modern professors. All such propositions are old--old as the
hills, I assure you; and these days in which you live are more
suggestive of the second childhood of the world than its
progressive prime. Especially in your own country the general
dotage seems to have reached a sort of climax, for there you have
the people actually forgetting, deriding, or denying their
greatest men who form the only lasting glories of their history;
they have even done their futile best to tarnish the unsoilable
fame of Shakespeare. In that land you,--who, according to your own
showing, started for the race of life full of high hopes and
inspiration to still higher endeavor--you have been, poisoned by
the tainted atmosphere of Atheism which is slowly and insidiously
spreading itself through all ranks, particularly among the upper
classes, who, while becoming every day more lax in their morals
and more dissolute of behavior, consider themselves far too wise
and 'highly cultured' to believe in anything. It is a most
unwholesome atmosphere, charged with the morbidities and microbes
of national disease and downfall; it is difficult to breathe it
without becoming fever-smitten; and in your denial of the divinity
of Christ, I do not blame you any more than I would blame a poor
creature struck down by a plague. You have caught the negative,
agnostic, and atheistical infection from others,--it is not the
natural, healthy condition of your temperament."

"On the contrary it IS, so far as that point goes," said Alwyn
with sudden heat--"I tell you I am amazed,--utterly amazed, that
you, with your intelligence, should uphold such a barbaric idea as
the Divinity of Christ! Human reason revolts at it,--and after
all, make as light of it as you will, reason is the only thing
that exalts us a little above the level of the beasts."