So much for his constructive teaching. But he was a destroyer too. The peculiarity of his position and the cause of his loneliness was that he was always throwing his darts not only into the camp of the business men and their allies the economists, but also into the two religious camps, generally opposed to one another, held, one by the clergy, the other by the materialistic men of science. He rebuked both parties for their assumptions, and he smote them with all the artillery of sarcasm, wit and indignation. “You have to guard against the fatalest darkness of the two opposite Prides: the Pride of Faith, which imagines that the nature of the Deity can be defined by its convictions; and the Pride of Science, which imagines that the energy of Deity can be explained by its analysis.”[17] As sword-play it is fine. He gives what purports to be a scientific account of Shakespeare: so much water, so much carbo-hydrate and phosphorus, and thus you build up your organism called William Shakespeare--with, of course, something left out. He was ever dwelling on the realities of the spirit which chemistry omits. The fashionable scientific materialism of the seventies he utterly abhorred: he behaved to it as St. George to the Dragon. He loathed anatomy, mocked at the idea that you understood a creature by cutting up its remains; and when the men of science at Oxford proceeded to vivisection he threw up his professorship in flaming wrath, sick at heart; every sentiment of mercy, every safe doctrine of science violated in unholy cruelty and impatience. He describes the limitations of “some scientific minds, which in their judgment of the Universe can be compared to nothing so accurately as to the woodworms in the panel of a picture by some great painter, if we may conceive them as tasting with discrimination of the wood, and with repugnance of the colour, and declaring that even this unlooked for and undesirable combination is a normal result of the action of molecular Forces.”[18] We pass on to the third period of sixteen years, the Mature Period as I call it, from 1874 to 1890, when his productive life ended. He now came to know more fully the fullness of faith. Here he entered into his reward, I say. The revelation of God to him became clearer, sweeter, mightier. As in 1858, the time of crisis was marked by two events which occurred that year, one in things spiritual and one in things artistic.[19]