On this subject I had some instructive conversations with my Father, whom I found not reluctant to have his convictions pushed to their logical extremity.  He did not wish to judge, he protested; but he could not admit that a single Unitarian (or ‘Socinian’, as he preferred to say) could possibly be redeemed; and he had no hope of eternal salvation for the inhabitants of Catholic countries.  I recollect his speaking of Austria.  He questioned whether a single Austrian subject, except, as he said, here and there a pious and extremely ignorant individual, who had not comprehended the errors of the Papacy, but had humbly studied his Bible, could hope to find eternal life.  He thought that the ordinary Chinaman or savage native of Fiji had a better chance of salvation than any cardinal in the Vatican.  And even in the priesthood of the Church of England he believed that while many were called, few indeed would be found to have been chosen.

I could not sympathize, even in my then state of ignorance, with so rigid a conception of the Divine mercy.  Little inclined as I was to be sceptical, I still thought it impossible, that a secret of such stupendous importance should have been entrusted to a little group of Plymouth Brethren, and have been hidden from millions of disinterested and pious theologians.  That the leaders of European Christianity were sincere, my Father did not attempt to question.  But they were all of them wrong, incorrect; and no matter how holy their lives, how self-sacrificing their actions, they would have to suffer for their inexactitude through aeons of undefined torment.  He would speak with a solemn complacency of the aged nun, who, after a long life of renunciation and devotion, died at last, ‘only to discover her mistake’.

He who was so tender-hearted that he could not bear to witness the pain or distress of any person, however disagreeable or undeserving, was quite acquiescent in believing that God would punish human beings, in millions, for ever, for a purely intellectual error of comprehension.  My Father’s inconsistencies of perception seem to me to have been the result of a curious irregularity of equipment.  Taking for granted, as he did, the absolute integrity of the Scriptures, and applying to them his trained scientific spirit, he contrived to stifle, with a deplorable success, alike the function of the imagination, the sense of moral justice, and his own deep and instinctive tenderness of heart.

There presently came over me a strong desire to know what doctrine indeed it was that the other Churches taught.  I expressed a wish to be made aware of the practices of Rome, or at least of Canterbury, and I longed to attend the Anglican and the Roman services.  But to do so was impossible.  My Father did not, indeed, forbid me to enter the fine parish church of our village, or the stately Puginesque cathedral which Rome had just erected at its side, but I knew that I could not be seen at either service