In the academical society to which he migrated from St. Anselm’s, he was subjected to a new and penetrating experience. His intellectual distinction won him, from the first, admission into a cultivated society. He was struck by the conversation of his associates. It was brilliant and fascinating. It sparkled with jest and epigram. It overran in festive good humour. But it lacked seriousness. It seemed remote from the realities of life. There was in it no sense of responsibility, of awe, of the sense of sin, of the longing for righteousness. The froth upon the cup was high and shining; but in the wine was no strength, no virtue. One of Gerald’s frequent companions at Balliol was heard to say that he did not see what good religion was; for he was doing his duty, and he could not do it better if there were a hundred Gods to punish him. Gerald thought of the Pharisee and the Publican, and of the reverential solemnity with which his father had been wont to repeat the words, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner.’ Yet the stream carried him away. How hard it is to live in the stream and not be borne away by it! And Gerald came to feel the absence of belief to be as natural as belief had once been to him. He took it for granted. He said to himself that nobody believed, because he and his half-score of friends were unbelievers. It began to seem to him a thing incredible that he had once enjoyed a simple unquestioning faith in God and Christ. It may be that, if it were the Divine Will to test the worth of human souls, no better test were possible than the withdrawal of religious faith. Better, in God’s eyes it may be, than the soul that believes, is the soul that acquits itself nobly in the absence of belief. To steer straight on when the waves of the deep run mountain-high, and neither sun nor moon appears for many days in heaven--this is the triumph of a faithless faith. O soul, that deemest thyself forsaken of God, thou bearest within thee a God whose name is conscience. And yet the desolation of being faithless--how great it is! Never had Gerald been so solitary before. He shrank more and more from going home. The meeting with his father was painful to him, for he had given up the habit of going to church. And if he knew that his father prayed for him, that was but one witness more to the vanity of prayer. At college the men whom he met habitually were either the votaries or (more often) the enemies of religion, and he was neither. Except at Helmsbury, and there only on the rare occasions of conversation with Lady Venniker, he could look for sympathy nowhere. He found it not in the earth nor yet in the heaven, and he knew not that it could ever be found.