that he had a mission to destroy the beliefs of everybody else.
Whence he derived this mission he would not have thought a
reasonable question--would have answered that, if any man knew any
truth unknown to another, understood any truth better, or could
present it more clearly than another, the truth itself was his
commission of apostleship. And his stand was indubitably a firm one.
Only there was the question--whether his presumed commission was
verily truth or no. It must be allowed that a good deal turns upon
that.

According to the judgment of some men who thought they knew him,
Bascombe was as yet--I will not say incapable of distinguishing,
but careless of the distinction between--not a fact and a law,
perhaps, but a law and a truth. They said also that he inveighed
against the beliefs of other people, without having ever seen more
than a distorted shadow of those beliefs--some of them he was not
capable of seeing, they said--only capable of denying. Now while he
would have been perfectly justified, they said, in asserting that he
saw no truth in the things he denied, was he justifiable in
concluding that his not seeing a thing was a proof of its
non-existence--anything more, in fact, than a presumption against
its existence? or in denouncing every man who said he believed this
or that which Bascombe did not believe, as either a knave or a fool,
if not both in one? He would, they said, judge anybody--a
Shakespeare, a Bacon, a Milton--without a moment's hesitation or a
quiver of reverence--judge men who, beside him, were as the living
ocean to a rose-diamond. If he was armed in honesty, the rivets were
of self-satisfaction. The suit, they allowed, was adamantine,
unpierceable.