A NEW element now entered into my life, a fresh rival arose to
compete for me with my Father's dogmatic theology. This rival was
the Sea. When Wordsworth was a little child, the presence of the
mountains and the clouds lighted up his spirit with gleams that
were like the flashing of a shield. He has described, in the
marvellous pages of the 'Prelude', the impact of nature upon the
infant soul, but he has described it vaguely and faintly, with
some 'infirmity of love for days disowned by memory',--I think
because he was brought up in the midst of spectacular beauty, and
could name no moment, mark no 'here' or 'now', when the wonder
broke upon him. It was at the age of twice five summers, he
thought, that he began to hold unconscious intercourse with
nature, 'drinking in a pure organic pleasure' from the floating
mists and winding waters. Perhaps, in his anxiety to be truthful,
and in the absence of any record, he put the date of this
conscious rapture too late rather than too early. Certainly my
own impregnation with the obscurely-defined but keenly-felt
loveliness of the open sea dates from the first week of my ninth
year.
The village, on the outskirts of which we had taken up our abode,
was built parallel to the cliff line above the shore, but half a
mile inland. For a long time after the date I have now reached,
no other form of natural scenery than the sea had any effect upon
me at all. The tors of the distant moor might be drawn in deep
blue against the pallor of our morning or our evening sky, but I
never looked at them. It was the Sea, always the sea, nothing but
the sea. From our house, or from the field at the back of our
house, or from any part of the village itself, there was no
appearance to suggest that there could lie anything in an
easterly direction to break the infinitude of red ploughed
fields. But on that earliest morning, how my heart remembers we
hastened,--Miss Marks, the maid, and I between them, along a
couple of high-walled lanes, when suddenly, far below us, in an
immense arc of light, there stretched the enormous plain of
waters. We had but to cross a step or two of downs, when the
hollow sides of the great limestone cove yawned at our feet,
descending, like a broken cup, down, down to the moon of snow-
white shingle and the expanse of blue-green sea.
In these twentieth-century days, a careful municipality has
studded the down with rustic seats and has shut its dangers out
with railings, has cut a winding carriage-drive round the curves
of the cove down to the shore, and has planted sausage-laurels at
intervals in clearings made for that aesthetic purpose. When last
I saw the place, thus smartened and secured, with its hair in
curl-papers and its feet in patent-leathers, I turned from it in
anger and disgust, and could almost have wept. I suppose that to
those who knew it in no other guise, it may still have beauty. No
parish councils, beneficent and shrewd, can obscure the lustre of
the waters or compress the vastness of the sky. But what man
could do to make wild beauty ineffectual, tame and empty, has
amply been performed at Oddicombe.
Very different was it fifty years ago, in its uncouth majesty. No
road, save the merest goat-path, led down its concave wilderness,
in which loose furze-bushes and untrimmed brambles wantoned into
the likeness of trees, each draped in audacious tissue of wild
clematis. Through this fantastic maze the traveller wound his
way, led by little other clue than by the instinct of descent.
For me, as a child, it meant the labour of a long, an endless
morning, to descend to the snow-white pebbles, to sport at the
edge of the cold, sharp sea, and then to climb up home again,
slipping in the sticky red mud, clutching at the smooth boughs of
the wild ash, toiling, toiling upwards into flat land out of that
hollow world of rocks.
On the first occasion I recollect, our Cockney housemaid,
enthusiastic young creature that she was, flung herself down upon
her knees, and drank of the salt waters. Miss Marks, more
instructed in phenomena, refrained, but I, although I was
perfectly aware what the taste would be, insisted on sipping a
few drops from the palm of my hand. This was a slight recurrence
of what I have called my 'natural magic' practices, which had
passed into the background of my mind, but had not quite
disappeared. I recollect that I thought I might secure some power
of walking on the sea, if I drank of it--a perfectly irrational
movement of mind, like those of savages.
My great desire was to walk out over the sea as far as I could,
and then lie flat on it, face downwards, and peer into the
depths. I was tormented with this ambition, and, like many grown-
up people, was so fully occupied by these vain and ridiculous
desires that I neglected the actual natural pleasures around me.
The idea was not quite so demented as it may seem, because we
were in the habit of singing, as well as reading, of those
enraptured beings who spend their days in 'flinging down their
golden crowns upon the jasper sea'. Why, I argued, should I not
be able to fling down my straw hat upon the tides of Oddicombe?
