"Do you mean to tell me now," said Bruce, turning round and looking full at Suton, "that you regard chapels as anything but an unmitigated nuisance?" "Most certainly I do mean to tell you so, if you ask me." "Ah! I see--a Sim!" said Bruce, with the slightest possible shrug of the shoulders. "I don't know what you mean by a `Sim,' Mr Bruce," said Suton, slightly colouring; "but whether a Sim or not, I at least expect to be treated as a gentleman." "Oh, I beg pardon," said Bruce; "but I couldn't help recognising the usual style of--" "Of cant, I suppose you would say. Thank you. You must find it a cold faith to disbelieve in all sincerity." "Well, I don't know. At any rate, I don't believe that all your saints put together were really a bit better than their neighbours; so I can't get up an annual enthusiasm in their honour. All men are really alike at the bottom." "Nero's belief," said Owen, who had overheard the conversation. "It doesn't matter whether it was Nero's or Neri's or Neander's," answered Bruce; "experience proves it to be true." Suton had finished dinner, and as he did not relish Bruce's off-hand and patronising manner, he left the discussion in Owen's hand. But between Owen and Bruce there was an implacable dissimilarity, and neither of them cared to pursue the subject. Bruce, who went to wine with D'Acres, repeated there the subject of the conversation, and found that most of his audience affected to agree with him. In fact, he had himself set the fashion of a semi-professed infidelity; and amid his most intimate associates there were many to adopt with readiness a theory which saved them from the trouble and expense of a scrupulous conscience. With Bruce this infidelity was rather the decay of faith than the growth of positive disbelief. He had dipped with a kind of wilful curiosity into Strauss's Life of Jesus, and other books of a similar description, together with such portions of current literature as were most clever in sneering at Christianity, or most undisguised in rejecting it. Such reading--harmless, or even desirable, as it might have been to a strong mind sincere in its search for truth, and furnished with that calm capacity for impartial thought which is the best antidote against error--was fatal to one whose superficial knowledge and irregular life gave him already a powerful bias towards getting rid of everything which stood in the way of his tendencies and pursuits. Bruce was not in earnest in the desire for knowledge and wisdom: he grasped with avidity at a popular objection, or a sceptical argument, without desiring to understand or master the principles which rendered them nugatory; and he was ignorant and untaught enough to fancy that the very foundations of religion were shaken if he could attack the authenticity of some Jewish miracle, or impugn the genuineness of some Old Testament book.