A dozen or so good fellows of the cloth had luncheon together each Tuesday at the house of one or another, or at a restaurant; and here they talked shop or not as they chose, the thing insisted upon being congeniality—­that for once in the week they should be secure from bores.

Here Presbyterian and Unitarian met on common ground; Baptist, Catholic, Episcopalian, Congregationalist, Methodist—­all became brothers over the soup.  Weekly they found what was common and helpful to all in discussing details of church administration, matters of faith, methods of handling their charitable funds; or the latest heresy trial.  They talked of these things amiably, often lightly.  They were choice spirits relaxed, who might be grave or gay, as they listed.

Their vein was not too serious the day Bernal was his brother’s guest, sitting between the very delightful Father Riley and the exciting Unitarian, one Whittaker.  With tensest interest he listened to their talk.

At first there was a little of Delitzsch and his Babel-Bible addresses, brought up by Selmour, an amiable Presbyterian of shining bare pate and cheerful red beard, a man whom scandal had filliped ever so coyly with a repute of leanings toward Universalism.

This led to a brief discussion of the old and new theology—­Princeton standing for the old with its definition of Christianity as “a piece of information given supernaturally and miraculously”; Andover standing for the new—­so alleged Whittaker—­with many polite and ingenious evasions of this proposition without actually repudiating it.

The Unitarian, however, was held to be the least bit too literal in his treatment of propositions not his own.

Then came Pleydell, another high-church Episcopalian who, over his chop and a modest glass of claret, declared earnest war upon the whole Hegel-Darwinian-Wellhausen school.  His method of attack was to state baldly the destructive conclusions of that school—­that most of the books of the Old Testament are literary frauds, intentionally misrepresenting the development of religion in Israel; that the whole Mosaic code is a later fabrication and its claim to have been given in the wilderness an historical falsehood.  From this he deduced that a mere glance at the Bible, as the higher critics explain it, must convince the earnest Christian that he can have no share in their views.  “Deprive Christianity of its supernatural basis,” he said, “and you would have a mere speculative philosophy.  Deny the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden, and the Atonement becomes meaningless.  If we have not incurred God’s wrath through Adam’s disobedience, we need no Saviour.  That is the way to meet the higher criticism,” he concluded earnestly.