.«
    And how should he best persuade his fellow countrymen to leave off believing
in this supernatural element? Looking at the matter from a practical point of
view, he thought the Archbishop of Canterbury afforded the most promising key to
the situation. It lay between him and the Pope. The Pope was perhaps best in
theory, but in practise the Archbishop of Canterbury would do sufficiently well.
If he could only manage to sprinkle a pinch of salt as it were on the
Archbishop's tail, he might convert the whole Church of England to free thought,
by a coup de main. There must be an amount of cogency which even an Archbishop -
even an Archbishop whose perceptions had never been quickened by imprisonment
for assault - would not be able to withstand. When brought face to face with the
facts as he, Ernest, could arrange them, his Grace would have no resource but to
admit them; being an honourable man he would at once resign his Archbishopric,
and Christianity would become extinct in England within a few months' time. This
at any rate was how things ought to be. But all the time Ernest had no
confidence in the Archbishop's not hopping off just as the pinch was about to
fall on him, and this seemed so unfair that his blood boiled at the thought of
it. If this was to be so, he must try if he could not fix him by the judicious
use of bird lime or snare, or throw the salt onto him from an ambuscade.
    To do him justice it was not himself that he greatly cared about. He knew he
had been humbugged, and he knew also that the greater part of the ills which had
afflicted him were due indirectly, in chief measure, to the influence of
Christian teaching; still if the mischief had ended with himself, he should have
thought little about it; but there was his sister, and his brother Joey, and the
hundreds and thousands of young people throughout England whose lives were
yearly blighted through the lies told them by people whose business it was to
know better, but who scamped their work, and shirked difficulties instead of
facing them. It was this which made him think it worth while to be angry, and to
consider whether he could not at least do something towards saving others from
such years of waste and misery as he had had to pass himself. If there was no
truth in the miraculous accounts of Christ's death and resurrection, the whole
of the religion founded upon the historic truth of those events tumbled to the
ground. »Why,« he exclaimed, with all the