Occasionally this humour was turned to good account, as when, one Friday evening before the lecture, he told the audience that he had been requested by the managers to mention two cases of infringement of rule. The first related to the red cord which marks off the members' seats. "The second case I take to be a hypothetical one, namely, that of a gentleman wearing his hat in the drawing-room." This produced a laugh, which the Professor joined in, bowed, and retired. This faithful discharge of duty, this almost intuitive insight into natural phenomena, and this persevering enthusiasm in the pursuit of truth, might alone have secured a great position in the scientific world, but they alone could never have won for him that large inheritance of respect and love. His contemporaries might have gazed upon him with an interest and admiration akin to that with which he watched a thunderstorm; but who feels his affections drawn out towards a mere intellectual Jupiter? We must look deeper into his character to understand this. There is a law well recognized in the science of light and heat, that a body can absorb only the same sort of rays which it is capable of emitting. Just so is it in the moral world. The respect and love of his generation were given to Faraday because his own nature was full of love and respect for others. Each of these qualities--his respect for and love to others, or, more generally, his reverence and kindliness--deserves careful examination. Throughout his life, Michael Faraday appeared as though standing in a reverential attitude towards Nature, Man, and God. Towards Nature, for he regarded the universe as a vast congeries of facts which would not bend to human theories. Speaking of his own early life, he says: "I was a very lively imaginative person, and could believe in the 'Arabian Nights' as easily as in the 'Encyclopædia;' but facts were important to me, and saved me. I could trust a fact, and always cross-examined an assertion." He was indeed a true disciple of that philosophy which says, "Man, who is the servant and interpreter of Nature, can act and understand no farther than he has, either in operation or in contemplation, observed of the method and order of Nature."[11] And verily Nature admitted her servant into her secret chambers, and showed him marvels to interpret to his fellow-men more wonderful and beautiful than the phantasmagoria of Eastern romance.