The Rector himself escorted the guests to his house, and Bride went upstairs to see the invalid, who reminded her a little of her own mother, and whose presence always acted on her soothingly and gratefully. She felt refreshed by the hour spent in that quiet room, refreshed in body and mind. She had had food given her to eat; and communion of thought with one who sympathised with her, even where their opinions might not be altogether in accord, was more to her in those days than any bodily sustenance could be. Since her mother’s death Bride had been shut up entirely within herself, and it is not good for such an ardent soul as hers to be deprived of the natural outlet of speech with her fellow-man. When the girl went downstairs again, she found the two men deep in talk, and sat quietly down in a shadowy corner to wait till they had finished. Mr. St. Aubyn observed her entrance, though Eustace, whose back was towards her, did not. The two were keenly interested in their discourse, and continued it with animation. Bride soon began to pick up the drift of it, and listened with wonder and amaze, a sense of indignation and sadness inextricably mixed together falling upon her as she realised what it all meant. The two scholars were discussing the various phases of German rationalism which had arisen close on the heels of French and English deism; and from the tone taken by Eustace it was abundantly evident that he was deeply bitten by the philosophy of Wolff, by the destructive rationalism of Semler and Bretschneider, and the subjective philosophy of Kant and his followers, who evolve all things in heaven and earth from their own consciousness of them, on the principle that “cogito, ergo sum.” He had been educated at Jena and Weimar, where this school of philosophy had its headquarters; and he was deeply impregnated with the teaching of those who had followed upon the first bold propounders of its doctrines. The names of Descartes and Locke, Spinoza and Fichte, fell glibly from his tongue, as he ran through in a masterly way the methods of these great thinkers of the different centuries, and strove to show how, one after another, each in a different way had struggled to show a blinded world that there could be no religion that did not appeal to the reason; that the allegorical and the dogmatic methods of interpreting Scripture had been tried in the balances and found wanting, and that only the historic--the true rational interpretation--could be found lasting with thinking men.