Elsewhere I have told how when he was young and stood at
the composing desk in his printing office, he used to declaim Byron
by heart. That a Puritan printer, one of the last men in the world
to be carried away by a fashion, should be vanquished by Byron, is
as genuine a testimony as any I know to the reality of his
greatness. Up to 1849 or thereabouts, my father in religion was
Independent and Calvinist, the creed which, as he thought then, best
suited him. But a change was at hand. His political opinions
remained unaltered to his death, but in 1851 he had completed his
discovery that the "simple gospel" which Calvinism preached was by
no means simple, but remarkably abstruse. It was the Heroes and
Hero Worship and the Sartor Resartus which drew him away from the
meeting-house. There is nothing in these two books directly hostile
either to church or dissent, but they laid hold on him as no books
had ever held, and the expansion they wrought in him could not
possibly tolerate the limitations of orthodoxy. He was not
converted to any other religion. He did not run for help to those
who he knew could not give it. His portrait; erect,
straightforward-looking, firmly standing, one foot a little in
advance, helps me and decides me when I look at it.
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