As to his own convictions on such subjects, he was extremely reserved, owing to a tendency which he believed he had detected in himself to religious melancholy, which he treated simply as a disease. But no one who knew him at all could ever doubt that a genuine and deep religious faith was the basis of his character, and those who knew him best testify unanimously to its ever increasing power. “I don’t know if you were ever told,” his sister writes, “of the singular desire dying people had that George should be with them. You know how reserved he was, and he would always think that people would prefer some one who talked more to them, but I think it was his great gentleness and strength which made the dying feel him such a comfort. He never volunteered; but when sent for, as was often the case, always went to them, and read and prayed constantly with them as long as they lived. There was one poor young man who died of consumption, and George was constantly with him to the last. The father was a very disreputable character, and George seldom saw him. But some time after the young man’s death, the father met George in the fields, and threw himself on his knees to bless him for his love for his dead son. George came home much shocked that the man should have knelt to him. One old man, whom he used to go to for weeks and weeks during his long last illness, really adored him, and, when George was away for a short time, prayed that he might live till he saw him again. And George was back before he died.” Of this old man, he writes himself to his mother:— “My old friend died on Saturday morning. I mean Tom Pearse, for fifty years an honest labourer in this parish. I am very sorry that (as he died in the short hours) I could not be with him at the last, but very glad that he died before I left Offley. So was he. He prayed every day to die, not that he suffered, but he had such a strong faith that death would be much better. He said to me almost the last time I saw him, ‘I thought, sir, I should have been home before this.’ And when he was taken worse at last, he asked the nurse, ‘Am I going home?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I’m so glad,’ he answered, and died soon after. What an euthanasia! All good people call death going home. ‘Let me die the death of the righteous, and my last end be like his.’”