“Eh, I knowna.  He preached a deal about doctrines.  But I’ve seen pretty clear, ever since I was a young un, as religion’s something else besides doctrines and notions.  I look at it as if the doctrines was like finding names for your feelings, so as you can talk of ’em when you’ve never known ’em, just as a man may talk o’ tools when he knows their names, though he’s never so much as seen ’em, still less handled ’em.  I’ve heard a deal o’ doctrine i’ my time, for I used to go after the Dissenting preachers along wi’ Seth, when I was a lad o’ seventeen, and got puzzling myself a deal about th’ Arminians and the Calvinists.  The Wesleyans, you know, are strong Arminians; and Seth, who could never abide anything harsh and was always for hoping the best, held fast by the Wesleyans from the very first; but I thought I could pick a hole or two in their notions, and I got disputing wi’ one o’ the class leaders down at Treddles’on, and harassed him so, first o’ this side and then o’ that, till at last he said, ‘Young man, it’s the devil making use o’ your pride and conceit as a weapon to war against the simplicity o’ the truth.’  I couldn’t help laughing then, but as I was going home, I thought the man wasn’t far wrong.  I began to see as all this weighing and sifting what this text means and that text means, and whether folks are saved all by God’s grace, or whether there goes an ounce o’ their own will to’t, was no part o’ real religion at all.  You may talk o’ these things for hours on end, and you’ll only be all the more coxy and conceited for’t.  So I took to going nowhere but to church, and hearing nobody but Mr. Irwine, for he said nothing but what was good and what you’d be the wiser for remembering.  And I found it better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries o’ God’s dealings, and not be making a clatter about what I could never understand.  And they’re poor foolish questions after all; for what have we got either inside or outside of us but what comes from God?  If we’ve got a resolution to do right, He gave it us, I reckon, first or last; but I see plain enough we shall never do it without a resolution, and that’s enough for me.”

Adam, you perceive, was a warm admirer, perhaps a partial judge, of Mr. Irwine, as, happily, some of us still are of the people we have known familiarly.  Doubtless it will be despised as a weakness by that lofty order of minds who pant after the ideal, and are oppressed by a general sense that their emotions are of too exquisite a character to find fit objects among their everyday fellowmen.  I have often been favoured with the confidence of these select natures, and find them to concur in the experience that great men are overestimated and small men are insupportable; that if you would love a woman without ever looking back on your love as a folly, she must die while you are courting her; and if you would maintain the slightest belief in human heroism, you must never make a pilgrimage to see the hero.  I confess I have often meanly