'I have been earning my own bread with my own pen for near twenty years now, and sometimes very hardly too; but in the worst time, please God, never lost my own respect.' His delicacy of feeling comes out in a letter from the United States, where he was lecturing-- 'As for writing about this country, about Goshen, about the friends I have found here, and who are helping me to procure independence for my children, if I cut jokes upon them, may I choke on the instant'-- having probably in remembrance, as he wrote, Charles Dickens and the _American Notes_. On the other hand, he was not free from the defects of his qualities, mental and artistic, from the propensity to set points of character in violent relief, or from the somewhat unfair generalisation which grows out of the habit of drawing types and distributing colours for satirical effect. In regard to his religion, it appears to have been of the rationalistic eighteenth-century order in which moral ideas are entirely dominant, to the exclusion of the deeply spiritual modes of thought; and we may say of him, as of Carlyle, that his philosophy was more practical than profound. The subjoined quotation is from a letter to his daughter: 'What is right must always be right, before it was practised as well as after. And if such and such a commandment delivered by Moses was wrong, depend upon it, it was not delivered by God, and the whole question of complete inspiration goes at once. And the misfortune of dogmatic belief is that, the first principle granted that the book called the Bible is written under the direct dictation of God--for instance, that the Catholic Church is under the direct dictation of God, and solely communicates with Him--that Quashimaboo is the directly appointed priest of God, and so forth--pain, cruelty, persecution, separation of dear relatives, follow as a matter of course.... Smith's truth being established in Smith's mind as the Divine one, persecution follows as a matter of course--martyrs have roasted over all Europe, over all God's world, upon this dogma. To my mind Scripture only means a writing, and Bible means a book.... Every one of us in every part, book, circumstance of life, sees a different meaning and moral, and so it must be about religion. But we can all love each other and say "Our Father."'