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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1269 ***
+
+THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
+
+By H. G. Wells
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+     CHAPTER THE FIRST   -  THE DREAM
+     CHAPTER THE SECOND  -  THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY
+     CHAPTER THE THIRD   -  INSOMNIA
+     CHAPTER THE FOURTH  -  THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND
+     CHAPTER THE FIFTH   -  THE FIRST VISION
+     CHAPTER THE SIXTH   -  EXEGETICAL
+     CHAPTER THE SEVENTH -  THE SECOND VISION
+     CHAPTER THE EIGHTH  -  THE NEW WORLD
+     CHAPTER THE NINTH   -  THE THIRD VISION
+
+
+“Man's true Environment is God”
+
+J. H. OLDHAM in “The Christian Gospel” (Tract of the N. M. R. and H.)
+
+
+
+
+THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST - THE DREAM
+
+(1)
+
+
+IT was a scene of bitter disputation. A hawk-nosed young man with a
+pointing finger was prominent. His face worked violently, his lips moved
+very rapidly, but what he said was inaudible.
+
+Behind him the little rufous man with the big eyes twitched at his robe
+and offered suggestions.
+
+And behind these two clustered a great multitude of heated, excited,
+swarthy faces....
+
+The emperor sat on his golden throne in the midst of the gathering,
+commanding silence by gestures, speaking inaudibly to them in a tongue
+the majority did not use, and then prevailing. They ceased their
+interruptions, and the old man, Arius, took up the debate. For a time
+all those impassioned faces were intent upon him; they listened as
+though they sought occasion, and suddenly as if by a preconcerted
+arrangement they were all thrusting their fingers into their ears and
+knitting their brows in assumed horror; some were crying aloud and
+making as if to fly. Some indeed tucked up their garments and fled. They
+spread out into a pattern. They were like the little monks who run from
+St. Jerome's lion in the picture by Carpaccio. Then one zealot rushed
+forward and smote the old man heavily upon the mouth....
+
+The hall seemed to grow vaster and vaster, the disputing, infuriated
+figures multiplied to an innumerable assembly, they drove about like
+snowflakes in a gale, they whirled in argumentative couples, they spun
+in eddies of contradiction, they made extraordinary patterns, and then
+amidst the cloudy darkness of the unfathomable dome above them there
+appeared and increased a radiant triangle in which shone an eye. The eye
+and the triangle filled the heavens, sent out flickering rays, glowed
+to a blinding incandescence, seemed to be speaking words of thunder
+that were nevertheless inaudible. It was as if that thunder filled the
+heavens, it was as if it were nothing but the beating artery in the
+sleeper's ear. The attention strained to hear and comprehend, and on the
+very verge of comprehension snapped like a fiddle-string.
+
+“Nicoea!”
+
+The word remained like a little ash after a flare.
+
+The sleeper had awakened and lay very still, oppressed by a sense of
+intellectual effort that had survived the dream in which it had arisen.
+Was it so that things had happened? The slumber-shadowed mind, moving
+obscurely, could not determine whether it was so or not. Had they indeed
+behaved in this manner when the great mystery was established? Who
+said they stopped their ears with their fingers and fled, shouting with
+horror? Shouting? Was it Eusebius or Athanasius? Or Sozomen.... Some
+letter or apology by Athanasius?... And surely it was impossible that
+the Trinity could have appeared visibly as a triangle and an eye. Above
+such an assembly.
+
+That was mere dreaming, of course. Was it dreaming after Raphael? After
+Raphael? The drowsy mind wandered into a side issue. Was the picture
+that had suggested this dream the one in the Vatican where all the
+Fathers of the Church are shown disputing together? But there surely God
+and the Son themselves were painted with a symbol--some symbol--also?
+But was that disputation about the Trinity at all? Wasn't it rather
+about a chalice and a dove? Of course it was a chalice and a dove! Then
+where did one see the triangle and the eye? And men disputing? Some such
+picture there was....
+
+What a lot of disputing there had been! What endless disputing! Which
+had gone on. Until last night. When this very disagreeable young man
+with the hawk nose and the pointing finger had tackled one when one was
+sorely fagged, and disputed; disputed. Rebuked and disputed. “Answer me
+this,” he had said.... And still one's poor brains disputed and would
+not rest.... About the Trinity....
+
+The brain upon the pillow was now wearily awake. It was at once
+hopelessly awake and active and hopelessly unprogressive. It was like
+some floating stick that had got caught in an eddy in a river, going
+round and round and round. And round. Eternally--eternally--eternally
+begotten.
+
+“But what possible meaning do you attach then to such a phrase as
+eternally begotten?”
+
+The brain upon the pillow stared hopelessly at this question, without an
+answer, without an escape. The three repetitions spun round and round,
+became a swiftly revolving triangle, like some electric sign that
+had got beyond control, in the midst of which stared an unwinking and
+resentful eye.
+
+(2)
+
+
+Every one knows that expedient of the sleepless, the counting of sheep.
+
+You lie quite still, you breathe regularly, you imagine sheep jumping
+over a gate, one after another, you count them quietly and slowly until
+you count yourself off through a fading string of phantom numbers to
+number Nod....
+
+But sheep, alas! suggest an episcopal crook.
+
+And presently a black sheep had got into the succession and was
+struggling violently with the crook about its leg, a hawk-nosed black
+sheep full of reproof, with disordered hair and a pointing finger. A
+young man with a most disagreeable voice.
+
+At which the other sheep took heart and, deserting the numbered
+succession, came and sat about the fire in a big drawing-room and argued
+also. In particular there was Lady Sunderbund, a pretty fragile tall
+woman in the corner, richly jewelled, who sat with her pretty eyes
+watching and her lips compressed. What had she thought of it? She had
+said very little.
+
+It is an unusual thing for a mixed gathering of this sort to argue about
+the Trinity. Simply because a tired bishop had fallen into their party.
+It was not fair to him to pretend that the atmosphere was a liberal and
+inquiring one, when the young man who had sat still and dormant by the
+table was in reality a keen and bitter Irish Roman Catholic. Then the
+question, a question-begging question, was put quite suddenly, without
+preparation or prelude, by surprise. “Why, Bishop, was the Spermaticos
+Logos identified with the Second and not the Third Person of the
+Trinity?”
+
+It was indiscreet, it was silly, to turn upon the speaker and affect an
+air of disengagement and modernity and to say: “Ah, that indeed is the
+unfortunate aspect of the whole affair.”
+
+Whereupon the fierce young man had exploded with: “To that, is it, that
+you Anglicans have come?”
+
+The whole gathering had given itself up to the disputation, Lady
+Sunderbund, an actress, a dancer--though she, it is true, did not say
+very much--a novelist, a mechanical expert of some sort, a railway peer,
+geniuses, hairy and Celtic, people of no clearly definable position,
+but all quite unequal to the task of maintaining that air of reverent
+vagueness, that tenderness of touch, which is by all Anglican standards
+imperative in so deep, so mysterious, and, nowadays, in mixed society at
+least, so infrequent a discussion.
+
+It was like animals breaking down a fence about some sacred spot. Within
+a couple of minutes the affair had become highly improper. They had
+raised their voices, they had spoken with the utmost familiarity of
+almost unspeakable things. There had been even attempts at epigram.
+Athanasian epigrams. Bent the novelist had doubted if originally there
+had been a Third Person in the Trinity at all. He suggested a reaction
+from a too-Manichaean dualism at some date after the time of St. John's
+Gospel. He maintained obstinately that that Gospel was dualistic.
+
+The unpleasant quality of the talk was far more manifest in the
+retrospect than it had been at the time. It had seemed then bold
+and strange, but not impossible; now in the cold darkness it seemed
+sacrilegious. And the bishop's share, which was indeed only the weak
+yielding of a tired man to an atmosphere he had misjudged, became a
+disgraceful display of levity and bad faith. They had baited him.
+Some one had said that nowadays every one was an Arian, knowingly or
+unknowingly. They had not concealed their conviction that the bishop did
+not really believe in the Creeds he uttered.
+
+And that unfortunate first admission stuck terribly in his throat.
+
+Oh! Why had he made it?
+
+(3)
+
+
+Sleep had gone.
+
+The awakened sleeper groaned, sat up in the darkness, and felt gropingly
+in this unaccustomed bed and bedroom first for the edge of the bed and
+then for the electric light that was possibly on the little bedside
+table.
+
+The searching hand touched something. A water-bottle. The hand resumed
+its exploration. Here was something metallic and smooth, a stem. Either
+above or below there must be a switch....
+
+The switch was found, grasped, and turned.
+
+The darkness fled.
+
+In a mirror the sleeper saw the reflection of his face and a corner
+of the bed in which he lay. The lamp had a tilted shade that threw
+a slanting bar of shadow across the field of reflection, lighting a
+right-angled triangle very brightly and leaving the rest obscure. The
+bed was a very great one, a bed for the Anakim. It had a canopy with
+yellow silk curtains, surmounted by a gilded crown of carved wood.
+Between the curtains was a man's face, clean-shaven, pale, with
+disordered brown hair and weary, pale-blue eyes. He was clad in purple
+pyjamas, and the hand that now ran its fingers through the brown hair
+was long and lean and shapely.
+
+Beside the bed was a convenient little table bearing the light, a
+water-bottle and glass, a bunch of keys, a congested pocket-book, a
+gold-banded fountain pen, and a gold watch that indicated a quarter past
+three. On the lower edge of the picture in the mirror appeared the back
+of a gilt chair, over which a garment of peculiar construction had been
+carelessly thrown. It was in the form of that sleeveless cassock of
+purple, opening at the side, whose lower flap is called a bishop's
+apron; the corner of the frogged coat showed behind the chair-back, and
+the sash lay crumpled on the floor. Black doeskin breeches, still warmly
+lined with their pants, lay where they had been thrust off at the corner
+of the bed, partly covering black hose and silver-buckled shoes.
+
+For a moment the tired gaze of the man in the bed rested upon these
+evidences of his episcopal dignity. Then he turned from them to the
+watch at the bedside.
+
+He groaned helplessly.
+
+(4)
+
+
+These country doctors were no good. There wasn't a physician in the
+diocese. He must go to London.
+
+He looked into the weary eyes of his reflection and said, as one makes a
+reassuring promise, “London.”
+
+He was being worried. He was being intolerably worried, and he was ill
+and unable to sustain his positions. This doubt, this sudden discovery
+of controversial unsoundness, was only one aspect of his general
+neurasthenia. It had been creeping into his mind since the “Light Unden
+the Altar” controversy. Now suddenly it had leapt upon him from his own
+unwary lips.
+
+The immediate trouble arose from his loyalty. He had followed the King's
+example; he had become a total abstainer and, in addition, on his own
+account he had ceased to smoke. And his digestion, which Princhester
+had first made sensitive, was deranged. He was suffering chemically,
+suffering one of those nameless sequences of maladjustments that still
+defy our ordinary medical science. It was afflicting him with a general
+malaise, it was affecting his energy, his temper, all the balance and
+comfort of his nerves. All day he was weary; all night he was wakeful.
+He was estranged from his body. He was distressed by a sense of
+detachment from the things about him, by a curious intimation of
+unreality in everything he experienced. And with that went this levity
+of conscience, a heaviness of soul and a levity of conscience, that
+could make him talk as though the Creeds did not matter--as though
+nothing mattered....
+
+If only he could smoke!
+
+He was persuaded that a couple of Egyptian cigarettes, or three at the
+outside, a day, would do wonders in restoring his nervous calm. That,
+and just a weak whisky and soda at lunch and dinner. Suppose now--!
+
+His conscience, his sense of honour, deserted him. Latterly he had had
+several of these conscience-blanks; it was only when they were over that
+he realized that they had occurred.
+
+One might smoke up the chimney, he reflected. But he had no cigarettes!
+Perhaps if he were to slip downstairs....
+
+Why had he given up smoking?
+
+He groaned aloud. He and his reflection eyed one another in mutual
+despair.
+
+There came before his memory the image of a boy's face, a swarthy little
+boy, grinning, grinning with a horrible knowingness and pointing
+his finger--an accusing finger. It had been the most exasperating,
+humiliating, and shameful incident in the bishop's career. It was
+the afternoon for his fortnightly address to the Shop-girls' Church
+Association, and he had been seized with a panic fear, entirely
+irrational and unjustifiable, that he would not be able to deliver the
+address. The fear had arisen after lunch, had gripped his mind, and then
+as now had come the thought, “If only I could smoke!” And he had smoked.
+It seemed better to break a vow than fail the Association. He had fallen
+to the temptation with a completeness that now filled him with shame and
+horror. He had stalked Dunk, his valet-butler, out of the dining-room,
+had affected to need a book from the book-case beyond the sideboard,
+had gone insincerely to the sideboard humming “From Greenland's icy
+mountains,” and then, glancing over his shoulder, had stolen one of
+his own cigarettes, one of the fatter sort. With this and his bedroom
+matches he had gone off to the bottom of the garden among the laurels,
+looked everywhere except above the wall to be sure that he was alone,
+and at last lit up, only as he raised his eyes in gratitude for the
+first blissful inhalation to discover that dreadful little boy peeping
+at him from the crotch in the yew-tree in the next garden. As though God
+had sent him to be a witness!
+
+Their eyes had met. The bishop recalled with an agonized distinctness
+every moment, every error, of that shameful encounter. He had been too
+surprised to conceal the state of affairs from the pitiless scrutiny of
+those youthful eyes. He had instantly made as if to put the cigarette
+behind his back, and then as frankly dropped it....
+
+His soul would not be more naked at the resurrection. The little boy
+had stared, realized the state of affairs slowly but surely, pointed his
+finger....
+
+Never had two human beings understood each other more completely.
+
+A dirty little boy! Capable no doubt of a thousand kindred
+scoundrelisms.
+
+It seemed ages before the conscience-stricken bishop could tear himself
+from the spot and walk back, with such a pretence of dignity as he could
+muster, to the house.
+
+And instead of the discourse he had prepared for the Shop-girls' Church
+Association, he had preached on temptation and falling, and how he knew
+they had all fallen, and how he understood and could sympathize with the
+bitterness of a secret shame, a moving but unsuitable discourse that
+had already been subjected to misconstruction and severe reproof in the
+local press of Princhester.
+
+But the haunting thing in the bishop's memory was the face and gesture
+of the little boy. That grubby little finger stabbed him to the heart.
+
+“Oh, God!” he groaned. “The meanness of it! How did I bring myself--?”
+
+He turned out the light convulsively, and rolled over in the bed, making
+a sort of cocoon of himself. He bored his head into the pillow and
+groaned, and then struggled impatiently to throw the bed-clothes off
+himself. Then he sat up and talked aloud.
+
+“I must go to Brighton-Pomfrey,” he said. “And get a medical
+dispensation. If I do not smoke--”
+
+He paused for a long time.
+
+Then his voice sounded again in the darkness, speaking quietly, speaking
+with a note almost of satisfaction.
+
+“I shall go mad. I must smoke or I shall go mad.”
+
+For a long time he sat up in the great bed with his arms about his
+knees.
+
+(5)
+
+
+Fearful things came to him; things at once dreadfully blasphemous and
+entirely weak-minded.
+
+The triangle and the eye became almost visible upon the black background
+of night. They were very angry. They were spinning round and round
+faster and faster. Because he was a bishop and because really he did not
+believe fully and completely in the Trinity. At one and the same time
+he did not believe in the Trinity and was terrified by the anger of the
+Trinity at his unbelief.... He was afraid. He was aghast.... And oh! he
+was weary....
