"I am loth to believe what you say," said Inglesant; "I am no prophet, yet I would willingly believe that God is speaking to me with an immediate voice, nay, more, that I may enter into the very life that God is leading, and partake of His nature. Also, what you now say seems to me to contradict what you said before, that we should endeavour to found our doctrine on the conceptions and ideas of things, which I take to mean a following after divine truth: nor do I see why you take the sacrament, as you say you do, except you expect some immediate communication from God in it." The philosopher smiled. "One may see you have been taught in the Jesuits’ college," he said, "and are a forward pupil and a close reasoner. But what I have said concerning faith coming by hearing need not prevent that afterwards God may convey other gifts to men by other means. Yet I confess I am not a proficient in this divine knowledge or life of which you speak; nor do I follow your master Plato very far into the same conclusions which many profess to find in him. One disputant grounds his knowledge upon the infallibility of the Church, and the other on the testimony of the private spirit. The first we need not discuss, but how do you know that your private spirit, that this divine life within you, is any other than a belief grounded on the authority and arguments of your teachers?" Inglesant made no reply, which the philosopher perceiving, began to talk of something else, and the other soon after took his leave. Hobbes’s doctrine was new to him, as it was to every one in that day, indeed, the particular form it took was peculiar to Hobbes, and perished with him; but the underlying materialism which in some form or other has presented itself to the thinkers of every age, and which now for the first time came before Inglesant’s mind, was not without its effect. "How do I know indeed," he said, "that this divine life within me is anything but an opinion formed by what I have heard and read? How do I know that there is any such thing as a divine life at all?" Such thoughts as these, if they produced no other effect, yet gradually lessened that eagerness in his mind towards divine things which had been so strong since his visit to Little Gidding, and quite satisfied him to defer at any rate any thoughts of joining the Church of Rome. But his thoughts were turned into other channels by the events which were occurring in the political world, and which began now to assume a very exciting character. *CHAPTER VI.*