or months tempting his fate, inviting catastrophe.
None the less did the first sure approaches of that catastrophe fill him
with a restless resistance which was in itself anguish.

As to the squire's talk, it was simply the outpouring of one of the
richest, most sceptical, and most highly-trained of minds on the subject
of Christian origins. At no previous period of his life would it have
greatly affected Elsmere. But now at every step the ideas, impressions,
arguments bred in him by his months of historical work and ordinary
converse with the squire rushed in, as they had done once before, to
cripple resistance, to check an emerging answer, to justify Mr.
Wendover.

We may quote a few fragmentary utterances taken almost at random from
the long wrestle of the two men, for the sake of indicating the main
lines of a bitter after-struggle.

'Testimony like every other human product has _developed_.
Man's power of apprehending and recording what he sees and
hears has grown from less to more, from weaker to stronger,
like any other of his faculties, just as the reasoning powers
of the cave-dweller have developed into the reasoning powers
of a Kant. What one wants is the ordered proof of this, and
it can be got from history and experience.'

* * * * *

'To plunge into the Christian period without having first
cleared the mind as to what is meant in history and
literature by "the critical method," which in history may be
defined as the "science of what is credible," and in
literature as "the science of what is rational," is to invite
fiasco. The theologian in such a state sees no obstacle to
accepting an arbitrary list of documents with all the strange
stuff they may contain, and declaring them to be sound
historical material, while he applies to all the strange
stuff of a similar kind surrounding them the most rigorous
principles of modern science. Or he has to make believe that
the reasoning processes exhibited in the speeches of the
Acts, in certain passages of St. Paul's Epistles, or in the
Old Testament quotations in the Gospels, have a validity for
the mind of the nineteenth century, when in truth they are
the imperfect, half-childish products of the mind of the
first century, of quite insignificant or indirect value to
the historian of fact, of enormous value to the historian of