It will be a satisfaction to students of spiritual progress to know that the extension and legalisation of the rights of conscience, brought no irreverence with it. The sense that the nature of Deity was beyond the capacity of dogmatism to define, created a feeling of profound humility in the mind; the incapacity which disabled me from asserting the infinite premises of Theism rendered denial an equal temerity. What tongue can speak, what eye can see, what imagination can conceive the marvels of the Inscrutable? I think of Deity as I think of Time, which is with us daily. Who can explain to us that mystery? Time--noiseless, impalpable, yet absolute--marshals the everlasting procession of nature. It touches us in the present with the hand of Eternity, and we know it only by finding that we were changed as it passed by us. CHAPTER XLIV. DIFFICULTY OF KNOWING MEN Events of the mind as well as of travel may be worth remembering. Columbus, high on a peak of Darien, saw an unexpected sight--never to be forgotten. Of another kind, as far as surprise was concerned, though infinitely less important in other respects, was my first reading of a passage of Pascal, which more than any other revealed to me a new world of human life. The passage was the well-known exclamation:-- "What an enigma is man? What a strange, chaotic and contradictory being? Judge of all things, feeble earth-worm, depository of the Truth, mass of uncertainty, glory and butt of the universe, incomprehensible monster! In truth, what is man in the midst of Nature? A cypher in respect to the infinite; all, in comparison with nonentity: a mean betwixt nothing and all." Everybody knows that not only in different nations, but in the same nation, mankind present a strange variety of qualities and passions. The English are outspoken, the Scotch reticent, the Irish uncertain, the American alert, the French ceremonial. Even our English counties have their special ways of action. London is confident, Birmingham dogged, Manchester resolute, New-castle-on-Tyne has greater modesty and greater pride than any other place. Yes; every one agrees with Pascal that man is a bewildering creature. He is proud and abject, generous and mean, defiant and craven, standing up for inflexible truth, and lying in his daily life. As Byron says, "Man is half dust, half deity." If we go far enough in our search we find people of all qualities. Everybody sees these characteristics of countries and classes. Everybody recognises these conflicting elements of character in a race; but what amazed me was to perceive that they are to be found in _each_ person in varying proportion and force--they are all there. The varieties of the race are to be found in the same individual. No man who understands this ever looks upon society as he did before. Not knowing this fact, not calculating upon it, error, distrust, disappointment, estrangement, grow up needlessly.