They are easily recognised, these enthusiasts, by their lined faces, by their nervous speech, but above all by their eyes. You can see there the emotional strain, the too highly strung system which has abandoned itself to the excesses of religion. But there seems to be another rule; religion varies according to the interests a person has in life. A man, or a woman, with many interests, with much work, living a full life in the world, has but little time usually for religion; he can devote but a small part of his life to it. Its call is to him less imperative, less alluring; it is but one among many notes. But as the absorption in daily life decreases, as the demands from without are less, so does the devotion to religion increase. Until at last among these rural people, who with strong feelings have but little to gratify them, whose lives are the dreary monotony of a daily routine into which excitement or novelty never enters, we find often the greatest, the strongest, and narrowest faith. So too among those many women of our middle classes whose lives, from the want of mankind or of children, fall into narrow ways, whose lives are dull, whose natural affections and desires are too often thwarted, there lives the purest and strongest, if often, too, the narrowest religion. It comes to them as a help where there is none other, it brings to them emotions when the world holds for them none, it contains in itself beauty and love and interest when the world has refused them. How much, how very much of the deeper religious feeling is due to the want of other pleasure in life, to the forced introspection of solitude, to the desire to feel emotion when there is nothing without to raise it. The old and disappointed turn almost always to religion. Thus it seems as if the quality of religion in mankind were due to two causes; to temperament, according to the emotional necessity, the desire for stimulation and the absence of mental restriction; and to environment, according as the life led furnishes excitement and interest or is dull, leading to a search within for that which does not come from without. Of such are the ultra religious. * * * * * And the irreligious, those who say openly that they have no religion, amongst whom are they to be found? They can, I think, be divided into three classes. There are first of all those who are very low down in the scale of humanity, who are wanting in all the finer instincts of mankind. You will find them usually in cities, amongst the dregs of the people; for in the country it is difficult to find any who are quite without the finer emotions. The air and land and sky, the sunset and the sunrise, the myriad beauties of the world, do not leave them quite unmoved. And then solitude, which gives men time to think, not to reason but to think; which gives their hearts peace to hear the echoes of nature, is a great refiner. Countrymen are often stupid, they are rarely brutalised.