worship, and, since Oxford, an example of
pastoral efficiency, had painfully affected young Armitstead, and he
began a correspondence with Robert which was in many ways a relief to
both. In Switzerland and Italy, when his wife's gentle inexorable
silence became too oppressive to him, Robert would pour himself out in
letters to Armitstead, and the correspondence did not altogether cease
with his return to London. To the squire during the same period Elsmere
also wrote frequently, but rarely or never on religious matters.

On one occasion Armitstead had been pressing the favourite Christian
dilemma--Christianity or nothing. Inside Christianity, light and
certainty; outside it, chaos. 'If it were not for the Gospels and the
Church I should be a Positivist to-morrow. Your Theism is a mere
arbitrary hypothesis, at the mercy of any rival philosophical theory.
How, regarding our position as precarious, you should come to regard
your own as stable, is to me incomprehensible!'

'What I conceive to be the vital difference between Theism and
Christianity,' wrote Elsmere in reply, 'is that as an explanation of
things _Theism can never be disproved_. At the worst it must always
remain in the position of an alternative hypothesis, which the hostile
man of science cannot destroy, though he is under no obligation to adopt
it. Broadly speaking, it is not the facts which are in dispute, but the
inference to be drawn from them.

'Now, considering the enormous complication of the facts, the Theistic
inference will, to put it at the lowest, always have its place, always
command respect. The man of science may not adopt it, but by no advance
of science that I, at any rate, can foresee, can it be driven out of the
field.

'Christianity is in a totally different position. Its grounds are not
philosophical but literary and historical. It rests not upon all fact,
but upon a special group of facts. It is, and will always remain, a
great literary and historical problem, a _question of documents and
testimony_. Hence, the Christian explanation is vulnerable in a way in
which the Theistic explanation can never be vulnerable. The contention,
at any rate, of persons in my position is: That to the man who has had
the special training required, and in whom this training has not been
neutralised by any overwhelming bias of temperament, it can be as
clearly demonstrated that the miraculous Christian story rests on a
tissue of mistake, as it can be dem