But she did not talk about her frame of mind, nor dignify the questions which began to come by calling them doubts; how could they be doubts, when she had never known what she had believed?
So, by degrees, she built up a belief for herself.
Love of good was really love of God, in her mind.

Heaven meant righteousness, and hell an absence from what was best and truest; but Helen did not feel that a soul must wait for death before it was overtaken by hell.

It was very simple and very short, this creed of hers; yet it was the doorway through which grief and patience were to come,--the sorrow of the world, the mystery of sin, and the hope of that far-off divine event.
There was no detail of religious thought with Helen Jeffrey; ideas presented themselves to her mind with a comprehensiveness and simplicity which would have been impossible to Mr.Ward.But at this time he knew nothing of the mental processes that were leading her out of the calm, unreasoning content of childhood into a mist of doubt, which, as she looked into the future, seemed to darken into night.

He was struggling with his conscience, and asking himself if he had any right to seek her love.
"Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers," he said to himself.
To his mind, Helen's lack of belief in certain doctrines--for it had hardly crystallized into unbelief--was sin; and sin was punishable by eternal death.

Here was his escape from conscience.