ment becomes meaningless. If we have not incurred God's
wrath through Adam's disobedience, we need no Saviour. That is the way
to meet the higher criticism," he concluded earnestly.

As the only rule of the association was that no man should talk long
upon any matter, Floud, the fiery and aggressive little Baptist,
hereupon savagely reviewed a late treatise on the ethnic Trinities, put
out by a professor of ecclesiastical history in a New England
theological seminary. Floud marvelled that this author could retain his
orthodox standing, for he viewed the Bible as a purely human collection
of imperfect writings, the wonder-stories concerning the birth and death
of Jesus as deserving no credence, and denied to Christianity any
supernatural foundation. Polytheism was shown to be the soil from which
all trinitarian conceptions naturally spring--the Brahmanic,
Zoroastrian, Homeric, Plotinian, as well as the Christian trinity--the
latter being a Greek idea engrafted on a Jewish stalk. The author's
conclusion, by which he reached "an undogmatic gospel of the spirit,
independent of all creeds and forms--a gospel of love to God and man,
with another Trinity of Love, Truth and Freedom," was particularly
irritating to the disturbed Baptist, who spoke bitterly of the day
having dawned when the Church's most dangerous enemies were those
critical vipers whom she had warmed in her own bosom.

Suffield, the gaunt, dark, but twinkling-eyed Methodist, also sniffed
at the conclusion of the ethnic-trinities person. "We have an age of
substitutes," he remarked. "We have had substitutes for silk and
sealskin--very creditable substitutes, so I have been assured by
a lady in whom I have every confidence--substitutes for coffee,
for diamonds--substitutes for breakfast which are widely
advertised--substitutes for medicine--and now we are coming to have
substitutes for religion--even a substitute for hell!"

Hereupon he told of a book he had read, also written by an orthodox
professor of theology, in which the argument, advanced upon scriptural
evidence, was that the wicked do not go into endless torment, but
ultimately shrivel and sink into a state of practical unconsciousness.
Yet the author had been unable to find any foundation for universalism.
This writer, Suffield explained, holds that the curtain falls after the
judgment on a lost world. Nor is there probation for the soul after the
body dies. The Scriptures teach the ruin of the final r