was travelling, which he indulged in at frequent
intervals, but for short times only. Do what he would he could not get
through more than about fifteen hundred a year; the rest of his income he
gave away if he happened to find a case where he thought money would be
well bestowed, or put by until some opportunity arose of getting rid of
it with advantage.

I knew he was writing, but we had had so many little differences of
opinion upon this head that by a tacit understanding the subject was
seldom referred to between us, and I did not know that he was actually
publishing till one day he brought me a book and told me flat it was his
own. I opened it and found it to be a series of semi-theological, semi-
social essays, purporting to have been written by six or seven different
people, and viewing the same class of subjects from different
standpoints.

People had not yet forgotten the famous "Essays and Reviews," and Ernest
had wickedly given a few touches to at least two of the essays which
suggested vaguely that they had been written by a bishop. The essays
were all of them in support of the Church of England, and appeared both
by internal suggestion, and their prima facie purport to be the work of
some half-dozen men of experience and high position who had determined to
face the difficult questions of the day no less boldly from within the
bosom of the Church than the Church's enemies had faced them from without
her pale.

There was an essay on the external evidences of the Resurrection; another
on the marriage laws of the most eminent nations of the world in times
past and present; another was devoted to a consideration of the many
questions which must be reopened and reconsidered on their merits if the
teaching of the Church of England were to cease to carry moral authority
with it; another dealt with the more purely social subject of middle
class destitution; another with the authenticity or rather the
unauthenticity of the fourth gospel--another was headed "Irrational
Rationalism," and there were two or three more.

They were all written vigorously and fearlessly as though by people used
to authority; all granted that the Church professed to enjoin belief in
much which no one could accept who had been accustomed to weigh evidence;
but it was contended that so much valuable truth had got so closely mixed
up with these mistakes, that the mistakes had better not be meddled with.
To lay great stress on these was li