I do not care to follow the intellectual duel between them.  Argument, save that of a man with himself, when council is held between heart, will, imagination, conscience, vision, and intellect, is of little avail or worth.  Nothing, however, could have suited Faber’s desires better.  Under the shadow of such difficulties as the wise man ponders and the fool flaunts, difficulties which have been difficulties from the dawn of human thought, and will in new shapes keep returning so long as the human understanding yearns to infold its origin, Faber brought up an array of arguments utterly destructive of the wretched theories of forms of religion which were all she had to bring into the field:  so wretched and false were they—­feeblest she found them just where she had regarded them as invincible—­that in destroying them Faber did even a poor part of the work of a soldier of God:  Mephistopheles describes himself as

Ein Theil von jener Kraft,
Die stets das Boese will, und stets das Gute schafft,
.     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .
.     .     .     .  der Geist der stets verneint.

For the nature of Juliet’s argument I must be content to refer any curious reader to the false defenses made, and lies spoken for God, in many a pulpit and many a volume, by the worshipers of letter and system, who for their sakes “accept His person,” and plead unrighteously for Him.  Before the common sense of Faber, they went down like toys, and Juliet, without consciously yielding at first, soon came to perceive that they were worse than worthless—­weapons whose handles were sharper than their blades.  She had no others, nor metal of which to make any; and what with the persuasive influence of the man, and the pleasure in the mere exercise of her understanding, became more and more interested as she saw the drift of his argument, and apprehended the weight of what truth lay upon his side.  For even the falsest argument is sustained in virtue of some show of truth, or perhaps some crumb of reality belonging to it.  The absolute lie, if such be frameable by lips of men, can look only the blackness of darkness it is.  The lie that can hurt, hurts in the strength of the second lie in which it is folded—­a likeness to the truth.  It would have mattered little that she was driven from line after line of her defense, had she not, while she seemed to herself to be its champion, actually lost sight of that for which she thought she was striving.

It added much to Faber’s influence on Juliet, that a tone of pathos and an element of poetry generally pervaded the forms of his denial.  The tone was the more penetrating that it veiled the pride behind it all, the pride namely of an unhealthy conscious individuality, the pride of self as self, which makes a man the center of his own universe, and a mockery to all the demons of the real universe.  That man only who rises above the small yet mighty predilection, who sets the self of his own consciousness behind his back, and cherishes only the self of the Father’s thought, the angel that beholds the eternal face, that man only is a free and noble being, he only breathes the air of the infinite.  Another may well deny the existence of any such Father, any such infinite, for he knows nothing of the nature of either, and his testimony for it would be as worthless as that is which he gives against it.