“After conflict and prayer I have gone trustingly whither God has been pleased to lead me.  In my humble sight the only spiritual body that actually claims to teach truth upon authority, the only body divinely protected from teaching error, is the Holy, Catholic and Roman Church.

“For the last time I have exercised my private judgment, as every man must exercise it once, at least, and I now seek communion with this largest and oldest body of Christians in the world.  I have faced an emergency fraught with vital interest to every thinking man.  I have met it; the rest is with my God.  Praying that I might be adorned with the splendours of holiness, and knowing that the prayer of him that humbleth himself shall pierce the clouds, I took for my motto this sentence from Huxley:  ’Sit down before fact as a little child; be prepared to give up every preconceived notion; follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads.’  Presently, God willing, I shall be in communion with the See of Rome, where I feel that there is a future for me!”

The reader had been absently stabbing at his fish with an aimless fork.  He now laid down his paper to give the food his entire attention.

“You see,” began Floud, “I say one brother is quite as extreme as the other.”

Father Riley smiled affably, and begged Whittaker to finish the letter.

“Your fish is fresh, dear man, but your news may be stale before we reach it—­so hasten now—­I’ve a presentiment that our friend goes still farther afield.”

Whittaker abandoned his fish with a last thoughtful look, and resumed the reading.

“May I conclude by reminding you that the issue between Christianity and science falsely so called has never been enough simplified?  Christianity rests squarely on the Fall of man.  Deny the truth of Genesis and the whole edifice of our faith crumbles.  If we be not under the curse of God for Adam’s sin, there was never a need for a Saviour, the Incarnation and the Atonement become meaningless, and our Lord is reduced to the status of a human teacher of a disputable philosophy—­a peasant moralist with certain delusions of grandeur—­an agitator and heretic whom the authorities of his time executed for stirring up the people.  In short, the divinity of Jesus must stand or fall with the divinity of the God of Moses, and this in turn rests upon the historical truth of Genesis.  If the Fall of man be successfully disputed, the God of Moses becomes a figment of the Jewish imagination—­Jesus becomes man.  And this is what Science asserts, while we of the outer churches, through cowardice or indolence—­too often, alas! through our own skepticism—­have allowed Science thus to obscure the issue.  We have fatuously thought to surrender the sin of Adam, and still to keep a Saviour—­not perceiving that we must keep both or neither.

“There is the issue.  The Church says that man is born under the curse of God and so remains until redeemed, through the sacraments of the Church, by the blood of God’s only begotten Son.