It was Elsworth’s third year at the hospital. He had taken several gold medals and scholarships; and so, to outward appearance, had done well. But he was not as he was when he entered. He was sowing what he called his “wild oats,” forgetting the reaping of the crop that one day would have to be considered. He had not abandoned his faith, but it had ceased to influence his life. The thing he came for he had not won. He defended Christianity still when he heard it attacked; but this was because he thought it honourable to take the side of the weakest in every argument, and partly because the set who were so severe upon it were a perky, superficial, insincere lot of folk, that, above all things, wanted taking down. Christianity might be false, he argued, but it could not be such a tissue of absurdities as these people maintained. One summer’s night, about this time, the society was assembled to hear an address by a well known atheist propagandist, on marriage. Mr. Edgar Adams he was called. He was a singular-looking man; he was tall, lean, and hungry-looking, with long, dank, black hair, and a complexion such as poor people get who work in lead factories, and let it impregnate their systems. His dress was untidy, not to say greasy; his vast display of shirt front looked as if it had done duty in gas-light more than once before. Altogether, he was an unwholesome looking object, and, as a seafaring youth present declared, “it seemed as if a good holystoning down was what he wanted.” It did not surprise you the least when he advocated the destruction of Czars and despots generally, and talked with enthusiasm of the great French Revolution, with his starting eye-balls, and his thin, claw-like hands nervously twitching, expressing his eagerness to assist in the work of another Robespierre. He declared he would “abolish all property, especially that in a wife. The origin of the marriage superstition was pagan and suicidal, for marriage is the suicide of love. When the law no longer supplies husband or wife with a cage, each will take care of holding what has been won. Chastity and modesty are merely conventional ideas, having their origin in utility.” He declared that till Christianity was finally abolished, the real progress of the world could not be continued. “What is called the virtue of humility was never known—not even the word for it—by the Greeks and Romans; that is the great barrier in the path of modern man. Humility was invented by priests to hold man in slavery.” He ended by reciting a poem of Shelley’s denouncing tyrants and despots, and was much applauded.