He really enjoyed reading Dean Church's sermons, and they exercised much influence on him. For Newman, on the other hand, he had little liking, and indeed he never did Newman adequate justice. He had promised a friend just before his death to read more of Newman, and discover for himself the great gifts of that wonderful man, but there was not time. Only one bit of Newman's writing was dear to him, 'Lead, kindly Light.' The following letter rose out of a conversation Mr. Romanes had with Dr. Paget, during one of the Oxford visits: The Palace, Ely: June 15, 1886. My dear Romanes,--I have often and anxiously thought over the question which you asked me when you were at Oxford about your boy's education, and the part which you should take in his religious training: and I would venture, with most true and affectionate gratitude for your trust, to write a few lines in partial qualification of what I then said. I start on the ground of your own wish (for which indeed I am with all my heart thankful) that your boy's character should be fashioned after the Christian type and under the influence of Christ. And I am as anxious as ever that, even if your own estimate of the evidences of Christianity should for a long while remain as it is, your children may never, in their later years, feel that you ever taught them anything which you did not believe: on every ground I long to avoid all danger of such a thought crossing their minds. But at the same time I do long that they may be spared to the very last possible moment the knowledge that in the judgment of the mind which they, I hope, will most reverence and love, the bases of their religious trust and hope are uncertain. It is only far on in life, I think, that a man comes to realise either the vast importance of things which are not held with absolute certainty, or the mysterious and complex nature of the act of faith, and the discipline of obscurity, and the way in which real spiritual progress may be going on where the mind seems only to be holding on, as it were, with fear and trembling. To a boy of sixteen the mere knowledge of uncertainty in his father's mind may drain all the moral cogency out of the whole conception of religion:--the very suspicion of the uncertainty may unnerve him more than the full realisation of the doubt would change his father's aim and hope in doing his duty.