It fell from him slowly,
year by year, as he continued to ripen, and grow milder, and
understand more generously the mingled characters of men. In the
early days he once read me a bitter lecture; and I remember leaving
his house in a fine spring afternoon, with the physical darkness of
despair upon my eyesight. Long after he made me a formal
retractation of the sermon and a formal apology for the pain he had
inflicted; adding drolly, but truly, 'You see, at that time I was
so much younger than you!' And yet even in those days there was
much to learn from him; and above all his fine spirit of piety,
bravely and trustfully accepting life, and his singular delight in
the heroic.
His piety was, indeed, a thing of chief importance. His views (as
they are called) upon religious matters varied much; and he could
never be induced to think them more or less than views. 'All dogma
is to me mere form,' he wrote; 'dogmas are mere blind struggles to
express the inexpressible. I cannot conceive that any single
proposition whatever in religion is true in the scientific sense;
and yet all the while I think the religious view of the world is
the most true view.
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