Though I have come myself to somewhat different conclusions, he
at least taught me to draw my own inferences from my own experiences,
without either deferring to or despising the conclusions of others.
The charm of his personality lay in his independence, his sympathy, his
eager freshness of view, his purity of motive, his perfect simplicity; and
it is all this which I have attempted to depict, rather than to trace his
theories, or to present a philosophy which was always concrete rather than
abstract, and passionate rather than deliberate. To use a homely proverb,
Father Payne was a man who filled his chair!
Of one thing I feel sure, and that is that wherever Father Payne is, and
whatever he may be doing--for I have as absolute a conviction of the
continued existence of his fine spirit as I have of the present existence
of my own--he will value my attempt to depict him as he was. I remember his
telling me a story of Dr. Johnson, how in the course of his last illness,
when he could not open his letters, he asked Boswell to read them for him.
Boswell opened a letter from some person in the North of England, of a
complimentary kind, and thinking it would fatigue Dr. Johnson to have it
read aloud, merely observed that it was highly in his praise. Dr. Johnson
at once desired it to be read to him, and said with great earnestness,
"_The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.
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