As regards his religious opinions, one of the thoughts which most strongly suggest themselves is,--how ill he must have been instructed in the principles of Christianity! He says himself in a letter to Godwin, “I have known no tutor or adviser (_not excepting my father_) from whose lessons and suggestions I have not recoiled with disgust.” So far is he from being an opponent of Christianity properly so called, that one can hardly help feeling what a Christian he would have been, could he but have seen Christianity in any other way than through the traditional and practical misrepresentations of it which surrounded him. All his attacks on Christianity are, in reality, directed against evils to which the true doctrines of Christianity are more opposed than those of Shelley could possibly be. How far he was excusable in giving the name of Christianity to what he might have seen to be only a miserable perversion of it, is another question, and one which hardly admits of discussion here. It was in the _name_ of Christianity, however, that the worst injuries of which he had to complain were inflicted upon him. Coming out of the cathedral at Pisa one day, [Footnote: From _Shelley Memorials_, edited by Lady Shelley, which the writer of this paper has principally followed in regard to the external facts of Shelley’s history.] Shelley warmly assented to a remark of Leigh Hunt, “that a divine religion might be found out, if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith.” Surely the founders of Christianity, even when they magnified faith, intended thereby a spiritual condition, of which the central principle is coincident with charity. Shelley’s own feelings towards others, as judged from his poetry, seem to be tinctured with the very essence of Christianity. [Footnote: His _Essay on Christianity_ is full of noble views, some of which are held at the present day by some of the most earnest believers. At what time of his life it was written we are not informed; but it seems such as would insure his acceptance with any company of intelligent and devout Unitarians.] He did not, at one time at least, believe that we could know the source of our being; and seemed to take it as a self-evident truth, that the Creator could not be like the creature. But it is unjust to fix upon any utterance of opinion, and regard it as the religion of a man who died in his thirtieth year, and whose habits of thinking were such, that his opinions must have been in a state of constant change. Coleridge says in a letter: “His (Shelley’s) discussions, tending towards atheism of a certain sort, would not have scared _me;_ for _me_ it would have been a semitransparent larva, soon to be sloughed, and through which I should have seen the true _image_--the final metamorphosis. Besides, I have ever thought that sort of atheism the next best religion to Christianity; nor does the better faith I have learned from Paul and John interfere with the cordial reverence I feel