And, without question, a majestic scene upon the Lake of
Gennesaret had also inflamed my fancy. Of all these things, of
course, I was careful to speak to no one.
It was not with Miss Marks, however, but with my Father, that I
became accustomed to make the laborious and exquisite journeys
down to the sea and back again. His work as a naturalist
eventually took him, laden with implements, to the rock-pools on
the shore, and I was in attendance as an acolyte. But our
earliest winter in South Devon was darkened for us both by
disappointments, the cause of which lay, at the time, far out of
my reach. In the spirit of my Father were then running, with
furious velocity, two hostile streams of influence. I was
standing, just now, thinking of these things, where the Cascine
ends in the wooded point which is carved out sharply by the lion-
coloured swirl of the Arno on the one side and by the pure flow
of the Mugnone on the other. The rivers meet, and run parallel,
but there comes a moment when the one or the other must conquer,
and it is the yellow vehemence that drowns the purer tide.
So, through my Father's brain, in that year of scientific crisis,
1857, there rushed two kinds of thought, each absorbing, each
convincing, yet totally irreconcilable. There is a peculiar agony
in the paradox that truth has two forms, each of them
indisputable, yet each antagonistic to the other. It was this
discovery, that there were two theories of physical life, each of
which was true, but the truth of each incompatible with the truth
of the other, which shook the spirit of my Father with
perturbation. It was not, really, a paradox, it was a fallacy, if
he could only have known it, but he allowed the turbid volume of
superstition to drown the delicate stream of reason. He took one
step in the service of truth, and then he drew back in an agony,
and accepted the servitude of error.
This was the great moment in the history of thought when the
theory of the mutability of species was preparing to throw a
flood of light upon all departments of human speculation and
action. It was becoming necessary to stand emphatically in one
army or the other. Lyell was surrounding himself with disciples,
who were making strides in the direction of discovery. Darwin had
long been collecting facts with regard to the variation of
animals and plants. Hooker and Wallace, Asa Gray and even
Agassiz, each in his own sphere, were coming closer and closer to
a perception of that secret which was first to reveal itself
clearly to the patient and humble genius of Darwin. In the year
before, in 1856, Darwin, under pressure from Lyell, had begun
that modest statement of the new revelation, that 'abstract of an
essay', which developed so mightily into 'The Origin of Species'.
Wollaston's 'Variation of Species' had just appeared, and had
been a nine days' wonder in the wilderness.
On the other side, the reactionaries, although never dreaming of
the fate which hung over them, had not been idle. In 1857 the
astounding question had for the first time been propounded with
contumely, 'What, then, did we come from an orang-outang?' The
famous 'Vestiges of Creation' had been supplying a sugar-and-
water panacea for those who could not escape from the trend of
evidence, and who yet clung to revelation. Owen was encouraging
reaction by resisting, with all the strength of his prestige, the
theory of the mutability of species.
In this period of intellectual ferment, as when a great political
revolution is being planned, many possible adherents were
confidentially tested with hints and encouraged to reveal their
bias in a whisper. It was the notion of Lyell, himself a great
mover of men, that, before the doctrine of natural selection was
given to a world which would be sure to lift up at it a howl of
execration, a certain bodyguard of sound and experienced
naturalists, expert in the description of species, should be
privately made aware of its tenor. Among those who were thus
initiated, or approached with a view towards possible
illumination, was my Father. He was spoken to by Hooker, and
later on by Darwin, after meetings of the Royal Society in the
summer of 1857.
My Father's attitude towards the theory of natural selection was
critical in his career, and oddly enough, it exercised an immense
influence on my own experience as a child. Let it be admitted at
once, mournful as the admission is, that every instinct in his
intelligence went out at first to greet the new light. It had
hardly done so, when a recollection of the opening chapter of
'Genesis' checked it at the outset. He consulted with Carpenter, a
great investigator, but one who was fully as incapable as himself
of remodelling his ideas with regard to the old, accepted
hypotheses. They both determined, on various grounds, to have
nothing to do with the terrible theory, but to hold steadily to
the law of the fixity of species. It was exactly at this juncture
that we left London, and the slight and occasional but always
extremely salutary personal intercourse with men of scientific
leading which my Father had enjoyed at the British Museum and at
the Royal Society came to an end. His next act was to burn his
ships down to the last beam and log out of which a raft could
have been made. By a strange act of wilfulness, he closed the
doors upon himself forever.
