That he should have been capable of such emotion was, he said to himself, in the just order of things; callousness in the first stages of an undertaking which demanded gross hypocrisy would signify an ignoble nature—­a nature, indeed, which could never have been submitted to trial of so strange a kind.  But he had overcome himself; that phase of difficulty was outlived, and henceforth he saw only the material obstacles to be defied by his vindicated will.

What he proposed to himself was a life of deliberate baseness.  Godwin Peak never tried to play the sophist with this fact.  But he succeeded in justifying himself by a consideration of the circumstances which had compelled him to a vile expedient.  Had his project involved conscious wrong to other persons, he would scarcely even have speculated on its possibilities.  He was convinced that no mortal could suffer harm, even if he accomplished the uttermost of his desires.  Whom was he in danger of wronging?  The conventional moralist would cry:  Everyone with whom he came in slightest contact!  But a mind such as Peak’s has very little to do with conventional morality.  Injury to himself he foresaw and accepted; he could never be the man nature designed in him; and he must frequently submit to a self-contempt which would be very hard to bear.  Those whom he consistently deceived, how would they suffer?  Martin Warricombe to begin with.  Martin was a man who had lived his life, and whose chief care would now be to keep his mind at rest in the faiths which had served him from youth onwards.  In that very purpose, Godwin believed he could assist him.  To see a young man, of strong and trained intellect, championing the old beliefs, must doubtless be a source of reassurance to one in Martin’s position.  Reassurance derived from a lie?—­And what matter, if the outcome were genuine, if it lasted until the man himself was no more?  Did not every form of content result from illusion?  What was truth without the mind of the believer?

Society, then—­at all events that part of it likely to be affected by his activity?  Suppose him an ordained priest, performing all the functions implied in that office.  Why, to think only of examples recognised by the public at large, how would he differ for the worse from this, that, and the other clergyman who taught Christianity, all but with blunt avowal, as a scheme of human ethics?  No wolf in sheep’s clothing he!  He plotted against no man’s pocket, no woman’s honour; he had no sinister design of sapping the faith of congregations—­a scheme, by-the-bye, which fanatic liberators might undertake with vast self-approval.  If by a word he could have banished religious dogma from the minds of the multitude, he would not have cared to utter it.  Wherein lay, indeed, a scruple to be surmounted.  The Christian priest must be a man of humble temper; he must be willing, even eager, to sit down among the poor in spirit as well as in estate, and impart to them his unworldly solaces.  Yes, but it had