never agitated the mind of a German metaphysician. If the query had
been put to me, I should have taken the liberty to question the
questioner thus: 'Can you explain to me the growth of a tree? Can
you explain how the will of man influences the material muscles?--In
fact the universe is full of forces or influences. Can you trace
whence it came and how it came? Can'st thou by searching find out
God? Can'st thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?--it is high
as heaven; what can'st thou do? deeper than hell; what can'st thou
know?'" To the council's inquiry whether we believed a statement
because it was in the Bible or because it was true, my father
replied partly with a quotation from the celebrated Platonist
divine, John Smith, of Cambridge--"All that knowledge which is
separate from an inward acquaintance with virtue and goodness is of
a far different nature from that which ariseth out of a living sense
of them which is the best discerner thereof, and by which alone we
know the true perfection, sweetness, energy, and loveliness of them,
and all that which is [Greek text], that which can no more "be known
by a naked demonstration than colours can be perceived of a blind
man by any definition or description which he can hear of them."

This pamphlet was written in 1852, three years after I entered
Cheshunt College, when my father declared to me that "a moderate
Calvinism suited him best". In 1852 he was forty-five years old.
He had not hardened: he was alive, rejecting what was dead, laying
hold of what was true to him, and living by it. Nor was the change
hurried or ill-considered which took place in him between 1849 and
1852. What he became in 1852 he was substantially to the end of his
days.

The expulsion excited some notice in the world then, although, as I