not heighten my appreciation of
the mental leisure which otherwise I now enjoyed. It was a leisure,
however, which before very long took the form of activity in a new
direction.

The more important questions which agitate the mind of an age, just like
those which agitate the mind of an individual, engross and affect it,
not simultaneously, but in alternation. One actor recedes for the moment
and makes way for another, and the newcomer is an old actor returning.
About the time of which I am now speaking there was--on the surface, at
all events--a lull in social controversy, and a new outbreak of
religious. An illustration of this fact may be found in the
extraordinary popularity achieved by a novel purely religious in
interest, its name being _Robert Elsmere_, and its authoress Mrs.
Humphry Ward. Its religious interest is of a highly specialized kind. It
is the story of an Anglican clergyman who starts as an earnest and
absolutely untroubled believer in the traditional dogmas which the
Church of England inculcates. He is thus at peace with himself till he
gradually becomes intimate with a certain distinguished scholar. This
scholar, who is the squire of his parish, is the possessor of an
enormous library, rich in the writings of continental and especially of
German skeptics. Having suggested to Robert Elsmere sundry disquieting
arguments, he turns him loose in his library, begging him to use it as
his own. The clergyman accepts the invitation. He soon is absorbed in
the works of such writers as Strauss and Renan; and little by little
their spirit becomes his own. Their eyes become his. Everything which
orthodoxy demands in the way of the supernatural disappears. The
sacraments become mummeries. Even Christ, in the ordinary sense, no
longer lives. The clergyman is left in desolation. How, he asks, can the
Church (by which he means the Anglican Church) help him? What evidence,
what shred even of probability, have its ministers to support their
teaching? They hardly, if closely pressed, know what they mean
themselves, and the supernatural teaching of one section of Anglicans
contradicts that of the others. The one moral which her hero draws from
his studies resolves itself into the words, "Miracles do not happen."

Mrs. Ward's novel was particularly appropriate to the time at which it
was published. The question of what a man, as a minister of the English
Church, might or might not teach without surrendering his office or