t of Burble. I resolved to tell him--if necessary with
arrogance. Then perhaps he would release me. I did not sit down
again, but stood by the corner of the fireplace.

"That was the little book you lent me last summer?" I said.

"He reasons closely, eh?" he said, and indicated the armchair with
a flat hand, and beamed persuasively.

I remained standing. "I didn't think much of his reasoning powers,"
I said.

"He was one of the cleverest bishops London ever had."

"That may be. But he was dodging about in a jolly feeble case,"
said I.

"You mean?"

"That he's wrong. I don't think he proves his case. I don't think
Christianity is true. He knows himself for the pretender he is.
His reasoning's--Rot."

Mr. Gabbitas went, I think, a shade paler than his wont, and propitiation
vanished from his manner. His eyes and mouth were round, his face
seemed to get round, his eyebrows curved at my remarks.

"I'm sorry you think that," he said at last, with a catch in his
breath.

He did not repeat his suggestion that I should sit. He made a step
or two toward the window and turned. "I suppose you will admit--" he
began, with a faintly irritating note of intellectual condescension.
. . . .

I will not tell you of his arguments or mine. You will find if
you care to look for them, in out-of-the-way corners of our book
museums, the shriveled cheap publications--the publications of the
Rationalist Press Association, for example--on which my arguments
were based. Lying in that curious limbo with them, mixed up with
them and indistinguishable, are the endless "Replies" of orthodoxy,
like the mixed dead in some hard-fought trench. All those disputes
of our fathers, and they were sometimes furious disputes, have
gone now beyond the range of comprehension. You younger people, I
know, read them with impatient perplexity. You cannot understand
how sane creatures could imagine they had joined issue at all
in most of these controversies. All the old methods of systematic
thinking, the queer absurdities of the Aristotelian logic, have
followed magic numbers and mystical numbers, and the Rumpelstiltskin
magic of names now into the blackness of the unthinkable. You can
no more understand our theological passions than you can understand
the fancies that made all ancient peoples speak of their gods only
by circumlocutions, that made savages pine away and die because
they had been photographed, or an Elizabethan farmer turn back from
a d