Since her father's death and her comparative isolation, she had read and thought a good deal; some of my readers may even think she had read and thought to tolerable purposes judging from her answers to Faber in the first serious conversation they had; but her religion had lain as before in a state of dull quiescence, until her late experience, realizing to her the idea of the special care of which she stood so much in need, awoke in her a keen sense of delight, and if not a sense of gratitude as well, yet a dull desire to be grateful.
The next day, as she sat pondering what had passed between them, altogether unaware of her own weakness, she was suddenly seized with the ambition--in its inward relations the same as his--of converting him to her belief.

The purpose justified an interest in him beyond what gratitude obligated, and was in part the cause why she neither shrank from his society, nor grew alarmed at the rapid growth of her intimacy.
But they only who love the truth simply and altogether, can really know what they are about.
I do not care to follow the intellectual duel between them.

Argument, save that of a man with himself, when council is held between heart, will, imagination, conscience, vision, and intellect, is of little avail or worth.

Nothing, however, could have suited Faber's desires better.
Under the shadow of such difficulties as the wise man ponders and the fool flaunts, difficulties which have been difficulties from the dawn of human thought, and will in new shapes keep returning so long as the human understanding yearns to infold its origin, Faber brought up an array of arguments utterly destructive of the wretched theories of forms of religion which were all she had to bring into the field: so wretched and false were they--feeblest she found them just where she had regarded them as invincible--that in destroying them Faber did even a poor part of the work of a soldier of God: Mephistopheles describes himself as Ein Theil von jener Kraft, Die stets das Boese will, und stets das Gute schafft,.

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