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. Balfour's Chief-Secretaryship. As I look back upon them--those five dramatic years culminating first in the Parnell Commission, and then in Parnell's tragic downfall and death, I see everything grouped round Mr. Balfour. From the moment when, in succession to Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Mr. Balfour took over the Chief-Secretaryship, his sudden and swift development seemed to me the most interesting thing in politics. We had first met him, as I have said, on a week-end visit to the Talbots at Oxford. It was then a question whether his health would stand the rough and tumble of politics. I recollect he came down late and looked far from robust. We traveled up to London with him, and he was reading Mr. Green's _Prolegomena to Ethics_, which, if I remember right, he was to review for _Mind_.