ple of Glaston and its neighborhood, where he had been ministering
only about a year, was already of the highest. Even now, when, in a
fever of honesty, he declared there _could_ be no God in such an
ill-ordered world, so full was his heart of the human half of religion,
that he could not stand by the bedside of dying man or woman, without
lamenting that there was no consolation--that stern truth would allow
him to cast no feeblest glamour of hope upon the departing shadow. His
was a nobler nature than theirs who, believing no more than he, are
satisfied with the assurance that at the heart of the evils of the world
lie laws unchangeable.

The main weak point in him was, that, while he was indeed
tender-hearted, and did no kindnesses to be seen of men, he did them to
be seen of himself: he saw him who did them all the time. The boy was in
the man; doing his deeds he sought, not the approbation merely, but the
admiration of his own consciousness. I am afraid to say this was
_wrong_, but it was poor and childish, crippled his walk, and obstructed
his higher development. He liked to _know_ himself a benefactor. Such a
man may well be of noble nature, but he is a mere dabbler in nobility.
Faber delighted in the thought that, having repudiated all motives of
personal interest involved in religious belief, all that regard for the
future, with its rewards and punishments, which, in his ignorance,
genuine or willful, of essential Christianity, he took for its main
potence, he ministered to his neighbor, doing to him as he would have
him do to himself, hopeless of any divine recognition, of any betterness
beyond the grave, in a fashion at least as noble as that of the most
devoted of Christians. It did not occur to him to ask if he loved him as
well--if his care about him was equal to his satisfaction in himself.
Neither did he reflect that the devotion he admired in himself had been
brought to the birth in him through others, in whom it was first
generated by a fast belief in an unselfish, loving, self-devoting God.
Had he inquired he might have discovered that this belief had carried
some men immeasurably further in the help of their fellows, than he had
yet gone. Indeed he might, I think, have found instances of men of faith
spending their lives for their fellows, whose defective theology or
diseased humility would not allow them to hope their own salvation.
Inquiry might have given him ground for fearing that with the love of