My Father had never admired Sir Charles Lyell. I think that the
famous 'Lord Chancellor manner' of the geologist intimidated him,
and we undervalue the intelligence of those whose conversation
puts us at a disadvantage. For Darwin and Hooker, on the other
hand, he had a profound esteem, and I know not whether this had
anything to do with the fact that he chose, for his impetuous
experiment in reaction, the field of geology, rather than that of
zoology or botany. Lyell had been threatening to publish a book
on the geological history of Man, which was to be a bombshell
flung into the camp of the catastrophists. My Father, after long
reflection, prepared a theory of his own, which, as he fondly
hoped, would take the wind out of Lyell's sails, and justify
geology to godly readers of 'Genesis'. It was, very briefly, that
there had been no gradual modification of the surface of the
earth, or slow development of organic forms, but that when the
catastrophic act of creation took place, the world presented,
instantly, the structural appearance of a planet on which life
had long existed.
The theory, coarsely enough, and to my Father's great
indignation, was defined by a hasty press as being this--that God
hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into
infidelity. In truth, it was the logical and inevitable
conclusion of accepting, literally, the doctrine of a sudden act
of creation; it emphasized the fact that any breach in the
circular course of nature could be conceived only on the
supposition that the object created bore false witness to past
processes, which had never taken place. For instance, Adam would
certainly possess hair and teeth and bones in a condition which
it must have taken many years to accomplish, yet he was created
full-grown yesterday. He would certainly--though Sir Thomas
Browne denied it--display an 'omphalos', yet no umbilical cord
had ever attached him to a mother.
Never was a book cast upon the waters with greater anticipations
of success than was this curious, this obstinate, this fanatical
volume. My Father lived in a fever of suspense, waiting for the
tremendous issue. This 'Omphalos' of his, he thought, was to
bring all the turmoil of scientific speculation to a close, fling
geology into the arms of Scripture, and make the lion eat grass
with the lamb. It was not surprising, he admitted, that there had
been experienced an ever-increasing discord between the facts
which geology brings to light and the direct statements of the
early chapters of 'Genesis'. Nobody was to blame for that. My
Father, and my Father alone, possessed the secret of the enigma;
he alone held the key which could smoothly open the lock of
geological mystery. He offered it, with a glowing gesture, to
atheists and Christians alike. This was to be the universal
panacea; this the system of intellectual therapeutics which could
not but heal all the maladies of the age. But, alas! atheists and
Christians alike looked at it, and laughed, and threw it away.
In the course of that dismal winter, as the post began to bring
in private letters, few and chilly, and public reviews, many and
scornful, my Father looked in vain for the approval of the
churches, and in vain for the acquiescence of the scientific
societies, and in vain for the gratitude of those 'thousands of
thinking persons', which he had rashly assured himself of
receiving. As his reconciliation of Scripture statements and
geological deductions was welcomed nowhere, as Darwin continued
silent, and the youthful Huxley was scornful, and even Charles
Kingsley, from whom my Father had expected the most instant
appreciation, wrote that he could not 'give up the painful and
slow conclusion of five and twenty years' study of geology, and
believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and
superfluous lie',--as all this happened or failed to happen, a
gloom, cold and dismal, descended upon our morning teacups. It
was what the poets mean by an 'inspissated' gloom; it thickened
day by day, as hope and self-confidence evaporated in thin clouds
of disappointment. My Father was not prepared for such a fate. He
had been the spoiled darling of the public, the constant
favourite of the press, and now, like the dark angels of old,
so huge a rout
Encumbered him with ruin.
He could not recover from amazement at having offended everybody
by an enterprise which had been undertaken in the cause of
universal reconciliation.
During that grim season, my Father was no lively companion, and
circumstance after circumstance combined to drive him further
from humanity. He missed more than ever the sympathetic ear of my
Mother; there was present to support him nothing of that artful,
female casuistry which insinuates into the wounded consciousness
of a man the conviction that, after all, he is right and all the
rest of the world is wrong. My Father used to tramp in solitude
around and around the red ploughed field which was going to be
his lawn, or sheltering himself from the thin Devonian rain, pace
up and down the still-naked verandah where blossoming creepers
were to be. And I think that there was added to his chagrin with
all his fellow mortals a first tincture of that heresy which was
to attack him later on. It was now that, I fancy, he began, in
his depression, to be angry with God. How much devotion had he
given, how many sacrifices had he made, only to be left storming
around this red morass with no one in all the world to care for
him except one pale-faced child with its cheek pressed to the
window!
