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Philip Gilbert Hamerton - An Autobiography, 1834-1858, and a Memoir by His Wife, 1858-1894 by Eugénie Hamerton;Philip Gilbert Hamerton
page 114 of 699 (16%)
have dreamed vaguely in this contemplation better, perhaps, in the Roman
Catholic Church than in any other. But my English and Protestant
education was against a religion of dreaming. An English Protestant may
have his poetical side, may be capable of feeling poetry that is frankly
avowed to be such--may read Tennyson's "Eve of St. Agnes" or Scott's
"Hymn to the Virgin" with almost complete imaginative sympathy; but he
expects to believe his religion as firmly as he believes in the
existence of the British Islands. Such, at least, was the matter-of-fact
temper that belonged to Protestantism in those days. In more recent
times a more hazy religion has become fashionable.

My decision, therefore, for some time was to remain in a provisional
condition of prolonged inquiry. I read a great deal on both sides, and
constantly prayed for light, following regularly the external services
of the Church of England. Here the subject may be left for the present.

The reader is to imagine me as a youth who no longer believed in the
special inspiration of the Scriptures, or in their infallibility, but
who was still a Christian as thousands of "liberal" Church people in the
present day are Christians.

Before resuming my religious history, I ought to mention an influence
which was supposed by my friends to have been powerful over me, but
which in reality had slightly affected the current of my thinking. Our
medical adviser was a surgeon rather advanced in years, and whose
private fortune made him independent of professional success. As time
went on, he allowed himself to be more and more replaced by his
assistant, Mr. Uttley, one of the most remarkable characters I ever met
with. In those days, in a northern provincial town, it required immense
courage to avow religious heterodoxy of any advanced kind, yet Mr.
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