How thoroughly his mind and heart were taken up with religious problems we can see in almost every letter. One of the correspondents to whom he seems to have expressed himself with the fullest freedom was Mr. John Brande Morris, and to him he writes, in 1834: "When, after writing to you, and one or two other relations and friends, I turn to pen a letter to my literary intellectual friends, you cannot conceive how weak and uninteresting the topics of discussion become. It is like one of Tom Moore's melodies after an Handelian chorus, at once ludicrous and disgusting from its inferiority." He read a great deal of religious biography, and when he saw "the maturity of faith and the religious perfection to which many good men arrive so early," he felt disheartened at his own condition. "It is true," he said, "I have often had hours of ecstatic, enthusiastic devotion; but the fever has soon subsided, and my feelings have flowed on calmly and soberly in their accustomed channels." He looked for the fruits of his faith and found none. Yet in his ignorance of what constitutes the true spiritual life, Faber, in his earnest search after perfection, was doubtless much nearer to God than the evangelical saints whose condition he so envied. He was soon surrounded at Oxford by a little circle of admirers, who made him, in some sort, the exemplar and guide of their religious life. He was about twenty or twenty-one years of age when he began a systematic effort to improve the opportunities for doing good which he believed had thus been providentially opened to him. "I proceeded," he wrote soon afterward, "to dictate, to organize, so to speak, a system of aggressive efforts in favor of religion; and under my guidance a number of prayer-meetings was speedily established; and by God's grace I was enabled to do it with little noise or ostentation." In another letter he describes the perplexity which he suffered during a vacation visit to one of his disciples, who had "declined from his Christian profession," and manifested an unregenerate fondness for the pleasures of life, balls, theatres, etc., which are generally so attractive to the young. Mr. Faber had little difficulty in reasserting his influence; but his friend's father had "a violent prejudice against what he called 'the humbug of evangelicals,'" and strongly disapproved of the enthusiastic views of the little Oxford coterie. Mr. Faber could not hold his tongue and let the son alone; he trembled at the thought of breeding domestic dissension; and he could not break off his visit without giving offence. It would be interesting to know how he got out of the difficulty, but he does not tell us.