She listened without distress, without anxiety, to all my doubts and falterings. "You must pass through this; you will be led; it will all come right," she said; "and then perhaps you will be the guide of others." I had feared to tell her that I had abandoned the purpose of the ministry, but I found it easy. "I would not have you embrace the ministry for anything but a true love," she said, "any more than I would that you should marry a wife for any other reason. If ever the time comes that you feel you _must_ be that, it will be your call; but you can be God's minister otherwise than through the pulpit." "Talk over your plans with your uncle," she said; "he is in your father's place now." In fact, my uncle, having no children of his own, had set his heart on me, and was disposed to make me heir, not only to his very modest personal estate, but also to his harvest of ideas and opinions,--all that backwater of thoughts and ideas that accumulate on the mind of a man who thinks and reads a great deal in a lonely neighborhood. So he took me up as a companion in his daily rides over the country. "Well, Harry, where next?" he said to me the day after my return, as we were driving together. "What are you about? Going to try the ministry?" "I dare not; I am not fit. I know father wanted it, and prayed for it, and nothing would be such a joy to mother, but----" My uncle gave a shrewd, sidelong glance on me. "I suppose you are like a good many fellows; an education gives them a general shaking up, and all their beliefs break from their lashings and go rolling and tumbling about like spars and oil-casks in a storm on ship-board." "I can't say that is true of all my beliefs; but yet a great many things that I tried to regard as certain are untied. I have too many doubts for a teacher." "Who hasn't? I don't know anything in heaven or earth that forty unanswerable questions can't be asked about." "You know," answered I, "Tennyson says, 'There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.'" "H'm! that depends. Doubt is very well as a sort of constitutional crisis in the beginning of one's life; but if it runs on and gets to be chronic, it breaks a fellow up, and makes him morally spindling and sickly. Men that _do_ anything in the world must be men of strong convictions; it won't do to go through life like a hen, craw-crawing and lifting up one foot, and not knowing where to set it down next." "But," said I, "while I am passing through the constitutional crisis, as you call it, is the very time I must make up my mind to teach others on the most awful of all subjects. I cannot and dare not. I must be a learner for some years to come, and I must be a learner without any pledges, expressed or implied, to find the truth this way or that."