the touch of
difficulty, and what it said came calmly down to them.

In after days Flaxman could not often be got to talk of the experiences
of this evening. When he did he would generally say, briefly, that as
an _intellectual_ effort he had never been inclined to rank this first
public utterance very high among Elsmere's performances. The speaker's
own emotion had stood somewhat in his way. A man argues better, perhaps,
when he feels less.

'I have often heard him put his case, as I thought, more cogently in
conversation,' Flaxman would say--though only to his most intimate
friends--'but what I never saw before or since was such an _effect of
personality_ as he produced that night. From that moment at any rate I
loved him, and I understood his secret!'

Elsmere began with a few words of courteous thanks to the club for the
hearing they had promised him.

Then he passed on to the occasion of his address--the vogue in the
district of 'certain newspapers which, I understand, are specially
relished and patronized by your association.'

And he laid down on the table beside him the copies of the 'Freethinker'
and of 'Faith and Fools' which he had brought with him, and faced his
audience again, his hands on his sides.

'Well! I am not here to-night to attack those newspapers. I want to
reach your sympathies if I can in another way. If there is anybody
here who takes pleasure in them, who thinks that such writings and such
witticisms as he gets purveyed to him in these sheets do really help the
cause of truth and intellectual freedom, I shall not attack his position
from the front. I shall try to undermine it. I shall aim at rousing in
him such a state of feeling as may suddenly convince him that what is
injured by writing of this sort is not the orthodox Christian, or the
Church, or Jesus of Nazareth, but always and inevitably, the man
who writes it and the man who loves it! His mind is possessed of an
inflaming and hateful image, which drives him to mockery and violence. I
want to replace it, if I can, by one of calm, of beauty and tenderness,
which may drive him to humility and sympathy. And this, indeed, is the
only way in which opinion is ever really altered--by the substitution of
one mental picture for another.

'But in the first place,' resumed the speaker, after a moment's pause,
changing his note a little, 'a word about myself. I am not here to-night
quite in the position of the casual stranger, coming down