belief was a modified
evangelicism.

My father's liberality of sentiment and the sceptical tendencies which
lay, in spite of himself, in his intellectual tendencies, had indeed
removed a good deal of the true evangelical dogmatism. Fitzjames for a
time, as I have intimated, seems to have sought for a guide in Maurice.
He had been attracted when at King's College by Maurice's personal
qualities, and when, in 1853, Maurice had to leave King's College on
account of his views about eternal punishment, Fitzjames took a leading
part in getting up a testimonial from the old pupils of his teacher.
When he became a law student he naturally frequented Maurice's sermons
at Lincoln's Inn. Nothing could be more impressive than the manner of
the preacher. His voice often trembled with emotion, and he spoke as
one who had a solemn message of vast importance to mankind. But what was
the message which could reach a hard-headed young 'lawyer by nature'
with a turn for Benthamism? Fitzjames gives a kind of general form of
Maurice's sermons. First would come an account of some dogma as
understood by the vulgar. Tom Paine could not put it more pithily or
expressively. Then his hearers were invited to look at the plain words
of Scripture. Do they not mean this or that, he would ask, which is
quite different to what they had been made to mean? My answer would have
been, says Fitzjames, that his questions were 'mere confused hints,'
which required all kinds of answers, but mostly the answer 'No, not at
all.' Then, however, came Maurice's own answers to them. About this time
his hearer used to become drowsy, with 'an indistinct consciousness of a
pathetic quavering set of entreaties to believe what, when it was
intelligible, was quite unsatisfactory.' Long afterwards he says
somewhere that it was 'like watching the struggles of a drowning creed.'
Fitzjames, however, fancied for a time that he was more or less of a
Mauricean.

From one of his friends, the Rev. J. Llewelyn Davies, I have some
characteristic recollections of the time. Mr. Davies was a college
friend, and remembers his combativeness and his real underlying warmth
of feeling. He remembers how, in 1848, Fitzjames was confident that the
'haves' could beat the 'have nots,' 'set his teeth' and exclaimed, 'Let
them come on.' Mr. Davies was now engaged in clerical work at the
East-end of London. My brother took pleasure in visiting his friend
there, learnt something of the ways of the d