“I shall do neither, Mr. Wingfold. Go on, if you please, sir. I am more deeply interested than I can tell you.” “Some few months ago then, I met a young man who takes for granted the opposite of all that I had up to that time taken for granted, and which now I want to be able to prove. He spoke with contempt of my profession. I could not defend my profession, and of course had to despise myself. I began to think. I began to pray--if you will excuse me for mentioning it. My whole past life appeared like the figures that glide over the field of a camera obscura--not an abiding fact in it all. A cloud gathered about me, and hangs about me still. I call, but no voice answers me out of the darkness, and at times I am in despair. I would, for the love and peace of honesty, give up the profession, but I shrink from forsaking what I may yet possibly find--though I fear, I fear--to be as true as I wish to find it. Something, I know not what, holds me to it--some dim vague affection, possibly mere prejudice, aided by a love for music, and the other sweet sounds of our prayers and responses. Nor would I willingly be supposed to deny what I dare not say--indeed know not how to say I believe, not knowing what it is. I should nevertheless have abandoned everything months ago, had I not felt bound by my agreement to serve my rector for a year. You are the only one of the congregation who has shown me any humanity, and I beg of you to be my friend and help me. What shall I do? After the avowal you have made, I may well ask you again, How am I to know that there is a God?” “It were a more pertinent question, sir,” returned Polwarth,--“If there be a God, how am I to find him?--And, as I hinted before, there is another question--one you have already put--more pertinent to your position as an English clergyman: Was there ever such a man as Jesus Christ?--Those, I think, were your own words: what do you mean by SUCH a man?” “Such as he is represented in the New Testament.” “From that representation, what description would you give of him now? What is that SUCH? What sort of person, supposing the story true, would you take this Jesus, from that story, to have been?” Wingfold thought for a while. “I am a worse humbug than I fancied,” he said. “I cannot tell what he was. My thoughts of him are so vague and indistinct that it would take me a long time to render myself able to answer your question.” “Perhaps longer still than you think, sir. It took me a very long time.--” CHAPTER XVIII. JOSEPH POLWARTH. “Shall I tell you,” the gate-keeper went on, “something of my life, in return of the confidence you have honoured me with?” “Nothing could be more to my mind,” answered Wingfold. “And I trust,” he added, “it is no unworthy curiosity that makes me anxious to understand how you have come to know so much.”