you could say to Chrysostom Trotter, provided you said it reverently, that would startle him.  He knew all that long ago and far more.  For, though obliged to trade in this backwater of belief, he was in many respects a very modern mind.  You were hardly likely to know your Herbert Spencer as intimately as he, and all the most exquisite literature of doubt was upon his shelves.  Though you might declare him superficially disingenuous, you could not, unless you were some commonplace atheist or materialist, gainsay the honest logic of his position.

“You believe that the world, that life, is a spiritual mystery?” he would say.

“Yes.”

“You do not for a moment think that any materialistic science has remotely approached an adequate explanation of its meaning?”

“Certainly not.”

“You believe too that, however it comes about, and whatever it means, there is an eternal struggle in man between what, for sake of argument, we will call the higher and lower natures?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, this spiritual mystery, this struggle, are hinted at in various media of human expression, in an ever-changing variety of human symbols.  Art chiefly concerns itself with the sexual mystery, with the wonderful love of man and woman, in its explanation of which alone science is so pitifully inadequate.  Literature more fully concerns itself with the mystery of man’s indestructibly instinctive relation to what we call the unseen,—­that is, the Whole, the Cosmos, God, or whatever you please to call it.  But more than literature, religion has for centuries concerned itself with these considerations, has consciously and industriously sought to make itself the science of what we call the soul.  It has thrown its observations, just as poetry and art have thrown their observations, into symbolic forms, of which Christianity is incomparably the most important.  You don’t reject the revelation of human love because Hero and Leander are probably creations of the poet’s fancy.  Will you reject the revelation of divine love, because it chances, for its greater efficiency in winning human hearts, to have found expression in a similar human symbolism?  Personally, I hold that Christ actually lived, and was literally the Son of God; but, were the human literalness of his divine story discredited, the eternal verities of human degeneration, and a mysterious regeneration, would be no whit disproved.  Externally, Christianity may be a symbol; essentially, it is a science of spiritual fact, as really as geology is a science of material fact.

“And as for its miraculous, supernatural, side,—­are the laws of nature so easy to understand that we should find such a difficulty in accepting a few divergencies from them?  He who can make laws for so vast a universe may surely be capable of inventing a few comparatively trivial exceptions.”

Not perhaps in so many words, but in some such spirit, would Chrysostom Trotter argue; and it was in some such fashion that he talked in his charmingly sympathetic way with Dorcas Mesurier, one afternoon, as she had tea with him in a study breathing on every hand the man of letters, rather than the minister of a somewhat antiquated sect.