Vaguely conscious of his real calling, Lowell passed in review the two professions of the ministry and the law, which at that time would be likely to attract one who had begun to use his pen with as much assiduity as an embryo artist plies his pencil in sketches. Unquestionably the ministry opened a fair way of life to him, somewhat as it had, less than a score of years earlier, to Emerson, though the conditions had already begun to change. Lowell shrank from adopting that calling with an instinct which sprang in part from his sense of its traditional sacredness, in part from an increasing consciousness of his own separation from the form of religious teaching which would naturally be looked for in him. There was a preacher in Lowell not merely by inheritance, but, even at this time of nonsense and idle levity, in the stirring of a soul that hated evil, and longed to exercise an active influence in righting wrongs. The full strength of this impulse was to be developed shortly, and thenceforward to find constant expression through his life, for a preacher at bottom he was throughout his career. An undercurrent of feeling persuaded him that he might even take to preaching, if he could be sure of being a celibate, and independent of any harassing anxiety respecting his support. But as he wrote of himself a few years later to his friend Briggs: “I believe my religion (I am an infidel, you know, to the Christianity of to-day, and so my religion is something palpable to me in case of strait) arms me against any sorrows to come.” The youthful protest in the parenthesis must be taken seriously, but not subjected to microscopic analysis. Reverence was an abiding element in his nature, and it was early displayed, but it was reverence for what was intrinsically to be revered, and that very spirit carried with it an impatient reaction against conventional religion. In the letter to Dr. Loring, in which he discussed the question of going into the Divinity School, he was led, from a slight reference to the doctrines which Emerson was announcing, to speak more directly of personal religion. “I don’t know,” he says, “whether we poor little worms (who though but little lower than the angels are [but] a little higher than those whom our every step annihilates) ought not to _condescend_ to allow that there may be something _above_ his reason. We must sometimes receive light like the Aurora without knowing where it comes from. And then, on the other hand, we may be allowed to doubt whether our wise Creator would have given us a dispensation by which to govern our everyday life, any part of which was repugnant to our reason. It is a question which every man must settle for himself: indeed he were mad to let any settle it for him.”