nly, in his restless pain,
a thought occurred to him. He had been much struck in the squire's
conversation by certain allusions to arguments drawn from the Book of
Daniel. It was not a subject with which Robert had any great
familiarity. He remembered his Pusey dimly, certain Divinity lectures,
an article of Westcott's.

He raised his hand quickly and took down the monograph on _The Use of
the Old Testament in the New_, which the squire had sent him in the
earliest days of their acquaintance. A secret dread and repugnance had
held him from it till now. Curiously enough it was not he but Catherine,
as we shall see, who had opened it first. Now, however, he got it down
and turned to the section on Daniel.

It was a change of conviction on the subject of the date and authorship
of this strange product of Jewish patriotism in the second century
before Christ that drove M. Renan out of the Church of Rome. 'For the
Catholic Church to confess,' he says in his _Souvenirs_, 'that Daniel is
an apocryphal book of the time of the Maccabees, would be to confess
that she had made a mistake; if she had made this mistake, she may have
made others; she is no longer divinely inspired.'

The Protestant, who is in truth more bound to the Book of Daniel than M.
Renan, has various ways of getting over the difficulties raised against
the supposed authorship of the book by modern criticism. Robert found
all these ways enumerated in the brilliant and vigorous pages of the
book before him.

In the first place, like the orthodox Saint-Sulpicien, the Protestant
meets the critic with a flat _non possumus_. 'Your arguments are useless
and irrelevant,' he says in effect. 'However plausible may be your
objections, the Book of Daniel is what it professes to be, _because_ our
Lord quoted it in such a manner as to distinctly recognise its
authority. The All-True and All-Knowing cannot have made a mistake, nor
can He have expressly led His disciples to regard as genuine and Divine,
prophecies which were in truth the inventions of an ingenious romancer.'

But the liberal Anglican--the man, that is to say, whose logical sense
is inferior to his sense of literary probabilities--proceeds quite
differently.

'Your arguments are perfectly just,' he says to the critic; 'the book is
a patriotic fraud, of no value except to the historian of literature.
But how do you know that our Lord quoted it as _true_ in the strict
sense? In fact He quoted it as _litera