1890 COEEESPONDENCE WITH THE EEV. F. PAGET 165 



Mr. Eomaiies had with Dr. Paget, during one of the 

 Oxford visits : 



The Palace, Ely : June 15, 1886. 



My dear Romanes , I have often and anxiously 

 thought over the question which you asked me when 

 you were at Oxford about your boy's education, and 

 the part which you should take in his religious train- 

 ing : and I would venture, with most true and 

 affectionate gratitude for your trust, to write a few 

 lines in partial qualification of what I then said. 



I start on the ground of your own wish (for which 

 indeed I am with all my heart thankful) that your boy's 

 character should be fashioned after the Christian type 

 and under the influence of Christ. And I am as anxious 

 as ever that, even if your own estimate of the evidences 

 of Christianity should for a long while remain as it is, 

 your children may never, in their later years, feel that 

 you ever taught them anything which you did not 

 believe : on every ground I long to avoid all danger of 

 such a thought crossing their minds. But at the 

 same time I do long that they may be spared to the 

 very last possible moment the knowledge that in the 

 judgment of the mind which they, I hope, will most 

 reverence and love, the bases of their religious trust 

 and hope are uncertain. It is only far on in life, I 

 think, that a man comes to realise either the vast im- 

 portance of things which are not held with absolute 

 certainty, or the mysterious and complex nature of the 

 act of faith, and the discipline of obscurity, and the 

 way in which real spiritual progress may be going on 

 where the mind seems only to be holding on, as it 

 were, with fear and trembling. 