After one or two brilliant excursions to the sea, winter, in its
dampest, muddiest, most languid form, had fallen upon us and shut
us in. It was a dreary winter for the wifeless man and the
motherless boy. We had come into the house, in precipitate
abandonment to that supposed answer to prayer, a great deal too
soon. In order to rake together the lump sum for buying it, my
Father had denuded himself of almost everything, and our sticks
of chairs and tables filled but two or three rooms. Half the
little house, or 'villa' as we called it, was not papered, two-
thirds were not furnished. The workmen were still finishing the
outside when we arrived, and in that connection I recall a little
incident which exhibits my Father's morbid delicacy of
conscience. He was accustomed in his brighter moments--and this
was before the publication of his 'Omphalos'--occasionally to
sing loud Dorsetshire songs of his early days, in a strange,
broad Wessex lingo that I loved. One October afternoon he and I
were sitting on the verandah, and my Father was singing; just
around the corner, out of sight, two carpenters were putting up
the framework of a greenhouse. In a pause, one of them said to
his fellow: 'He can zing a zong, zo well's another, though he be
a minister.' My Father, who was holding my hand loosely, clutched
it, and looking up, I saw his eyes darken. He never sang a
secular song again during the whole of his life.
Later in the year, and after his literary misfortune, his
conscience became more troublesome than ever. I think he
considered the failure of his attempt at the reconciliation of
science with religion to have been intended by God as a
punishment for something he had done or left undone. In those
brooding tramps around and around the garden, his soul was on its
knees searching the corners of his conscience for some sin of
omission or commission, and one by one every pleasure, every
recreation, every trifle scraped out of the dust of past
experience, was magnified into a huge offence. He thought that
the smallest evidence of levity, the least unbending to human
instinct, might be seized by those around him as evidence of
inconsistency, and might lead the weaker brethren into offence.
The incident of the carpenters and the comic song is typical of a
condition of mind which now possessed my Father, in which act
after act became taboo, not because each was sinful in itself,
but because it might lead others into sin.
I have the conviction that Miss Marks was now mightily afraid of
my Father. Whenever she could, she withdrew to the room she
called her 'boudoir', a small, chilly apartment, sparsely
furnished, looking over what was in process of becoming the
vegetable garden. Very properly, that she might have some
sanctuary, Miss Marks forbade me to enter this virginal bower,
which, of course, became to me an object of harrowing curiosity.
Through the key-hole I could see practically nothing; one day I
contrived to slip inside, and discovered that there was nothing
to see but a plain bedstead and a toilet-table, void of all
attraction. In this 'boudoir', on winter afternoons, a fire would
be lighted, and Miss Marks would withdraw to it, not seen by us
anymore between high-tea and the apocalyptic exercise known as
'worship'--in less strenuous households much less austerely
practised under the name of 'family prayers'. Left meanwhile to
our own devices, my Father would mainly be reading his book or
paper held close up to the candle, while his lips and heavy
eyebrows occasionally quivered and palpitated, with literary
ardour, in a manner strangely exciting to me. Miss Marks, in a
very high cap, and her large teeth shining, would occasionally
appear in the doorway, desiring, with spurious geniality, to know
how we were 'getting on'. But on these occasions neither of us
replied to Miss Marks.
Sometimes in the course of this winter, my Father and I had long
cosy talks together over the fire. Our favourite subject was
murders. I wonder whether little boys of eight, soon to go
upstairs alone at night, often discuss violent crime with a
widower-papa? The practice, I cannot help thinking, is unusual;
it was, however, consecutive with us. We tried other secular
subjects, but we were sure to come around at last to 'what do you
suppose they really did with the body?' I was told, a thrilled
listener, the adventure of Mrs. Manning, who killed a gentleman on
the stairs and buried him in quick-lime in the back-kitchen, and
it was at this time that I learned the useful historical fact,
which abides with me after half a century, that Mrs. Manning was
hanged in black satin, which thereupon went wholly out of fashion
in England. I also heard about Burke and Hare, whose story nearly
froze me into stone with horror.
