slackened the pace and chilled the atmosphere of the novel. After all, what really supplied "the other side" was the whole system of things in which the readers of the book lived and moved--the ideas in which they had been brought up, the books they read, the churches in which they worshiped, the sermons to which they listened every week. The novel challenged this system of things; but it was always there to make reply. It was the eternal _sous-entendu_ of the story, and really gave the story all its force. But in the dialogue I could put the underlying conflict of thought into articulate and logical form, and build up, in outline at least, the history of "a new learning." When it was published, the dear Master, with a sigh of relief, confessed that it had "done no harm," and "showed a considerable knowledge of critical theology." I, too, felt that it had done no harm--rather that it had vindicated my right to speak, not as an expert and scholar--to that I never pretended for a moment--but as the interpreter of experts and scholars who had something to say to the English world, and of whom the English world was far too little aware. In the preface to one of the latest editions of his Bampton Lectures, Canon Liddon wrote an elaborate answer to it, which, I think, implies that it was felt to have weight; and if Lord Acton had waited for its appearance he might not, perhaps, have been so ready to condemn the character of Newcome as belonging "to the infancy of art." That Newcome's type might have been infinitely better presented is indeed most true. But in the scheme of the book, it is _right_. For the 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.