"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!"

"All granted. It is a chaos, the motions of whose organization must be
strife. The spirit of life is at war with the spasmatical body of death.
If Christianity be not still in the process of development, it is the
saddest of all failures."

"The fact is, Wingfold, your prophet would have been King of the race if
He had not believed in a God."