He gladly turned his back on doctrines he did not like. He was spiritually minded, but soberly so, as if to be spiritually minded belonged to a special temperament; a Christian theist in all respects, though indifferent to many details of Christian doctrine; an optimist on principle as well as from instinct, inclined to put the most cheerful construction on the ways of divine Providence, and to look patiently on the moral conditions of human life; an unquestioning believer in Christ, immortality, the need of revelation, the supremacy of the religious and moral nature, the demand for the steady influence of the spiritual world to enlighten mankind on the truths of conscience no less than on the mysteries of faith. He was no seer, gazing on things unseen with the penetrating, inward eye; no prophet possessed by an overwhelming conviction of the absolute law; no regenerator believing that men must be lifted up from the earth by an interior renewal of soul; no reformer bent on changing the circumstances of society. He was an apostle of air, sunshine, and the mild, enticing summer shower which covered the wintry ground with the smiling grass and the sweet-smelling flowers. Reformers, of whatever school, were not to his taste, partly because their methods seemed to him violent, but partly also because their primary assumption that the world was out of joint did not command his sympathy. He could not think that the established institutions of the age ought to be subverted, even though they might be improved under enlightened teaching. Socially he was conservative, although by no means reactionary; disposed to see the soul of good in things evil, though not always as studious as one must needs be to "search it out." Rather he took it for granted, and was often impatient with those who felt keenly the evil but could not discover the good.