“If we were always in a right mood, there would be no room for the exercise of the will.  We should go by our mood and inclination only.  But that is by the by.—­Where you have been wrong is—­that you have sought to influence your feelings only by thought and argument with yourself—­and not also by contact with your fellows.  Besides the ladies of whom you have spoken, I think you have hardly a friend in this neighbourhood but myself.  One friend cannot afford you half experience enough to teach you the relations of life and of human needs.  At best, under such circumstances, you can only have right theories:  practice for realising them in yourself is nowhere.  It is no more possible for a man in the present day to retire from his fellows into the cave of his religion, and thereby leave the world of his own faults and follies behind, than it was possible for the eremites of old to get close to God in virtue of declining the duties which their very birth of human father and mother laid upon them.  I do not deny that you and the eremite may both come nearer to God, in virtue of whatever is true in your desires and your worship; ’but if a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?’—­which surely means to imply at least that to love our neighbour is a great help towards loving God.  How this love is to come about without intercourse, I do not see.  And how without this love we are to bear up from within against the thousand irritations to which, especially in sickness, our unavoidable relations with humanity will expose us, I cannot tell either.”

“But,” returned Mr Stoddart, “I had had a true regard for you, and some friendly communication with you.  If human intercourse were what is required in my case, how should I fail just with respect to the only man with whom I had held such intercourse?”

“Because the relations in which you stood with me were those of the individual, not of the race.  You like me, because I am fortunate enough to please you—­to be a gentleman, I hope—­to be a man of some education, and capable of understanding, or at least docile enough to try to understand, what you tell me of your plans and pursuits.  But you do not feel any relation to me on the ground of my humanity—­that God made me, and therefore I am your brother.  It is not because we grow out of the same stem, but merely because my leaf is a little like your own that you draw to me.  Our Lord took on Him the nature of man:  you will only regard your individual attractions.  Disturb your liking and your love vanishes.”

“You are severe.”

“I don’t mean really vanishes, but disappears for the time.  Yet you will confess you have to wait till, somehow, you know not how, it comes back again—­of itself, as it were.”

“Yes, I confess.  To my sorrow, I find it so.”