"It may well look such to those who are outside of it, and it must at length appear such to all who, feeling in it any claim upon them, yet do not put it to the test of their obedience."
"Well, you have had your turn, and now we are having ours—you of the legends, we of the facts."
"No," said Wingfold, "we have not had our turn, and you have been having yours for a far longer time than we. But if, as you profess, you are doing the truth you see, it belongs to my belief that you will come to see the truth you do not see. Christianity is not a failure; for to it mainly is the fact owing that here is a class of men which, believing in no God, yet believes in duty toward men. Look here: if Christianity be the outcome of human aspiration, the natural growth of the human soil, is it not strange it should be such an utter failure as it seems to you? and as such a natural growth, it must be a failure, for if it were a success, must not you be the very one to see it? If it is false, it is worthless, or an evil: where then is your law of development, if the highest result of that development is an evil to the nature and the race?"
"I do not grant it the highest result," said Faber. "It is a failure—a false blossom, with a truer to follow."
"To produce a superior architecture, poetry, music?"
"Perhaps not. But a better science."
"Are the architecture and poetry and music parts of the failure?"
"Yes—but they are not altogether a failure, for they lay some truth at the root of them all. Now we shall see what will come of turning away from every thing we do not know."
"That is not exactly what you mean, for that would be never to know any thing more. But the highest you have in view is immeasurably below what Christianity has always demanded of its followers."
"But has never got from them, and never will. Look at the wars, the hatreds, to which your gospel has given rise! Look at Calvin and poor Servetus! Look at the strifes and divisions of our own day! Look at the religious newspapers!"