The consolations which Hodgson offered him in his distress were those of religion. He wrote him long letters concerning the immortality of the soul; letters which caused Byron, years afterwards, to remark, when his friend had taken orders, that Hodgson was always pious, "even when he was kept by a washerwoman"--and was shocked by his blasphemous reply that he did not believe in immortality and did not desire it. He appealed to Byron--"for God's sake"--to pull himself together and read Paley's "Evidences of Christianity." He had a great respect for Paley as a Senior Wrangler and entertained no doubt that his conclusions followed from his premisses. A little later, he and Harness,[7] one of Byron's Harrow protégés, who was then at Cambridge, reading for his degree, went down to Newstead to stay with Byron. There were no orgies there this time. No "Paphian girls" were introduced; no practical jokes were played; the cook and the housemaid remained in the servants' quarters. "Nothing," says Harness, "could have been more orderly than the course of our days"--which was right and proper seeing that both he and Hodgson were shortly going to be ordained. If the trio sat up late, it was only to talk about literature and religion. Hodgson pressed orthodox views on Byron with "judicious zeal and affectionate earnestness." Harness supported him with the diffidence appropriate to his tender years. Byron maintained his own point of view, while thinking of other things. Chiefly he thought of the ghost which now revisited his secret orchard, telling himself that it was not the ghost but the real woman which should have been there. With Mary Chaworth alone he had known the sensation that nothing else mattered while he and she were together. Now that so many deaths had made a solitude in his heart he sorely needed the renewal of that feeling. She could have vouchsafed it to him; she both could and should. Why then, was she not at Annesley, waiting for him, granting more stolen interviews, proving that she still cared, affording him that escape from life to ecstasy? That was the drift of Byron's thoughts at the time when Hodgson was trying to direct his attention to Paley's "Evidences." He saw, as youth is apt to do, more possibilities of comfort in love than in theology--a fact which is the less to be wondered at seeing that the theology in which he had been brought up was of the uncomfortable Calvinistic kind; and though he was the victim of a mood rather than of a passion--for passion needed the stimulus of sight and touch--the mood had to be expressed, and perhaps worked off, in verse. It burst into "Childe Harold":