It was with a smile, and with great courtesy and patience, that Mr. St. Aubyn listened to the clear and terse arguments of his intellectual guest; and then he asked him what he thought of the Berlin school of thought, which had trodden quickly upon the heels of the one he had been ardently advocating--asked him what had been the teaching of Schleiermacher and Neander and De Wette, and whether they had been able (whilst giving all due weight to the value of reason) to remain where the destructive rationalist thinkers had left them. Already they had begun to strive to reconstruct a living and personal Christ out of the ruins of the historic method, which would have robbed Him of all but a shadowy existence as a misguided though well-meaning fanatic, deceiving and deceived. How was it men could never rest without some theory of a Divine personality, call it by what name they would? Was it not the most rational deduction to admit that the reason for this inherent longing (which none of the world’s greatest thinkers had ever attempted to deny) was that the subjective philosophy never can content the heart of man; that man _must_ have an object of worship, an external standard, a living Head, and not an abstraction, simply because there _is_ a living God, who created him in His own image; because he _has_ been redeemed by a living and incarnate Saviour, and because the Spirit of the Eternal God the Father and the Son is for ever working in his heart, and seeking to bring it back to uniformity with the heart of Christ, overflowing with love towards God and towards man? That, in brief, was the argument on both sides, only argued out at length with skill and knowledge and versatility of thought by each combatant. Bride, in her dim corner, sat and listened, and sometimes shivered in horror, sometimes glowed with an ecstatic rapture, but always listened with undivided attention, for these matters were not to her the dry arguments of philosophers merely, but indications of the spirit of perversity and blindness at work in the world in the latter days--the spirit of the lawless one, coming in every insidious form; first under the guise of liberality of thought and intellect, then teaching men to throw off from them all the fetters imposed by the precepts of Christ, all the external authority of the Church; paving the way for that other rising against kings and rulers and external authority of any kind whatsoever which she had been warned was one of the signs of the latter days, when the voice of the people should prevail once again, and they should give the power to him who should come “in his own name.” But the discussion ended at last as all such do, each man thinking as he did before, though glad of the opportunity of exchanging ideas with a scholar and person of intellectual acumen.