+
+He rubbed his eyes.
+
+“If I could have a cup of tea!” he said.
+
+Then he perceived with surprise that he had not thought of praying. What
+should he say? To what could he pray?
+
+He tried not to think of that whizzing Triangle, that seemed now to be
+nailed like a Catherine wheel to the very centre of his forehead,
+and yet at the same time to be at the apex of the universe. Against
+that--for protection against that--he was praying. It was by a great
+effort that at last he pronounced the words:
+
+“Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord ....”
+
+Presently he had turned up his light, and was prowling about the room.
+The clear inky dinginess that comes before the raw dawn of a spring
+morning, found his white face at the window, looking out upon the great
+terrace and the park.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND - THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY
+
+(1)
+
+
+IT was only in the last few years that the bishop had experienced
+these nervous and mental crises. He was a belated doubter. Whatever
+questionings had marked his intellectual adolescence had either been
+very slight or had been too adequately answered to leave any serious
+scars upon his convictions.
+
+And even now he felt that he was afflicted physically rather than
+mentally, that some protective padding of nerve-sheath or brain-case had
+worn thin and weak, and left him a prey to strange disturbances, rather
+than that any new process of thought was eating into his mind. These
+doubts in his mind were still not really doubts; they were rather alien
+and, for the first time, uncontrolled movements of his intelligence.
+He had had a sheltered upbringing; he was the well-connected son of
+a comfortable rectory, the only son and sole survivor of a family
+of three; he had been carefully instructed and he had been a willing
+learner; it had been easy and natural to take many things for granted.
+It had been very easy and pleasant for him to take the world as he found
+it and God as he found Him. Indeed for all his years up to manhood
+he had been able to take life exactly as in his infancy he took his
+carefully warmed and prepared bottle--unquestioningly and beneficially.
+
+And indeed that has been the way with most bishops since bishops began.
+
+It is a busy continuous process that turns boys into bishops, and it
+will stand few jars or discords. The student of ecclesiastical biography
+will find that an early vocation has in every age been almost universal
+among them; few are there among these lives that do not display the
+incipient bishop from the tenderest years. Bishop How of Wakefield
+composed hymns before he was eleven, and Archbishop Benson when scarcely
+older possessed a little oratory in which he conducted services and--a
+pleasant touch of the more secular boy--which he protected from a too
+inquisitive sister by means of a booby trap. It is rare that those
+marked for episcopal dignities go so far into the outer world
+as Archbishop Lang of York, who began as a barrister. This early
+predestination has always been the common episcopal experience.
+Archbishop Benson's early attempts at religious services remind one both
+of St. Thomas a Becket, the “boy bishop,” and those early ceremonies of
+St. Athanasius which were observed and inquired upon by the good bishop
+Alexander. (For though still a tender infant, St. Athanasius with
+perfect correctness and validity was baptizing a number of his innocent
+playmates, and the bishop who “had paused to contemplate the sports of
+the child remained to confirm the zeal of the missionary.”) And as with
+the bishop of the past, so with the bishop of the future; the Rev. H. J.
+Campbell, in his story of his soul's pilgrimage, has given us a pleasant
+picture of himself as a child stealing out into the woods to build
+himself a little altar.
+
+Such minds as these, settled as it were from the outset, are either
+incapable of real scepticism or become sceptical only after catastrophic
+changes. They understand the sceptical mind with difficulty, and their
+beliefs are regarded by the sceptical mind with incredulity. They have
+determined their forms of belief before their years of discretion, and
+once those forms are determined they are not very easily changed. Within
+the shell it has adopted the intelligence may be active and lively
+enough, may indeed be extraordinarily active and lively, but only within
+the shell.
+
+There is an entire difference in the mental quality of those who are
+converts to a faith and those who are brought up in it. The former know
+it from outside as well as from within. They know not only that it is,
+but also that it is not. The latter have a confidence in their creed
+that is one with their apprehension of sky or air or gravitation. It
+is a primary mental structure, and they not only do not doubt but they
+doubt the good faith of those who do. They think that the Atheist and
+Agnostic really believe but are impelled by a mysterious obstinacy to
+deny. So it had been with the Bishop of Princhester; not of cunning
+or design but in simple good faith he had accepted all the inherited
+assurances of his native rectory, and held by Church, Crown, Empire,
+decorum, respectability, solvency--and compulsory Greek at the Little
+Go--as his father had done before him. If in his undergraduate days he
+had said a thing or two in the modern vein, affected the socialism
+of William Morris and learnt some Swinburne by heart, it was out of a
+conscious wildness. He did not wish to be a prig. He had taken a far
+more genuine interest in the artistry of ritual.
+
+Through all the time of his incumbency of the church of the Holy
+Innocents, St. John's Wood, and of his career as the bishop suffragan
+of Pinner, he had never faltered from his profound confidence in those
+standards of his home. He had been kind, popular, and endlessly active.
+His undergraduate socialism had expanded simply and sincerely into a
+theory of administrative philanthropy. He knew the Webbs. He was
+as successful with working-class audiences as with fashionable
+congregations. His home life with Lady Ella (she was the daughter of
+the fifth Earl of Birkenholme) and his five little girls was simple,
+beautiful, and happy as few homes are in these days of confusion. Until
+he became Bishop of Princhester--he followed Hood, the first bishop,
+as the reign of his Majesty King Edward the Peacemaker drew to its
+close--no anticipation of his coming distress fell across his path.
+
+(2)
+
+
+He came to Princhester an innocent and trustful man. The home life
+at the old rectory of Otteringham was still his standard of truth and
+reality. London had not disillusioned him. It was a strange waste of
+people, it made him feel like a missionary in infidel parts, but it was
+a kindly waste. It was neither antagonistic nor malicious. He had always
+felt there that if he searched his Londoner to the bottom, he would
+find the completest recognition of the old rectory and all its data and
+implications.
+
+But Princhester was different.
+
+Princhester made one think that recently there had been a second and
+much more serious Fall.
+
+Princhester was industrial and unashamed. It was a countryside savagely
+invaded by forges and mine shafts and gaunt black things. It was scarred
+and impeded and discoloured. Even before that invasion, when the heather
+was not in flower it must have been a black country. Its people were
+dour uncandid individuals, who slanted their heads and knitted their
+brows to look at you. Occasionally one saw woods brown and blistered by
+the gases from chemical works. Here and there remained old rectories,
+closely reminiscent of the dear old home at Otteringham, jostled and
+elbowed and overshadowed by horrible iron cylinders belching smoke and
+flame. The fine old abbey church of Princhester, which was the cathedral
+of the new diocese, looked when first he saw it like a lady Abbess who
+had taken to drink and slept in a coal truck. She minced apologetically
+upon the market-place; the parvenu Town Hall patronized and protected
+her as if she were a poor relation....
+
+The old aristocracy of the countryside was unpicturesquely decayed. The
+branch of the Walshinghams, Lady Ella's cousins, who lived near Pringle,
+was poor, proud and ignoble. And extremely unpopular. The rich people
+of the country were self-made and inclined to nonconformity, the
+working-people were not strictly speaking a “poor,” they were highly
+paid, badly housed, and deeply resentful. They went in vast droves to
+football matches, and did not care a rap if it rained. The prevailing
+wind was sarcastic. To come here from London was to come from
+atmospheric blue-greys to ashen-greys, from smoke and soft smut to grime
+and black grimness.
+
+The bishop had been charmed by the historical associations of
+Princhester when first the see was put before his mind. His realization
+of his diocese was a profound shock.
+
+Only one hint had he had of what was coming. He had met during
+his season of congratulations Lord Gatling dining unusually at the
+Athenaeum. Lord Gatling and he did not talk frequently, but on this
+occasion the great racing peer came over to him. “You will feel like a
+cherub in a stokehole,” Lord Gatling had said....
+
+“They used to heave lumps of slag at old Hood's gaiters,” said Lord
+Gatling.
+
+“In London a bishop's a lord and a lark and nobody minds him,” said Lord
+Gatling, “but Princhester is different. It isn't used to bishops....
+Well,--I hope you'll get to like 'em.”
+
+(3)
+
+
+Trouble began with a fearful row about the position of the bishop's
+palace. Hood had always evaded this question, and a number of
+strong-willed self-made men of wealth and influence, full of local
+patriotism and that competitive spirit which has made England what it
+is, already intensely irritated by Hood's prevarications, were resolved
+to pin his successor to an immediate decision. Of this the new bishop
+was unaware. Mindful of a bishop's constant need to travel, he was
+disposed to seek a home within easy reach of Pringle Junction, from
+which nearly every point in the diocese could be simply and easily
+reached. This fell in with Lady Ella's liking for the rare rural
+quiet of the Kibe valley and the neighbourhood of her cousins the
+Walshinghams. Unhappily it did not fall in with the inflexible
+resolution of each and every one of the six leading towns of the see to
+put up, own, obtrude, boast, and swagger about the biggest and showiest
+thing in episcopal palaces in all industrial England, and the new
+bishop had already taken a short lease and gone some way towards the
+acquisition of Ganford House, two miles from Pringle, before he realized
+the strength and fury of these local ambitions.
+
+At first the magnates and influences seemed to be fighting only among
+themselves, and he was so ill-advised as to broach the Ganford House
+project as a compromise that would glorify no one unfairly, and leave
+the erection of an episcopal palace for some future date when he perhaps
+would have the good fortune to have passed to “where beyond these
+voices there is peace,” forgetting altogether among other oversights
+the importance of architects and builders in local affairs. His
+proposal seemed for a time to concentrate the rich passions of the whole
+countryside upon himself and his wife.
+
+Because they did not leave Lady Ella alone. The Walshinghams were
+already unpopular in their county on account of a poverty and shyness
+that made them seem “stuck up” to successful captains of industry
+only too ready with the hand of friendship, the iron grip indeed
+of friendship, consciously hospitable and eager for admission and
+endorsements. And Princhester in particular was under the sway of that
+enterprising weekly, The White Blackbird, which was illustrated by,
+which indeed monopolized the gifts of, that brilliant young caricaturist
+“The Snicker.”
+
+It had seemed natural for Lady Ella to acquiesce in the proposals of the
+leading Princhester photographer. She had always helped where she could
+in her husband's public work, and she had been popular upon her own
+merits in Wealdstone. The portrait was abominable enough in itself; it
+dwelt on her chin, doubled her age, and denied her gentleness, but it
+was a mere starting-point for the subtle extravagance of The Snicker's
+poisonous gift.... The thing came upon the bishop suddenly from the
+book-stall at Pringle Junction.
+
+He kept it carefully from Lady Ella.... It was only later that he found
+that a copy of The White Blackbird had been sent to her, and that she
+was keeping the horror from him. It was in her vein that she should
+reproach herself for being a vulnerable side to him.
+
+Even when the bishop capitulated in favour of Princhester, that decision
+only opened a fresh trouble for him. Princhester wanted the palace to be
+a palace; it wanted to combine all the best points of Lambeth and
+Fulham with the marble splendours of a good modern bank. The bishop's
+architectural tastes, on the other hand, were rationalistic. He was all
+for building a useful palace in undertones, with a green slate roof
+and long horizontal lines. What he wanted more than anything else was
+a quite remote wing with a lot of bright little bedrooms and a
+sitting-room and so on, complete in itself, examination hall and
+everything, with a long intricate connecting passage and several doors,
+to prevent the ordination candidates straying all over the place and
+getting into the talk and the tea. But the diocese wanted a proud
+archway--and turrets, and did not care a rap if the ordination
+candidates slept about on the carpets in the bishop's bedroom.
+Ordination candidates were quite outside the sphere of its imagination.
+
+And he disappointed Princhester with his equipage. Princhester had
+a feeling that it deserved more for coming over to the church from
+nonconformity as it was doing. It wanted a bishop in a mitre and a gilt
+coach. It wanted a pastoral crook. It wanted something to go with its
+mace and its mayor. And (obsessed by The Snicker) it wanted less of Lady
+Ella. The cruelty and unreason of these attacks upon his wife distressed
+the bishop beyond measure, and baffled him hopelessly. He could not see
+any means of checking them nor of defending or justifying her against
+them.
+
+The palace was awaiting its tenant, but the controversies and
+bitternesses were still swinging and swaying and developing when King
+George was being crowned. Close upon that event came a wave of social
+discontent, the great railway strike, a curious sense of social and
+political instability, and the first beginnings of the bishop's ill
+health.
+
+(4)
+
+
+There came a day of exceptional fatigue and significance.
+
+The industrial trouble was a very real distress to the bishop. He had
+a firm belief that it is a function of the church to act as mediator
+between employer and employed. It was a common saying of his that the
+aim of socialism--the right sort of socialism--was to Christianize
+employment. Regardless of suspicion on either hand, regardless of
+very distinct hints that he should “mind his own business,” he exerted
+himself in a search for methods of reconciliation. He sought out every
+one who seemed likely to be influential on either side, and did his
+utmost to discover the conditions of a settlement. As far as possible
+and with the help of a not very efficient chaplain he tried to combine
+such interviews with his more normal visiting.
+
+At times, and this was particularly the case on this day, he seemed to
+be discovering nothing but the incurable perversity and militancy of
+human nature. It was a day under an east wind, when a steely-blue sky
+full of colourless light filled a stiff-necked world with whitish high
+lights and inky shadows. These bright harsh days of barometric high
+pressure in England rouse and thwart every expectation of the happiness
+of spring. And as the bishop drove through the afternoon in a hired
+fly along a rutted road of slag between fields that were bitterly wired
+against the Sunday trespasser, he fell into a despondent meditation upon
+the political and social outlook.
+
+His thoughts were of a sort not uncommon in those days. The world was
+strangely restless. Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had
+been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some
+compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people's ideas,
+and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow. Not that Queen
+Victoria had really been a paper-weight or any weight at all, but
+it happened that she died as an epoch closed, an epoch of tremendous
+stabilities. Her son, already elderly, had followed as the selvedge
+follows the piece, he had passed and left the new age stripped bare.
+In nearly every department of economic and social life now there was
+upheaval, and it was an upheaval very different in character from the
+radicalism and liberalism of the Victorian days. There were not only
+doubt and denial, but now there were also impatience and unreason.
+People argued less and acted quicker. There was a pride in rebellion for
+its own sake, an indiscipline and disposition to sporadic violence that
+made it extremely hard to negotiate any reconciliations or compromises.
+Behind every extremist it seemed stood a further extremist prepared to
+go one better....
+
+The bishop had spent most of the morning with one of the big employers,
+a tall dark man, lean and nervous, and obviously tired and worried
+by the struggle. He did not conceal his opinion that the church was
+meddling with matters quite outside its sphere. Never had it been
+conveyed to the bishop before how remote a rich and established
+Englishman could consider the church from reality.
+
+“You've got no hold on them,” he said. “It isn't your sphere.”
+
+And again: “They'll listen to you--if you speak well. But they don't
+believe you know anything about it, and they don't trust your good
+intentions. They won't mind a bit what you say unless you drop something
+they can use against us.”
+
+The bishop tried a few phrases. He thought there might be something in
+co-operation, in profit-sharing, in some more permanent relationship
+between the business and the employee.
