s the
Christian bases of faith were overthrown, that faith had naturally to
find for itself other supports and attachments. For faith itself--in God
and a spiritual order--had been so wrought into the nature by years of
reverent and adoring living that nothing could destroy it. With Elsmere,
as with all men of religious temperament, belief in Christianity and
faith in God had not at the outset been a matter of reasoning at all,
but of sympathy, feeling, association, daily experience. Then the
intellect had broken in, and destroyed or transformed the belief in
Christianity. But after the crash, _faith_ emerged as strong as ever,
only craving and eager to make a fresh peace, a fresh compact with the
reason.

Elsmere had heard Grey say long ago in one of the few moments of real
intimacy he had enjoyed with him at Oxford, 'My interest in philosophy
springs solely from the chance it offers me of knowing something more of
God!' Driven by the same thirst he too threw himself into the same
quest, pushing his way laboriously through the philosophical borderlands
of science, through the ethical speculation of the day, through the
history of man's moral and religious past. And while on the one hand the
intellect was able to contribute an ever stronger support to the faith
which was the man, on the other the sphere in him of a patient ignorance
which abstains from all attempts at knowing what man cannot know, and
substitutes trust for either knowledge or despair, was perpetually
widening. 'I take my stand on conscience and the moral life!' was the
upshot of it all. 'In them I find my God! As for all these various
problems, ethical and scientific, which you press upon me, my pessimist
friend, I, too, am bewildered; I, too, have no explanation to offer. But
I trust and wait. In spite of them--beyond them--I have abundantly
enough for faith--for hope--for action!'

We may quote a passage or two from some letters of his written at this
time to that young Armitstead who had taken his place at Murewell, and
was still there till Mowbray Elsmere should appoint a new man.
Armitstead had been a college friend of Elsmere's. He was a High
Churchman of a singularly gentle and delicate type, and the manner in
which he had received Elsmere's story on the day of his arrival at
Murewell had permanently endeared him to the teller of it. At the same
time the defection from Christianity of a man who at Oxford had been to
him the object of much hero-