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think she would. I think I could make her happy.
Yes, I think you could, but I fancy you will make shipwreck of
your hopes if you speak to her now. Have patience.
I am sick of patience! cried Brian desperately. Have I not been
patient for nearly seven years? For what would you have me wait?
Am I to wait till, between our injustice to secularists and their
injustice to Christians, she is half badgered out of life? If she
could but love me, if she would marry me now, I could save her from
what must be a life of misery.
If I could but get you to see it from what I am convinced is
Erica's point of view! exclaimed Charles Osmond. Forget for a
minute that you are her knight and champion, and try to see things
as she sees them. Let us try to reverse things. Just imagine for
a minute that you are the child of some leading man, the head and
chief of a party or association we'll say that you are the child of
an Archbishop of Canterbury. You are carefully educated, you
become a zealous worker, you enter into all your father's
interests, you are able to help him in a thousand ways. But, by
slow degrees, we will say that you perceive a want in the system in
which you have been educated, and, after many years of careful
study and thought, you are obliged to reject your former beliefs
and to accept that other system which shall most recommend itself
to you. We will suppose for the sake of analogy that you become a
secularist. Knowing that your change of views will be a terrible
grief to your father the archbishop, it takes your whole strength
to make your confession, and you not only feel your father's
personal pain, but you feel that his pain will be increased by his
public position. To make it worse, too, we must suppose that a
number of people calling themselves atheists, and in the name of
atheism, have at intervals for the last thirty years been annoying
and insulting your father, that in withstanding their attacks he
has often received bodily injury, and that the atheists have so
often driven him into the law courts that he has been pretty nearly
beggared. All his privations you have shared for instance, you
went with him and lived for years in a poky little lodging, and
denied yourself every single luxury. But now you have, in spite of
all these persecutions carried on in the name of secularism,
learned to see that the highest form of secularism is true. The
archbishop feels this terribly. However, being a very loving
father, he wisely refuses to indulge in perpetual controversy with

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