_tolerated_ view?"

"It has certainly been strongly opposed," answered Bateman; "but it has
never been condemned."

"That is no answer," said Charles, who saw by Bateman's manner how the
truth lay. "Does any one Bishop hold it? did any one Bishop ever hold
it? has it ever been formally admitted as tenable by any one Bishop? is
it a view got up to meet existing difficulties, or has it an historical
existence?"

Bateman could give but one answer to these questions, as they were
successively put to him.

"I thought so," said Charles, when he had made his answer: "I know, of
course, whose view you are putting before me, though I never heard it
drawn out before. It is specious, certainly: I don't see but it might
have done, had it been tolerably sanctioned; but you have no sanction to
show me. It is, as it stands, a mere theory struck out by individuals.
Our Church _might_ have adopted this mode of interpreting the Articles;
but from what you tell me, it certainly _has not_ done so. I am where I
was."

CHAPTER XVI.

The thought came across Reding whether perhaps, after all, what is
called Evangelical Religion was not the true Christianity: its
professors, he knew, were active and influential, and in past times had
been much persecuted. Freeborn had surprised and offended him at
Bateman's breakfast-party before the Vacation; yet Freeborn had a
serious manner about him, and perhaps he had misunderstood him. The
thought, however, passed away as suddenly as it came, and perhaps would
not have occurred to him again, when an accident gave him some data for
determining the question.

One afternoon he was lounging in the Parks, gazing with surprise on one
of those extraordinary lights for which the neighbourhood of Oxford is
at that season celebrated, and which, as the sun went down, was
colouring Marston, Elsfield, and their half-denuded groves with a pale
gold-and-brown hue, when he found himself overtaken and addressed by the
said Freeborn _in propria persona_. Freeborn liked a _tete-a-tete_ talk
much better than a dispute in a party; he felt himself at more advantage
in long leisurely speeches, and he was soon put out of breath when he
had to bolt-out or edge-in his words amid the ever-varying voices of a
breakfast-table. He thought the present might be a good opportunity of
doing good to a poor youth who did not know chalk from cheese, and who,
by his means, might be, as he would word it, "savingly converted."