latter
observing him.
    Jude went home and to bed, after reading up a little about these men and
their several messages to the world from a book or two that he had brought with
him concerning the sons of the University. As he drew towards sleep various
memorable words of theirs that he had just been conning seemed spoken by them in
muttering utterances; some audible, some unintelligible to him. One of the
spectres (who afterwards mourned Christminster as the home of lost causes,
though Jude did not remember this) was now apostrophizing her thus:
    »Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce
intellectual life of our century, so serene!... Her ineffable charm keeps ever
calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection.«
    Another voice was that of the Corn Law convert, whose phantom he had just
seen in the quadrangle with a great bell. Jude thought his soul might have been
shaping the historic words of his master-speech:
    »Sir, I may be wrong, but my impression is that my duty towards a country
threatened with famine requires that that which has been the ordinary remedy
under all similar circumstances should be resorted to now, namely, that there
should be free access to the food of man from whatever quarter it may come....
Deprive me of office to-morrow, you can never deprive me of the consciousness
that I have exercised the powers committed to me from no corrupt or interested
motives, from no desire to gratify ambition, for no personal gain.«
    Then the sly author of the immortal Chapter on Christianity: »How shall we
excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philosophic world, to those
evidences [miracles] which were presented by Omnipotence?... The sages of Greece
and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and appeared unconscious of any
alterations in the moral or physical government of the world.«
    Then the shade of the poet, the last of the optimists:
 
»How the world is made for each of us!
And each of the Many helps to recruit
The life of the race by a general plan.«
 
Then one of the three enthusiasts he had seen just now, the author of the
Apologia:
    »My argument was... that absolute certitude as to the truths of natural
theology was the result of an assemblage of concurring and converging
probabilities... that probabilities which did not reach to logical certainty
might create a mental certitude.«
    The second of them, no polemic, murmured quieter things:
 
»Why should we faint,