The change of religion when it comes on a man gradually,--when it is not welcomed from the first, but, on the contrary, long resisted, must always be a mysterious and perplexing process, hard to realise and follow by the person most deeply interested, veiled and clouded to lookers-on, because naturally belonging to the deepest depths of the human conscience, and inevitably, and without much fault on either side, liable to be misinterpreted and misunderstood. And this process is all the more tangled when it goes on, not in an individual mind, travelling in its own way on its own path, little affected by others, and little affecting them, but in a representative person, with the responsibilities of a great cause upon him, bound by closest ties of every kind to friends, colleagues, and disciples, thinking, feeling, leading, pointing out the way for hundreds who love and depend on him. Views and feelings vary from day to day, according to the events and conditions of the day. How shall he speak, and how shall he be silent? How shall he let doubts and difficulties appear, yet how shall he suppress them?--doubts which may grow and become hopeless, but which, on the other hand, may be solved and disappear. How shall he go on as if nothing had happened, when all the foundations of the world seem to have sunk from under him? Yet how shall he disclose the dreadful secret, when he is not yet quite sure whether his mind will not still rally from its terror and despair? He must in honesty, in kindness, give some warning, yet how much? and how to prevent it being taken for more than it means? There are counter-considerations, to which he cannot shut his eyes. There are friends who will not believe his warnings. There are watchful enemies who are on the look-out for proofs of disingenuousness and bad faith. He could cut through his difficulties at once by making the plunge in obedience to this or that plausible sign or train of reasoning, but his conscience and good faith will not let him take things so easily; and yet he knows that if he hangs on, he will be accused by and by, perhaps speciously, of having been dishonest and deceiving. So subtle, so shifting, so impalpable are the steps by which a faith is disintegrated; so evanescent, and impossible to follow, the shades by which one set of convictions pass into others wholly opposite; for it is not knowledge and intellect alone which come into play, but all the moral tastes and habits of the character, its likings and dislikings, its weakness and its strength, its triumphs and its vexations, its keenness and its insensibilities, which are in full action, while the intellect alone seems to be busy with its problems. A picture has been given us, belonging to this time, of the process, by a great master of human nature, and a great sufferer under the process; it is, perhaps, the greatest attempt ever made to describe it; but it is not wholly successful. It tells us much, for it is written with touching