Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/49

 Violet, another active member of our society, was one of Gray's hardest opponents. Violet in religion was Unitarian, and in his phlegmatic way, which was so irritating to Gray's sincerely hot zeal, he would argue that God must be as greatly dishonoured by believing too much as too little. The "peculiar domestic institution" did not, of course, escape Violet's sarcastic animadversion. But the already well-practised Gray was not unprepared for the enemy on this delicate point. He would remark, with an off-hand but lofty reserve, that if he must condescend to defend what God himself had, by direct intimation, sanctioned and even enjoined upon the saints, he would ask what was man that he should presume to set up his mere human notions of morality against God? God was infinite, and infinite morality might well be, and doubtless really was, something different from the finite.

All this "measure for measure" was well enough in its way; but my over-zealous converting foreman was as nearly as possible in a serious scrape lately, which came about in this way. There were two young Scotch girls, sisters, and servants next door to us, whom Gray thus got slightly to know, and on whose conversion he had set his heart. They had, however, very much taken my wife's fancy by their quiet and humble ways; and accordingly she never rested till she had got them out of their wrong northern Presbyterianism—a religion in her eyes no better than it should be—and had them both securely