desire from me? How shall I attain unto Him? What is it He has sent
me into the world to do? These were the ceaseless questions of a
heart that rested, meanwhile, in an unshaken confidence that time
would bring the answer.

But these were early days, days when the influence of his mother,
never wholly shaken off, was still dominant and pervasive in all that
concerned him. There came a period, however, beginning in all
likelihood about his fourteenth, and lasting until his twentieth year
or thereabouts, in which he certainly lost hold on all distinctively
Christian doctrines. With such a mind as his, and such a training,
this was almost inevitable. His intellect, while it hungered
incessantly after supernatural truth, kept nevertheless a persistent
hold upon the verities of the natural order, and could not rest until
it had synthetized them into a coherent whole. That was his life-long
characteristic. During the years of painful ill health which preceded
his death, he often said that he was unlike the Celt, who takes to
the supernatural as if by instinct. "But I am a Saxon and cling to
the earthy" he would say; "I want an explicit and satisfactory reason
why any innocent pleasure should not be enjoyed." He attributed this
to his racial peculiarities. Others may differ with him and credit it
to his nature, taken in its human and rational integrity.
Furthermore, he was always singularly independent and self-poised. He
could not endure being hindered of anything that was his, except by
an authority which had legitimated to his intelligence its right to
command. He could obey that readily and entirely, as his life from
infancy clearly witnesses; but he never knew a merely arbitrary
master.

Such a nature, fed on the mingled truth and error characteristic of