“There you are again out of my region,” said Faber.  “But answer me one thing:  is it not weak to desire happiness?”

“Yes; if the happiness is poor and low,” rejoined Wingfold.  “But the man who would choose even the grandeur of duty before the bliss of the truth, must be a lover of himself.  Such a man must be traveling the road to death.  If there be a God, truth must be joy.  If there be not, truth may be misery.—­But, honestly, I know not one advanced Christian who tries to obey for the hope of Heaven or the fear of hell.  Such ideas have long vanished from such a man.  He loves God; he loves truth; he loves his fellow, and knows he must love him more.  You judge of Christianity either by those who are not true representatives of it, and are indeed, less of Christians than yourself; or by others who, being intellectually inferior, perhaps even stupid, belie Christ with their dull theories concerning Him.  Yet the latter may have in them a noble seed, urging them up heights to you at present unconceived and inconceivable; while, in the meantime, some of them serve their generation well, and do as much for those that are to come after as you do yourself.”

“There is always weight as well as force in what you urge, Wingfold,” returned Faber.  “Still it looks to me just a cunningly devised fable—­I will not say of the priests, but of the human mind deceiving itself with its own hopes and desires.”

“It may well look such to those who are outside of it, and it must at length appear such to all who, feeling in it any claim upon them, yet do not put it to the test of their obedience.”

“Well, you have had your turn, and now we are having ours—­you of the legends, we of the facts.”

“No,” said Wingfold, “we have not had our turn, and you have been having yours for a far longer time than we.  But if, as you profess, you are doing the truth you see, it belongs to my belief that you will come to see the truth you do not see.  Christianity is not a failure; for to it mainly is the fact owing that here is a class of men which, believing in no God, yet believes in duty toward men.  Look here:  if Christianity be the outcome of human aspiration, the natural growth of the human soil, is it not strange it should be such an utter failure as it seems to you? and as such a natural growth, it must be a failure, for if it were a success, must not you be the very one to see it?  If it is false, it is worthless, or an evil:  where then is your law of development, if the highest result of that development is an evil to the nature and the race?”

“I do not grant it the highest result,” said Faber.  “It is a failure—­a false blossom, with a truer to follow.”

“To produce a superior architecture, poetry, music?”

“Perhaps not.  But a better science.”

“Are the architecture and poetry and music parts of the failure?”

“Yes—­but they are not altogether a failure, for they lay some truth at the root of them all.  Now we shall see what will come of turning away from every thing we do not know.”