Note 60 — Chapter VIII · RELIGIOUS VIEWS.
Reading edition
A letter from his nephew, Frank Barnard, to Dr. Gladstone says: “I believe that in his younger days he had his period of hesitation, of questioning in that great argument. I have heard that, so alive was he to the necessity of investigating anything that seemed important, he visited Joanna Southcote, perhaps to learn what that woman’s pretensions were: I think he was a mere lad at that time. But this period once passed, he questioned no more, for the more he saw that Nature was mighty, the more he felt that God was mightier; and to any cavillings upon the doubts of Colenso or the reality of the Mosaic cosmogony, I believe he would simply have replied in the apostle’s words: ‘Is anything too hard for God?’...
“I once heard him say from the pulpit, ‘I hope none of my hearers will in these matters listen to the thing called philosophy.’”