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a religious music — subtile, sweet, mournful." How Kingsley at 

 Cambridge, like Clough at Oxford, felt the charm and compulsion 

 of that Anglican Eenaissauce may be read between the lines of 

 " Yeast," and how Kingsley, like Clough, fought his brave way 

 through and out of it into a broader brawnier faith may also 

 there be read. Kingsley wanted a faith that could engage every 

 fibre of a man, not one that only cultured the heart, while it 

 slighted and distrusted the reason, and renounced the flesh. The 

 creed of the Anglicans seemed the surrender of all that was 

 worth fighting for as Protestants. But the grim struggle between 

 Catholicism and Protestantism was ended for Charles Kingsley 

 on the 6th of July, 1839. That day he first saw his after wife, 

 and it was a case of love at first sight. So sudden and strong 

 was the first love of Kingsley and his wife that it seemed less 

 like the making of a new friendship, than the renewing of an old 

 one. It was the inrush of that love to the heart of Kingsley that 

 hushed the conflict of those college years. Henceforth to him 

 no religion was possible that cast a slur upon that love. All 

 religion henceforth had to be judged thus simply — which gives 

 the truest sacredness to marriage and to human love. It is the 

 remembrance of the great part that the love of his after wife 

 played in the rehgious life of Charles Kingsley that is the key to 

 what else is misleading in his novels. He is continually showing 

 the power of a woman's love to change a man's heart and life, 

 as in the cases of Lancelot and Tom Thurnall. By human love, 

 by prayer and repentance, and the brooding of the Spirit, the 

 great re-birth came to Kingsley one June night when he was 22 

 years old. " Before the sleeping earth and the sleepless sea and 

 stars, he devoted himself to God," and twelve months after he 

 was praying day and night that " God would even reject him from 

 the office of a deacon in the Church of England if he needed yet 

 more strongly to be taught his own weakness and the holiness of 

 his work." On July 17th, 1842, he preached for the first time 

 as curate in the church now hallowed by his name in Eversley, a 

 parish of three small hamlets in the north-east corner of Hants. 

 None of the then Church sects could ever claim him as dis 

 ciple or as champion. Taking his stand there on the divinity of 

 human life and love, on the discoveries of science as inspirations 

 of God, on the facts of history, of all history, but especially of 

 the history of Jesus Christ as the will of God revealed, he built 

 up his own structure of thought and faith. The more he tried 

 to clothe his own native thought in words, the more all other 

 words failed him, save those of the Church of England Articles. 

 Most of the parishioners were field labourers and " heth-croppers,' 

 earning only from 8s. to 10s. a week. It seemed a dreary start 

 for the young curate. The church was empty, the alehouses were 

 full, so that Sunday was more like that dull beery village-revel 

 he has described vividly in " Yeast." 