These were crimes which appear in the chronicles. But who will
tell me what 'the Carpet-bag Mystery' was, which my Father and I
discussed evening after evening? I have never come across a
whisper of it since, and I suspect it of having been a hoax. As I
recall the details, people in a boat, passing down the Thames,
saw a carpet-bag hung high in air, on one of the projections of a
pier of Waterloo Bridge. Being with difficulty dragged down--or
perhaps up--this bag was found to be full of human remains,
dreadful butcher's business of joints and fragments. Persons were
missed, were identified, were again denied--the whole is a vapour
in my memory which shifts as I try to define it. But clear enough
is the picture I hold of myself, in a high chair, on the left-
hand side of the sitting-room fireplace, the leaping flames
reflected in the glass-case of tropical insects on the opposite
wall, and my Father, leaning anxiously forward, with uplifted
finger, emphasizing to me the pros and cons of the horrible
carpet-bag evidence.
I suppose that my interest in these discussions--and Heaven knows
I was animated enough--amused and distracted my Father, whose
idea of a suitable theme for childhood's ear now seems to me
surprising. I soon found that these subjects were not welcome to
everybody, for, starting the Carpet-bag Mystery one morning with
Miss Marks, in the hope of delaying my arithmetic lesson, she
fairly threw her apron over her ears, and told me, from that
vantage, that if I did not desist at once, she should scream.
Occasionally we took winter walks together, my Father and I, down
some lane that led to a sight of the sea, or over the rolling
downs. We tried to recapture the charm of those delightful
strolls in London, when we used to lean over the bridges and
watch the ducks. But we could not recover this pleasure. My
Father was deeply enwoven in the chain of his own thoughts, and
would stalk on, without a word, buried in angry reverie. If he
spoke to me, on these excursions, it was a pain to me to answer
him. I could talk on easy terms with him indoors, seated in my
high chair, with our heads on a level, but it was intolerably
laborious to look up into the firmament and converse with a dark
face against the sky. The actual exercise of walking, too, was
very exhausting to me; the bright red mud, to the strange colour
of which I could not for a long while get accustomed, becoming
caked about my little shoes, and wearying me extremely. I would
grow petulant and cross, contradict my Father, and oppose his
whims. These walks were distressing to us both, yet he did not
like to walk alone, and he had no other friend. However, as the
winter advanced, they had to be abandoned, and the habit of our
taking a 'constitutional' together was never resumed.
I look back upon myself at this time as upon a cantankerous, ill-
tempered and unobliging child. The only excuse I can offer is
that I really was not well. The change to Devonshire had not
suited me; my health gave the excellent Miss Marks some anxiety,
but she was not ready in resource. The dampness of the house was
terrible; indoors and out, the atmosphere seemed soaked in chilly
vapours. Under my bed-clothes at night I shook like a jelly,
unable to sleep for cold, though I was heaped with coverings,
while my skin was all puckered with gooseflesh. I could eat
nothing solid, without suffering immediately from violent
hiccough, so that much of my time was spent lying prone on my
back upon the hearthrug, awakening the echoes like a cuckoo. Miss
Marks, therefore, cut off all food but milk-sop, a loathly bowl
of which appeared at every meal. In consequence the hiccough
lessened, but my strength declined with it. I languished in a
perpetual catarrh. I was roused to a conscious-ness that I was
not considered well by the fact that my Father prayed publicly at
morning and evening 'worship' that if it was the Lord's will to
take me to himself there might be no doubt whatever about my
being a sealed child of God and an inheritor of glory. I was
partly disconcerted by, partly vain of, this open advertisement
of my ailments.
Of our dealings with the 'Saints', a fresh assortment of whom met
us on our arrival in Devonshire, I shall speak presently. My
Father's austerity of behaviour was, I think, perpetually
accentuated by his fear of doing anything to offend the
consciences of these persons, whom he supposed, no doubt, to be
more sensitive than they really were. He was fond of saying that
'a very little stain upon the conscience makes a wide breach in
our communion with God', and he counted possible errors of
conduct by hundreds and by thousands. It was in this winter that
his attention was particularly drawn to the festival of
Christmas, which, apparently, he had scarcely noticed in London.
On the subject of all feasts of the Church he held views of an
almost grotesque peculiarity. He looked upon each of them as
nugatory and worthless, but the keeping of Christmas appeared to
him by far the most hateful, and nothing less than an act of
idolatry. 'The very word is Popish', he used to exclaim,
'Christ's Mass!' pursing up his lips with the gesture of one who
tastes assafoetida by accident. Then he would adduce the
antiquity of the so-called feast, adapted from horrible heathen
rites, and itself a soiled relic of the abominable Yule-Tide. He
would denounce the horrors of Christmas until it almost made me
blush to look at a holly-berry.
