for women which is the saviour of men until the Truth Himself saves both.  A few years of worthy labor in his profession had done much to develop him, and his character for uprightness, benevolence, and skill, with the people of Glaston and its neighborhood, where he had been ministering only about a year, was already of the highest.  Even now, when, in a fever of honesty, he declared there could be no God in such an ill-ordered world, so full was his heart of the human half of religion, that he could not stand by the bedside of dying man or woman, without lamenting that there was no consolation—­that stern truth would allow him to cast no feeblest glamour of hope upon the departing shadow.  His was a nobler nature than theirs who, believing no more than he, are satisfied with the assurance that at the heart of the evils of the world lie laws unchangeable.

The main weak point in him was, that, while he was indeed tender-hearted, and did no kindnesses to be seen of men, he did them to be seen of himself:  he saw him who did them all the time.  The boy was in the man; doing his deeds he sought, not the approbation merely, but the admiration of his own consciousness.  I am afraid to say this was wrong, but it was poor and childish, crippled his walk, and obstructed his higher development.  He liked to know himself a benefactor.  Such a man may well be of noble nature, but he is a mere dabbler in nobility.  Faber delighted in the thought that, having repudiated all motives of personal interest involved in religious belief, all that regard for the future, with its rewards and punishments, which, in his ignorance, genuine or willful, of essential Christianity, he took for its main potence, he ministered to his neighbor, doing to him as he would have him do to himself, hopeless of any divine recognition, of any betterness beyond the grave, in a fashion at least as noble as that of the most devoted of Christians.  It did not occur to him to ask if he loved him as well—­if his care about him was equal to his satisfaction in himself.  Neither did he reflect that the devotion he admired in himself had been brought to the birth in him through others, in whom it was first generated by a fast belief in an unselfish, loving, self-devoting God.  Had he inquired he might have discovered that this belief had carried some men immeasurably further in the help of their fellows, than he had yet gone.  Indeed he might, I think, have found instances of men of faith spending their lives for their fellows, whose defective theology or diseased humility would not allow them to hope their own salvation.  Inquiry might have given him ground for fearing that with the love of the imagined God, the love of the indubitable man would decay and vanish.  But such as Faber was, he was both loved and honored by all whom he had ever attended; and, with his fine tastes, his genial nature, his quiet conscience, his good health, his enjoyment of life,