by the bedside of my dear mother. Well was I repaid for the struggle it
had cost me to ask so great a kindness from a stranger, when I saw the
comfort that gentle noble heart had given to my mother. He soothed away
all her anxiety about my heresy with tactful wisdom, bidding her have no
fear of differences of opinion where the heart was set on truth.
"Remember", she told me he had said to her, "remember that our God is the
God of truth, and that therefore the honest search for truth can never be
displeasing in his eyes".

Once again after that he came, and after his visit to my mother we had
another long talk. I ventured to ask him, the conversation having turned
that way, how, with views so broad as his own, he found it possible to
remain in communion with the Church of England. "I think", he said
gently, "that I am of more service to true religion by remaining in the
Church and striving to widen its boundaries from within, than if I left
it and worked from without". And he went on to explain how, as Dean of
Westminster, he was in a rarely independent position, and could make the
Abbey of a wider national service than would otherwise be possible. In
all he said on this his love for and his pride in the glorious Abbey were
manifest, and it was easy to see that old historical associations, love
of music, of painting, and of stately architecture, were the bonds that
held him bound to the "old historic Church of England". His emotions, not
his intellect, kept him Churchman, and he shrunk with the
over-sensitiveness of the cultured scholar from the idea of allowing the
old traditions, to be handled roughly by inartistic hands. Naturally of a
refined and delicate nature, he had been rendered yet more sensitive by
the training of the college and the court; the exquisite courtesy of his
manners was but the high polish of a naturally gentle and artistic
spirit, a spirit whose gentleness sometimes veiled its strength. I have
often heard Dean Stanley harshly spoken of, I have heard his honesty