“You could not!” said Agnes, in a sudden and rash defiance. She turned to him in her turn, beginning to tremble a little with the excitement of controversy. She was a young polemic, rather more graceful in its manifestation, but quite as strong in the spirit of the conflict as any Mause Headrigg--which is to say, that, after her eager girlish fashion, she believed with her whole heart, and did not know what toleration meant. Mr Rivers smiled once more. “I will not try,” he said. “I remember what Christ said, and endeavour to have charity even for those who condemn me.” “Oh, Mr Rivers!” cried Agnes suddenly, and with trembling, “do not speak so coldly--do not say Christ; it sounds as if you did not care for Him--as if you thought He was no friend to you.” The Rector paused, somewhat startled: it was an objection which never had occurred to him--one of those subtle touches concerning the spirit and not the letter, which, being perfectly sudden, and quite simple, had some chance of coming to the heart. “What do _you_ say?” he asked with a little interest. Agnes’s voice was low, and trembled with reverence and with emotion. She was not thinking of him, in his maze of intellectual trifling--she was thinking of that Other, whom she knew so much better, and whose name she spoke. She answered with an involuntary bending of her head--“Our Lord.” It was no conviction that struck the mind of the young man--conviction was not like to come readily to him--and he was far too familiar with all the formal arguments, to be moved by the reasonings of a polemic, or the fervour of an enthusiast. But he who professed so much anxiety about truth, and contemplated himself as a moral martyr, woefully following his principles, though they led him to ever so dark a desolation, had lived all his life among an infinite number of shams, and willingly enough had yielded to many of them. Perhaps this was the first time in his life in which he had been brought into immediate contact with people who were simply true in their feelings and their actions--whose opinions were without controversy--whose settled place in life, humble as it was, shut them out from secondary emulations and ambitions--and who were swayed by the primitive rule of human existence--the labour and the rest, the affliction and the prosperity, which were real things, and not creations of the brain. He paused a little over the words of Agnes Atheling. He did not want her to think as he did: he was content to believe that the old boundaries were suitable and seemly for a woman; and he was rather pleased than otherwise, by the horror, interest, and regret which such opinions as his generally met with. He paused upon her words, with the air of a spectator, and said in a meditative fashion, “It is a glorious faith.”