he had
done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent, and if it was bad he was
rather amused than troubled as to the effect in your mind. He would not
obtrude the fact upon you, but if it were in the way of personal history
he would not dream of withholding it, far less of hiding it.

He was the readiest of men to allow an error if he were found in it. In
one of our walks about Hartford, when he was in the first fine flush of
his agnosticism, he declared that Christianity had done nothing to
improve morals and conditions, and that the world under the highest pagan
civilization was as well off as it was under the highest Christian
influences. I happened to be fresh from the reading of Charles Loring
Brace's 'Gesta Christi'; or, 'History of Humane Progress', and I could
offer him abundant proofs that he was wrong. He did not like that
evidently, but he instantly gave way, saying he had not known those
things. Later he was more tolerant in his denials of Christianity, but
just then he was feeling his freedom from it, and rejoicing in having
broken what he felt to have been the shackles of belief worn so long. He
greatly admired Robert Ingersoll, whom he called an angelic orator, and
regarded as an evangel of a new gospel--the gospel of free thought. He
took the warmest interest in the newspaper controversy raging at the time
as to the existence of a hell; when the noes carried the day, I suppose
that no enemy of perdition was more pleased. He still loved his old
friend and pastor, Mr. Twichell, but he no longer went to hear him preach
his sage and beautiful sermons, and was, I think, thereby the greater
loser. Long before that I had asked him if he went regularly to church,
and he groaned out: "Oh yes, I go. It 'most kills me, but I go," and I
did not need his telling me to understand that he went because his wife
wished it. He did tell me, after they both ceased to go, that it had
finally come to her saying, "Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be
lost with you." He could accept that willingness for supreme sacrifice
and exult in it because of the supreme truth as he saw it. After they had
both ceased to be formal Christians, she was still grieved by his denial
of immortality, so grieved that he resolved upon one of those heroic
lies, which for love's sake he held above even the truth, and he went to
her, saying that he had been thinking the whole matter over, and now he
was convinced that the soul did live after death. I