ry now and then the inner protest of
an attacked faith would break through in words so full of poignancy, in
imagery so dramatic, that the Squire's closely-knit sentences would be
for the moment wholly disarranged. On the whole, he proved himself no
mean guardian of all that was most sacred to himself and to Catherine,
and the Squire's intellectual respect for him rose considerably.

All the same, by the end of their conversation that first period
of happy unclouded youth we have been considering was over for poor
Elsmere. In obedience to certain inevitable laws and instincts of the
mind, he had been for months tempting his fate, inviting catastrophe.
None the less did the first sure approaches of that catastrophe fill him
with a restless resistance which was in itself anguish.

As to the Squire's talk, it was simply the outporing of one of the
richest, most sceptical, and most highly trained of minds on the subject
of Christian origins. At no previous period of his life would it have
greatly affected Elsmere. But now at every step the ideas, impressions
arguments bred in him by his months of historical work and ordinary
converse with the Squire rushed in, as they had done once before,
to cripple resistance, to check an emerging answer, to justify Mr.
Wendover.

We may quote a few fragmentary utterances taken almost at random from
the long wrestle of the two men, for the sake of indicating the main
lines of a bitter after-struggle.

'Testimony like every other human product has _developed_. Man's power
of apprehending and recording what he sees and hears has grown from less
to more, from weaker to stronger, like any other of his faculties, just
as the reasoning powers of the cave-dweller have developed into the
reasoning powers of a Kant. What one wants is the ordered proof of this,
and it can be got from history and experience.'

'To plunge into the Christian period without having first cleared the
mind as to what is meant in history and literature by "the critical
method," which in history may be defined as the "science of what is
credible," and in literature as "the science of what is rational," is
to invite fiasco. The theologian in such a state sees no obstacle to
accepting an arbitrary list of documents with all the strange stuff they
may contain, and declaring them to be sound historical material, while
he applies to all the strange stuff of a similar kind surrounding
them the most rigorous principles of