The qualities of Guerin were fit correctives of Albert’s. The teacher was placid, but not mystical; cheerful, but not enthusiastic; scholarly, but not philosophic; kind, but not heroic. Without him, Albert might have been an ignorant zealot, or a fanatical soldier; he never could have been malign or weak. The changes of opinion which had turned so many French priests into infidels, had only made Guerin half a Protestant. He was too yielding and too timid to those of his early profession; nor did his circumstances demand it. But he acquired forbearance, and enlarged the circle of his survey. In turning over the volumes at Crowscrag, the mountain home of Albert, he learned to recognize some virtue even in a Huguenot, and to admire the argument, and taste the truth of writers such as Chamier, Plessis du Mornay, Claude, Sauria, and Bonnet. He and his pupil talked them over among the limestone rocks and caverns of the mountains. But Guerin had cravings which his mercurial ward could not understand. The abbé, as he loved to call him, as if penetrated by the mysterious “Zeit-Geist,” swelled with inward longings for communion with the spiritual. The sound of the great ocean came to him even in his solitude; while Albert felt that truth, if ever reached, was for men, for man. Both were religious in their thoughts; but Albert’s religion was less of form and dogma, and more of expansive affection and lofty aspirations. The kind-hearted priest often charged to the account of Protestantism certain traits in his young friend, which he could not understand, and wondered to see him dissatisfied with all the beauties and glories of his mountain-home.