+
+“There isn't,” said the employer compactly. “It's just the malice of
+being inferior against the man in control. It's just the spirit of
+insubordination and boredom with duty. This trouble's as old as the
+Devil.”
+
+“But that is exactly the business of the church,” said the bishop
+brightly, “to reconcile men to their duty.”
+
+“By chanting the Athanasian creed at 'em, I suppose,” said the big
+employer, betraying the sneer he had been hiding hitherto.
+
+“This thing is a fight,” said the big employer, carrying on before the
+bishop could reply. “Religion had better get out of the streets until
+this thing is over. The men won't listen to reason. They don't mean
+to. They're bit by Syndicalism. They're setting out, I tell you, to be
+unreasonable and impossible. It isn't an argument; it's a fight. They
+don't want to make friends with the employer. They want to make an end
+to the employer. Whatever we give them they'll take and press us for
+more. Directly we make terms with the leaders the men go behind
+it.... It's a raid on the whole system. They don't mean to work the
+system--anyhow. I'm the capitalist, and the capitalist has to go. I'm to
+be bundled out of my works, and some--some “--he seemed to be rejecting
+unsuitable words--“confounded politician put in. Much good it would do
+them. But before that happens I'm going to fight. You would.”
+
+The bishop walked to the window and stood staring at the brilliant
+spring bulbs in the big employer's garden, and at a long vista of
+newly-mown lawn under great shapely trees just budding into green.
+
+“I can't admit,” he said, “that these troubles lie outside the sphere of
+the church.”
+
+The employer came and stood beside him. He felt he was being a little
+hard on the bishop, but he could not see any way of making things
+easier.
+
+“One doesn't want Sacred Things,” he tried, “in a scrap like this.
+
+“We've got to mend things or end things,” continued the big employer.
+“Nothing goes on for ever. Things can't last as they are going on
+now....”
+
+Then he went on abruptly to something that for a time he had been
+keeping back.
+
+“Of course just at present the church may do a confounded lot of harm.
+Some of you clerical gentlemen are rather too fond of talking socialism
+and even preaching socialism. Don't think I want to be overcritical.
+I admit there's no end of things to be said for a proper sort of
+socialism, Ruskin, and all that. We're all Socialists nowadays.
+Ideals--excellent. But--it gets misunderstood. It gives the men a sense
+of moral support. It makes them fancy that they are It. Encourages them
+to forget duties and set up preposterous claims. Class war and all that
+sort of thing. You gentlemen of the clergy don't quite realize that
+socialism may begin with Ruskin and end with Karl Marx. And that from
+the Class War to the Commune is just one step.”
+
+(5)
+
+
+From this conversation the bishop had made his way to the vicarage of
+Mogham Banks. The vicar of Mogham Banks was a sacerdotal socialist of
+the most advanced type, with the reputation of being closely in touch
+with the labour extremists. He was a man addicted to banners, prohibited
+ornaments, special services at unusual hours, and processions in the
+streets. His taste in chasubles was loud, he gardened in a cassock
+and, it was said, he slept in his biretta; he certainly slept in a hair
+shirt, and he littered his church with flowers, candles, side altars,
+confessional boxes, requests for prayers for the departed, and the like.
+There had already been two Kensitite demonstrations at his services, and
+altogether he was a source of considerable anxiety to the bishop. The
+bishop did his best not to know too exactly what was going on at Mogham
+Banks. Sooner or later he felt he would be forced to do something--and
+the longer he could put that off the better. But the Rev. Morrice Deans
+had promised to get together three or four prominent labour leaders for
+tea and a frank talk, and the opportunity was one not to be missed.
+So the bishop, after a hasty and not too digestible lunch in the
+refreshment room at Pringle, was now in a fly that smelt of straw
+and suggested infectious hospital patients, on his way through the
+industry-scarred countryside to this second conversation.
+
+The countryside had never seemed so scarred to him as it did that day.
+
+It was probably the bright hard spring sunshine that emphasized
+the contrast between that dear England of hedges and homes and the
+south-west wind in which his imagination lived, and the crude presences
+of a mechanical age. Never before had the cuttings and heapings, the
+smashing down of trees, the obtrusion of corrugated iron and tar, the
+belchings of smoke and the haste, seemed so harsh and disregardful
+of all the bishop's world. Across the fields a line of gaunt iron
+standards, abominably designed, carried an electric cable to some
+unknown end. The curve of the hill made them seem a little out of the
+straight, as if they hurried and bent forward furtively.
+
+“Where are they going?” asked the bishop, leaning forward to look out of
+the window of the fly, and then: “Where is it all going?”
+
+And presently the road was under repair, and was being done at a great
+pace with a huge steam-roller, mechanically smashed granite, and kettles
+of stinking stuff, asphalt or something of that sort, that looked
+and smelt like Milton's hell. Beyond, a gaunt hoarding advertised
+extensively the Princhester Music Hall, a mean beastly place that
+corrupted boys and girls; and also it clamoured of tyres and potted
+meats....
+
+The afternoon's conference gave him no reassuring answer to his
+question, “Where is it all going?”
+
+The afternoon's conference did no more than intensify the new and
+strange sense of alienation from the world that the morning's talk had
+evoked.
+
+The three labour extremists that Morrice Deans had assembled obviously
+liked the bishop and found him picturesque, and were not above a certain
+snobbish gratification at the purple-trimmed company they were in, but
+it was clear that they regarded his intervention in the great dispute
+as if it were a feeble waving from the bank across the waters of a great
+river.
+
+“There's an incurable misunderstanding between the modern employer and
+the modern employed,” the chief labour spokesman said, speaking in a
+broad accent that completely hid from him and the bishop and every one
+the fact that he was by far the best-read man of the party. “Disraeli
+called them the Two Nations, but that was long ago. Now it's a case
+of two species. Machinery has made them into different species. The
+employer lives away from his work-people, marries a wife foreign, out of
+a county family or suchlike, trains his children from their very birth
+in a different manner. Why, the growth curve is different for the two
+species. They haven't even a common speech between them. One looks east
+and the other looks west. How can you expect them to agree? Of course
+they won't agree. We've got to fight it out. They say we're their
+slaves for ever. Have you ever read Lady Bell's 'At the Works'? A
+well-intentioned woman, but she gives the whole thing away. We say,
+No! It's our sort and not your sort. We'll do without you. We'll get a
+little more education and then we'll do without you. We're pressing for
+all we can get, and when we've got that we'll take breath and press
+for more. We're the Morlocks. Coming up. It isn't our fault that we've
+differentiated.”
+
+“But you haven't understood the drift of Christianity,” said the bishop.
+“It's just to assert that men are One community and not two.”
+
+“There's not much of that in the Creeds,” said a second labour leader
+who was a rationalist. “There's not much of that in the services of the
+church.”
+
+The vicar spoke before his bishop, and indeed he had plenty of time
+to speak before his bishop. “Because you will not set yourselves to
+understand the symbolism of her ritual,” he said.
+
+“If the church chooses to speak in riddles,” said the rationalist.
+
+“Symbols,” said Morrice Deans, “need not be riddles,” and for a time the
+talk eddied about this minor issue and the chief labour spokesman and
+the bishop looked at one another. The vicar instanced and explained
+certain apparently insignificant observances, his antagonist was
+contemptuously polite to these explanations. “That's all very pratty,”
+ he said....
+
+The bishop wished that fine points of ceremonial might have been left
+out of the discussion.
+
+Something much bigger than that was laying hold of his intelligence, the
+realization of a world extravagantly out of hand. The sky, the wind,
+the telegraph poles, had been jabbing in the harsh lesson of these men's
+voices, that the church, as people say, “wasn't in it.” And that at
+the same time the church held the one remedy for all this ugliness and
+contention in its teaching of the universal fatherhood of God and the
+universal brotherhood of men. Only for some reason he hadn't the phrases
+and he hadn't the voice to assert this over their wrangling and their
+stiff resolution. He wanted to think the whole business out thoroughly,
+for the moment he had nothing to say, and there was the labour leader
+opposite waiting smilingly to hear what he had to say so soon as the
+bout between the vicar and the rationalist was over.
+
+(6)
+
+
+That morning in the long galleries of the bishop's imagination a fresh
+painting had been added. It was a big wall painting rather in the manner
+of Puvis de Chavannes. And the central figure had been the bishop of
+Princhester himself. He had been standing upon the steps of the
+great door of the cathedral that looks upon the marketplace where the
+tram-lines meet, and he had been dressed very magnificently and rather
+after the older use. He had been wearing a tunicle and dalmatic under a
+chasuble, a pectoral cross, purple gloves, sandals and buskins, a mitre
+and his presentation ring. In his hand he had borne his pastoral staff.
+And the clustering pillars and arches of the great doorway were painted
+with a loving flat particularity that omitted nothing but the sooty
+tinge of the later discolourations.
+
+On his right hand had stood a group of employers very richly dressed
+in the fashion of the fifteenth century, and on the left a rather more
+numerous group of less decorative artisans. With them their wives and
+children had been shown, all greatly impressed by the canonicals. Every
+one had been extremely respectful.
+
+He had been reconciling the people and blessing them and calling them
+his “sheep” and his “little children.”
+
+But all this was so different.
+
+Neither party resembled sheep or little children in the least degree. .
+
+The labour leader became impatient with the ritualistic controversy; he
+set his tea-cup aside out of danger and leant across the corner of the
+table to the bishop and spoke in a sawing undertone. “You see,” he said,
+“the church does not talk our language. I doubt if it understands our
+language. I doubt if we understand clearly where we are ourselves. These
+things have to be fought out and hammered out. It's a big dusty dirty
+noisy job. It may be a bloody job before it's through. You can't
+suddenly call a halt in the middle of the scrap and have a sort of
+millennium just because you want it....
+
+“Of course if the church had a plan,” he said, “if it had a proposal to
+make, if it had anything more than a few pious palliatives to suggest,
+that might be different. But has it?”
+
+The bishop had a bankrupt feeling. On the spur of the moment he could
+say no more than: “It offers its mediation.”
+
+(7)
+
+
+Full as he was with the preoccupation of these things and so a little
+slow and inattentive in his movements, the bishop had his usual luck
+at Pringle Junction and just missed the 7.27 for Princhester. He might
+perhaps have got it by running through the subway and pushing past
+people, but bishops must not run through subways and push past people.
+His mind swore at the mischance, even if his lips refrained.
+
+He was hungry and, tired; he would not get to the palace now until long
+after nine; dinner would be over and Lady Ella would naturally suppose
+he had dined early with the Rev. Morrice Deans. Very probably there
+would be nothing ready for him at all.
+
+He tried to think he was exercising self-control, but indeed all his
+sub-conscious self was busy in a manner that would not have disgraced
+Tertullian with the eternal welfare of those city fathers whose
+obstinacy had fixed the palace at Princhester. He walked up and down the
+platform, gripping his hands very tightly behind him, and maintaining
+a serene upcast countenance by a steadfast effort. It seemed a small
+matter to him that the placards of the local evening papers should
+proclaim “Lloyd George's Reconciliation Meeting at Wombash Broken up
+by Suffragettes.” For a year now he had observed a strict rule against
+buying the products of the local press, and he saw no reason for varying
+this protective regulation.
+
+His mind was full of angry helplessness.
+
+Was he to blame, was the church to blame, for its powerlessness in these
+social disputes? Could an abler man with a readier eloquence have done
+more?
+
+He envied the cleverness of Cardinal Manning. Manning would have got
+right into the front of this affair. He would have accumulated credit
+for his church and himself....
+
+But would he have done much?...
+
+The bishop wandered along the platform to its end, and stood
+contemplating the convergent ways that gather together beyond the
+station and plunge into the hillside and the wilderness of sidings and
+trucks, signal-boxes, huts, coal-pits, electric standards, goods sheds,
+turntables, and engine-houses, that ends in a bluish bricked-up cliff
+against the hill. A train rushed with a roar and clatter into the
+throat of the great tunnel and was immediately silenced; its rear lights
+twinkled and vanished, and then out of that huge black throat came wisps
+of white steam and curled slowly upward like lazy snakes until they
+caught the slanting sunshine. For the first time the day betrayed
+a softness and touched this scene of black energy to gold. All late
+afternoons are beautiful, whatever the day has been--if only there is a
+gleam of sun. And now a kind of mechanical greatness took the place of
+mere black disorder in the bishop's perception of his see. It was harsh,
+it was vast and strong, it was no lamb he had to rule but a dragon.
+Would it ever be given to him to overcome his dragon, to lead it home,
+and bless it?
+
+He stood at the very end of the platform, with his gaitered legs wide
+apart and his hands folded behind him, staring beyond all visible
+things.
+
+Should he do something very bold and striking? Should he invite both men
+and masters to the cathedral, and preach tremendous sermons to them upon
+these living issues?
+
+Short sermons, of course.
+
+But stating the church's attitude with a new and convincing vigour.
+
+He had a vision of the great aisle strangely full and alive and astir.
+The organ notes still echoed in the fretted vaulting, as the preacher
+made his way from the chancel to the pulpit. The congregation was tense
+with expectation, and for some reason his mind dwelt for a long time
+upon the figure of the preacher ascending the steps of the pulpit.
+Outside the day was dark and stormy, so that the stained-glass windows
+looked absolutely dead. For a little while the preacher prayed. Then in
+the attentive silence the tenor of the preacher would begin, a thin jet
+of sound, a ray of light in the darkness, speaking to all these men as
+they had never been spoken to before....
+
+Surely so one might call a halt to all these harsh conflicts. So one
+might lay hands afresh upon these stubborn minds, one might win them
+round to look at Christ the Master and Servant....
+
+That, he thought, would be a good phrase: “Christ the Master and
+Servant.”....
+
+“Members of one Body,” that should be his text.... At last it was
+finished. The big congregation, which had kept so still, sighed and
+stirred. The task of reconciliation was as good as done. “And now to God
+the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost....”
+
+Outside the day had become suddenly bright, the threatening storm had
+drifted away, and great shafts of coloured light from the pictured
+windows were smiting like arrows amidst his hearers....
+
+This idea of a great sermon upon capital and labour did so powerfully
+grip the bishop's imagination that he came near to losing the 8.27 train
+also.
+
+He discovered it when it was already in the station. He had to walk down
+the platform very quickly. He did not run, but his gaiters, he felt,
+twinkled more than a bishop's should.
+
+(8)
+
+
+Directly he met his wife he realized that he had to hear something
+important and unpleasant.
+
+She stood waiting for him in the inner hall, looking very grave and
+still. The light fell upon her pale face and her dark hair and her long
+white silken dress, making her seem more delicate and unworldly than
+usual and making the bishop feel grimy and sordid.
+
+“I must have a wash,” he said, though before he had thought of nothing
+but food. “I have had nothing to eat since tea-time--and that was mostly
+talk.”
+
+Lady Ella considered. “There are cold things.... You shall have a tray
+in the study. Not in the dining-room. Eleanor is there. I want to tell
+you something. But go upstairs first and wash your poor tired face.”
+
+“Nothing serious, I hope?” he asked, struck by an unusual quality in her
+voice.
+
+“I will tell you,” she evaded, and after a moment of mutual scrutiny he
+went past her upstairs.
+
+Since they had come to Princhester Lady Ella had changed very markedly.
+She seemed to her husband to have gained in dignity; she was stiller
+and more restrained; a certain faint arrogance, a touch of the “ruling
+class” manner had dwindled almost to the vanishing point. There had been
+a time when she had inclined to an authoritative hauteur, when she had
+seemed likely to develop into one of those aggressive and interfering
+old ladies who play so overwhelming a part in British public affairs.
