“_Robert Elsmere_ was a type of a large class of minds which cannot be sure that the sacred story is true. It is philosophical, doubtless, and a duty to the intellect to recognise our doubts, to locate them, perhaps to give them practical effect. It may be also a moral duty to do this. But then there is also a large class of minds which cannot be sure it is false—minds of very various degrees of conscientiousness and intellectual power, up to the highest. They will think those who are quite sure it is false, unphilosophical through lack of doubt. For their part, they make allowance in their scheme of life for a great possibility, and with some of them that bare concession of possibility (the subject of it being what it is) becomes the most important fact in the world. The recognition of it straightway opens wide the door to hope and love; and such persons are, as we fancy they always will be, the nucleus of a Church. Their particular phase of doubt, of philosophic uncertainty, has been the secret of millions of good Christians, multitudes of worthy priests. They knit themselves to believers, in various degrees, of all ages.” And thus he came both to feel and to express a deep and sincere sympathy with the Christian point of view; _Marius_ reveals most subtly the closeness of this approximation; but it may be seen, in scattered hints and touches, through all his later writings. Speaking, for instance, of the death of Socrates he wrote that the “details, as one cannot but observe in passing, which leave those famous hours, even for purely human, or say! pagan dignity and tenderness, wholly incomparable to one sacred scene to which they have sometimes been compared.” A friend of Pater’s tells me that the present Bishop of Birmingham, Dr. Gore, went to the Brasenose Church Society to read a paper on the Blessed Trinity, and was rather taken aback to find Pater in the chair. “However, he proved to be an admirable chairman, directing the discussion after the paper, and checking anything approaching irreverence.” He wrote Mrs. Humphry Ward a very interesting letter on December 23, 1885, on receiving from her as a Christmas gift her newly published translation of _Amiel’s Journal_. After congratulating her on the admirable literary grace of the translation, he continued:—