red by the Roman Empire can
be said to be substantially happier now than in the days of Severus.

_O corruptio optimi!_ That men should have been so little affected by
that shining ideal of the New Jerusalem, 'descended out of Heaven from
God,' into their very midst--that the print of the 'blessed feet' along
the world's highway should have been so often buried in the sands of
cruelty and fraud!

The September wind blew about him as he strolled through the darkening
column, set thick with great bushes of sombre juniper among the
yellowing fern, which stretched away on the left-hand side of the road
leading to the Hall. He stood and watched the masses of restless
discordant cloud which the sunset had left behind it, thinking the while
of Mr. Grey, of his assertions and his denials. Certain phrases of his
which Robert had heard drop from him on one or two rare occasions during
the later stages of his Oxford life ran through his head.

'_The fairy-tale of Christianity'--'The origins of Christian
Mythology._' He could recall, as the words rose in his memory, the
simplicity of the rugged face, and the melancholy mingled with fire
which had always marked the great tutor's sayings about religion.

'_Fairy Tale!_' Could any reasonable man watch a life like Catherine's
and believe that nothing but a delusion lay at the heart of it? And as
he asked the question, he seemed to hear Mr. Grey's answer: 'All
religions are true, and all are false. In them all, more or less
visibly, man grasps at the one thing needful--self forsaken, God laid
hold of. The spirit in them all is the same, answers eternally to
reality; it is but the letter, the fashion, the imagery, that are
relative and changing.'

He turned and walked homeward, struggling, with a host of tempestuous
ideas as swift and varying as the autumn clouds hurrying overhead. And
then, through a break in a line of trees, he caught sight of the tower
and chancel window of the little church. In an instant he had a vision
of early summer mornings--dewy, perfumed, silent, save for the birds,
and all the soft stir of rural birth and growth, of a chancel fragrant
with many flowers, of a distant church with scattered figures, of the
kneeling form of his wife close beside him, himself bending over her,
the sacrament of the Lord's death in his hand. The emotion, the
intensity, the absolute self-surrender of innumerable such moments in
the past--moments of a common faith, a common self-