For myself [wrote Walter Pater], I shall probably think, on
finishing the book, that there was still something Amiel might have
added to those elements of natural religion which he was able to
accept at times with full belief and always with the sort of hope
which is a great factor in life. To my mind, the beliefs and the
function in the world of the historic Church form just one of those
obscure but all-important possibilities which the human mind is
powerless effectively to dismiss from itself, and might wisely
accept, in the first place, as a workable hypothesis. The supposed
facts on which Christianity rests, utterly incapable as they have
become of any ordinary test, seem to me matters of very much the
same sort of assent we give to any assumptions, in the strict and
ultimate sense, moral. The question whether those facts are real
will, I think, always continue to be what I should call one of the
_natural_ questions of the human mind.

A passage, it seems to me, of considerable interest as throwing light
upon the inner mind of one of the most perfect writers, and most
important influences of the nineteenth century. Certainly there is no
sign in it, on Mr. Pater's part, of "dropping Christianity"; very much
the contrary.

* * * * *

But all this time, while literary and meditative folk went on writing
and thinking, how fast the political world was rushing!

Those were the years, after the defeat of the first Home Rule Bill, and
the dismissal of Mr. Gladstone, of Lord Salisbury's Government and Mr.