+She had been known to initiate adverse judgments, to exercise the snub,
+to cut and humiliate. Princhester had done much to purge her of such
+tendencies. Princhester had made her think abundantly, and had put a new
+and subtler quality into her beauty. It had taken away the least little
+disposition to rustle as she moved, and it had softened her voice.
+
+Now, when presently she stood in the study, she showed a new
+circumspection in her treatment of her husband. She surveyed the tray
+before him.
+
+“You ought not to drink that Burgundy,” she said. “I can see you
+are dog-tired. It was uncorked yesterday, and anyhow it is not very
+digestible. This cold meat is bad enough. You ought to have one of those
+quarter bottles of champagne you got for my last convalescence. There's
+more than a dozen left over.”
+
+The bishop felt that this was a pretty return of his own kindly thoughts
+“after many days,” and soon Dunk, his valet-butler, was pouring out the
+precious and refreshing glassful....
+
+“And now, dear?” said the bishop, feeling already much better.
+
+Lady Ella had come round to the marble fireplace. The mantel-piece was
+a handsome work by a Princhester artist in the Gill style--with
+contemplative ascetics as supporters.
+
+“I am worried about Eleanor,” said Lady Ella.
+
+“She is in the dining-room now,” she said, “having some dinner. She came
+in about a quarter past eight, half way through dinner.”
+
+“Where had she been?” asked the bishop.
+
+“Her dress was torn--in two places. Her wrist had been twisted and a
+little sprained.”
+
+“My dear!”
+
+“Her face--Grubby! And she had been crying.”
+
+“But, my dear, what had happened to her? You don't mean--?”
+
+Husband and wife stared at one another aghast. Neither of them said the
+horrid word that flamed between them.
+
+“Merciful heaven!” said the bishop, and assumed an attitude of despair.
+
+“I didn't know she knew any of them. But it seems it is the second
+Walshingham girl--Phoebe. It's impossible to trace a girl's thoughts and
+friends. She persuaded her to go.”
+
+“But did she understand?”
+
+“That's the serious thing,” said Lady Ella.
+
+She seemed to consider whether he could bear the blow.
+
+“She understands all sorts of things. She argues.... I am quite unable
+to argue with her.”
+
+“About this vote business?”
+
+“About all sorts of things. Things I didn't imagine she had heard of.
+I knew she had been reading books. But I never imagined that she could
+have understood....”
+
+The bishop laid down his knife and fork.
+
+“One may read in books, one may even talk of things, without fully
+understanding,” he said.
+
+Lady Ella tried to entertain this comforting thought. “It isn't like
+that,” she said at last. “She talks like a grown-up person. This--this
+escapade is just an accident. But things have gone further than that.
+She seems to think--that she is not being educated properly here, that
+she ought to go to a College. As if we were keeping things from her....”
+
+The bishop reconsidered his plate.
+
+“But what things?” he said.
+
+“She says we get all round her,” said Lady Ella, and left the
+implications of that phrase to unfold.
+
+(9)
+
+
+For a time the bishop said very little.
+
+Lady Ella had found it necessary to make her first announcement standing
+behind him upon the hearthrug, but now she sat upon the arm of the great
+armchair as close to him as possible, and spoke in a more familiar tone.
+
+The thing, she said, had come to her as a complete surprise. Everything
+had seemed so safe. Eleanor had been thoughtful, it was true, but it had
+never occurred to her mother that she had really been thinking--about
+such things as she had been thinking about. She had ranged in the
+library, and displayed a disposition to read the weekly papers and the
+monthly reviews. But never a sign of discontent.
+
+“But I don't understand,” said the bishop. “Why is she discontented?
+What is there that she wants different?”
+
+“Exactly,” said Lady Ella.
+
+“She has got this idea that life here is secluded in some way,” she
+expanded. “She used words like 'secluded' and 'artificial' and--what was
+it?--'cloistered.' And she said--”
+
+Lady Ella paused with an effect of exact retrospection.
+
+“'Out there,' she said, 'things are alive. Real things are happening.'
+It is almost as if she did not fully believe--”
+
+Lady Ella paused again.
+
+The bishop sat with his arm over the back of his chair, and his face
+downcast.
+
+“The ferment of youth,” he said at last. “The ferment of youth. Who has
+given her these ideas?”
+
+Lady Ella did not know. She could have thought a school like St. Aubyns
+would have been safe, but nowadays nothing was safe. It was clear the
+girls who went there talked as girls a generation ago did not talk.
+Their people at home encouraged them to talk and profess opinions about
+everything. It seemed that Phoebe Walshingham and Lady Kitty Kingdom
+were the leaders in these premature mental excursions. Phoebe aired
+religious doubts.
+
+“But little Phoebe!” said the bishop.
+
+“Kitty,” said Lady Ella, “has written a novel.”
+
+“Already!”
+
+“With elopements in it--and all sorts of things. She's had it typed.
+You'd think Mary Crosshampton would know better than to let her daughter
+go flourishing the family imagination about in that way.”
+
+“Eleanor told you?”
+
+“By way of showing that they think of--things in general.”
+
+The bishop reflected. “She wants to go to College.”
+
+“They want to go in a set.”
+
+“I wonder if college can be much worse than school.... She's eighteen--?
+But I will talk to her....”
+
+(10)
+
+
+All our children are changelings. They are perpetually fresh strangers.
+Every day they vanish and a new person masquerades as yesterday's child
+until some unexpected development betrays the cheat.
+
+The bishop had still to learn this perennial newness of the young. He
+learnt it in half an hour at the end of a fatiguing day.
+
+He went into the dining-room. He went in as carelessly as possible and
+smoking a cigarette. He had an honourable dread of being portentous in
+his family; almost ostentatiously he laid the bishop aside. Eleanor had
+finished her meal, and was sitting in the arm-chair by the fire with one
+hand holding her sprained wrist.
+
+“Well,” he said, and strolled to the hearthrug. He had had an odd idea
+that he would find her still dirty, torn, and tearful, as her mother had
+described her, a little girl in a scrape. But she had changed into
+her best white evening frock and put up her hair, and became in the
+firelight more of a lady, a very young lady but still a lady, than she
+had ever been to him before. She was dark like her mother, but not of
+the same willowy type; she had more of her father's sturdy build, and
+she had developed her shoulders at hockey and tennis. The firelight
+brought out the gracious reposeful lines of a body that ripened in
+adolescence. And though there was a vibration of resolution in her voice
+she spoke like one who is under her own control.
+
+“Mother has told you that I have disgraced myself,” she began.
+
+“No,” said the bishop, weighing it. “No. But you seem to have been
+indiscreet, little Norah.”
+
+“I got excited,” she said. “They began turning out the other
+women--roughly. I was indignant.”
+
+“You didn't go to interrupt?” he asked.
+
+She considered. “No,” she said. “But I went.”
+
+He liked her disposition to get it right. “On that side,” he assisted.
+
+“It isn't the same thing as really meaning, Daddy,” she said.
+
+“And then things happened?”
+
+“Yes,” she said to the fire.
+
+A pause followed. If they had been in a law-court, her barrister would
+have said, “That is my case, my lord.” The bishop prepared to open the
+next stage in the proceedings.
+
+“I think, Norah, you shouldn't have been there at all,” he said.
+
+“Mother says that.”
+
+“A man in my position is apt to be judged by his family. You commit
+more than yourself when you commit an indiscretion. Apart from that, it
+wasn't the place for a girl to be at. You are not a child now. We give
+you freedom--more freedom than most girls get--because we think you
+will use it wisely. You knew--enough to know that there was likely to be
+trouble.”
+
+The girl looked into the fire and spoke very carefully. “I don't think
+that I oughtn't to know the things that are going on.”
+
+The bishop studied her face for an instant. It struck him that they
+had reached something very fundamental as between parent and child. His
+modernity showed itself in the temperance of his reply.
+
+“Don't you think, my dear, that on the whole your mother and I, who have
+lived longer and know more, are more likely to know when it is best that
+you should begin to know--this or that?”
+
+The girl knitted her brows and seemed to be reading her answer out of
+the depths of the coals. She was on the verge of speaking, altered her
+mind and tried a different beginning.
+
+“I think that every one must do their thinking--his
+thinking--for--oneself,” she said awkwardly.
+
+“You mean you can't trust--?”
+
+“It isn't trusting. But one knows best for oneself when one is hungry.”
+
+“And you find yourself hungry?”
+
+“I want to find out for myself what all this trouble about votes and
+things means.”
+
+“And we starve you--intellectually?”
+
+“You know I don't think that. But you are busy....”
+
+“Aren't you being perhaps a little impatient, Eleanor? After all--you
+are barely eighteen.... We have given you all sorts of liberties.”
+
+Her silence admitted it. “But still,” she said after a long pause,
+“there are other girls, younger than I am, in these things. They talk
+about--oh, all sorts of things. Freely....”
+
+“You've been awfully good to me,” she said irrelevantly. “And of course
+this meeting was all pure accident.”
+
+Father and daughter remained silent for awhile, seeking a better grip.
+
+“What exactly do you want, Eleanor?” he asked.
+
+She looked up at him. “Generally?” she asked.
+
+“Your mother has the impression that you are discontented.”
+
+“Discontented is a horrid word.”
+
+“Well--unsatisfied.”
+
+She remained still for a time. She felt the moment had come to make her
+demand.
+
+“I would like to go to Newnham or Somerville--and work. I feel--so
+horribly ignorant. Of all sorts of things. If I were a son I should
+go--”
+
+“Ye--es,” said the bishop and reflected.
+
+He had gone rather far in the direction of the Woman Suffrage people;
+he had advocated equality of standard in all sorts of matters, and the
+memory of these utterances hampered him.
+
+“You could read here,” he tried.
+
+“If I were a son, you wouldn't say that.”
+
+His reply was vague. “But in this home,” he said, “we have a certain
+atmosphere.”
+
+He left her to imply her differences in sensibility and response from
+the hardier male.
+
+Her hesitation marked the full gravity of her reply. “It's just that,”
+ she said. “One feels--” She considered it further. “As if we were living
+in a kind of magic world--not really real. Out there--” she glanced
+over her shoulder at the drawn blind that hid the night. “One meets with
+different sorts of minds and different--atmospheres. All this is very
+beautiful. I've had the most wonderful home. But there's a sort of
+feeling as though it couldn't really go on, as though all these strikes
+and doubts and questionings--”
+
+She stopped short at questionings, for the thing was said.
+
+The bishop took her meaning gallantly and honestly.
+
+“The church of Christ, little Norah, is built upon a rock.”
+
+She made no answer. She moved her head very slightly so that he could
+not see her face, and remained sitting rather stiffly and awkwardly with
+her eyes upon the fire.
+
+Her silence was the third and greatest blow the bishop received that
+day....
+
+It seemed very long indeed before either of them spoke. At last he said:
+“We must talk about these things again, Norah, when we are less tired
+and have more time.... You have been reading books.... When Caxton set
+up his printing-press he thrust a new power between church and disciple
+and father and child.... And I am tired. We must talk it over a little
+later.”
+
+The girl stood up. She took her father's hands. “Dear, dear Daddy,”
+ she said, “I am so sorry to be a bother. I am so sorry I went to that
+meeting.... You look tired out.”
+
+“We must talk--properly,” said the bishop, patting one hand, then
+discovering from her wincing face that it was the sprained one. “Your
+poor wrist,” he said.
+
+“It's so hard to talk, but I want to talk to you, Daddy. It isn't that I
+have hidden things....”
+
+She kissed him, and the bishop had the odd fancy that she kissed him as
+though she was sorry for him....
+
+It occurred to him that really there could be no time like the present
+for discussing these “questionings” of hers, and then his fatigue and
+shyness had the better of him again.
+
+(11)
+
+
+The papers got hold of Eleanor's share in the suffragette disturbance.
+The White Blackbird said things about her.
+
+It did not attack her. It did worse. It admired her ...impudently.
+
+It spoke of her once as “Norah,” and once as “the Scrope Flapper.”
+
+Its headline proclaimed: “Plucky Flappers Hold Up L. G.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD - INSOMNIA
+
+(1)
+
+
+THE night after his conversation with Eleanor was the first night of the
+bishop's insomnia. It was the definite beginning of a new phase in his
+life.
+
+Doctors explain to us that the immediate cause of insomnia is always
+some poisoned or depleted state of the body, and no doubt the
+fatigues and hasty meals of the day had left the bishop in a state of
+unprecedented chemical disorder, with his nerves irritated by strange
+compounds and unsoothed by familiar lubricants. But chemical disorders
+follow mental disturbances, and the core and essence of his trouble was
+an intellectual distress. For the first time in his life he was
+really in doubt, about himself, about his way of living, about all his
+persuasions. It was a general doubt. It was not a specific suspicion
+upon this point or that. It was a feeling of detachment and unreality at
+once extraordinarily vague and extraordinarily oppressive. It was as
+if he discovered himself flimsy and transparent in a world of minatory
+solidity and opacity. It was as if he found himself made not of flesh
+and blood but of tissue paper.
+
+But this intellectual insecurity extended into his physical sensations.
+It affected his feeling in his skin, as if it were not absolutely his
+own skin.
+
+And as he lay there, a weak phantom mentally and bodily, an endless
+succession and recurrence of anxieties for which he could find no
+reassurance besieged him.
+
+Chief of this was his distress for Eleanor.
+
+She was the central figure in this new sense of illusion in familiar and
+trusted things. It was not only that the world of his existence which
+had seemed to be the whole universe had become diaphanous and betrayed
+vast and uncontrollable realities beyond it, but his daughter had as it
+were suddenly opened a door in this glassy sphere of insecurity that had
+been his abiding refuge, a door upon the stormy rebel outer world, and
+she stood there, young, ignorant, confident, adventurous, ready to step
+out.
+
+“Could it be possible that she did not believe?”
+
+He saw her very vividly as he had seen her in the dining-room, slender
+and upright, half child, half woman, so fragile and so fearless. And the
+door she opened thus carelessly gave upon a stormy background like one
+of the stormy backgrounds that were popular behind portrait Dianas in
+eighteenth century paintings. Did she believe that all he had taught
+her, all the life he led was--what was her phrase?--a kind of magic
+world, not really real?
+
+He groaned and turned over and repeated the words: “A kind of magic
+world--not really real!”
+
+The wind blew through the door she opened, and scattered everything in
+the room. And still she held the door open.
+
+He was astonished at himself. He started up in swift indignation. Had
+he not taught the child? Had he not brought her up in an atmosphere
+of faith? What right had she to turn upon him in this matter? It
+was--indeed it was--a sort of insolence, a lack of reverence....
+
+It was strange he had not perceived this at the time.
+
+But indeed at the first mention of “questionings” he ought to have
+thundered. He saw that quite clearly now. He ought to have cried out and
+said, “On your knees, my Norah, and ask pardon of God!”
+
+Because after all faith is an emotional thing....
+
+He began to think very rapidly and copiously of things he ought to have
+said to Eleanor. And now the eloquence of reverie was upon him. In a
+little time he was also addressing the tea-party at Morrice Deans'. Upon
+them too he ought to have thundered. And he knew now also all that he
+should have said to the recalcitrant employer. Thunder also. Thunder is
+surely the privilege of the higher clergy--under Jove.
