their pain, knowing
nothing of the one Healer. He thought of Buddhist patience and Buddhist
charity; of the long centuries during which Chaldean or Persian or
Egyptian lived, suffered, and died, trusting the gods they knew. And how
many other generations, nominally children of the Great Hope, had used
it as a mere instrument of passion or of hate, cursing in the name of
love, destroying in the name of pity! For how much of the world's pain
was not Christianity itself responsible? His thoughts recurred with a
kind of anguished perplexity to some of the problems stirred in him of
late by his historical reading. The strifes and feuds and violences
of the early Church returned to weigh upon him--the hair-splitting
superstition, the selfish passion for power. He recalled Gibbon's
lamentation over the age of the Antonines, and Mommsen's grave doubt
whether, taken as a whole, the area once covered by the Roman Empire can
be said to be substantially happier now than in the days of Severus.

_O corruptio optimi!_ That men should have been so little affected by
that shining ideal of the New Jerusalem, 'descended out of Heaven from
God,' into their very midst--that the print of the 'blessed feet' along
the world's highway should have been so often buried in the sands of
cruelty and fraud!

The September wind blew about him as he strolled through the darkening
common, set thick with great bushes of sombre juniper among the
yellowing fern, which stretched away on the left-hand side of the
road leading to the Hall. He stood and watched the masses of restless
discordant cloud which the sunset had left behind it, thinking the while
of Mr. Grey, of his assertions and his denials. Certain phrases of his
which Robert had heard drop from him on one or two rare occasions during
the later stages of his Oxford life ran through his head.

'_The fairy-tale of Christianity_'--'_The origins of Christian
Mythology_.' He could recall, as the words rose in his memory, the
simplicity of the rugged face, and the melancholy mingled with fire
which had always marked the great tutor's sayings about religion.

'_Fairy Tale!_' Could any reasonable man watch a life like Catherine's
and believe that nothing but a delusion lay at the heart of it? And
as he asked the question, he seemed to hear Mr. Grey's answer: 'All
religions are true and all are false. In them all, more or less visibly,
man grasps at the one thing needful--self forsaken, God laid hold of