With the cool airs of that summer evening wafted about him, he felt, as he passed now under the vast shadow of the Abbey-church, that there were immense resources of renewal, of restoration, spread abroad over the face of the earth, such as had hardly been drawn upon at all by the sons and daughters of men. “Why is it,” he thought, “that this particular expression, ‘immortal souls,’ should act upon my mind in this way?” And as he moved slowly along now between the sculptured entrance to the Schoolhouse and the little low-roofed shop where the straw-hatted boys of the School bought their confectionery, it occurred to him as curiously significant that the syllable “God,” so talismanic to most people, had never, from his childhood, possessed the faintest magic for him! “It must be,” he thought, as, passing under a carved archway, he came bolt upon the old monastic conduit, “that anything suggestive of metaphysical unity is distasteful to me. It must be that my world is essentially a manifold world, and my religion, if I have any, essentially polytheistic! And yet, in matters of good and evil”⁠—and he recalled his sensations at Lenty Pond⁠—“I’m what they’d call a dualist, I suppose. Ay! It’s funny. Directly one comes to putting feelings into words, one is compelled to accept hopeless contradictions in the very depths of one’s being!”