As a convert, Patmore is most uninteresting to the controversialist. His mind was altogether concrete, affirmative, and synthetic, with a profound distrust of abstract and analytical reasoning. As we have said, Christianity and, later, Catholicism appealed profoundly to his intellectual imagination in virtue of some of their deeper tenets, for whose sake he took over all the rest _per modum unius_. The idea [of the Incarnation] no sooner flashed upon me as a possible reality than it became, what it has ever since remained, ... the only reality worth seriously caring for; a reality so clearly seen and possessed that the most irrefragable logic of disproof has always affected me as something trifling and irrelevant. Again: "Christianity is not an 'historical religion,' but a revelation which is renewed in every receiver of it." "My heart loves that of whose existence my intellect allows the probability, and my will puts the seal to the blessed compact which produces faith"--an ingenious application of his favourite category. Of the efforts of Manning and de Vere to proselytize him, he says: Their position seemed to me to be so logically perfect that I was long repelled by its perfection. I felt, half unconsciously, that a living thing ought not to be so spick and span in its external evidence for itself, and that what I wanted for conviction was not the sight of a faultless intellectual superficies, but the touch and pressure of a moral solid. Whatever some may think or have thought of his theology, none who knew him could have any doubt as to the robust and uncompromising character of his faith. It was because he felt so sure of his footing that he allowed himself a liberty of movement perplexing to those whose position was one of more delicate balance. He had a ruthlessness in tossing aside what might be called "non-essentials," that was dictated not so much by an under-estimate of their due importance, as by an impatience with those who over-estimated them, confounding the vessel with its contained treasure.