they are best in extracts—­one can omit the controversial element.  And he has taken, as children do, to the Revelation enormously, and gets much mysterious delight from it.

“A long and wearisome letter this, and not, I feel, satisfactory.  I haven’t done justice to the side of tradition, the jussum et traditum, but that is the fault of my mind.  I have only been professing to represent the other side.

“I would like to thrash the matter out further.  I wish you would come down and see us.  Tredennis has a sombre beauty, even in winter—­a ‘season of mists’ with us.  The magnolia on the south wall is blooming, though we are only two days off Christmas.  Our love to you.

      “Arthur Hamilton.”

I subjoin another extract, on the education of the moral faculty.

“I have always held that the concentration of thought upon morality is a very dangerous system of life.  Morality should be an incidental basis to life, not to be brooded over unless some grave disorder should arise.  We breathe, and eat, and sleep, and pay no heed to those processes; and indeed both physiologists and moralists exclaim, in the case of those natural processes, that the healthier we are the more unconscious will those processes be.