Yet it was months before he came and told her.

What right had he to love her?
he said to himself, when he knelt and prayed for her soul's salvation: she was an unbeliever; she had never come to Christ, or she would have known the truth.

His duty to his people confronted him with its uncompromising claim that the woman whom he should bring to help him in his labors among them should be a Christian, and he struggled to tear this love out of his heart.
John Ward's was an intellect which could not hold a belief subject to the mutations of time or circumstances.

Once acknowledged by his soul, its growth was ended; it hardened into a creed, in which he rested in complete satisfaction.

It was not that he did not desire more light; it was simply that he could not conceive that there might be more light.