Such things had been--why might it not be?
As they walked, his father told him he had been thinking all night what it would be best to do with him, now that the school was closed against him; and that he had come to the conclusion to ask his friend Peter Simon--the wits of the neighbourhood called him Simon Peter--to take charge of his education.
"He is a man of peculiar opinions," he said, "as I daresay you may have heard; but everything in him is, practice and theory, on a scale so grand, that to fear harm from him would be to sin against the truth.

A man must learn to judge for himself, and he will teach you that.

I have seen in him so much that I recognize as good and great, that I am compelled to believe in him where the things he believes appear to me out of the way, or even extravagant." "I have heard that he believes in ghosts, papa!" said Cosmo.
His father smiled, and made him no answer.

He had been born into an age whose incredulity, taking active form, was now fast approaching its extreme, and becoming superstition; and the denial of many things that had long been believed in the country had penetrated at last even to the remote region where his property lay: like that property, his mind, because of the age, lay also in a sort of border-land, An active believer in the care and providence of God, with no conscious difficulty in accepting any miracle recorded in the Bible, he was, where the oracles were dumb, in a measure inclined to a scepticism, which yet was limited to the region of his intellect;--his imagination turned from its conclusions, and cherished not a little so-called weakness for the so-called supernatural--so far as any glimmer of sense or meaning or reason would show itself therein.

And in the history of the world, the imagination has, I fancy, been quite as often right as the intellect, and the things in which it has been right, have been of much the greater importance.