+
+But why hadn't he thundered?
+
+He gesticulated in the darkness, thrust out a clutching hand.
+
+There are situations that must be gripped--gripped firmly. And without
+delay. In the middle ages there had been grip enough in a purple glove.
+
+(2)
+
+
+From these belated seizures of the day's lost opportunities the bishop
+passed to such a pessimistic estimate of the church as had never entered
+his mind before.
+
+It was as if he had fallen suddenly out of a spiritual balloon into
+a world of bleak realism. He found himself asking unprecedented and
+devastating questions, questions that implied the most fundamental
+shiftings of opinion. Why was the church such a failure? Why had it
+no grip upon either masters or men amidst this vigorous life of modern
+industrialism, and why had it no grip upon the questioning young? It was
+a tolerated thing, he felt, just as sometimes he had felt that the
+Crown was a tolerated thing. He too was a tolerated thing; a curious
+survival....
+
+This was not as things should be. He struggled to recover a proper
+attitude. But he remained enormously dissatisfied....
+
+The church was no Levite to pass by on the other side away from the
+struggles and wrongs of the social conflict. It had no right when the
+children asked for the bread of life to offer them Gothic stone....
+
+He began to make interminable weak plans for fulfilling his duty to his
+diocese and his daughter.
+
+What could he do to revivify his clergy? He wished he had more personal
+magnetism, he wished he had a darker and a larger presence. He wished he
+had not been saddled with Whippham's rather futile son as his chaplain.
+He wished he had a dean instead of being his own dean. With an
+unsympathetic rector. He wished he had it in him to make some resounding
+appeal. He might of course preach a series of thumping addresses and
+sermons, rather on the lines of “Fors Clavigera,” to masters and men,
+in the Cathedral. Only it was so difficult to get either masters or men
+into the Cathedral.
+
+Well, if the people will not come to the bishop the bishop must go out
+to the people. Should he go outside the Cathedral--to the place where
+the trains met?
+
+Interweaving with such thoughts the problem of Eleanor rose again into
+his consciousness.
+
+Weren't there books she ought to read? Weren't there books she ought to
+be made to read? And books--and friends--that ought to be imperatively
+forbidden? Imperatively!
+
+But how to define the forbidden?
+
+He began to compose an address on Modern Literature (so-called).
+
+It became acrimonious.
+
+Before dawn the birds began to sing.
+
+His mind had seemed to be a little tranquillized, there had been a
+distinct feeling of subsidence sleepwards, when first one and then
+another little creature roused itself and the bishop to greet the
+gathering daylight.
+
+It became a little clamour, a misty sea of sound in which individuality
+appeared and disappeared. For a time a distant cuckoo was very
+perceptible, like a landmark looming up over a fog, like the cuckoo in
+the Pastoral Symphony.
+
+The bishop tried not to heed these sounds, but they were by their very
+nature insistent sounds. He lay disregarding them acutely.
+
+Presently he pulled the coverlet over his ears.
+
+A little later he sat up in bed.
+
+Again in a slight detail he marked his strange and novel detachment from
+the world of his upbringing. His hallucination of disillusionment had
+spread from himself and his church and his faith to the whole animate
+creation. He knew that these were the voices of “our feathered
+songsters,” that this was “a joyous chorus” greeting the day. He knew
+that a wakeful bishop ought to bless these happy creatures, and join
+with them by reciting Ken's morning hymn. He made an effort that was
+more than half habit, to repeat and he repeated with a scowling face and
+the voice of a schoolmaster:
+
+
+“Awake my soul, and with the sun
+Thy daily stage of duty run....”
+
+
+He got no further. He stopped short, sat still, thinking what utterly
+detestable things singing birds were. A. blackbird had gripped his
+attention. Never had he heard such vain repetitions. He struggled
+against the dark mood of criticism. “He prayeth best who loveth best--”
+
+No, he did not love the birds. It was useless to pretend. Whatever one
+may say about other birds a cuckoo is a low detestable cad of a bird.
+
+Then the bishop began to be particularly tormented by a bird that made a
+short, insistent, wheezing sound at regular intervals of perhaps twenty
+seconds. If a bird could have whooping-cough, that, he thought, was the
+sort of whoop it would have. But even if it had whooping-cough he could
+not pity it. He hung in its intervals waiting for the return of the
+wheeze.
+
+And then that blackbird reasserted itself. It had a rich boastful note;
+it seemed proud of its noisy reiteration of simple self-assertion. For
+some obscure reason the phrase “oleographic sounds” drifted into the
+bishop's thoughts. This bird produced the peculiar and irrational
+impression that it had recently made a considerable sum of money by
+shrewd industrialism. It was, he thought grimly, a genuine Princhester
+blackbird.
+
+This wickedly uncharitable reference to his diocese ran all unchallenged
+through the bishop's mind. And others no less wicked followed it.
+
+Once during his summer holidays in Florence he and Lady Ella had
+subscribed to an association for the protection of song-birds. He
+recalled this now with a mild wonder. It seemed to him that perhaps
+after all it was as well to let fruit-growers and Italians deal with
+singing-birds in their own way. Perhaps after all they had a wisdom....
+
+He passed his hands over his face. The world after all is not made
+entirely for singing-birds; there is such a thing as proportion.
+Singing-birds may become a luxury, an indulgence, an excess.
+
+Did the birds eat the fruit in Paradise?
+
+Perhaps there they worked for some collective musical effect, had some
+sort of conductor in the place of this--hullabaloo....
+
+He decided to walk about the room for a time and then remake his bed....
+
+The sunrise found the bishop with his head and shoulders out of the
+window trying to see that blackbird. He just wanted to look at it. He
+was persuaded it was a quite exceptional blackbird.
+
+Again came that oppressive sense of the futility of the contemporary
+church, but this time it came in the most grotesque form. For hanging
+half out of the casement he was suddenly reminded of St. Francis of
+Assisi, and how at his rebuke the wheeling swallow stilled their cries.
+
+But it was all so different then.
+
+(3)
+
+
+It was only after he had passed four similar nights, with intervening
+days of lassitude and afternoon siestas, that the bishop realized that
+he was in the grip of insomnia.
+
+He did not go at once to a doctor, but he told his trouble to every one
+he met and received much tentative advice. He had meant to have his
+talk with Eleanor on the morning next after their conversation in the
+dining-room, but his bodily and spiritual anaemia prevented him.
+
+The fifth night was the beginning of the Whitsuntide Ember week, and
+he wore a red cassock and had a distracting and rather interesting day
+welcoming his ordination candidates. They had a good effect upon him; we
+spiritualize ourselves when we seek to spiritualize others, and he went
+to bed in a happier frame of mind than he had done since the day of the
+shock. He woke in the night, but he woke much more himself than he had
+been since the trouble began. He repeated that verse of Ken's:
+
+“When in the night I sleepless lie, My soul with heavenly thoughts
+supply; Let no ill dreams disturb my rest, No powers of darkness me
+molest.”
+
+
+Almost immediately after these there floated into his mind, as if it
+were a message, the dear familiar words:
+
+“He giveth his Beloved sleep.”
+
+
+These words irradiated and soothed him quite miraculously, the clouds of
+doubt seemed to dissolve and vanish and leave him safe and calm under a
+clear sky; he knew those words were a promise, and very speedily he fell
+asleep and slept until he was called.
+
+But the next day was a troubled one. Whippham had muddled his timetable
+and crowded his afternoon; the strike of the transport workers had
+begun, and the ugly noises they made at the tramway depot, where they
+were booing some one, penetrated into the palace. He had to snatch a
+meal between services, and the sense of hurry invaded his afternoon
+lectures to the candidates. He hated hurry in Ember week. His ideal was
+one of quiet serenity, of grave things said slowly, of still, kneeling
+figures, of a sort of dark cool spiritual germination. But what sort of
+dark cool spiritual germination is possible with an ass like Whippham
+about?
+
+In the fresh courage of the morning the bishop had arranged for that
+talk with Eleanor he had already deferred too long, and this had proved
+less satisfactory than he had intended it to be.
+
+The bishop's experience with the ordination candidates was following
+the usual course. Before they came there was something bordering upon
+distaste for the coming invasion; then always there was an effect of
+surprise at the youth and faith of the neophytes and a real response of
+the spirit to the occasion. Throughout the first twenty-four hours
+they were all simply neophytes, without individuality to break up their
+uniformity of self-devotion. Then afterwards they began to develop
+little personal traits, and scarcely ever were these pleasing traits.
+Always one or two of them would begin haunting the bishop, giving way
+to an appetite for special words, special recognitions. He knew the
+expression of that craving on their faces. He knew the way-laying
+movements in room and passage that presently began.
+
+This time in particular there was a freckled underbred young man who
+handed in what was evidently a carefully prepared memorandum upon what
+he called “my positions.” Apparently he had a muddle of doubts about
+the early fathers and the dates of the earlier authentic copies of the
+gospels, things of no conceivable significance.
+
+The bishop glanced through this bale of papers--it had of course no
+index and no synopsis, and some of the pages were not numbered--handed
+it over to Whippham, and when he proved, as usual, a broken reed, the
+bishop had the brilliant idea of referring the young man to Canon Bliss
+(of Pringle), “who has a special knowledge quite beyond my own in this
+field.”
+
+But he knew from the young man's eye even as he said this that it was
+not going to put him off for more than a day or so.
+
+The immediate result of glancing over these papers was, however, to
+enhance in the bishop's mind a growing disposition to minimize the
+importance of all dated and explicit evidences and arguments for
+orthodox beliefs, and to resort to vague symbolic and liberal
+interpretations, and it was in this state that he came to his talk with
+Eleanor.
+
+He did not give her much time to develop her objections. He met her
+half way and stated them for her, and overwhelmed her with sympathy
+and understanding. She had been “too literal.” “Too literal” was his
+keynote. He was a little astonished at the liberality of his own views.
+He had been getting along now for some years without looking into his
+own opinions too closely and he was by no means prepared to discover
+how far he had come to meet his daughter's scepticisms. But he did meet
+them. He met them so thoroughly that he almost conveyed that hers was a
+needlessly conservative and oldfashioned attitude.
+
+Occasionally he felt he was being a little evasive, but she did not
+seem to notice it. As she took his drift, her relief and happiness were
+manifest. And he had never noticed before how clear and pretty her eyes
+were; they were the most honest eyes he had ever seen. She looked at him
+very steadily as he explained, and lit up at his points. She brightened
+wonderfully as she realized that after all they were not apart, they had
+not differed; simply they had misunderstood....
+
+And before he knew where he was, and in a mere parenthetical declaration
+of liberality, he surprised himself by conceding her demand for Newnham
+even before she had repeated it. It helped his case wonderfully.
+
+“Call in every exterior witness you can. The church will welcome
+them.... No, I want you to go, my dear....”
+
+But his mind was stirred again to its depths by this discussion. And
+in particular he was surprised and a little puzzled by this Newnham
+concession and the necessity of making his new attitude clear to Lady
+Ella....
+
+It was with a sense of fatality that he found himself awake again that
+night, like some one lying drowned and still and yet perfectly conscious
+at the bottom of deep cold water.
+
+He repeated, “He giveth his Beloved sleep,” but all the conviction had
+gone out of the words.
+
+(4)
+
+
+Neither the bishop's insomnia nor his incertitudes about himself and his
+faith developed in a simple and orderly manner. There were periods of
+sustained suffering and periods of recovery; it was not for a year or
+so that he regarded these troubles as more than acute incidental
+interruptions of his general tranquillity or realized that he was
+passing into a new phase of life and into a new quality of thought.
+He told every one of the insomnia and no one of his doubts; these he
+betrayed only by an increasing tendency towards vagueness, symbolism,
+poetry and toleration. Eleanor seemed satisfied with his exposition; she
+did not press for further enlightenment. She continued all her outward
+conformities except that after a time she ceased to communicate; and in
+September she went away to Newnham. Her doubts had not visibly affected
+Clementina or her other sisters, and the bishop made no further attempts
+to explore the spiritual life of his family below the surface of its
+formal acquiescence.
+
+As a matter of fact his own spiritual wrestlings were almost exclusively
+nocturnal. During his spells of insomnia he led a curiously double
+existence. In the daytime he was largely the self he had always been,
+able, assured, ecclesiastical, except that he was a little jaded and
+irritable or sleepy instead of being quick and bright; he believed in
+God and the church and the Royal Family and himself securely; in
+the wakeful night time he experienced a different and novel self, a
+bare-minded self, bleakly fearless at its best, shamelessly weak at its
+worst, critical, sceptical, joyless, anxious. The anxiety was quite the
+worst element of all. Something sat by his pillow asking grey questions:
+“What are you doing? Where are you going? Is it really well with the
+children? Is it really well with the church? Is it really well with the
+country? Are you indeed doing anything at all? Are you anything more
+than an actor wearing a costume in an archaic play? The people turn
+their backs on you.”
+
+He would twist over on his pillow. He would whisper hymns and prayers
+that had the quality of charms.
+
+“He giveth his Beloved sleep”; that answered many times, and many times
+it failed.
+
+The labour troubles of 1912 eased off as the year wore on, and the
+bitterness of the local press over the palace abated very considerably.
+Indeed there was something like a watery gleam of popularity when he
+brought down his consistent friend, the dear old Princess Christiana of
+Hoch and Unter, black bonnet, deafness, and all, to open a new wing of
+the children's hospital. The Princhester conservative paper took the
+occasion to inform the diocese that he was a fluent German scholar and
+consequently a persona grata with the royal aunts, and that the Princess
+Christiana was merely just one of a number of royalties now practically
+at the beck and call of Princhester. It was not true, but it was very
+effective locally, and seemed to justify a little the hauteur of which
+Lady Ella was so unjustly suspected. Yet it involved a possibility of
+disappointments in the future.
+
+He went to Brighton-Pomfrey too upon the score of his general health,
+and Brighton-Pomfrey revised his general regimen, discouraged indiscreet
+fasting, and suggested a complete abstinence from red wine except white
+port, if indeed that can be called a red wine, and a moderate use of
+Egyptian cigarettes.
+
+But 1913 was a strenuous year. The labour troubles revived, the
+suffragette movement increased greatly in violence and aggressiveness,
+and there sprang up no less than three ecclesiastical scandals in
+the diocese. First, the Kensitites set themselves firmly to make
+presentations and prosecutions against Morrice Deans, who was reserving
+the sacrament, wearing, they said, “Babylonish garments,” going beyond
+all reason in the matter of infant confession, and generally brightening
+up Mogham Banks; next, a popular preacher in Wombash, published a book
+under the exasperating title, “The Light Under the Altar,” in which
+he showed himself as something between an Arian and a Pantheist, and
+treated the dogma of the Trinity with as little respect as one would
+show to an intrusive cat; while thirdly, an obscure but overworked
+missioner of a tin mission church in the new working-class district at
+Pringle, being discovered in some sort of polygamous relationship, had
+seen fit to publish in pamphlet form a scandalous admission and defence,
+a pamphlet entitled “Marriage True and False,” taking the public
+needlessly into his completest confidence and quoting the affairs of
+Abraham and Hosea, reviving many points that are better forgotten about
+Luther, and appealing also to such uncanonical authorities as
+Milton, Plato, and John Humphrey Noyes. This abnormal concurrence of
+indiscipline was extremely unlucky for the bishop. It plunged him into
+strenuous controversy upon three fronts, so to speak, and involved
+a great number of personal encounters far too vivid for his mental
+serenity.
