it honesty?--if so, how dishonest had he not hitherto been?--was it diffidence?--if so, how presumptuous his position in that church!--this nondescript something seemed to raise a “viewless obstruction” in his throat, and, having thus rendered him the first moment incapable of speaking out like a man, had taught him the next--had it?--to quibble--“like a priest” the lawyer-fellow would doubtless have said! He must go home and study Paley--or perhaps Butler’s Analogy--he owed the church something, and ought to be able to strike a blow for her. Or would not Leighton be better? Or a more modern writer--say Neander, or Coleridge, or perhaps Dr. Liddon? There were thousands able to fit him out for the silencing of such foolish men as this Bascombe of the shirt-front! Wingfold found himself filled with contempt, but the next moment was not sure whether this Bascombe or one Wingfold were the more legitimate object of it. One thing was undeniable--his friends HAD put him into the priest’s office, and he had yielded to go, that he might eat a piece of bread. He had no love for it except by fits, when the beauty of an anthem, or the composition of a collect, awoke in him a faint consenting admiration, or a weak, responsive sympathy. Did he not, indeed, sometimes despise himself, and that pretty heartily, for earning his bread by work which any pious old woman could do better than he? True, he attended to his duties; not merely “did church,” but his endeavour also that all things should be done decently and in order. All the same it remained a fact that if Barrister Bascombe were to stand up and assert in full congregation--as no doubt he was perfectly prepared to do--that there was no God anywhere in the universe, the Rev. Thomas Wingfold could not, on the church’s part, prove to anybody that there was;--dared not, indeed, so certain would he be of discomfiture, advance a single argument on his side of the question. Was it even HIS side of the question? Could he say he believed there was a God? Or was not this all he knew--that there was a church of England, which paid him for reading public prayers to a God in whom the congregation--and himself--were supposed by some to believe, by others, Bascombe, for instance, not?