greedy as ever of admiration.  Her maxims and principles, if she could be said to have any of the latter, were not a little opposed to her husband’s; but she died when Juliet was only five years old, and the child grew to be almost the companion of her father.  Hence it came that she heard much religious conversation, often partaking not a little of the character of discussion and even of dispute.  She thus became familiar with the forms of a religious belief as narrow as its partisans are numerous.  Her heart did not remain uninterested, but she was never in earnest sufficiently to discover what a thing of beggarly elements the system was, and how incapable of satisfying any childlike soul.  She never questioned the truth of what she heard, and became skilled in its idioms and arguments and forms of thought.  But the more familiar one becomes with any religious system, while yet the conscience and will are unawakened and obedience has not begun, the harder is it to enter into the kingdom of heaven.  Such familiarity is a soul-killing experience, and great will be the excuse for some of those sons of religious parents who have gone further toward hell than many born and bred thieves and sinners.

When Juliet came to understand clearly that her new friend did mean thorough-going unbelief, the rejection of all the doctrines she had been taught by him whose memory she revered, she was altogether shocked, and for a day and a night regarded him as a monster of wickedness.  But her horror was mainly the reflex of that with which her father would have regarded him, and all that was needed to moderate horror to disapproval, was familiarity with his doctrines in the light of his agreeable presence and undeniable good qualities.  Thoroughly acquainted as she believed herself with “the plan of salvation,” Jesus of Nazareth was to her but the vague shadow of something that was more than a man, yet no man at all.  I had nearly said that what He came to reveal had become to her yet more vague from her nebulous notion of Him who was its revelation.  Her religion was, as a matter of course, as dusky and uncertain, as the object-center of it was obscure and unrealized.  Since her father’s death and her comparative isolation, she had read and thought a good deal; some of my readers may even think she had read and thought to tolerable purposes judging from her answers to Faber in the first serious conversation they had; but her religion had lain as before in a state of dull quiescence, until her late experience, realizing to her the idea of the special care of which she stood so much in need, awoke in her a keen sense of delight, and if not a sense of gratitude as well, yet a dull desire to be grateful.

The next day, as she sat pondering what had passed between them, altogether unaware of her own weakness, she was suddenly seized with the ambition—­in its inward relations the same as his—­of converting him to her belief.  The purpose justified an interest in him beyond what gratitude obligated, and was in part the cause why she neither shrank from his society, nor grew alarmed at the rapid growth of her intimacy.  But they only who love the truth simply and altogether, can really know what they are about.