that meantime he is disposed to make himself very easy in the midst of these uncertainties, and to await the great revelation of the future with philosophical, that is, being interpreted, with idiotic tranquillity, I see that, in point of fact, he has never entered into the question at all; that he has failed to realize the terrible moment of the questions (however they may be decided) of which he speaks with such amazing flippancy.

It is too often the result of thoughtlessness; of a wish to get rid of truths unwelcome to the heart; of a vain love of paradox, or perhaps, in many cases, (as a friend of mine said,) of an amiable wish to frighten “mammas and maiden aunts.”  But let us be assured that a frivolous sceptic,—­a sceptic indeed,—­after duly pondering and feeling the doubts he professes to embrace, is an impossibility.  What may be expected in the genuine sceptic is a modest hope that he may be mistaken, a desire to be confuted; a retention of his convictions as if they were a guilty secret; or the promulgation of them only as the utterance of an agonized heart, unable to suppress the language of its misery; a dread of making proselytes,—­even as men refrain from exposing their sores or plague-infected garments in the eyes of the world.  The least we can expect from him is that mood of mind which Pascal so sublimely says becomes the Atheist ...  “Is this, then, a thing to be said with gayety?  Is it not rather a thing to be said with tears as the saddest thing in the world?”

The current of conversation after a while, somehow swept us round again to the point I had resolved to quit for this evening.  “But since we are there,” said I, “I wish you would in brief tell me why, when you doubted of Christianity, you did not stop at any of those harbours of refuge which, in our time especially, have been so plentifully provided for those who reject the New Testament?  You are not ignorant, I know, of the writings of Mr. Theodore Parker, and other modern Deists.  How is it that none of them even transiently satisfied you?  An ingenious eclecticism founded on them has satisfied, you see, your old college friend, George Fellowes, of whom I hear rare things.  He is far enough from being a sceptic,”

“Why,” said he, laughing, “it is quite true that George is not a sceptic, He has believed more and disbelieved more, and both one and the other for less reason, than any other man I know.  He used to send me the strangest letters when I was abroad, and almost every one presented him under some new phase.  No, he is no sceptic.  If he has rejected almost every thing, he has also embraced almost every thing; at each point in his career, his versatile faith has found him some system to replace that he had abandoned; and he is now a dogmatist par excellence, for he has adopted a theory of religion which formally abjures intellect and logic, and is as sincerely abjured by them.  If the difficulties he has successively encountered had been seen all at once, I fancy he would