, urging them up heights to you at present unconceived and
inconceivable; while, in the meantime, some of them serve their
generation well, and do as much for those that are to come after as you
do yourself."

"There is always weight as well as force in what you urge, Wingfold,"
returned Faber. "Still it looks to me just a cunningly devised fable--I
will not say of the priests, but of the human mind deceiving itself with
its own hopes and desires."

"It may well look such to those who are outside of it, and it must at
length appear such to all who, feeling in it any claim upon them, yet do
not put it to the test of their obedience."

"Well, you have had your turn, and now we are having ours--you of the
legends, we of the facts."

"No," said Wingfold, "we have not had our turn, and you have been
having yours for a far longer time than we. But if, as you profess, you
are _doing_ the truth you see, it belongs to my belief that you will
come to see the truth you do not see. Christianity is not a failure; for
to it mainly is the fact owing that here is a class of men which,
believing in no God, yet believes in duty toward men. Look here: if
Christianity be the outcome of human aspiration, the natural growth of
the human soil, is it not strange it should be such an utter failure as
it seems to you? and as such a natural growth, it must be a failure, for
if it were a success, must not you be the very one to see it? If it is
false, it is worthless, or an evil: where then is your law of
development, if the highest result of that development is an evil to the
nature and the race?"

"I do not grant it the highest result," said Faber. "It is a failure--a
false blossom, with a truer to follow."

"To produce a superior architecture, poetry, music?"

"Perhaps not. But a better science."

"Are the architecture and poetry and music parts of the failure?"

"Yes--but they are not altogether a failure, for they lay some truth at
the root of them all. Now we shall see what will come of turning away
from every thing we do not _know_."

"That is not exactly what you mean, for that would be never to know any
thing more. But the highest you have in view is immeasurably below what
Christianity has always demanded of its followers."

"But has never got from them, and never will. Look at the wars, the
hatreds, to which your _gospel_ has given rise! Look at Calvin and poor
Servetus! Look at the strifes and divisions of our own day! Loo