The foregoing summary is needed to enable the reader to comprehend the relationship of Faraday to this body. His father and grandfather had belonged to this sect. In 1763 there was a congregation at Kirkby Stephen (the home of Faraday’s mother) numbering about thirty persons; and there appears to have been a chapel--now used as a barn--in Clapham. A strong religious feeling had been dominant in the Faraday family through the preceding generation. James Faraday, on his removal to London, there joined the Sandemanian congregation, which at that time met in a small chapel in St. Paul’s Alley, Barbican, since pulled down. It had, when founded in 1762, held its first meetings in the hall of the Glovers’ Company, and later in Bull and Mouth Street, till 1778. James Faraday’s wife, mother of Michael Faraday, never formally joined the Sandemanian Church, though a regular attendant of the congregation. Michael Faraday was from a boy brought up in the practice of attending this simple worship, and in the atmosphere of this primitive religious faith. Doubtless such surroundings exercised a moulding influence on his mind and character. The attitude of abstinence from attempts to proselytise, on the part of the church, finds its reflex in Faraday’s habitual reticence, towards all save only the most intimate of friends, on matters of religious faith. “Never once,” says Professor Tyndall, “during an intimacy of fifteen years, did he mention religion to me, save when I drew him on to the subject. He then spoke to me without hesitation or reluctance; not with any apparent desire to ‘improve the occasion,’ but to give me such information as I sought. He believed the human heart to be swayed by a power to which science or logic opened no approach; and right or wrong, this faith, held in perfect tolerance of the faiths of others, strengthened and beautified his life.” [Sidenote: HIS PROFESSION OF FAITH.]