"FEARS AND SCRUPLES" illustrates this personal religion in an opposite
manner. It is the expression of a tender and very simple religious
feeling, saddened by the obscurity which surrounds its object, and still
more by the impossibility of proving to other minds that this object is
a real one. It is described as the devotion to an unseen friend, known
only by his letters and reported deeds, but whom one loves as by
instinct, believes in without testimony, and trusts to as accepting the
allegiance of the smaller being, and sure sooner or later to acknowledge
it In the present case the days are going by. No sign of acknowledgment
has been given. Sceptics assure the believer that his faith rests on
letters which were forged, on actions which others equally have
performed; he can only yearn for some word or token which would enable
him to shut their mouth. But when some one hints that the friend is only
concealing himself to test his power of vision, and will punish him if
he does not see; and another objects that this would prove the friend a
monster; he crushes the objector with a word: "and what if the friend be
GOD?"

The next group is fuller and still more characteristic: for it displays
the love of Art in its special conditions, and, at the same time, in its
union with all the general human instincts in which artistic emotion can
be merged. We find it in its relation to the general love of life in

"Fra Lippo Lippi." ("Men and Women." 1855.)

In its relation to the spiritual sense of existence in

"Abt Vogler." ("Dramatis Personæ." 1864.)