heard the conversation.

"It doesn't matter whether it was Nero's or Neri's or Neander's,"
answered Bruce; "experience proves it to be true."

Suton had finished dinner, and as he did not relish Bruce's off-hand and
patronising manner, he left the discussion in Owen's hand. But between
Owen and Bruce there was an implacable dissimilarity, and neither of
them cared to pursue the subject.

Bruce, who went to wine with D'Acres, repeated there the subject of the
conversation, and found that most of his audience affected to agree with
him. In fact, he had himself set the fashion of a semi-professed
infidelity; and amid his most intimate associates there were many to
adopt with readiness a theory which saved them from the trouble and
expense of a scrupulous conscience. With Bruce this infidelity was
rather the decay of faith than the growth of positive disbelief. He had
dipped with a kind of wilful curiosity into Strauss's Life of Jesus, and
other books of a similar description, together with such portions of
current literature as were most clever in sneering at Christianity, or
most undisguised in rejecting it.

Such reading--harmless, or even desirable, as it might have been to a
strong mind sincere in its search for truth, and furnished with that
calm capacity for impartial thought which is the best antidote against
error--was fatal to one whose superficial knowledge and irregular life
gave him already a powerful bias towards getting rid of everything which
stood in the way of his tendencies and pursuits. Bruce was not in
earnest in the desire for knowledge and wisdom: he grasped with avidity
at a popular objection, or a sceptical argument, without desiring to
understand or master the principles which rendered them nugatory; and he
was ignorant and untaught enough to fancy that the very foundations of
religion were shaken if he could attack the authenticity of some Jewish
miracle, or impugn the genuineness of some Old Testament book.

When all belief was shaken down in his shallow and somewhat feeble
understanding, the structure of his moral convictions was but a baseless
fabric. Error in itself is not fatal to the inner sense of right; but
Bruce's error was not honest doubt, it was wilful self-deception,
blindness of heart, first deliberately induced, then penally permitted.

In Bruce's character there was not only the _error in intellectu_, but
also the _pertinacia in voluntate_. All sense of honour, all deli