“You are very puzzling;” I said. “I cannot believe that you do not value intellect. Surely it is a gift of God, and therefore may adorn faith, as any other gift may do.” “Yes,” he said, walking on, “it may adorn it; but it has nothing more to do with it really than jewels have to do with a beautiful woman. In fact, sometimes faith is far more beautiful unadorned, and it is quite possible to crush a delicate and growing faith with a weight of learned arguments intended to adorn and perfect it. Christian apologetics, it seems to me, are only really useful in the mouth of one who realises their entire inadequacy. You can demonstrate nothing of God. You can, by arguments, draw a number of lines that converge towards God, and render His existence and His attributes probable; but you cannot reach Him along those lines. Faith depends not on intellectual but on moral conditions. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ said our Saviour, not ‘Blessed are the profound or acute of intellect’––‘for they shall see God.’ It is certainly true of intellectual as of all other riches that they who possess them shall find difficulty in entering into the kingdom of God.” “And so,” I said, “you think that intellectual powers are not things to covet, and that education is not a very important question after all?” “No more than wealth,” he answered, “at least so far as you mean by education instruction in demonstrable facts or exact sciences. The point of our existence here is to know God. Well, you know for yourself how the race for wealth is ruining millions of souls to-day. No less surely is keen intellectual competition ruining souls. Mr. ––––, for instance,” he said, naming a well-known critic and poet; “was there ever a man of keener and finer intellect, or of more unerring instinct in matters of literary taste? Well, once I talked with that man most of a day on all his own subjects; in fact, he did nearly all the talking, and I was astonished, I must confess, at the perfection of the training of his already brilliant powers. So much I could perceive, though of course I could not follow him. And of course there were many delicate shades of beauty, if not much more, invisible to me in his talk and criticism. His scale of intellectual beauty ran up out of my sight altogether. But what astonished me more was the coarseness and dulness of his spiritual instinct. I will not call him a child in matters of faith, because that would be high praise; but he was just an ill-bred boor. I have known many a Sussex villager of far purer and finer spiritual fibre. No, no; faith can and does exist quite apart from intellect; and to increase or develop the one often means the decrease and incoherence of the other. _Seigneur, donnez-moi la foi du charbonnier!_”