Of course, we cannot help seeing that his peculiarities and faults affected his religion. He was intolerant in his expression of theological views to a degree which seems almost ludicrous. We may, perhaps, keep a straight face and a respectful attitude when we see him turning his back on the Abbé Raynal, and refusing to “shake hands with an infidel.” But when he exclaims in regard to a young lady who had left the Church of England to become a Quaker, “I hate the wench and shall ever hate her; I hate all impudence of a chit; apostasy I nauseate”; and when he answers the gently expressed hope of a friend that he and the girl would meet, after all, in a blessed eternity, by saying, “Madam, I am not fond of _meeting fools anywhere_,” we cannot help joining in the general laughter of the company to whom he speaks; and as the Doctor himself finally laughs and becomes cheerful and entertaining, we feel that it was only the bear in him that growled,—an honest beast, but sometimes very surly. As for his remarkable strictures upon Presbyterianism, his declaration that he preferred the Roman Catholic Church, his expressed hope that John Knox was buried in the highway, and his wish that a dangerous steeple in Edinburgh might not be taken down because if it were let alone it might fall on some of the posterity of John Knox, which, he said, would be “no great matter,”—if when we read these things we remember that he was talking to his Scotch friend Boswell, we get a new idea of the audacity of the great man’s humour. I believe he even stirred up his natural high-churchism to rise rampant and roar vigourously, for the pleasure of seeing Boswell’s eyes stand out, and his neat little pigtail vibrate in dismay. There are many other sayings of Johnson’s which disclose a deeper vein of tolerance; such as that remark about the essential agreement and trivial differences of all Christians, and his warm commendation, on his dying bed, of the sermons of Dr. Samuel Clarke, a Dissenting minister. But even suppose we are forced to admit that Dr. Johnson was lacking in that polished liberality, that willingness to admit that every other man’s opinions are as good as his own, which we have come nowadays to regard as the chief of the theological virtues; even suppose we must call him “narrow,” we must admit at the same time that he was “deep”; he had a profundity of conviction, a sincerity of utterance which made of his religion something, as the Germans say, “to take hold of with your hands.”