with the unspeakable morasses at the bottom."
This is a little like the man who left the Unitarian church because "somebody told him it wasn't true." How is a soul so sensitive to be kept in—or out of—any fold? A religion which dissolves before the persuasions of a magazine article must necessarily be as short-lived as the love—"the slight, thin sort of inclination"—which is starved, so Elizabeth Bennett tells us, by a sonnet. "Ten thousand difficulties," says Cardinal Newman nobly, "do not make one doubt;" but the thinker who cannot surmount the first and feeblest of the difficulties should never have essayed the perilous pathway of the alphabet. Neither was St. Augustine's inspiration a flashlight upon darkness. The "self-satisfied rhetorician" was not converted, like Harlequin, in one dazzling moment. There had been a long and bitter struggle between the forces of life and death, of the spirit and the flesh, before the word of St. Paul penetrated with overwhelming sweetness into a soul cleared by hard thinking, and cleansed by a passion for perfection.
