ce. No man was more free than Stafford from any
conscious hypocrisy or posing, or from the inverted pride in immorality
that is often an affectation, but also, more often than we are willing
to allow, a real disease of the mind. But in his interview with Morewood
he had yielded to the temptation of giving a more dramatic setting and
stronger contrasts to his conviction and his action than the actual
inmost movement of his mind justified. It was true that he was
determined to set action and conviction in sharp antagonism, and to
follow an overpowering passion rather than a belief that he depicted as
no less dominant. Had his fierce words to Morewood reproduced exactly
what he felt, it may be doubted whether the resultant of two forces so
opposite and so equal could have been the ultimately unwavering
intention that now possessed him. In truth, the aggressive strength of
his belief had been sapped from within. His efforts after doubt,
described by himself as entirely unsuccessful, had not in reality been
without result. They had not issued in any radical or wholesale
alteration of his views. He was right in supposing that he would still
have given as full intellectual assent to all the dogmas of his creed as
formerly; the balance of probability was still in his view
overwhelmingly in their favor. But it had come to be a balance of
probability--not, of course, in the way in which a man balances one
account of an ordinary transaction against another, and decides out of
his own experience of how things happen--Stafford had not lost his
mental discrimination so completely--but in the sense that he had
appealed to reason, and thus admitted the jurisdiction of reason in
matters which he had formerly proclaimed as outside the province of that
sort of reasoning that governs other intellectual questions. In the
result, he was left under the influence of a persuasion, not under the
dominion of a command; and the former failed to withstand an assault
that the latter might well have enabled him to repulse. He found
himself able to forget what he believed, though not to disbelieve it;
his convictions could be postponed, though not expelled; and in
representing his mind as the present battle-ground of equal and opposite
forces, he had rather expressed what a preacher would reveal as the
inner truth of his struggle than what he was himself conscious of as
going on within him. It is likely enough that his previous experience
had made him