ultimate answer to the critical intellect, or, as Newman called it, the
"wild living intellect of man," when it is dealing with Christianity and
miracle, is that reason is _not_ the final judge--is, indeed, in the
last resort, the enemy, and must at some point go down, defeated and
trampled on. "Ideal Ward," and Archdeacon Denison, and Mr. Spurgeon--and
not Doctor Figgis or Doctor Creighton--are the apologists who in the end
hold the fort.

But with this analysis of what may be called the intellectual
presuppositions of _Robert Elsmere_, my mind began to turn to what I
believed to be the other side of the Greenian or Modernist
message--i.e., that life itself, the ordinary human life and
experience of every day as it has been slowly evolved through history,
is the true source of religion, if man will but listen to the message in
his own soul, to the voice of the Eternal Friend, speaking through
Conscience, through Society, through Nature. Hence _David Grieve_, which
was already in my mind within a few months of the publication of _Robert
Elsmere_. We were at Borough Farm when the vision of it first came upon
me. It was a summer evening of extraordinary beauty, and I had been
wandering through the heather and the pine woods. "The country"--to
quote an account written some years ago--"was drenched in sunset; white
towering thunder-clouds descending upon and mingling with the crimson of
the heath, the green stretches of bracken, the brown pools upon the
common, everywhere a rosy suffusion, a majesty of light interweaving
heaven and earth and transfiguring all dear familiar things--the old
farm-house, the sand-pit where the children played and the sand-martins
nested, the wood-pile by the farm door, the phloxes in the tumble-down
farm-yard, the cottage down the lane." After months of rest, the fount
of mental energy which had been exhausted in me the year before had
filled again. I was eager to be at work, and this time on something