pleased with my own wise humanity, as I thought it. But now that I look back upon it and examine my mixed motives, I am forced to admit that there was more of cowardice than compassion in the amalgam. I was not even quite sincere, I now find, in pleading to myself my aunt's distress of mind as an excuse for the concealment, or rather the misrepresentation, of my opinions. I knew at the time that she had had a bad night and that she is suffering severely just now from suppressed gout. In other words, I was secretly conscious at the back of my mind that the abnormal excess of her momentary sufferings was due to physical and not mental causes, and would yield readily enough to colchicum or salicylic acid, which no one has ever ranked among Christian apologetics. Yet I persuaded myself for the moment that it was this quite exceptional and transitory state of my aunt's feelings which compelled me to keep silence.
"June 23.—To-day I have had what seems—or seemed to me, for I have not yet had time for a thorough analysis—a clear indication of my only rational and legitimate course. My aunt Catherine said plainly to me this afternoon that as she had gathered from our conversations that my views were strictly orthodox, she would not pain me in future by any further disclosures of her own doubts. At the same time, she added, it was only right to tell me that my pious advice had done her no good, but, on the contrary, harm, since there was to her mind nothing so calculated to confirm scepticism as the sight of a man of good understanding thus firmly wedded to certain received opinions of which nevertheless he was unable to offer any reasonable defence or even intelligible explanation whatsoever. Upon this hint I of course spoke. It was clear that if my silence only increased my aunt s trouble, and that if, further, it threatened to convict me unjustly of stupidity, I was clearly entitled, as well on altruistic as on self-regarding grounds, to reveal
