Stevenson's character and opinions which I
have not touched; such as his religious views. He never mentioned the
topic of religion in my hearing; it is to his printed words that the
reader must turn, and he cannot but perceive that Stevenson's was a
deeply religious nature. With his faith, whatever its tenets may have
been, was implicated his uneasily active conscience; his sense of duty.
This appears to have directed his life; and was practically the same
thing as his sense of honour. Honour, I conceive, is, in a phrase of
Aristotle's, duty "with a bloom on it."

Readers of his Letters, and of his Biography by his cousin, Mr. Balfour;
readers of his essays, and of his novels, must see that he was keenly
interested in cases of conscience; in the right course to steer in an
apparent conflict of duties. To say that his theory of the right course,
in a hypothetical instance, was always the same as my own would be to
abuse the confidence of the reader. As Preston-grange observes: "I would
never charge myself with Mr. David's conscience; and if you could cast
some part of it (as you went by) in a moss bog, you would find yourself
to ride much easier without it"; and _not_, perhaps, always in the wrong
direction. There is a case of conscience in "The Wrecker," something
about opium-smuggling, and the conscience of Mr. Loudon Dodd (a truly
Balfourian character), which I have studied, aided by other casuists,
for a summer's day. We never could agree as to what the case really was,
as to what was the moral issue.

Casuistry may not be my strong point. I have found myself between no
less authorities than a Chancellor of England and a learned Jesuit, both
of whom, I thought, would certainly accept my view of a very unusual
case of conduct. A certain cleric, in his ecclesiastical duties,
happened to overhear an automatically uttered remark by another person;
who never meant to speak or to be overheard. The cleric acted on this
information, with results distressing to a pair of true lovers. I
maintained that he did wrong. "There was no appeal," I said, "to the
umpire. Nobody in the field asked 'How's that?'" But the Chancellor and
the learned Jesuit backed the clergyman.

Now, I never knew for certain how "Mr. David's conscience" would decide,
but I think he would have been with me on this occasion, and with the
Rules of the Game.

There was a very pleasant trait in Stevenson's character which, perhaps,
does not display itself