choose, you cannot
make."

"I know," said Reding, "I can't make a religion, nor can I perhaps find
one better than my own. I don't want to do so; but this is not my
difficulty. Take your own image. I am jogging along my own old road, and
lo, a high turnpike, fast locked; and my poor pony can't clear it. I
don't complain; but there's the fact, or at least may be."

"The pony must," answered Carlton; "or if not, there must be some way
about; else what is the good of a road? In religion all roads have their
obstacles; one has a strong gate across it, another goes through a bog.
Is no one to go on? Is religion to be at a deadlock? Is Christianity to
die out? Where else will you go? Not surely to Methodism, or
Plymouth-brotherism. As to the Romish Church, I suspect it has more
difficulties than we have. You _must_ sacrifice your private judgment."

"All this is very good," answered Charles; "but what is very expedient
still may be very impossible. The finest words about the necessity of
getting home before nightfall will not enable my poor little pony to
take the gate."

"Certainly not," said Carlton; "but if you had a command from a
benevolent Prince, your own Sovereign and Benefactor, to go along the
road steadily till evening, and he would meet you at the end of your
journey, you would be quite sure that he who had appointed the end had
also assigned the means. And, in the difficulty in question, you ought
to look out for some mode of opening the gate, or some gap in the hedge,
or some parallel cut, some way or other, which would enable you to turn
the difficulty."

Charles said that somehow he did not like this mode of arguing; it
seemed dangerous; he did not see whither it went, where it ended.
Presently he said, abruptly, "Why do you think there are more
difficulties in the Church of Rome?"

"Clearly there are," answered Carlton; "if the Articles are a crust, is
not Pope Pius's Creed a bone?"

"I don't know Pope Pius's Creed," said Charles; "I know very little
about the state of the case, certainly. What does it say?"

"Oh, it includes transubstantiation, purgatory, saint-worship, and the
rest," said Carlton; "I suppose you could not quite subscribe these?"

"It depends," answered Charles slowly, "on this--on what authority they
came to me." He stopped, and then went on: "Of course I could, if they
came to me on the same authority as the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity
comes. Now, the Articles come on no aut