+
+The Pringle polygamist was the most moving as Morrice Deans was the most
+exacting and troublesome and the Wombash Pantheist the most insidiously
+destructive figure in these three toilsome disputes. The Pringle man's
+soul had apparently missed the normal distribution of fig-leaves; he
+was an illiterate, open-eyed, hard-voiced, freckled, rational-minded
+creature, with large expository hands, who had come by a side way into
+the church because he was an indefatigable worker, and he insisted upon
+telling the bishop with an irrepressible candour and completeness just
+exactly what was the matter with his intimate life. The bishop very
+earnestly did not want these details, and did his utmost to avoid the
+controversial questions that the honest man pressed respectfully but
+obstinately upon him.
+
+“Even St. Paul, my lord, admitted that it is better to marry than burn,”
+ said the Pringle misdemeanant, “and here was I, my lord, married and
+still burning!” and, “I think you would find, my lord, considering
+all Charlotte's peculiarities, that the situation was really much more
+trying than the absolute celibacy St. Paul had in view.”...
+
+The bishop listened to these arguments as little as possible, and did
+not answer them at all. But afterwards the offender came and wept and
+said he was ruined and heartbroken and unfairly treated because
+he wasn't a gentleman, and that was distressing. It was so exactly
+true--and so inevitable. He had been deprived, rather on account of
+his voice and apologetics than of his offence, and public opinion was
+solidly with the sentence. He made a gallant effort to found what
+he called a Labour Church in Pringle, and after some financial
+misunderstandings departed with his unambiguous menage to join the
+advanced movement on the Clyde.
+
+The Morrice Deans enquiry however demanded an amount of erudition that
+greatly fatigued the bishop. He had a very fair general knowledge of
+vestments, but he had never really cared for anything but the poetry of
+ornaments, and he had to work strenuously to master the legal side
+of the question. Whippham, his chaplain, was worse than useless as a
+helper. The bishop wanted to end the matter as quickly, quietly, and
+favourably to Morrice Deans as possible; he thought Morrice Deans a
+thoroughly good man in his parish, and he believed that the substitution
+of a low churchman would mean a very complete collapse of church
+influence in Mogham Banks, where people were now thoroughly accustomed
+to a highly ornate service. But Morrice Deans was intractable and his
+pursuers indefatigable, and on several occasions the bishop sat far into
+the night devising compromises and equivocations that should make the
+Kensitites think that Morrice Deans wasn't wearing vestments when he
+was, and that should make Morrice Deans think he was wearing vestments
+when he wasn't. And it was Whippham who first suggested green tea as
+a substitute for coffee, which gave the bishop indigestion, as his
+stimulant for these nocturnal bouts.
+
+Now green tea is the most lucid of poisons.
+
+And while all this extra activity about Morrice Deans, these vigils and
+crammings and writings down, were using all and more energy than the
+bishop could well spare, he was also doing his quiet utmost to keep “The
+Light under the Altar” ease from coming to a head.
+
+This man he hated.
+
+And he dreaded him as well as hated him. Chasters, the author of “The
+Light under the Altar,” was a man who not only reasoned closely
+but indelicately. There was a demonstrating, jeering, air about his
+preaching and writing, and everything he said and did was saturated by
+the spirit of challenge. He did not so much imitate as exaggerate the
+style of Matthew Arnold. And whatever was done publicly against him
+would have to be done very publicly because his book had got him a
+London reputation.
+
+From the bishop's point of view Chasters was one of nature's ignoblemen.
+He seemed to have subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles and passed all
+the tests and taken all the pledges that stand on the way to ordination,
+chiefly for the pleasure of attacking them more successfully from the
+rear; he had been given the living of Wombash by a cousin, and filled it
+very largely because it was not only more piquant but more remunerative
+and respectable to be a rationalist lecturer in a surplice. And in a
+hard kind of ultra-Protestant way his social and parochial work was not
+badly done. But his sermons were terrible. “He takes a text,” said one
+informant, “and he goes on firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly, like
+somebody tearing the petals from a flower. 'Finally,' he says, and
+throws the bare stalk into the dustbin.”
+
+The bishop avoided “The Light under the Altar” for nearly a year. It
+was only when a second book was announced with the winning title of “The
+Core of Truth in Christianity” that he perceived he must take action.
+He sat up late one night with a marked copy, a very indignantly marked
+copy, of the former work that an elderly colonel, a Wombash parishioner,
+an orthodox Layman of the most virulent type, had sent him. He perceived
+that he had to deal with a dialectician of exceptional ability, who had
+concentrated a quite considerable weight of scholarship upon the task of
+explaining away every scrap of spiritual significance in the Eucharist.
+From Chasters the bishop was driven by reference to the works of Legge
+and Frazer, and for the first time he began to measure the dimensions
+and power of the modern criticism of church doctrine and observance.
+Green tea should have lit his way to refutation; instead it lit up the
+whole inquiry with a light of melancholy confirmation. Neither by night
+nor by day could the bishop find a proper method of opening a counter
+attack upon Chasters, who was indisputably an intellectually abler man
+and a very ruthless beast indeed to assail, and meanwhile the demand
+that action should be taken increased.
+
+The literature of church history and the controversies arising out of
+doctrinal development became the employment of the bishop's leisure and
+a commanding preoccupation. He would have liked to discuss with some one
+else the network of perplexities in which he was entangling himself, and
+more particularly with Canon Bliss, but his own positions were becoming
+so insecure that he feared to betray them by argument. He had grown up
+with a kind of intellectual modesty. Some things he had never yet talked
+about; it made his mind blench to think of talking about them. And his
+great aching gaps of wakefulness began now, thanks to the green tea, to
+be interspersed with theological dreams and visions of an extravagant
+vividness. He would see Frazer's sacrificial kings butchered
+picturesquely and terribly amidst strange and grotesque rituals; he
+would survey long and elaborate processions and ceremonials in which
+the most remarkable symbols were borne high in the sight of all men; he
+would cower before a gigantic and threatening Heaven. These
+green-tea dreams and visions were not so much phases of sleep as an
+intensification and vivid furnishing forth of insomnia. It added
+greatly to his disturbance that--exceeding the instructions of
+Brighton-Pomfrey--he had now experimented ignorantly and planlessly
+with one or two narcotics and sleeping mixtures that friends and
+acquaintances had mentioned in his hearing. For the first time in his
+life he became secretive from his wife. He knew he ought not to take
+these things, he knew they were physically and morally evil, but
+a tormenting craving drove him to them. Subtly and insensibly his
+character was being undermined by the growing nervous trouble.
+
+He astonished himself by the cunning and the hypocritical dignity he
+could display in procuring these drugs. He arranged to have a tea-making
+set in his bedroom, and secretly substituted green tea, for which he
+developed a powerful craving, in the place of the delicate China tea
+Lady Ella procured him.
+
+(5)
+
+
+These doctrinal and physical anxieties and distresses were at their
+worst in the spring and early summer of 1914. That was a time of great
+mental and moral disturbance. There was premonition in the air of those
+days. It was like the uneasiness sensitive people experience before a
+thunderstorm. The moral atmosphere was sullen and close. The whole
+world seemed irritable and mischievous. The suffragettes became
+extraordinarily malignant; the democratic movement went rotten with
+sabotage and with a cant of being “rebels”; the reactionary Tories and a
+crew of noisy old peeresses set themselves to create incurable confusion
+again in the healing wounds of Ireland, and feuds and frantic folly
+broke out at every point of the social and political edifice. And then
+a bomb burst at Sarajevo that silenced all this tumult. The unstable
+polity of Europe heeled over like a ship that founders.
+
+Through the swiftest, tensest week in history Europe capsized into war.
+
+(6)
+
+
+The first effect of the war upon the mind of the bishop, as upon
+most imaginative minds, was to steady and exalt it. Trivialities and
+exasperations seemed swept out of existence. Men lifted up their eyes
+from disputes that had seemed incurable and wrangling that promised to
+be interminable, and discovered a plain and tragic issue that involved
+every one in a common call for devotion. For a great number of men and
+women who had been born and bred in security, the August and September
+of 1914 were the supremely heroic period of their lives. Myriads
+of souls were born again to ideas of service and sacrifice in those
+tremendous days.
+
+Black and evil thing as the war was, it was at any rate a great thing;
+it did this much for countless minds that for the first time they
+realized the epic quality of history and their own relationship to the
+destinies of the race. The flimsy roof under which we had been living
+our lives of comedy fell and shattered the floor under our feet; we saw
+the stars above and the abyss below. We perceived that life was insecure
+and adventurous, part of one vast adventure in space and time....
+
+Presently the smoke and dust of battle hid the great distances again,
+but they could not altogether destroy the memories of this revelation.
+
+For the first two months the bishop's attention was so detached from
+his immediate surroundings and employments, so absorbed by great events,
+that his history if it were told in detail would differ scarcely at all
+from the histories of most comparatively unemployed minds during those
+first dramatic days, the days when the Germans made their great rush
+upon Paris and it seemed that France was down, France and the whole
+fabric of liberal civilization. He emerged from these stunning
+apprehensions after the Battle of the Marne, to find himself busy upon a
+score of dispersed and disconnected war jobs, and trying to get all the
+new appearances and forces and urgencies of the war into relations with
+himself. One thing became very vivid indeed, that he wasn't being used
+in any real and effective way in the war. There was a mighty going
+to and fro upon Red Cross work and various war committees, a vast
+preparation for wounded men and for the succour of dislocated
+families; a preparation, that proved to be needless, for catastrophic
+unemployment. The war problem and the puzzle of German psychology ousted
+for a time all other intellectual interests; like every one else the
+bishop swam deep in Nietzsche, Bernhardi, Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
+and the like; he preached several sermons upon German materialism
+and the astonishing decay of the German character. He also read every
+newspaper he could lay his hands on--like any secular man. He signed
+an address to the Russian Orthodox church, beginning “Brethren,” and
+he revised his impressions of the Filioque controversy. The idea of a
+reunion of the two great state churches of Russia and England had always
+attracted him. But hitherto it had been a thing quite out of scale,
+visionary, utopian. Now in this strange time of altered perspectives it
+seemed the most practicable of suggestions. The mayor and corporation
+and a detachment of the special reserve in uniform came to a great
+intercession service, and in the palace there were two conferences of
+local influential people, people of the most various types, people
+who had never met tolerantly before, expressing now opinions of
+unprecedented breadth and liberality.
+
+All this sort of thing was fresh and exciting at first, and then it
+began to fall into a routine and became habitual, and as it became
+habitual he found that old sense of detachment and futility was creeping
+back again. One day he realized that indeed the whole flood and tumult
+of the war would be going on almost exactly as it was going on now if
+there had been neither cathedral nor bishop in Princhester. It came to
+him that if archbishops were rolled into patriarchs and patriarchs into
+archbishops, it would matter scarcely more in the world process that was
+afoot than if two men shook hands while their house was afire. At times
+all of us have inappropriate thoughts. The unfortunate thought that
+struck the bishop as a bullet might strike a man in an exposed trench,
+as he was hurrying through the cloisters to a special service and
+address upon that doubly glorious day in our English history, the day of
+St. Crispin, was of Diogenes rolling his tub.
+
+It was a poisonous thought.
+
+It arose perhaps out of an article in a weekly paper at which he had
+glanced after lunch, an article written by one of those sceptical
+spirits who find all too abundant expression in our periodical
+literature. The writer boldly charged the “Christian churches” with
+absolute ineffectiveness. This war, he declared, was above all other
+wars a war of ideas, of material organization against rational freedom,
+of violence against law; it was a war more copiously discussed than any
+war had ever been before, the air was thick with apologetics. And what
+was the voice of the church amidst these elemental issues? Bishops and
+divines who were patriots one heard discordantly enough, but where were
+the bishops and divines who spoke for the Prince of Peace? Where was the
+blessing of the church, where was the veto of the church? When it
+came to that one discovered only a broad preoccupied back busied in
+supplementing the Army Medical Corps with Red Cross activities, good
+work in its way--except that the canonicals seemed superfluous. Who
+indeed looked to the church for any voice at all? And so to Diogenes.
+
+The bishop's mind went hunting for an answer to that indictment. And
+came back and came back to the image of Diogenes.
+
+It was with that image dangling like a barbed arrow from his mind that
+the bishop went into the pulpit to preach upon St. Crispin's day, and
+looked down upon a thin and scattered congregation in which the elderly,
+the childless, and the unoccupied predominated.
+
+That night insomnia resumed its sway.
+
+Of course the church ought to be controlling this great storm, the
+greatest storm of war that had ever stirred mankind. It ought to be
+standing fearlessly between the combatants like a figure in a wall
+painting, with the cross of Christ uplifted and the restored memory of
+Christendom softening the eyes of the armed nations. “Put down those
+weapons and listen to me,” so the church should speak in irresistible
+tones, in a voice of silver trumpets.
+
+Instead it kept a long way from the fighting, tucked up its vestments,
+and was rolling its local tubs quite briskly.
+
+(7)
+
+
+And then came the aggravation of all these distresses by an abrupt
+abandonment of smoking and alcohol. Alcoholic relaxation, a necessary
+mitigation of the unreality of peacetime politics, becomes a grave
+danger in war, and it was with an understandable desire to forward the
+interests of his realm that the King decided to set his statesmen an
+example--which unhappily was not very widely followed--by abstaining
+from alcohol during the continuance of the struggle. It did however
+swing over the Bishop of Princhester to an immediate and complete
+abandonment of both drink and tobacco. At that time he was finding
+comfort for his nerves in Manila cheroots, and a particularly big and
+heavy type of Egyptian cigarette with a considerable amount of opium,
+and his disorganized system seized upon this sudden change as a
+grievance, and set all his jangling being crying aloud for one
+cigarette--just one cigarette.
+
+The cheroots, it seemed, he could better spare, but a cigarette became
+his symbol for his lost steadiness and ease.
+
+It brought him low.
+
+The reader has already been told the lamentable incident of the stolen
+cigarette and the small boy, and how the bishop, tormented by that
+shameful memory, cried aloud in the night.
+
+The bishop rolled his tub, and is there any tub-rolling in the world
+more busy and exacting than a bishop's? He rolled in it spite of
+ill-health and insomnia, and all the while he was tormented by the
+enormous background of the world war, by his ineffective realization
+of vast national needs, by his passionate desire, for himself and his
+church, not to be ineffective.
+
+The distressful alternation between nights of lucid doubt and days of
+dull acquiescence was resumed with an intensification of its contrasts.
+The brief phase of hope that followed the turn of the fighting upon the
+Maine, the hope that after all the war would end swiftly, dramatically,
+and justly, and everything be as it had been before--but pleasanter,
+gave place to a phase that bordered upon despair. The fall of Antwerp
+and the doubts and uncertainties of the Flanders situation weighed
+terribly upon the bishop. He was haunted for a time by nightmares of
+Zeppelins presently raining fire upon London. These visions became
+Apocalyptic. The Zeppelins came to England with the new year, and with
+the close of the year came the struggle for Ypres that was so near
+to being a collapse of the allied defensive. The events of the early
+spring, the bloody failure of British generalship at Neuve Chapelle,
+the naval disaster in the Dardanelles, the sinking of the Falaba,
+the Russian defeat in the Masurian Lakes, all deepened the bishop's
+impression of the immensity of the nation's difficulties and of his
+own unhelpfulness. He was ashamed that the church should hold back its
+curates from enlistment while the French priests were wearing their
+uniforms in the trenches; the expedition of the Bishop of London to
+hold open-air services at the front seemed merely to accentuate the
+tub-rolling. It was rolling the tub just where it was most in the way.
