notion that women should be "religious," while men might philosophise as
they would; but it so deeply influenced her own intellectual life that
she utterly rejected the most irrational dogmas of Christianity, such as
eternal punishment, the vicarious atonement of Christ, the doctrine that
faith is necessary to salvation, the equality of Christ with God, the
infallibility of the Bible; she made morality of life, not orthodoxy of
belief, her measure of "religion"; she was "a Christian", in her own view
of the matter, but it was a Christian of the school of Jowett, of
Colenso, and of Stanley. The latter writer had for her, in after years,
the very strongest fascination, and I am not sure that his "variegated
use of words", so fiercely condemned by Dr. Pusey, did not exactly suit
her own turn of mind, which shrank back intellectually from the crude
dogmas of orthodox Christianity, but clung poetically to the artistic
side of religion, to its art and to its music, to the grandeur of its
glorious fanes, and the solemnity of its stately ritual. She detested the
meretricious show, the tinsel gaudiness, the bowing and genuflecting, the
candles and the draperies, of Romanism, and of its pinchbeck imitator
Ritualism; but I doubt whether she knew any keener pleasure than to sit
in one of the carved stalls of Westminster Abbey, listening to the
polished sweetness of Dean Stanley's exquisite eloquence; or to the
thunder of the organ mingled with the voices of the white-robed
choristers, as the music rose and fell, as it pealed up to the arched
roof and lost itself in the carven fretwork, or died away softly among
the echoes of the chapels in which kings and saints and sages lay
sleeping, enshrining in themselves the glories and the sorrows of the
past.

To return to October, 1852. On the day of the funeral my elder brother
and I were taken back to the house where my father lay dead, and while my
brother went as chief mourner, poor little boy swamped in crape and