t is harmless enough; but if they read it with any care--which we should
assume they will if we give it them at all--it is fatal to them."

"What do you mean?" said Ernest, more and more astonished, but more and
more feeling that he was at least in the hands of a man who had definite
ideas.

"Your question shows me that you have never read your Bible. A more
unreliable book was never put upon paper. Take my advice and don't read
it, not till you are a few years older, and may do so safely."

"But surely you believe the Bible when it tells you of such things as
that Christ died and rose from the dead? Surely you believe this?" said
Ernest, quite prepared to be told that Pryer believed nothing of the
kind.

"I do not believe it, I know it."

"But how--if the testimony of the Bible fails?"

"On that of the living voice of the Church, which I know to be infallible
and to be informed of Christ himself."

CHAPTER LIII

The foregoing conversation and others like it made a deep impression upon
my hero. If next day he had taken a walk with Mr Hawke, and heard what
he had to say on the other side, he would have been just as much struck,
and as ready to fling off what Pryer had told him, as he now was to throw
aside all he had ever heard from anyone except Pryer; but there was no Mr
Hawke at hand, so Pryer had everything his own way.

Embryo minds, like embryo bodies, pass through a number of strange
metamorphoses before they adopt their final shape. It is no more to be
wondered at that one who is going to turn out a Roman Catholic, should
have passed through the stages of being first a Methodist, and then a
free thinker, than that a man should at some former time have been a mere
cell, and later on an invertebrate animal. Ernest, however, could not be
expected to know this; embryos never do. Embryos think with each stage
of their development that they have now reached the only condition which
really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last,
inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive
it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a _pro tanto_ death. What
we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to
recognise a past and a present as resembling one another. It is the
making us consider the points of difference between our present and our
past greater than the points of resemblance, so that we can no longer
call the former of these two in an