‘How’s this got here?’ he almost roared.  ‘Who brings things o’ this kind into my room?  Who’s put this into my children’s hands?’

‘What on earth is it?’ Gilbert asked in amazement.

’What is it?  Look at that!  Look at that, I say!  If this is the landlady’s work, I’ll find a new room this very night!’

Gilbert tried to take the paper, but Bunce’s hand, which trembled violently, held it with such a grip that there was no getting possession of it.  With difficulty Grail perceived that it was a religious tract.

‘Why, there’s no great harm done,’ he said.  ’The children can’t read, can they?’

‘Jack can!  The boy can!  I’m teaching him myself.’

He raved.  The sight of that propagandist document affected him, to use the old simile, as scarlet does a bull.  Gilbert knew the man’s prejudices, but, in his own more cultured mind, could not have conceived such frenzy of hatred as this piece of Christian doctrine excited in Bunce.  For five minutes the poor fellow was possessed; sweat covered his face; he was shaken as if by bodily anguish.  He read scraps aloud, commenting on them with scornful violence.  Last of all he flung the paper to the ground and trampled it into shreds.  Gilbert had at first difficulty in refraining from laughter; then he sat down and waited with some impatience for the storm to spend itself.

‘Come, come, Bunce,’ he said, when he could make himself heard, ’remember Mr. Egremont’s lecture on those things.  I think pretty much as you do about Christianity—­about the dogmas, that is; but we’ve no need to fear it in this way.  Let’s take what good there is in it, and have nothing to do with the foolish parts.’

Bunce seated himself, exhausted.  Not a few among the intelligent artisans of our time are filled with that spirit of hatred against all things Christian; in him it had become a mania.  Egremont’s eirenicon had been a hard saying to him; he had tried to think it over, because of his respect for the teacher, but as yet it had resulted in no sobering.  His mind was not sufficiently prepared for lessons of wisdom; had Egremont witnessed this scene, he might well have groaned in spirit over the ineffectualness of his prophesying.

Gilbert spoke with earnestness.  To him his friend’s teaching had come as true and refreshing, and he could not lose such an opportunity as this of pushing on the work.  He insisted on the beauty there was in the Christian legend, on its profound spiritual significance, on the poverty of all religious schemes which man had devised to replace it.

‘We want no religion!’ cried Bunce angrily.  ’It’s been the curse of the world.  Look at the Inquisition!  Look at the religious wars!  Look at the Jesuits!’

He was primed with such historic instances out of books and pamphlets spread broadcast by the contemporary apostles of ’free thought.’  Of history proper he of course knew nothing, but these splinters of quasi-historic evidence had run deep into his flesh.  Despise him, if you like, but try to understand him.  It was his very humaneness which brought him to this pass; recitals of old savagery had poisoned his blood, and the ‘spirit of the age’ churned his crude acquisitions into a witch’s cauldron.  Academic sweetness and light was a feeble antidote to offer him.