perhaps, understanding the Christian religion as a man with a weaker
faith in the truth of his own convictions might have understood it,
his attitude was one, I judge, of sympathetic scepticism. He was
always endeavoring to impress upon me that, while there must
necessarily have been something great and good in a faith that had
been the inspiration of so many souls, and comfort of mankind through
so many centuries, yet at the same time it was incomplete; that very
often the followers of Christ gave more to the doctrine than they
received from it; and that the teaching of Auguste Comte supplied what
was lacking in the teaching of Jesus Christ. His desire to impress
upon me a belief which he held himself with all the force of religious
conviction led him to attempt explanations which the mind of a child
could neither grasp nor retain. He even discussed, for my benefit,
theoretical questions as to the existence and nature of the Supreme
Being; discussions, of course, that I could so little understand that
it was like pouring water on a flat board. It was simply the fulness
of his belief that led him to do this. His desire was that, surrounded
as I was by people who burnt their candles at the altars of the
Christian faith, I should have full opportunity to compare the
Positivist _Grand Être_ with the Christian Cross. Under such
instruction it was not strange that in time I dropped insensibly into
his mode of thinking, or, more correctly, into his mode of believing.

While I was at college I was surrounded by other influences, and while
retaining everything that was positive and constructive in his
teaching, I dropped the negative cloth in which it was shrouded. My
change in opinion was a bitter disappointment to him, as several
letters which he wrote at the time testify. But intense as was his
disappointment, it never took the form of a reproach. This is very
remarkable when we consider what an essential part of his character