As to Marshall’s religious affiliations, he was a regular and devoted attendant, all his life, of the Episcopal Church, in which he was brought up; taking an active part in the services and the responses, and kneeling in prayer, we are told, even when the pews were so narrow that his tall form had to be accommodated by the projection of his feet into the aisle. His friend, Bishop Meade, the Episcopal bishop of Virginia, states that he was never a communicant in that church; and he quotes a letter from an Episcopal clergyman who often visited Mrs. Harvie, Marshall’s only daughter, in her last illness, and who reports from her the statement that, during the last months of his life, he told her “that the reason why he never communed was that he was a Unitarian in opinion, though he never joined their society.” It is added, however, in the same letter, that Mrs. Harvie, a person “of the strictest probity, the most humble piety, and the most clear and discriminating mind,” also said that, during these last months, Marshall read Keith on Prophecy, and was convinced by that work, and the fuller investigation to which it led, of the supreme divinity of Jesus, and wished to commune, but thought it his duty to do it publicly; and while waiting for the opportunity, died. The reader of such a statement seems to perceive or to conjecture an anxiety to relieve the memory of the Chief Justice of an opprobrium. Whatever the exact fact may be about this late change in opinion, there is little occasion to be surprised that Marshall shared, during his active life, the opinions of his friend Judge Story. The genuineness and the simplicity of Marshall’s lifelong piety are indicated by another statement reported from Mrs. Harvie: “Her father told her that he never went to bed without concluding his prayer with those which his mother taught him when a child, viz. the Lord’s prayer and the prayer beginning, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep.’” Marshall was a man of vigorous physique. “He was always,” says a descendant,[45] “devoted to walking, but more especially before breakfast in the early morning. A venerable professor I met in Washington told me that, when he was a boy, regularly every morning at seven o’clock, when he was on his way to school, he met the Chief Justice returning from a long walk. He walked rapidly always. Hon. Horace Binney says: ‘After doing my best one morning to overtake Chief Justice Marshall, in his quick march to the Capitol, when he was nearer to eighty than seventy, I asked him to what cause in particular he attributed that strong and quick step, and he replied that he thought it was most due to his commission in the army of the Revolution, in which he had been a regular foot practitioner for six years.’”