+
+What was wrong? What was wanting?
+
+The Westminster Gazette, The Spectator, and several other of the most
+trusted organs of public opinion were intermittently discussing the same
+question. Their discussions implied at once the extreme need that
+was felt for religion by all sorts of representative people, and the
+universal conviction that the church was in some way muddling and
+masking her revelation. “What is wrong with the Churches?” was,
+for example, the general heading of The Westminster Gazette's
+correspondence.
+
+One day the bishop skimmed a brief incisive utterance by Sir Harry
+Johnston that pierced to the marrow of his own shrinking convictions.
+Sir Harry is one of those people who seem to write as well as speak in
+a quick tenor. “Instead of propounding plainly and without the acereted
+mythology of Asia Minor, Greece and Rome, the pure Gospel of Christ....
+they present it overloaded with unbelievable myths (such as, among
+a thousand others, that Massacre of the Innocents which never took
+place).... bore their listeners by a Tibetan repetition of creeds that
+have ceased to be credible.... Mutually contradictory propositions....
+Prayers and litanies composed in Byzantine and mediaeval times....
+the want of actuality, the curious silliness which has, ever since the
+destruction of Jerusalem, hung about the exposition of Christianity....
+But if the Bishops continue to fuss about the trappings of religion....
+the maintenance of codes compiled by people who lived sixteen hundred
+or two thousand five hundred years ago.... the increasingly educated
+and practical-minded working classes will not come to church, weekday or
+Sunday.”
+
+The bishop held the paper in his hand, and with a mind that he felt to
+be terribly open, asked himself how true that sharp indictment might be,
+and, granting its general truth, what was the duty of the church, that
+is to say of the bishops, for as Cyprian says, ecelesia est in episcopo.
+We say the creeds; how far may we unsay them?
+
+So far he had taken no open action against Chasters. Suppose now he
+were to side with Chasters and let the whole diocese, the church of
+Princhester, drift as far as it chose under his inaction towards an
+extreme modernism, risking a conflict with, and if necessary fighting,
+the archbishop.... It was but for a moment that his mind swung to this
+possibility and then recoiled. The Laymen, that band of bigots, would
+fight. He could not contemplate litigation and wrangling about the
+teaching of the church. Besides, what were the “trappings of religion”
+ and what the essentials? What after all was “the pure gospel of Christ”
+ of which this writer wrote so glibly? He put the paper down and took a
+New Testament from his desk and opened it haphazard. He felt a curious
+wish that he could read it for the first time. It was over-familiar.
+Everything latterly in his theology and beliefs had become
+over-familiar. It had all become mechanical and dead and unmeaning to
+his tired mind....
+
+Whippham came with a reminder of more tub-rolling, and the bishop's
+speculations were broken off.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH - THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND
+
+(1)
+
+
+THAT night when he cried aloud at the memory of his furtive cigarette,
+the bishop was staying with a rich man named Garstein Fellows. These
+Garstein Fellows people were steel people with a financial side to them;
+young Garstein Fellows had his fingers in various chemical businesses,
+and the real life of the firm was in various minor partners called
+Hartstein and Blumenhart and so forth, who had acquired a considerable
+amount of ungentlemanly science and energy in Germany and German
+Switzerland. But the Fellows element was good old Princhester stuff.
+There had been a Fellows firm in Princhester in 1819. They were not
+people the bishop liked and it was not a house the bishop liked staying
+at, but it had become part of his policy to visit and keep in touch with
+as many of the local plutocracy as he could, to give and take with them,
+in order to make the presence of the church a reality to them. It had
+been not least among the negligences and evasions of the sainted but
+indolent Hood that he had invariably refused overnight hospitality
+whenever it was possible for him to get back to his home. The morning
+was his working time. His books and hymns had profited at the cost of
+missing many a generous after-dinner subscription, and at the expense
+of social unity. From the outset Scrope had set himself to alter this.
+A certain lack of enthusiasm on Lady Ella's part had merely provoked
+him to greater effort on his own. His ideal of what was needed with the
+people was something rather jolly and familiar, something like a very
+good and successful French or Irish priest, something that came
+easily and readily into their homes and laid a friendly hand on their
+shoulders. The less he liked these rich people naturally the more
+familiar his resolution to be successfully intimate made him. He put
+down the names and brief characteristics of their sons and daughters in
+a little note-book and consulted it before every visit so as to get
+his most casual enquiries right. And he invited himself to the Garstein
+Fellows house on this occasion by telegram.
+
+
+“A special mission and some business in Wombash may I have a scrap of
+supper and a bed?”
+
+
+Now Mrs. Garstein Fellows was a thoroughly London woman; she was one of
+the banking Grunenbaums, the fair tall sort, and she had a very decided
+tendency to smartness. She had a little party in the house, a sort of
+long week-end party, that made her hesitate for a minute or so before
+she framed a reply to the bishop's request.
+
+
+It was the intention of Mrs. Garstein Fellows to succeed very
+conspicuously in the British world, and the British world she felt was
+a complicated one; it is really not one world but several, and if you
+would surely succeed you must keep your peace with all the systems and
+be a source of satisfaction to all of them. So at least Mrs. Garstein
+Fellows saw it, and her method was to classify her acquaintances
+according to their systems, to keep them in their proper bundles, and
+to give every one the treatment he or she was accustomed to receive. And
+since all things British are now changing and passing away, it may not
+be uninteresting to record the classification Mrs. Garstein Fellows
+adopted. First she set apart as most precious and desirable, and
+requiring the most careful treatment, the “court dowdies “--for so it
+was that the dignity and quiet good taste that radiated from Buckingham
+Palace impressed her restless, shallow mind--the sort of people who
+prefer pair horse carriages to automobiles, have quiet friendships in
+the highest quarters, quietly do not know any one else, busy themselves
+with charities, dress richly rather than impressively, and have either
+little water-colour accomplishments or none at all, and no other
+relations with “art.” At the skirts of this crowning British world Mrs.
+Garstein Fellows tugged industriously and expensively. She did not keep
+a carriage and pair and an old family coachman because that, she felt,
+would be considered pushing and presumptuous; she had the sense to stick
+to her common unpretending 80 h.p. Daimler; but she wore a special sort
+of blackish hat-bonnet for such occasions as brought her near the centre
+of honour, which she got from a little good shop known only to very few
+outside the inner ring, which hat-bonnet she was always careful to
+sit on for a few minutes before wearing. And it was to this first and
+highest and best section of her social scheme that she considered that
+bishops properly belonged. But some bishops, and in particular such
+a comparatively bright bishop as the Bishop of Princhester, she also
+thought of as being just as comfortably accommodated in her second
+system, the “serious liberal lot,” which was more fatiguing and less
+boring, which talked of books and things, visited the Bells, went to all
+first-nights when Granville Barker was the producer, and knew and valued
+people in the grey and earnest plains between the Cecils and the Sidney
+Webbs. And thirdly there were the smart intellectual lot, again not very
+well marked off, and on the whole practicable to bishops, of whom fewer
+particulars are needed because theirs is a perennial species, and then
+finally there was that fourth world which was paradoxically at once very
+brilliant and a little shady, which had its Night Club side, and seemed
+to set no limit to its eccentricities. It seemed at times to be aiming
+to shock and yet it had its standards, but here it was that the dancers
+and actresses and forgiven divorcees came in--and the bishops as a rule,
+a rule hitherto always respected, didn't. This was the ultimate world of
+Mrs. Garstein Fellows; she had no use for merely sporting people and
+the merely correct smart and the duller county families, sets that led
+nowhere, and it was from her fourth system of the Glittering Doubtfuls
+that this party which made her hesitate over the bishop's telegram, was
+derived.
+
+She ran over their names as she sat considering her reply.
+
+What was there for a bishop to object to? There was that admirable
+American widow, Lady Sunderbund. She was enormously rich, she was
+enthusiastic. She was really on probation for higher levels; it was her
+decolletage delayed her. If only she kept off theosophy and the Keltic
+renascence and her disposition to profess wild intellectual passions,
+there would be no harm in her. Provided she didn't come down to dinner
+in anything too fantastically scanty--but a word in season was possible.
+No! there was no harm in Lady Sunderbund. Then there were Ridgeway Kelso
+and this dark excitable Catholic friend of his, Paidraig O'Gorman. Mrs.
+Garstein Fellows saw no harm in them. Then one had to consider Lord
+Gatling and Lizzie Barusetter. But nothing showed, nothing was likely to
+show even if there was anything. And besides, wasn't there a Church and
+Stage Guild?
+
+Except for those people there seemed little reason for alarm. Mrs.
+Garstein Fellows did not know that Professor Hoppart, who so amusingly
+combined a professorship of political economy with the writing of
+music-hall lyrics, was a keen amateur theologian, nor that Bent, the
+sentimental novelist, had a similar passion. She did not know that her
+own eldest son, a dark, romantic-looking youngster from Eton, had also
+come to the theological stage of development. She did however weigh
+the possibilities of too liberal opinions on what are called social
+questions on the part of Miss Sharsper, the novelist, and decided that
+if that lady was watched nothing so terrible could be said even in an
+undertone; and as for the Mariposa, the dancer, she had nothing but
+Spanish and bad French, she looked all right, and it wasn't very likely
+she would go out of her way to startle an Anglican bishop. Simply she
+needn't dance. Besides which even if a man does get a glimpse of a
+little something--it isn't as if it was a woman.
+
+But of course if the party mustn't annoy the bishop, the bishop must
+do his duty by the party. There must be the usual purple and the silver
+buckles.
+
+She wired back:
+
+
+“A little party but it won't put you out send your man with your
+change.”
+
+(2)
+
+
+In making that promise Mrs. Garstein Fellows reckoned without the
+morbid sensibility of the bishop's disorganized nervous system and the
+unsuspected theological stirrings beneath the apparent worldliness of
+Hoppart and Bent.
+
+The trouble began in the drawing-room after dinner. Out of deference to
+the bishop's abstinence the men did not remain to smoke, but came in to
+find the Mariposa and Lady Sunderbund smoking cigarettes, which these
+ladies continued to do a little defiantly. They had hoped to finish them
+before the bishop came up. The night was chilly, and a cheerful wood
+fire cracking and banging on the fireplace emphasized the ordinary
+heating. Mrs. Garstein Fellows, who had not expected so prompt an
+appearance of the men, had arranged her chairs in a semicircle for a
+little womanly gossip, and before she could intervene she found her
+party, with the exception of Lord Gatling, who had drifted just a little
+too noticeably with Miss Barnsetter into a window, sitting round with
+a conscious air, that was perhaps just a trifle too apparent, of being
+“good.”
+
+And Mr. Bent plunged boldly into general conversation.
+
+“Are you reading anything now, Mrs. Garstein Fellows?” he asked. “I'm an
+interested party.”
+
+She was standing at the side of the fireplace. She bit her lip and
+looked at the cornice and meditated with a girlish expression. “Yes,”
+ she said. “I am reading again. I didn't think I should but I am.”
+
+“For a time,” said Hoppart, “I read nothing but the papers. I bought
+from a dozen to twenty a day.”
+
+“That is wearing off,” said the bishop.
+
+“The first thing I began to read again,” said Mrs. Garstein Fellows,
+“--I'm not saying it for your sake, Bishop--was the Bible.”
+
+“I went to the Bible,” said Bent as if he was surprised.
+
+“I've heard that before,” said Ridgeway Kelso, in that slightly
+explosive manner of his. “All sorts of people who don't usually read the
+Bible--”
+
+“But Mr. Kelso!” protested their hostess with raised eyebrows.
+
+“I was thinking of Bent. But anyhow there's been a great wave of
+seriousness, a sudden turning to religion and religious things. I don't
+know if it comes your way, Bishop....”
+
+“I've had no rows of penitents yet.”
+
+“We may be coming,” said Hoppart.
+
+He turned sideways to face the bishop. “I think we should be coming
+if--if it wasn't for old entangled difficulties. I don't know if you
+will mind my saying it to you, but....”
+
+The bishop returned his frank glance. “I'd like to know above all
+things,” he said. “If Mrs. Garstein Fellow will permit us. It's my
+business to know.”
+
+“We all want to know,” said Lady Sunderbund, speaking from the low chair
+on the other side of the fireplace. There was a vibration in her voice
+and a sudden gleam of enthusiasm in her face. “Why shouldn't people talk
+se'iously sometimes?”
+
+“Well, take my own case,” said Hoppart. “In the last few weeks, I've
+been reading not only in the Bible but in the Fathers. I've read most of
+Athanasius, most of Eusebius, and--I'll confess it--Gibbon. I find all
+my old wonder come back. Why are we pinned to--to the amount of creed we
+are pinned to? Why for instance must you insist on the Trinity?”
+
+“Yes,” said the Eton boy explosively, and flushed darkly to find he had
+spoken.
+
+“Here is a time when men ask for God,” said Hoppart. “And you give them
+three!” cried Bent rather cheaply. “I confess I find the way encumbered
+by these Alexandrian elaborations,” Hoppart completed.
+
+“Need it be?” whispered Lady Sunderbund very softly.
+
+“Well,” said the bishop, and leant back in his armchair and knitted his
+brow at the fire. “I do not think,” he said, “that men coming to God
+think very much of the nature of God. Nevertheless,” he spoke slowly
+and patted the arm of his chair, “nevertheless the church insists that
+certain vitally important truths have to be conveyed, certain mortal
+errors are best guarded against, by these symbols.”
+
+“You admit they are symbols.”
+
+“So the church has always called them.”
+
+Hoppart showed by a little movement and grimace that he thought the
+bishop quibbled.
+
+“In every sense of the word,” the bishop hastened to explain, “the
+creeds are symbolical. It is clear they seek to express ineffable things
+by at least an extended use of familiar words. I suppose we are all
+agreed nowadays that when we speak of the Father and of the Son we mean
+something only in a very remote and exalted way parallel with--with
+biological fatherhood and sonship.”
+
+Lady Sunderbund nodded eagerly. “Yes,” she said, “oh, yes,” and held up
+an expectant face for more.
+
+“Our utmost words, our most elaborately phrased creeds, can at the best
+be no better than the shadow of something unseen thrown upon the screen
+of experience.”
+
+He raised his rather weary eyes to Hoppart as if he would know what else
+needed explanation. He was gratified by Lady Sunderbund's approval, but
+he affected not to see or hear it. But it was Bent who spoke.
+
+He spoke in the most casual way. He made the thing seem the most
+incidental of observations.
+
+“What puzzles me,” he said, “is why the early Christians identified the
+Spermaticos Logos of the Stoics with the second and not with the third
+person of the Trinity.”
+
+To which the bishop, rising artlessly to the bait, replied, “Ah! that
+indeed is the unfortunate aspect of the whole affair.”
+
+And then the Irish Catholic came down on him....
+
+(3)
+
+
+How the bishop awakened in the night after this dispute has been
+told already in the opening section of this story. To that night of
+discomfort we now return after this comprehensive digression. He
+awoke from nightmares of eyes and triangles to bottomless remorse and
+perplexity. For the first time he fully measured the vast distances
+he had travelled from the beliefs and attitudes of his early training,
+since his coming to Princhester. Travelled--or rather slipped and fallen
+down the long slopes of doubt.
