 really suits them. This, they
say, must certainly be their last inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock
that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto
death. What we call Death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to
recognise a past and a present as resembling one another. It is the making us
consider the points of difference between our present and our past greater than
the points of resemblance, so that we can no longer call the former of these two
in any proper sense a continuation of the second, but find it less trouble to
think of it as something that we choose to call new.
    But to let this pass. It was clear that spiritual pathology (I may as well
confess that I do not know myself what pathology means - but Mr. Pryer and
Ernest doubtless did) was the great desideratum of the age. It seemed to Ernest
that he had made this discovery himself and been familiar with it all his life -
that he had never known, in fact, of anything else. He wrote long letters to his
college friends expounding his views as though he had been one of the Apostolic
fathers. As for the Old Testament writers - he had no patience with them. »Do
oblige me,« I find him writing to one friend, »by reading the prophet Zechariah,
and giving me your candid opinion upon him. He is poor stuff - full of Yankee
bounce; it is sickening to live in an age when such balderdash can be gravely
admired whether as poetry or prophecy«; this was because Pryer had set him
against Zechariah - I do not know what Zechariah had done; I should think myself
that Zechariah was a very good prophet; perhaps it was because he was a Bible
writer, and not a very prominent one, that Pryer selected him as one through
whom to disparage the Bible in comparison with the church.
    To his friend Dawson I find him saying a little later on,
 
        »Pryer and I continue our walks, working out each other's thoughts. At
        first he used to do all the thinking, but I think I am pretty well
        abreast with him now, and rather chuckle at seeing that he is already
        beginning to modify some of the views he held most strongly when I first
        knew him.
            Then, I think, he was on the high road to Rome; now, however, he
        seems to be a good deal struck with a suggestion of mine in which you
        too perhaps may be interested. You see we must infuse new life into
