sionate appeal to that inward witness
of the soul which holds its own long after the reason has practically
ceased to struggle.

It came about in this way. One morning he stood reading in the window of
the library the last of the Squire's letters. It contained a short but
masterly analysis of the mental habits and idiosyncrasies of St. Paul,
_a propos_ of St. Paul's witness to the Resurrection. Every now and
then, as Elsmere turned the pages, the orthodox protest would assert
itself, the orthodox arguments make themselves felt as though in
mechanical involuntary protest. But their force and vitality were gone.
Between the Paul of Anglican theology and the fiery, fallible man of
genius--so weak logically, so strong in poetry, in rhetoric, in moral
passion, whose portrait has been drawn for us by a free and temperate
criticism--the Rector knew, in a sort of dull way, that his choice was
made. The one picture carried reason and imagination with it; the other
contented neither.

But as he put down the letter something seemed to snap within him. Some
chord of physical endurance gave way. For five months he had been living
intellectually at a speed no man maintains with impunity, and this
letter of the Squire's, with its imperious demands upon the tired
irritable bran, was the last straw.

He sank down on the oriel seat, the letter dropping from his hands.
Outside, the little garden, now a mass of red and pink roses, the hill
and the distant stretches of park were wrapped in a thick, sultry mist,
through which a dim, far-off sunlight struggled on to the library floor,
and lay in ghostly patches on the polished boards and lower ranges of
books.

The simplest religious thoughts began to flow over him--the simplest,
childish words of prayer were on his lips. He felt himself delivered, he
knew not how or why.

He rose deliberately, laid the Squire's letter among his other papers,
and tied them up carefully; then he took up the books which lay piled
on the Squire's writing-table: all those volumes of German, French, and
English criticism, liberal or apologetic, which he had been accumulating
round him day, by day with a feverish toilsome impartiality, and
began rapidly and methodically to put them back in their places on the
shelves.

'I have done too much thinking, too much reading,' he was saying
to himself as he went through his task. 'Now let it be the turn of
something else!'

And still as he handled the books, it w