happy may we feel that with whatever faults and failings, there is an orthodox and established form of religion amongst us in the land.  For my own part, I go freely to any house of prayer, national or nonconformist, where the Gospel is preached and the preacher is capable:  all I want is a good man for the good word and work—­and if he has the true Spirit in him, I care next to nothing for his orders:  though to many less independent minds human authorisation may be a necessity.  From cradle hymns to the more serious prayings of senility, my own religion in two words is crystallised as “Abba, Father;” my only priest being my Divine Brother; and my Friend and Guide through this life and beyond it the Holy Spirit, who unites all the family of God.  May I die, as I have lived, in this simple faith of childhood.

My “Probabilities” has, amongst others apposite, this sentence about the origin of evil, and the usefulness of temptation:  “To our understanding, at least, there was no possible method of illustrating the amiabilities of Goodness and the contrivances of Wisdom but by the infused permission of some physical and moral evils; mercy, benevolence, design would in a universe of Best have nothing to do; that universe itself would grow stagnant, as incapable of progress; and the principal record of God’s excellences, the book of redemption, would have been unwritten.  Is not then the existence of evil justified in reason’s calculation? and was not such existence an antecedent probability?”

CHAPTER X.

FADS AND FANCIES.

In a recent page I have alluded to sundry “fads and fancies of the day,” some of greater and others of lesser import, and I have been mixed up in two or three of them.  For example;—­as an undergraduate at Oxford I starved myself in the matter of sugar, by way of somehow discouraging the slave-trade; I don’t know that either Caesar or Pompey was any the better for my small self-sacrifice; but as a trifling fact, I may mention that I then followed some of the more straitlaced fashions of Clapham.  Also, when in lodgings after my degree, I resolved to leave off meat, bought an immense Cheshire cheese, and, after two months of part-consumption thereof, reduced my native strength to such utter weakness as quite to endanger health.  So I had to relapse into the old carnality of mutton chops, like other folk:  such extreme virtue doesn’t pay.

Of course abstinence from all stimulant has had its hold on me heretofore, as it has upon many others,—­but, after a persistent six months of only water, my nerve power was so exhausted (I was working hard at the time as editor of “The Anglo-Saxon,” a long extinct magazine) that my wise doctor enjoined wine and whisky—­of course in moderation; and so my fluttering heart soon recovered, and I have been well ever since.