“Who that believes either in God or man—­who with any self-respect, or respect for the gift of reason with which God had endowed him, either would, or could, believe that a chariot and four horses had come down from heaven, and gone back again with human or quasi-human occupants, unless the evidences for the fact left no loophole for escape?  If a single loophole were left him, he would be unpardonable, not for disbelieving the story, but for believing it.  The sin against God would lie not in want of faith, but in faith.

“My friends, there are two sins in matters of belief.  There is that of believing on too little evidence, and that of requiring too much before we are convinced.  The guilt of the latter is incurred, alas! by not a few amongst us at the present day, but if the testimony to the truth of the wondrous event so faithfully depicted on the picture that confronts you had been less contemporaneous, less authoritative, less unanimous, future generations—­and it is for them that we should now provide—­would be guilty of the first-named, and not less heinous sin if they believed at all.

“Small wonder, then, that the Sunchild, having come amongst us for our advantage, not his own, would not permit his beneficent designs to be endangered by the discrepancies, mythical developments, idiosyncracies, and a hundred other defects inevitably attendant on amateur and irresponsible recording.  Small wonder, then, that he should have chosen the officials of the Musical Banks, from the Presidents and Vice-Presidents downwards to be the authoritative exponents of his teaching, the depositaries of his traditions, and his representatives here on earth till he shall again see fit to visit us.  For he will come.  Nay it is even possible that he may be here amongst us at this very moment, disguised so that none may know him, and intent only on watching our devotion towards him.  If this be so, let me implore him, in the name of the sun his father, to reveal himself.”

Now Hanky had already given my father more than one look that had made him uneasy.  He had evidently recognised him as the supposed ranger of last Thursday evening.  Twice he had run his eye like a searchlight over the front benches opposite to him, and when the beam had reached my father there had been no more searching.  It was beginning to dawn upon my father that George might have discovered that he was not Professor Panky; was it for this reason that these two young special constables, though they gave up their places, still kept so close to him?  Was George only waiting his opportunity to arrest him—­not of course even suspecting who he was—­but as a foreign devil who had tried to pass himself off as Professor Panky?  Had this been the meaning of his having followed him to Fairmead?  And should he have to be thrown into the Blue Pool by George after all?  “It would serve me,” said he to himself, “richly right.”