During the years of painful ill health which preceded his death, he often said that he was unlike the Celt, who takes to the supernatural as if by instinct.

"But I am a Saxon and cling to the earthy" he would say; "I want an explicit and satisfactory reason why any innocent pleasure should not be enjoyed." He attributed this to his racial peculiarities.

Others may differ with him and credit it to his nature, taken in its human and rational integrity.
Furthermore, he was always singularly independent and self-poised.

He could not endure being hindered of anything that was his, except by an authority which had legitimated to his intelligence its right to command.

He could obey that readily and entirely, as his life from infancy clearly witnesses; but he never knew a merely arbitrary master.
Such a nature, fed on the mingled truth and error characteristic of orthodox Protestantism, was certain to reject it sooner or later, impelled by hunger for the whole Divine gift of which that teaching contains fragments only.