‘Yet you probably had your time of doubt?’ remarked the other, touching for the first time on this personal matter.

’Oh, yes; that was inevitable.  It only means that one’s development is imperfect.  Most men who confirm themselves in agnosticism are kept at that point by arrested moral activity.  They give up the intellectual question as wearisome, and accept the point of view which flatters their prejudices:  thereupon follows a blunting of the sensibilities on the religious side.’

’There are men constitutionally unfitted for the reception of spiritual truth,’ said Martin, in a troubled tone.  He was playing with a piece of string, and did not raise his eyes.

’I quite believe that.  There’s our difficulty when we come to evidences.  The evidences of science are wholly different in kind from those of religion.  Faith cannot spring from any observation of phenomena, or scrutiny of authorities, but from the declaration made to us by the spiritual faculty.  The man of science can only become a Christian by the way of humility—­and that a kind of humility he finds it difficult even to conceive.  One wishes to impress upon him the harmony of this faith with the spiritual voice that is in every man.  He replies:  I know nothing of that spiritual voice.  And if that be true, one can’t help him by argument.’

Peak had constructed for himself, out of his reading, a plausible system which on demand he could set forth with fluency.  The tone of current apologetics taught him that, by men even of cultivated intellect, such a position as he was now sketching was deemed tenable; yet to himself it sounded so futile, so nugatory, that he had to harden his forehead as he spoke.  Trial more severe to his conscience lay in the perceptible solicitude with which Mr Warricombe weighed these disingenuous arguments.  It was a hateful thing to practise such deception on one who probably yearned for spiritual support.  But he had committed himself to this course, and must brave it out.

‘Christianity,’ he was saying presently—­appropriating a passage of which he had once made careful note—­’is an organism of such vital energy that it perforce assimilates whatever is good and true in the culture of each successive age.  To understand this is to learn that we must depend rather on constructive, than on defensive, apology.  That is to say, we must draw evidence of our faith from its latent capacities, its unsuspected affinities, its previsions, its adaptability, comprehensiveness, sympathy, adequacy to human needs.’

‘That puts very well what I have always felt,’ replied Mr Warricombe.  ’Yet there will remain the objection that such a faith may be of purely human origin.  If evolution and biblical criticism seem to overthrow all the historic evidences of Christianity, how convince the objectors that the faith itself was divinely given?’

‘But I cannot hold for a moment,’ exclaimed Peak, in the words which he knew his interlocutor desired to hear, ’that all the historic evidences have been destroyed.  That indeed would shake our position.’