lxiv LIFE OF DR. ROLLESTON. 



got him a fox's skin and skeleton, and appeared on the whole 

 less of a savage than most of his fellow-islanders. These are 

 trifling details, but they make up the picture of a man still able 

 to hold his own against bodily weakness, still comforted by 

 friendship, and spreading around him the social enjoyment so 

 well remembered by his friends. A graver letter from Corsica 

 shows him under the influence of rest and quiet contemplation 

 among the paradise- vegetation of the island, not yet burnt up by 

 the summer sun, with the sea and the snow-mountains dividing 

 the distant landscape. Here he had come to feel, for the first 

 time in many years, that labour should have its bounds ; he 

 quotes George Macdonald's lines : — 



'Help me to yield my will in labour even, 

 Nor toil on toil, greedy of doing, heap, 

 Fretting I cannot more than me is given.' 



He goes on to view his experience of Oxford, in the 'transi- 

 tion from one system to another, from that of Protection of 

 things sacred by artificial enactment, with the usual result of 

 neglect of duty and ignorance, to that of free exposure to open 

 competition in the battle with the unrestrained spirit of modern 

 thought.' The correspondent he is answering had evidently put 

 to him some searching theological questions, to which he replies : 

 1 It is true that as regards many doctrines, I should, as in the 

 case of the particular one you dwell upon, be slow either to 

 assert myself in definite words, or to condemn other persons for 

 having some one or for not having some one definite set of 

 phrases about any such tenets. Many doctrines are really 

 beyond the power of the human understanding to grasp, and I 

 cannot see my way to making them de fide either for myself or 

 for others. Or to put the matter still more in the concrete, 

 whilst I am on the one hand a member of the Association for 

 the Reform without Disestablishment of the Church of England, 

 I am on the other one of some seven or eight Professors of 

 Science who were to meet at Lambeth to confer privately with 

 the Archbishop last Christmas on the supposed incompatibility 

 of Belief and Science. So, I think, you have the facts as to my 



