is idea first took hold
of me. It was simply this:--Could one through an exhaustive examination
of human records, helped by modern physiological and mental science,
get at the conditions, physical and mental, which govern the greater or
lesser correspondence between human witness and the fact it reports?'

'A giant's task!' cried Robert; 'hardly conceivable!'

The Squire smiled slightly--the smile of a man who looks back with
indulgent, half-melancholy satire on the rash ambitions of his youth.

'Naturally,' he resumed, 'I soon saw I must restrict myself to European
testimony, and that only up to the Renaissance. To do that, of course, I
had to dig into the East, to learn several Oriental languages--Sanscrit
among them. Hebrew I already knew. Then, when I had got my languages,
I began to work steadily through the whole mass of existing records,
sifting and comparing. It is thirty years since I started. Fifteen years
ago I finished the section dealing with classical antiquity--with
India, Persia, Egypt, and Judaea. To-day I have put the last strokes to
a History of Testimony from the Christian era down to the sixth
century--from Livy to Gregory of Tours, from Augustus to Justinian.'

Elsmere turned to him with wonder, with a movement of irrepressible
homage. Thirty years of unbroken solitary labor for one end, one cause!
In our hurried, fragmentary life, a purpose of this tenacity, this power
of realizing itself, strikes the imagination.

'And your two books?'

'Were a mere interlude,' replied the Squire briefly. 'After the
completion of the first part of my work, there were certain deposits
left in me which it was a relief to get rid of, especially in connection
with my renewed impressions of England,' he added dryly.

Elsmere was silent, thinking this then was the explanation of the
Squire's minute and exhaustive knowledge of the early Christian
centuries, a knowledge into which--apart from certain forbidden
topics-he had himself dipped so freely. Suddenly, as he mused, there
awoke in the young man a new hunger, a new unmanageable impulse toward
frankness of speech. All his nascent intellectual powers were alive and
clamorous. For the moment his past reticences and timidities looked to
him absurd. The mind rebelled against the barriers it had been rearing
against itself. It rushed on to sweep them away, crying out that all
this shrinking from free discussion had been at bottom 'a mere treason
to faith.'

'Natu