sistent.

"When people tell me," he said, "as you have been doing, that the old
methods are _passes_, and compare the crude new ideas with
them for effectiveness, as working theories, I snap my fingers
mentally in their face.

"These new ideas may, and doubtless do, contain all the good of the
world's future, all the seed of progress in them--but as working
ideas! A system that has been mellowed and coloured, that has
insinuated itself year by year into all the irregularities and
whimsical, capricious, unexpected chinks and crannies of human
nature, accommodating itself gradually to all, to be torn out and
have the bleeding sensitive gap filled with a hard angular heavy
object thrust straight in from an intellectual workshop--the idea
is absolutely preposterous!"

A friend wrote to him once in great perplexity about the following
problem: as to whether, taking as he did, a purely agnostic view of
life, he should continue to receive the Communion with his parents
when at home; as to whether it was not a base concession to his own
weakness; as to whether he should not stand by his principles.

"If you have any principles to stand by," he wrote, "by all means
stand by them; but if all you mean is throwing cold water on other
people's principles, my advice is to make no move. Dissembling your
own uneasiness in the matter and quieting their anxious scruples is
one of those matters which seem so simple that heroism appears to
have no part in it. It would be so much nobler (we are tempted to
think) to stand up and protest and denunciate; to throw gloom and
dissension into a happy home and wreck (if you are the affectionate
son I believe you to be) your own happiness, not to speak of
usefulness. It would be more arduous, I admit; not therefore nobler.
Your duty is most plain; you have no right to cause acute distress to
several people, because you can not take exactly such an exalted view
as they do, of an institution which, from the lowest point of view,
is the dying request of a great and loving soul, to all who can feel
his beauty or listen to his call, a beautiful pledge of family and
national unity, and a touching symbol of all good things."

To another friend, who wrote to him to say that his principles,
though still religious, and faithful in general idea to the Christian
creed, were in so many points different from the principles taught
and demanded by the Church of England, that he felt he ought to take
some def