That walk prolonged itself far beyond Mr. Wendover’s original intention. There was something in the situation, in Elsmere’s comments, or arguments, or silences which after a while banished the scholar’s sense of exhaustion and made him oblivious of the country distances. No man feels another’s soul quivering and struggling in his grasp without excitement, let his nerve and his self-restraint be what they may. As for Elsmere, that hour and a half, little as he realized it at the time, represented the turning-point of life. He listened, he suggested, he put in an acute remark here, an argument there, such as the Squire had often difficulty in meeting. Every now and then the inner protest of an attacked faith would break through in words so full of poignancy, in imagery so dramatic, that the Squire’s closely-knit sentences would be for the moment wholly disarranged. On the whole, he proved himself no mean guardian of all that was most sacred to himself and to Catherine, and the Squire’s intellectual respect for him rose considerably. All the same, by the end of their conversation that first period of happy unclouded youth we have been considering was over for poor Elsmere. In obedience to certain inevitable laws and instincts of the mind, he had been for months tempting his fate, inviting catastrophe. None the less did the first sure approaches of that catastrophe fill him with a restless resistance which was in itself anguish. As to the Squire’s talk, it was simply the outporing of one of the richest, most sceptical, and most highly trained of minds on the subject of Christian origins. At no previous period of his life would it have greatly affected Elsmere. But now at every step the ideas, impressions arguments bred in him by his months of historical work and ordinary converse with the Squire rushed in, as they had done once before, to cripple resistance, to check an emerging answer, to justify Mr. Wendover. We may quote a few fragmentary utterances taken almost at random from the long wrestle of the two men, for the sake of indicating the main lines of a bitter after-struggle. ‘Testimony like every other human product has _developed_. Man’s power of apprehending and recording what he sees and hears has grown from less to more, from weaker to stronger, like any other of his faculties, just as the reasoning powers of the cave-dweller have developed into the reasoning powers of a Kant. What one wants is the ordered proof of this, and it can be got from history and experience.’