Here, then, is suggested another aspect of his mind's history. He notes:
'As I rejected at this period of my life the Divinity of Christ, I sought, under Renan's guidance, more fully than I need have done, the origin of Christ's teaching and of that of Paul, in the doctrines previously taught by the Essenes and the Sadducees.'
Elsewhere a manuscript note describes his varying attitude towards
Christianity:
'In the course of 1863 I ceased my attendance upon Holy Communion, and fell into a sceptical frame of mind which lasted for several years, was modified in 1874, and came to an end in 1875. I had been a very strong believer, and in the loss of my belief in the supernatural, as it is called—i.e., in the Divinity of our Blessed Lord—I kept an unbounded admiration for His words, as recorded in the Sermon on the Mount, and belief in duty towards others. From 1885 to 1888 the Holy Sacrament was a profound blessing to me, but in 1905 I ceased again to find any help in forms.'
To what he called in 1865 the essential Radicalism of Christ's teaching— to-day it would be called Christian Socialism—he was always constant. It was the guiding principle of that inner idealism which underlay his whole life and which strengthened with his maturity. The world was for him 'a Christian' world. But acceptance not so much of the dogma as of the mystical faith of Christians would seem to have varied with him from time to time, and to have varied also in its formal expression. His mind was too positive, too much occupied in the detail of life, to have time either for brooding meditation or for the metaphysics of religious inquiry; and, at least in 1866, Christianity interested him mainly as one of the most potent shaping forces of human society. The desire to follow out and investigate at first hand certain of its modern manifestations helped to direct the impulse for travel which was already prompting him.
The Long Vacation of 1865 had found him tramping, first with Warr in Guernsey, afterwards alone 'through Brittany and Normandy and partly into the provinces south of the Loire,' eloquent on the charms of travelling without luggage, sketching also, and increasing his carefully gathered knowledge of French architecture.
He had explored France very thoroughly before he found the part of it which was to become almost a second homeland in his affections; and he had the Frenchman's appreciation of what was most characteristically France. "I think the better of the French," he wrote at this time, "for their admiration of the scenery of the Loire, the Indre, and the Vienne. Few English people are capable of appreciating the scenery of Anjou…. I never saw anything more lovely than the scenery of the Vilaine south of Guichen and Bourg des Comptes."
But this was only an excursion. The whole bent of his desire lay towards serious travel, in which he should pass from the training- ground of the University to that wider school where knowledge was to be gained, applied, and perfected. In the early part of 1866 he was talking only of a journey in America, and it was a journey with a literary purpose. In his History of Radicalism he had given much space to the Revivals in Prussia led by Ebel, and also to the rise in America of the school of the Perfectionists in 1834. He proposed to take with him the sketch of this book, and work into it the results of inquiry made on the spot as regards the communistic experiments which had been tried in the United States.
But travel for its own sake tempted him, and even before he set out, 'I fancy,' he writes, 'my intention was already to go round the world: but if I had asked my father's leave to do so, I should have been refused.'
At all events, when once fairly launched, the interest of travelling absorbed his mind; and accordingly the book on Radicalism was finally put aside, though not before some work had been done on it at Quebec and Ottawa. Nor was it altogether abandoned; for, he says, in treating of 'Radicalism in modern history':