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About this time his hearer used to become drowsy, with 'an indistinct consciousness of a pathetic quavering set of entreaties to believe what, when it was intelligible, was quite unsatisfactory. Long afterwards he says somewhere that it was 'like watching the struggles of a drowning creed. Fitzjames, however, fancied for a time that he was more or less of a Mauricean.
The school, however, says Fitzjames, had two good points. The boys, in the first place, were gentlemen by birth and breeding, and did not forget their home training.
The writings of Bentham consisted largely in denunciations of the various failings of the English law; and here Fitzjames takes a different position. One main point of the book was the working out of a comparison already made in the 'Cambridge Essays' between the English and the French systems.
We have become so accustomed to the assertion that it is a duty for the ignorant to hold with unequivocal faith doctrines which are notoriously the very centres of philosophical doubt, that it is hard to believe that a man can regard them as at once important and incapable of strict proof. Fitzjames naturally appears to the orthodox as an unbeliever, because he admits the doubt.
The Irish cavalry regiments in the service of France were Sheldon's, Galmoy's, Clare's, and Killmallock's; the infantry were known as the regiments of Dublin, Charlemont, Limerick, and Athlone. There were two other infantry regiments, known as Luttrel's and Dorrington's and a regiment of Irish marines, of which the Grand Prior, Fitzjames, was colonel.
But if the facts are insufficient to a lawyer's eye, what is to happen? For reasons which will partly appear, Fitzjames did not at present draw the conclusions which to many seem obvious. It took him, in fact, years to develope distinctly new conclusions.
His bill for hats at Sanders' must have amounted to a stiff figure, for my visions of Fitzjames are of a discrowned warrior, returning to Windsor bareheaded, his hair moist with the steam of recent conflict. My own childish recollections of his school life refer mainly to pugilism.
Their friendship, happily, was not interrupted by the controversy, in which Fitzjames was scrupulously respectful. This, again, raised the old question about International Law, which Fitzjames, as a good Austinian, regarded mainly as a figment. The moral point, however, is the only one of general interest.
Fitzjames certainly became a disciple and before long an advocate of these principles. I find one or two other indications of disturbing studies. He told me that he had once studied Lardner's famous 'Credibility of the Gospel History, to which Greg may not improbably have sent him. Paley, for whom Fitzjames had always a great respect, put the argument most skilfully in this shape.
This gives no doubt one secret of the decay of the evangelical party. The Protestant demand for a rational basis of faith widened among men of any intellectual force into an inquiry about the authority of the Bible or of Christianity. Fitzjames had moved, reluctantly and almost in spite of himself, very far from the creed of his fathers.
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