ited their coming with impatience. He
said nothing of the order to Catherine; somehow there were by now two or
three portions of his work, two or three branches of his thought,
which had fallen out of their common discussion. After all she was
not literary and with all their oneness of soul there could not be an
_identity_ of interests or pursuits.

The books arrived in the morning. (Oh, how dismally well, with what a
tightening of the heart, did Robert always remember that day in after
years!) He was much too busy to look at them, and went off to a meeting.
In the evening, coming home late from his night-school, he found
Catherine tired, sent her to bed, and went himself into his study to put
together some notes for a cottage lecture he was to give the following
day. The packet of books, unopened, lay on his writing-table. He took
off the wrapper, and in his eager way fell to reading the first he
touched.

It was the first volume of the 'Idols of the Market Place.'

Ten or twelve years before, Mr. Wendover had launched this book into
a startled and protesting England. It had been the fruit of his first
renewal of contact with English life and English ideas after his return
from Berlin. Fresh from the speculative ferment of Germany and the far
profaner scepticism of France, he had returned to a society where the
first chapter of Genesis and the theory of verbal inspiration were still
regarded as valid and important counters on the board of thought. The
result had been this book. In it each stronghold of English popular
religion had been assailed in turn, at a time when English orthodoxy was
a far more formidable thing than it is now.

The Pentateuch, the Prophets, the Gospels, St. Paul, Tradition, the
Fathers, Protestantism and Justification by Faith, the Eighteenth
Century, the Broad Church Movement, Anglican Theology--the Squire had
his say about them all. And while the coolness and frankness of the
method sent a shook of indignation and horror through the religious
public, the subtle and caustic style, and the epigrams with which the
book was strewn, forced both the religious and irreligious public to
read, whether they would or no. A storm of controversy rose round the
volumes, and some of the keenest observers of English life had said at
the time, and maintained since, that the publication of the book had
made or marked an epoch.

Robert had lit on those pages in the Essay on the Gospels where the
Squire fell