On Christmas Day of this year 1857 our villa saw a very unusual
sight. My Father had given strictest charge that no difference
whatever was to be made in our meals on that day; the dinner was
to be neither more copious than usual nor less so. He was obeyed,
but the servants, secretly rebellious, made a small plum-pudding
for themselves. (I discovered afterwards, with pain, that Miss
Marks received a slice of it in her boudoir.) Early in the
afternoon, the maids,--of whom we were now advanced to keeping
two,--kindly remarked that 'the poor dear child ought to have a
bit, anyhow', and wheedled me into the kitchen, where I ate a
slice of plum-pudding. Shortly I began to feel that pain inside
which in my frail state was inevitable, and my conscience smote
me violently. At length I could bear my spiritual anguish no
longer, and bursting into the study I called out: 'Oh! Papa,
Papa, I have eaten of flesh offered to idols!' It took some time,
between my sobs, to explain what had happened. Then my Father
sternly said: 'Where is the accursed thing?' I explained that as
much as was left of it was still on the kitchen table. He took me
by the hand, and ran with me into the midst of the startled
servants, seized what remained of the pudding, and with the plate
in one hand and me still tight in the other, ran until we reached
the dust-heap, when he flung the idolatrous confectionery on to
the middle of the ashes, and then raked it deep down into the
mass. The suddenness, the violence, the velocity of this
extraordinary act made an impression on my memory which nothing
will ever efface.
The key is lost by which I might unlock the perverse malady from
which my Father's conscience seemed to suffer during the whole of
this melancholy winter. But I think that a dislocation of his
intellectual system had a great deal to do with it. Up to this
point in his career, he had, as we have seen, nourished the
delusion that science and revelation could be mutually justified,
that some sort of compromise was possible. With great and ever
greater distinctness, his investigations had shown him that in
all departments of organic nature there are visible the evidences
of slow modification of forms, of the type developed by the
pressure and practice of aeons. This conviction had been borne
in upon him until it was positively irresistible. Where was his
place, then, as a sincere and accurate observer? Manifestly, it
was with the pioneers of the new truth, it was with Darwin,
Wallace and Hooker. But did not the second chapter of 'Genesis'
say that in six days the heavens and earth were finished, and the
host of them, and that on the seventh day God ended his work
which he had made?
Here was a dilemma! Geology certainly seemed to be true, but the
Bible, which was God's word, was true. If the Bible said that all
things in Heaven and Earth were created in six days, created in
six days they were,--in six literal days of twenty-four hours
each. The evidences of spontaneous variation of form, acting,
over an immense space of time, upon ever-modifying organic
structures, seemed overwhelming, but they must either be brought
into line with the six-day labour of creation, or they must be
rejected. I have already shown how my Father worked out the
ingenious 'Omphalos' theory in order to justify himself as a
strictly scientific observer who was also a humble slave of
revelation. But the old convention and the new rebellion would
alike have none of his compromise.
To a mind so acute and at the same time so narrow as that of my
Father--a mind which is all logical and positive without breadth,
without suppleness and without imagination--to be subjected to a
check of this kind is agony. It has not the relief of a smaller
nature, which escapes from the dilemma by some foggy formula; nor
the resolution of a larger nature to take to its wings and
surmount the obstacle. My Father, although half suffocated by the
emotion of being lifted, as it were, on the great biological
wave, never dreamed of letting go his clutch of the ancient
tradition, but hung there, strained and buffeted. It is
extraordinary that he--an 'honest hodman of science', as Huxley
once called him--should not have been content to allow others,
whose horizons were wider than his could be, to pursue those
purely intellectual surveys for which he had no species of
aptitude. As a collector of facts and marshaller of observations,
he had not a rival in that age; his very absence of imagination
aided him in this work. But he was more an attorney than
philosopher, and he lacked that sublime humility which is the
crown of genius. For, this obstinate persuasion that he alone
knew the mind of God, that he alone could interpret the designs
of the Creator, what did it result from if not from a congenital
lack of that highest modesty which replies 'I do not know' even
to the questions which Faith, with menacing forger, insists on
having most positively answered?