He even cherished unconsciously the feeling that his faculty was a merit. He took the credit of his individual humanity, as if the good working of his brain, the thing he most admired, was attributable to his own will and forethought. The idea had never arisen in that brain, that he was in the world by no creative intent of his own. Nothing had as yet suggested to him that, after all, if he was clever, he could not help it. It had not occurred to him that there was a stage in his history antecedent to his consciousness--a stage in which his pleasure with regard to the next could not have been appealed to, or his consent asked--a stage, for any satisfaction concerning which, his resultant consciousness must repose on a creative will, answerable to itself for his existence. A man's patent of manhood is, that he can call upon God--not the God of any theology, right or wrong, but the God out of whose heart he came, and in whose heart he is. This is his highest power--that which constitutes his original likeness to God. Had any one tried to wake this idea in Tuke, he would have mocked at the sound of it, never seeing it. The words which represented it he would have thought he understood, but he would never have laid hold of the idea. He found himself what he found himself, and was content with the find; therefore asked no questions as to whence he came--was to himself consequently as if he had come from nowhere--which made it easy for him to imagine that he was going nowhither. He had never reflected that he had not made himself, and that therefore there might be a power somewhere that had called him into being, and had a word to say to him on the matter. The region where he began to be, had never, in speculation or mirage any more than in direct vision, lifted itself above the horizon-line of his consciousness. An ordinarily well-behaved man, with a vague narrow regard for his moral nature, and an admiration of intellectual humanity in the abstract, he thought of himself as exceptionally worthy, and as having neighbours mostly inferior. In relation to Richard, he was specially pleased with himself: had he not, for the sake of the youth, put himself in the danger of the law!