Bute continued his yachting cruise from Orkney to Iceland, and spent there his twentieth birthday, viewing the volcano of Hecla in full eruption, as he had seen Etna a year previously. One of his birthday letters was from Lady Elizabeth Moore, with whom he had renewed a regular correspondence, and who was now happy in the belief that her former ward's secession from Protestantism was postponed sine die. Her letters are always characteristically kind and affectionate, if every phrase is not altogether judicious.
MY VERY DEAR COUSIN,
You are much in my thoughts this day.... My most affectionate good wishes on your entering your twenty-first year. May the Almighty bless and protect you. May you be preserved from evil doings and erroneous opinions, and prove a bright example of good to others in the elevated position of life in which God has placed you. Ten years ago I spent September 12 at St. Andrews with a little boy, the cherished object of his mother's deepest affection. We little thought how soon he would be deprived of that excellent parent, and how cruel would be the consequences that followed her sad loss. You have wonderfully escaped the dangers and survived the difficulties of your too eventful life in early youth. May the future be more calm, more happy! ... Your mother's bequest to me has been a source of more anxiety than you can ever know. My consolation is that I firmly did my duty towards my cousin who trusted me, and towards her orphan child.
Lady Elizabeth wrote a week later:
MY DEAREST BUTE,
I was charmed to receive your letter of the 16th, with most interesting details. I pass it on to-day to Sir James Fergusson, who merits that attention. I am thankful you are safe out of cold, dreary, dangerous Iceland, though in after times it will be amusing to talk of your travels in such a curious unvisited country. You are a dear good Boy for writing so often, and I thank you very very much; only it vexed me to be forced to remain so long silent. On your birthday we drank your health "with a sentiment," and the servants had a bottle of wine for the festive occasion, and Mungo [Bute's dog] was decorated with a new ribbon.... Mr. Henry Stuart has been extremely civil in sending me boxes of game and fruit from Mountstuart. There were great doings on the 12th at Rothesay, from which I gather you are now considered Somebody, instead of being Nobody (which I always felt you were wrong in ever permitting). If Sir J. F. had been Guardian long ago, such a state of things would not have existed.
Bute was called away from Oxford, soon after his return for the October term, to attend the funeral at Cheltenham of his last surviving aunt, Lady Selina Henry. His mother had had three sisters, but he had never been intimate with any of them, although he appreciated their personal piety more, perhaps, than they did his. "When I return," he wrote from Cheltenham to his Oxford friend, "I shall be able, perhaps, to add to your knowledge of the ultra-Protestant school, as I have already added to my own. It is wonderful how holy some people are in spite of everything." Bute always recalled with pleasure the extreme piety of some of his Protestant forbears, notably that of his great-great-grandmother, Selina ninth Countess of Huntingdon,[[9]] after whom Lady Selina Henry was named. He gave an old engraved portrait of this esteemed ancestress, who was as homely-looking as she was pious, to an intimate friend, with these words written under it by himself: "Fallax est gratia et vana pulchritudo: mulier timens Dominum ipsa laudabitur."[[10]]
Not only tolerant of, but conspicuously fair-minded towards, the religious views of others, Bute gave evidence of this, as well as of his deep interest in theological questions, in a letter written early in 1868 on the subject of the Filioque clause in the Creed, which divides East from West. Himself persuaded of the truth of the doctrine on this, as on all other points, held in the Latin Church, he could not pass unchallenged defective or disingenuous arguments even on the right side.
It is really breaking a fly on the wheel to attack the argument of the writer in the Rock.
What he says is this: If the Spirit proceeds from the Father only, and not from the Father and the Son, then the Father, by this attribute of emitting the Spirit, which the Son has not, is of a nature so different from that of the Son that they cannot be of one substance.