"Yes, gnawing! but gnawing is not eating. Did the poor fellow eat the stick? That is just it! Many a man will gnaw at a lie all his life, and perish of want. I mean LIE, of course, the real lie--a thing which is in its nature false. He may gnaw at it, he may even swallow it, but I deny that he can believe it. There is not that in it which can be believed; at most it can but be supposed to be true. Belief is another thing. Truth is alone the correlate of belief, just as air is for the lungs, just as form and colour are for the sight. A lie can no more be believed than carbonic acid can be breathed. It goes into the lungs, true, and a lie goes into the mind, but both kill; the one is not BREATHED, the other is not BELIEVED. The thing that is not true cannot find its way to the home of faith; if it could, it would be at once rejected with a loathing beyond utterance; to a pure soul, which alone can believe, nothing is so loathsome as a pretence of truth. A lie is a pretended truth. If there were no truth there could be no lie. As the devil upon God, the very being of a lie depends on that whose opposite and enemy it is. But tell me, Alister, do you believe the parables of our Lord?" "With all my heart." "Was there any real person in our Lord's mind when he told that one about the unjust judge?" "I do not suppose there was; but there were doubtless many such." "Many who would listen to a poor woman because she plagued them?" "Well, it does not matter; what the story teaches is true, and that was what he wanted believed." "Just so. The truth in the parables is what they mean, not what they say; and so it is, I think, with Rob of the Angels' stories. He believes all that can be believed of them. At the same time, to a mind so simple, the spirit of God must have freer entrance than to ours--perhaps even teaches the man by what we call THE MAN'S OWN WORDS. His words may go before his ideas--his higher ideas at least--his ideas follow after his words. As the half-thoughts pass through his mind--who can say how much generated by himself, how much directly suggested by the eternal thought in which his spirit lives and breathes!--he drinks and is refreshed. I am convinced that nowhere so much as in the highest knowledge of all--what the people above count knowledge--will the fulfilment of the saying of our Lord, "Many first shall be last, and the last first," cause astonishment; that a man who has been leader of the age's opinion, may be immeasurably behind another whom he would have shut up in a mad-house. Depend upon it, things go on in the soul of that Rob of the Angels which the angels, whether they come to talk with him or not, would gladly look into. Of such as he the angels may one day be the pupils." A silence followed. "Do you think the young ladies of the New House could understand Rob of the Angels, Ian?" at length asked Alister. "Not a bit. I tried the younger, and she is the best.--They could if they would wake up."