owded hall and hurried
off to the little meeting-house where two or three had met together to
renew their fellowship with God.

In that one incident the man stands revealed. All the sublimities and
all the simplicities of life met in his soul. The master of all the
sciences, he kept in his breast the heart of a little child. Mr. Cosmo
Monkhouse has well asked--

Was ever man so simple and so sage,
So crowned and yet so careless of a prize?
Great Faraday, who made the world so wise,
And loved the labor better than the wage!

And this, you say, is how he looked in age,
With that strong brow and these great humble eyes
That seem to look with reverent surprise
On all outside himself. Turn o'er the page,
Recording Angel, it is white as snow!
Ah, God, a fitting messenger was he
To show Thy mysteries to us below!
Child as he came has he returned to Thee!
Would he could come but once again to show
The wonder-deep of his simplicity!

In him the simplicities were always stronger than the sublimities; the
child outlived the sage. As he lay dying they tried to interview the
professor, but it was the little child in him that answered them.

'What are your speculations?' they inquired.

'Speculations?' he asked, in wondering surprise. 'Speculations! I have
none! I am resting on certainties. _I know whom I have believed and am
persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him
against that day!_' And, reveling like a little child in those cloudless
simplicities, his great soul passed away.

II

Faraday was a perpetual mystery. He baffled all his colleagues and
companions. Nobody could understand how the most learned man of his time
could find in his faith those restful certainties on which he so calmly
and securely reposed. They saw him pass from a meeting of the Royal
Society to sit at the feet of a certain local preacher who was notorious
for his illiteracy; and the spectacle filled them with bewilderment and
wonder. Some suggested that he was, in an intellectual sense, living a
double life. Tyndall said that, when Faraday opened the door of his
oratory, he shut that of his laboratory. He did nothing of the kind. He
never closed his eyes to any fragment of truth; he never divided his
mind into watertight compartments; he never shrank from the approach of
a doubt. He saw life whole. His biography has been written a dozen
times; and each writer views it from