d and had
children, nothing more.

The old Scotchman, Macdonald, came out after the first lecture somewhat
crestfallen.

'Not the sort of stooff I'd expected!' he said, with a shade of
perplexity on the rugged face. 'He doosn't talk eneuf in the _aa_bstract
for me.'

But he went again, and the second lecture, on the origin of the Gospels,
got hold of him, especially as it supplied him with a whole armory
of new arguments in support of Hume's doctrine of conscience, and in
defiance of 'that blatin' creetur, Reid'. The thesis with which Robert,
drawing on some of the stores supplied him by the Squire's book, began
his account--i.e. the gradual growth within the limits of history
of man's capacity for telling the exact truth--fitted in, to the
Scotchman's thinking, so providentially with his own favorite
experimental doctrines as against the 'intueetion' folks, 'who will have
it that a babby's got as moch mind as Mr. Gladstone ef it only knew it!'
that afterward he never missed a lecture.

Lestrange was more difficult. He had the inherited temperament of the
Genevese _frondeur_, which made Geneva the headquarters of Calvinism
in the sixteenth century, and bids fair to make her the headquarters of
continental radicalism in the nineteenth. Robert never felt his wits
so much stretched and sharpened as when after the lecture Lestrange was
putting questions and objections with an acrid subtlety and persistence
worthy of a descendant of that burgher class which first built up the
Calvinistic system and then produced the destroyer of it in Rousseau.
Robert bore his heckling, however, with great patience and adroitness.
He had need of all he knew, as Murray Edwardes had warned him. But
luckily he knew a great deal; his thought was clearing and settling
month by month, and whatever he may have lost at any moment by the
turn of an argument, he recovered immediately afterward by the force of
personality, and of a single-mindedness in which there was never a trace
of personal grasping.

Week by week the lecture became more absorbing to him, the men more
pliant, his hold on them firmer. His disinterestedness, his brightness
and resource, perhaps, too, the signs about him of a light and frail
physical organization, the novelty of his position, the inventiveness
of his method, gave him little by little an immense power in the place.
After the first two lectures Murray Edwardes became his constant and
enthusiastic hearer on Sunday