[He finally decided upon a site on the high ground near Beachy Head, a little way back from the sea front, at the corner of the Staveley and Buxton Roads, with a guarantee from the Duke of Devonshire’s agent that no house should be built at the contiguous end of the adjoining plot of land in the Buxton Road, a plot which he himself afterwards bought.  The principal rooms were planned for the back of the house, looking south-west over open gardens to the long line of downs which culminate in Beachy Head, but with due provision against southerly gales and excess of sunshine.

On May 29 the builder’s contract was accepted, and for the rest of the year the progress of the house, which was designed by his son-in-law, F.W.  Waller, afforded a constant interest.

Meantime, with the improvement in his general health, the old appetite for work returned with increased and unwonted zest.  For the first time in his life he declares that he enjoyed the process of writing.  As he wrote somewhat later to his newly married daughter from Eastbourne, where he had gone again very weary the day after her wedding:  “Luckily the bishops and clergy won’t let me alone, so I have been able to keep myself pretty well amused in replying.”  The work which came to him so easily and pleasurably was the defence of his attitude of agnosticism against the onslaught made upon it at the previous Church Congress by Dr. Wace, the Principal of King’s College, London, and followed up by articles in the “Nineteenth Century” from the pen of Mr. Frederic Harrison and Mr. Laing, the effect of which upon him he describes to Mr. Knowles on December 30, 1888:—­]

I have been stirred up to the boiling pitch by Wace, Laing, and Harrison in re Agnosticism, and I really can’t keep the lid down any longer.  Are you minded to admit a goring article into the February “Nineteenth”?

[As for his health, he adds:—­]

I have amended wonderfully in the course of the last six weeks, and my doctor tells me I am going to be completely patched up—­seams caulked and made seaworthy, so the old hulk may make another cruise.

We shall see.  At any rate I have been able and willing to write lately, and that is more than I can say for myself for the first three-quarters of the year.

...I was so pleased to see you were in trouble about your house.  Good for you to have a taste of it for yourself.

[To this controversy he contributed four articles; three directly in defence of Agnosticism, the fourth on the value of the underlying question of testimony to the miraculous.

The first article, “Agnosticism,” appeared in the February number of the “Nineteenth Century”.  No sooner was this finished than he began a fresh piece of work, “which,” he writes, “is all about miracles, and will be rather amusing.”  This, on the “Value of Testimony to the Miraculous,” appeared in the following number of the “Nineteenth Century”.  It did not form part of the controversy on hand, though it bore indirectly upon the first principles of agnosticism.  The question at issue, he urges, is not the possibility of miracles, but the evidence to their occurrence, and if from preconceptions or ignorance the evidence be worthless the historical reality of the facts attested vanishes.  The cardinal point, then, “is completely, as the author of Robert Elsmere says, the value of testimony.”