even have speculated on its
possibilities. He was convinced that no mortal could suffer harm, even
if he accomplished the uttermost of his desires. Whom was he in danger
of wronging? The conventional moralist would cry: Everyone with whom he
came in slightest contact! But a mind such as Peak's has very little to
do with conventional morality. Injury to himself he foresaw and
accepted; he could never be the man nature designed in him; and he must
frequently submit to a self-contempt which would be very hard to bear.
Those whom he consistently deceived, how would they suffer? Martin
Warricombe to begin with. Martin was a man who had lived his life, and
whose chief care would now be to keep his mind at rest in the faiths
which had served him from youth onwards. In that very purpose, Godwin
believed he could assist him. To see a young man, of strong and trained
intellect, championing the old beliefs, must doubtless be a source of
reassurance to one in Martin's position. Reassurance derived from a
lie?--And what matter, if the outcome were genuine, if it lasted until
the man himself was no more? Did not every form of content result from
illusion? What was truth without the mind of the believer?

Society, then--at all events that part of it likely to be affected by
his activity? Suppose him an ordained priest, performing all the
functions implied in that office. Why, to think only of examples
recognised by the public at large, how would he differ for the worse
from this, that, and the other clergyman who taught Christianity, all
but with blunt avowal, as a scheme of human ethics? No wolf in sheep's
clothing he! He plotted against no man's pocket, no woman's honour; he
had no sinister design of sapping the faith of congregations--a scheme,
by-the-bye, which fanatic liberators might undertake with vast
self-approval. If by a word he could have banished religious dogma from
the minds of the multitude, he would not have cared to utter it.
Wherein lay, indeed, a scruple to be surmounted. The Christian priest
must be a man of humble temper; he must be willing, even eager, to sit
down among the poor in spirit as well as in estate, and impart to them
his unworldly solaces. Yes, but it had always been recognised that some
men who could do the Church good service were personally unfitted for
those meek ministrations. His place was in the hierarchy of intellect;
if he were to be active at all, it must be with the brain. In his
conversa