Mr. Gabbitas went, I think, a shade paler than his wont, and propitiation vanished from his manner.  His eyes and mouth were round, his face seemed to get round, his eyebrows curved at my remarks.

“I’m sorry you think that,” he said at last, with a catch in his breath.

He did not repeat his suggestion that I should sit.  He made a step or two toward the window and turned.  “I suppose you will admit—­” he began, with a faintly irritating note of intellectual condescension. . . . .

I will not tell you of his arguments or mine.  You will find if you care to look for them, in out-of-the-way corners of our book museums, the shriveled cheap publications—­the publications of the Rationalist Press Association, for example—­on which my arguments were based.  Lying in that curious limbo with them, mixed up with them and indistinguishable, are the endless “Replies” of orthodoxy, like the mixed dead in some hard-fought trench.  All those disputes of our fathers, and they were sometimes furious disputes, have gone now beyond the range of comprehension.  You younger people, I know, read them with impatient perplexity.  You cannot understand how sane creatures could imagine they had joined issue at all in most of these controversies.  All the old methods of systematic thinking, the queer absurdities of the Aristotelian logic, have followed magic numbers and mystical numbers, and the Rumpelstiltskin magic of names now into the blackness of the unthinkable.  You can no more understand our theological passions than you can understand the fancies that made all ancient peoples speak of their gods only by circumlocutions, that made savages pine away and die because they had been photographed, or an Elizabethan farmer turn back from a day’s expedition because he had met three crows.  Even I, who have been through it all, recall our controversies now with something near incredulity.

Faith we can understand to-day, all men live by faith, but in the old time every one confused quite hopelessly Faith and a forced, incredible Belief in certain pseudo-concrete statements.  I am inclined to say that neither believers nor unbelievers had faith as we understand it—­they had insufficient intellectual power.  They could not trust unless they had something to see and touch and say, like their barbarous ancestors who could not make a bargain without exchange of tokens.  If they no longer worshipped stocks and stones, or eked out their needs with pilgrimages and images, they still held fiercely to audible images, to printed words and formulae.

But why revive the echoes of the ancient logomachies?

Suffice it that we lost our tempers very readily in pursuit of God and Truth, and said exquisitely foolish things on either side.  And on the whole—­from the impartial perspective of my three and seventy years—­I adjudicate that if my dialectic was bad, that of the Rev. Gabbitas was altogether worse.