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You admit that you are either so dull in your thought or indifferent in your convictions that you know you are wearying your auditors and must rest them by some mental diversion. This is inconsistent with merriment of delivery, which robs speech of a certain weight and intrinsic worth. It is also inconsistent with the voice of storm and the hurricane manner.
I need not dwell upon the thought that the firmest, most personally precious convictions of an eternity of future blessedness, rise and fall in a Christian consciousness with the purity and the depth of its own experience of the peace and joy of the Gospel.
But father was not a man that dealt in platitudes. "Friends," said he, quietly, as he faced his audience and drew himself to his full height, "friends, you are mistaken in your man. I am sorry to disappoint you. I have no wish to quarrel with you. But you have forced me to speak, and I can do no less than declare my real convictions. I am, and always have been, opposed to slavery.
New doors of insight were silently swinging open on their hinges, old prejudices were closing, fresh convictions long snugly in the bud were unfolding like flowers. These things were not new. They had begun many years before when as a young boy he had stared wide-eyed, unseeing and uncomprehending, gazing down the sun-streaked, green, lucent depths of an aisle in the forest.
And among these were some of the oldest monks, strictest in their devotion, genuine ascetics, who had kept silent during the life of the deceased elder, but now suddenly unsealed their lips. And this was terrible, for their words had great influence on young monks who were not yet firm in their convictions.
Minetti was as pleasant as one could imagine. He told the most droll stories of his life in London. It appeared that he had lived there in a hotbed of exiled radicals; but he, himself, seemed to have no convictions. Everything he described was touched with a certain ironic humor. When he rose to go he said, quite simply: "How are things? Do you sleep nights now?" "No.
She knew that she must go about such work with strong convictions, and as yet she could not bring herself to think that "dancing and delights" were damnable. No doubt she would come to have such belief if told so often enough by some persuasive divine; but she was not sure that she wished to believe it.
But the sphere of faith is wider even than this; the almost instinctive belief that each man has in his own longevity and success, the trust in the permanence of friendship and love, the confidence in the unique value of one's work or genius these are also convictions founded more on desire than on knowledge, and may function in the same way as religion in a man's life.
They that never go to heaven may see much of sin, and of the wrath of God due thereto. This had Cain and Judas, and yet they came short of the kingdom. The convictions of the one doth drive them sincerely to Christ; the convictions of the other doth drive them to the law, and the law to desperation at last.
"This account," adds Madame Récamier, "had an air of sincerity about it, which shook my previous convictions, and the regard I felt for the Queen was heightened. From that time we became firm friends.
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