aspiring to, and in the masterly clearness and justice of which the
opportunity of the son blends with that of the critic, each character
acting in perfect felicity, after a fashion of which I know elsewhere no
such fine example. It conveys the whole sense of our father's
philosophic passion, which was theologic, by my direct impression of it,
to a degree fairly outdistancing all theologies; representing its
weight, reproducing its utterance, placing it in the eye of the world,
and making for it the strong and single claim it suggests, in a manner
that leaves nothing to be added to the subject. I am not concerned with
the intrinsic meaning of these things here, and should not be even had
they touched me more directly, or more converted me from what I can best
call, to my doubtless scant honour, a total otherness of contemplation,
during the years when my privilege was greatest and my situation for
inquiry and response amplest; but the active, not to say the obvious,
moral of them, in all our younger time, was that a life of the most
richly consequent flowed straight out of them, that in this life, the
most abundantly, and above all naturally, communicated _as_ life that it
was possible to imagine, we had an absolutely equal share, and that in
fine I was to live to go back with wonder and admiration to the quantity
of secreted thought in our daily medium, the quality of intellectual
passion, the force of cogitation and aspiration, as to the explanation
both of a thousand surface incoherences and a thousand felt felicities.
A religion that was so systematically a philosophy, a philosophy that
was so sweepingly a religion, being together, by their necessity, as I
have said, an intensity of relation to the actual, the consciousness so
determined was furnished forth in a way that met by itself the whole
question of the attitude of "worship" for instance; as I have attempted
a little to show that it met, with a beautiful good faith and the
easiest sufficiency, every other when such came up: those of education,
acquisition, material vindication, what is called success generally. In
the beauty of the whole thing, again, I lose myself--by which I mean in
the fact that we were all the while partaking, to our most intimate
benefit, of an influence of direction and enlargement attended with
scarce a single consecrated form and which would have made many of
these, had we been exposed to intrusion from them, absurdly irrelevant.
My father liked in our quite younger period to read us chapters from the
New Testament and the Old, and I hope we liked to listen to them--though
I recall their seeming dreary from their association with school
practice; but that was the sole approach to a challenge of our complete
freedom of inward, not less than our natural ingenuity of outward,
experience. No other explicit address to us in the name of the Divine
could, I see, have been made with any congruity--in face of the fact
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