The pinafore of the child will be more than a match for the frock of the bishop and the surplice of the priest.

On leaving he was apprenticed to a civil engineer at Derby where he acquired "a store of exclusively scientific conceptions" but also began to look to religion for mental stimulation. And as his theism was so was his religion and his philosophy. And when in 1890 he began to gather together the miscellaneous essays and papers written during a period of sixty years he expressed the hope that though "they could lay no claim to logical consistency" they might yet show "beneath the varying complexion of their thought some intelligible moral continuity" "leading in the end to a view of life more coherent and less defective than was presented at the beginning.

For 45 years he was Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy and Political Economy in Manchester New College the principal training college for British Unitarianism.