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Arowhena and I had a pitched battle on this point, and should have had many more but for my prudence in allowing her to get the better of me.

I am sure that in her heart she was suspicious of her own position for she returned more than once to the subject. “Can you not see,” I had exclaimed, “that the fact of Justice being admirable will not be in the least affected by the absence of a belief in her being also a living agent? Can you really think that men will be one whit less hopeful, because they no longer believe that hope is an actual person?” She shook her head, and said that with men's belief in the personality all incentive to the reverence of the thing itself, as justice or hope, would cease; men from that hour would never be either just or hopeful again. She was evidently so sincere, and looked so genuinely grieved at hearing any one doubt what she had been always told that she should regard as a first principle of belief, that I was fonder and fonder of her at every word she said. Never did she look so beautiful. There was in her face such a sweet and wondering simplicity that it was all I could do to avoid telling her that I had been converted by my own eyes into accepting faith's existence as a divinity.

But I could not move her, nor indeed did I seriously wish to do so. She deferred to me in most things, for she knew that I had travelled far and seen much, also, that I was quite sincere, and would not for the world have pained her; but from the first she never shrank from fearlessly maintaining her opinions if they were put in question; nor does she to this day abate one jot of her belief in the religion of her childhood, though in compliance with my repeated