This taste of business experience did not heighten my appreciation of the mental leisure which otherwise I now enjoyed. It was a leisure, however, which before very long took the form of activity in a new direction.
The more important questions which agitate the mind of an age, just like those which agitate the mind of an individual, engross and affect it, not simultaneously, but in alternation. One actor recedes for the moment and makes way for another, and the newcomer is an old actor returning. About the time of which I am now speaking there was--on the surface, at all events--a lull in social controversy, and a new outbreak of religious. An illustration of this fact may be found in the extraordinary popularity achieved by a novel purely religious in interest, its name being _Robert Elsmere_, and its authoress Mrs. Humphry Ward. Its religious interest is of a highly specialized kind. It is the story of an Anglican clergyman who starts as an earnest and absolutely untroubled believer in the traditional dogmas which the Church of England inculcates. He is thus at peace with himself till he gradually becomes intimate with a certain distinguished scholar. This scholar, who is the squire of his parish, is the possessor of an enormous library, rich in the writings of continental and especially of German skeptics. Having suggested to Robert Elsmere sundry disquieting arguments, he turns him loose in his library, begging him to use it as his own. The clergyman accepts the invitation. He soon is absorbed in the works of such writers as Strauss and Renan; and little by little their spirit becomes his own. Their eyes become his. Everything which orthodoxy demands in the way of the supernatural disappears. The sacraments become mummeries. Even Christ, in the ordinary sense, no longer lives. The clergyman is left in desolation. How, he asks, can the Church (by which he means the Anglican Church) help him? What evidence, what shred even of probability, have its ministers to support their teaching? They hardly, if closely pressed, know what they mean themselves, and the supernatural teaching of one section of Anglicans contradicts that of the others. The one moral which her hero draws from his studies resolves itself into the words, "Miracles do not happen."