+
+That clear inky dimness that comes before dawn found his white face at
+the window looking out upon the great terrace and the park.
+
+(4)
+
+
+After a bout of mental distress and sleeplessness the bishop would
+sometimes wake in the morning not so much exhausted as in a state of
+thin mental and bodily activity. This was more particularly so if the
+night had produced anything in the nature of a purpose. So it was
+on this occasion. The day was clear before him; at least it could be
+cleared by sending three telegrams; his man could go back to Princhester
+and so leave him perfectly free to go to Brighton-Pomfrey in London and
+secure that friendly dispensation to smoke again which seemed the only
+alternative to a serious mental breakdown. He would take his bag, stay
+the night in London, smoke, sleep well, and return the next morning.
+Dunk, his valet-butler, found him already bathed and ready for a cup of
+tea and a Bradshaw at half-past seven. He went on dressing although the
+good train for London did not start until 10.45.
+
+Mrs. Garstein Fellows was by nature and principle a late riser; the
+breakfast-room showed small promise yet of the repast, though the table
+was set and bright with silver and fresh flowers, and a wood fire popped
+and spurted to greet and encourage the March sunshine. But standing in
+the doorway that led to the promise and daffodils and crocuses of Mrs.
+Garstein Fellows' garden stood Lady Sunderbund, almost with an effect
+of waiting, and she greeted the bishop very cheerfully, doubted the
+immediate appearance of any one else, and led him in the most natural
+manner into the new but already very pleasant shrubbery.
+
+In some indefinable special way the bishop had been aware of Lady
+Sunderbund's presence since first he had met her, but it was only now
+that he could observe her with any particularity. She was tall like his
+own Lady Ella but not calm and quiet; she was electric, her eyes, her
+smiles, her complexion had as it were an established brightness that
+exceeded the common lustre of things. This morning she was dressed in
+grey that was nevertheless not grey but had an effect of colour, and
+there was a thread of black along the lines of her body and a gleam of
+gold. She carried her head back with less dignity than pride; there was
+a little frozen movement in her dark hair as if it flamed up out of her
+head. There were silver ornaments in her hair. She spoke with a pretty
+little weakness of the r's that had probably been acquired abroad. And
+she lost no time in telling him, she was eager to tell him, that she had
+been waylaying him. “I did so want to talk to you some maw,” she said.
+“I was shy last night and they we' all so noisy and eaga'. I p'ayed that
+you might come down early.
+
+“It's an oppo'tunity I've longed for,” she said.
+
+She did her very pretty best to convey what it was had been troubling
+her. 'iligion bad been worrying her for years. Life was--oh--just
+ornaments and games and so wea'isome, so wea'isome, unless it was
+'iligious. And she couldn't get it 'iligious.
+
+The bishop nodded his head gravely.
+
+“You unde'stand?” she pressed.
+
+“I understand too well--the attempt to get hold--and keep hold.”
+
+“I knew you would!” she cried.
+
+She went on with an impulsive rapidity. O'thodoxy had always 'ipelled
+her,--always. She had felt herself confronted by the most insurmountable
+difficulties, and yet whenever she had gone away from Christianity--she
+had gone away from Christianity, to the Theosophists and the Christian
+Scientists--she had felt she was only “st'aying fu'tha.” And then
+suddenly when he was speaking last night, she had felt he knew. It was
+so wonderful to hear the “k'eed was only a symbol.”
+
+“Symbol is the proper name for it,” said the bishop. “It wasn't for
+centuries it was called the Creed.”
+
+Yes, and so what it really meant was something quite different from what
+it did mean.
+
+The bishop felt that this sentence also was only a symbol, and nodded
+encouragingly--but gravely, warily.
+
+And there she was, and the point was there were thousands and thousands
+and thousands of educated people like her who were dying to get through
+these old-fashioned symbols to the true faith that lay behind them. That
+they knew lay behind them. She didn't know if he had read “The Light
+under the Altar”?
+
+“He's vicar of Wombash--in my diocese,” said the bishop with restraint.
+
+“It's wonde'ful stuff,” said Lady Sunderbund. “It's spi'tually cold,
+but it's intellectually wonde'ful. But we want that with spi'tuality. We
+want it so badly. If some one--”
+
+She became daring. She bit her under lip and flashed her spirit at him.
+
+“If you--” she said and paused.
+
+“Could think aloud,” said the bishop.
+
+“Yes,” she said, nodding rapidly, and became breathless to hear.
+
+It would certainly be an astonishing end to the Chasters difficulty if
+the bishop went over to the heretic, the bishop reflected.
+
+“My dear lady, I won't disguise,” he began; “in fact I don't see how
+I could, that for some years I have been growing more and more
+discontented with some of our most fundamental formulae. But it's been
+very largely a shapeless discontent--hitherto. I don't think I've said a
+word to a single soul. No, not a word. You are the first person to
+whom I've ever made the admission that even my feelings are at times
+unorthodox.”
+
+She lit up marvellously at his words. “Go on,” she whispered.
+
+But she did not need to tell him to go on. Now that he had once broached
+the casket of his reserves he was only too glad of a listener. He talked
+as if they were intimate and loving friends, and so it seemed to both
+of them they were. It was a wonderful release from a long and painful
+solitude.
+
+To certain types it is never quite clear what has happened to them until
+they tell it. So that now the bishop, punctuated very prettily by
+Lady Sunderbund, began to measure for the first time the extent of his
+departure from the old innate convictions of Otteringham Rectory. He
+said that it was strange to find doubt coming so late in life, but
+perhaps it was only in recent years that his faith had been put to any
+really severe tests. It had been sheltered and unchallenged.
+
+“This fearful wa',” Lady Sunderbund interjected.
+
+But Princhester had been a critical and trying change, and “The Light
+under the Altar” case had ploughed him deeply. It was curious that
+his doubts always seemed to have a double strand; there was a moral
+objection based on the church's practical futility and an intellectual
+strand subordinated to this which traced that futility largely to its
+unconvincing formulae.
+
+“And yet you know,” said the bishop, “I find I can't go with Chasters.
+He beats at the church; he treats her as though she were wrong. I feel
+like a son, growing up, who finds his mother isn't quite so clear-spoken
+nor quite so energetic as she seemed to be once. She's right, I feel
+sure. I've never doubted her fundamental goodness.”
+
+“Yes,” said Lady Sunderbund, very eagerly, “yes.”
+
+“And yet there's this futility.... You know, my dear lady, I don't
+know what to do. One feels on the one hand, that here is a cloud of
+witnesses, great men, sainted men, subtle men, figures permanently
+historical, before whom one can do nothing but bow down in the utmost
+humility, here is a great instrument and organization--what would the
+world be without the witness of the church?--and on the other hand here
+are our masses out of hand and hostile, our industrial leaders equally
+hostile; there is a failure to grip, and that failure to grip is so
+clearly traceable to the fact that our ideas are not modern ideas, that
+when we come to profess our faith we find nothing in our mouths but
+antiquated Alexandrian subtleties and phrases and ideas that may have
+been quite alive, quite significant, quite adequate in Asia Minor or
+Egypt, among men essentially orientals, fifteen hundred years ago, but
+which now--”
+
+He expressed just what they came to now by a gesture.
+
+She echoed his gesture.
+
+“Probably I'm not alone among my brethren,” he went on, and then: “But
+what is one to do?”
+
+With her hands she acted her sense of his difficulty.
+
+“One may be precipitate,” he said. “There's a kind of loyalty and
+discipline that requires one to keep the ranks until one's course of
+action is perfectly clear. One owes so much to so many. One has to
+consider how one may affect--oh! people one has never seen.”
+
+He was lugging things now into speech that so far had been scarcely
+above the threshold of his conscious thought. He went on to discuss the
+entire position of the disbelieving cleric. He discovered a fine point.
+
+“If there was something else, an alternative, another religion, another
+Church, to which one could go, the whole case would be different. But to
+go from the church to nothingness isn't to go from falsehood to truth.
+It's to go from truth, rather badly expressed, rather conservatively
+hidden by its protections, truth in an antiquated costume, to the
+blackest lie--in the world.”
+
+She took that point very brightly.
+
+“One must hold fast to 'iligion,” she said, and looked earnestly at him
+and gripped fiercely, pink thumbs out, with her beautiful hands held up.
+
+That was it, exactly. He too was gripping. But while on the outside the
+Midianites of denial were prowling for these clinging souls, within
+the camp they were assailed by a meticulous orthodoxy that was only too
+eager to cast them forth. The bishop dwelt for a time upon the curious
+fierceness orthodoxy would sometimes display. Nowadays atheism can be
+civil, can be generous; it is orthodoxy that trails a scurrilous fringe.
+
+“Who was that young man with a strong Irish accent--who contradicted me
+so suddenly?” he asked.
+
+“The dark young man?”
+
+“The noisy young man.”
+
+“That was Mist' Pat'ick O'Go'man. He is a Kelt and all that. Spells
+Pat'ick with eva so many letters. You know. They say he spends ouas and
+ouas lea'ning E'se. He wo'ies about it. They all t'y to lea'n E'se, and
+it wo'ies them and makes them hate England moa and moa.”
+
+“He is orthodox. He--is what I call orthodox to the ridiculous extent.”
+
+“'idiculous.”
+
+A deep-toned gong proclaimed breakfast over a square mile or so of
+territory, and Lady Sunderbund turned about mechanically towards the
+house. But they continued their discussion.
+
+She started indeed a new topic. “Shall we eva, do 'ou think, have a new
+'iligion--t'ua and betta?”
+
+That was a revolutionary idea to him.
+
+He was still fending it off from him when a gap in the shrubs brought
+them within sight of the house and of Mrs. Garstein Fellows on the
+portico waving a handkerchief and crying “Break-fast.”
+
+“I wish we could talk for houas,” said Lady Sunderbund.
+
+“I've been glad of this talk,” said the bishop. “Very glad.”
+
+She lifted her soft abundant skirts and trotted briskly across the still
+dewy lawn towards the house door. The bishop followed gravely and slowly
+with his hands behind his back and an unusually peaceful expression upon
+his face. He was thinking how rare and precious a thing it is to find
+intelligent friendship in women. More particularly when they were
+dazzlingly charming and pretty. It was strange, but this was really his
+first woman friend. If, as he hoped, she became his friend.
+
+Lady Sunderbund entered the breakfast room in a gusty abundance like
+Botticelli's Primavera, and kissed Mrs. Garstein Fellows good-morning.
+She exhaled a glowing happiness. “He is wondyful,” she panted. “He is
+most wondyful.”
+
+“Mr. Hidgeway Kelso?”
+
+“No, the dee' bishop! I love him. Are those the little sausages I like?
+May I take th'ee? I've been up houas.”
+
+The dee' bishop appeared in the sunlit doorway.
+
+(5)
+
+
+The bishop felt more contentment in the London train than he had felt
+for many weeks. He had taken two decisive and relieving steps. One was
+that he had stated his case to another human being, and that a very
+charming and sympathetic human being, he was no longer a prey to a
+current of secret and concealed thoughts running counter to all the
+appearances of his outward life; and the other was that he was now
+within an hour or so of Brighton-Pomfrey and a cigarette. He would lunch
+on the train, get to London about two, take a taxi at once to the wise
+old doctor, catch him over his coffee in a charitable and understanding
+mood, and perhaps be smoking a cigarette publicly and honourably and
+altogether satisfyingly before three.
+
+So far as Brighton-Pomfrey's door this program was fulfilled without
+a hitch. The day was fine and he had his taxi opened, and noted with a
+patriotic satisfaction as he rattled through the streets, the glare of
+the recruiting posters on every vacant piece of wall and the increasing
+number of men in khaki in the streets. But at the door he had a
+disappointment. Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was away at the front--of all
+places; he had gone for some weeks; would the bishop like to see Dr.
+Dale?
+
+The bishop hesitated. He had never set eyes on this Dr. Dale.
+
+Indeed, he had never heard of Dr. Dale.
+
+Seeing his old friend Brighton-Pomfrey and being gently and tactfully
+told to do exactly what he was longing to do was one thing; facing some
+strange doctor and going slowly and elaborately through the whole
+story of his illness, his vow and his breakdown, and perhaps having his
+reaction time tested and all sorts of stripping and soundings done, was
+quite another. He was within an ace of turning away.
+
+If he had turned away his whole subsequent life would have been
+different. It was the very slightest thing in the world tipped the
+beam. It was the thought that, after all, whatever inconvenience and
+unpleasantness there might be in this interview, there was at the end of
+it a very reasonable prospect of a restored and legitimate cigarette.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIFTH - THE FIRST VISION
+
+(1)
+
+
+Dr. DALE exceeded the bishop's worst apprehensions. He was a lean, lank,
+dark young man with long black hair and irregular, rather prolonged
+features; his chin was right over to the left; he looked constantly at
+the bishop's face with a distinctly sceptical grey eye; he could not
+have looked harder if he had been a photographer or a portrait painter.
+And his voice was harsh, and the bishop was particularly sensitive to
+voices.
+
+He began by understanding far too much of the bishop's illness, and he
+insisted on various familiarities with the bishop's heart and tongue and
+eye and knee that ruffled the bishop's soul.
+
+“Brighton-Pomfrey talked of neurasthenia?” he asked. “That was his
+diagnosis,” said the bishop. “Neurasthenia,” said the young man as
+though he despised the word.
+
+The bishop went on buttoning up his coat.
+
+“You don't of course want to break your vows about drinking and
+smoking,” said the young man with the very faintest suggestion of
+derision in his voice.
+
+“Not if it can possibly be avoided,” the bishop asserted. “Without a
+loss, that is, of practical efficiency,” he added. “For I have much to
+do.”
+
+“I think that it is possible to keep your vow,” said the young man,
+and the bishop could have sworn at him. “I think we can manage that all
+right.”
+
+(2)
+
+
+The bishop sat at the table resting his arm upon it and awaiting the
+next development of this unsatisfactory interview. He was on the verge
+of asking as unpleasantly as possible when Brighton-Pomfrey would
+return.
+
+The young man stood upon Brighton-Pomfrey's hearth-rug and was evidently
+contemplating dissertations.
+
+“Of course,” he said, as though he discussed a problem with himself,
+“you must have some sort of comfort. You must get out of this state, one
+way or another.”
+
+The bishop nodded assent. He had faint hopes of this young man's ideas
+of comfort.
+
+Dr. Dale reflected. Then he went off away from the question of comfort
+altogether. “You see, the trouble in such a case as this is peculiarly
+difficult to trace to its sources because it comes just upon the
+border-line of bodily and mental things. You may take a drug or alter
+your regimen and it disturbs your thoughts, you may take an idea and
+it disturbs your health. It is easy enough to say, as some do, that all
+ideas have a physical substratum; it is almost as easy to say with the
+Christian Scientist that all bodily states are amenable to our ideas.
+The truth doesn't, I think, follow the border between those opposite
+opinions very exactly on either side. I can't, for instance, tell you to
+go home and pray against these uncertainties and despairs, because it
+is just these uncertainties and despairs that rob you of the power of
+efficient prayer.”
+
+He did not seem to expect anything from the bishop.
+
+“I don't see that because a case brings one suddenly right up against
+the frontier of metaphysics, why a doctor should necessarily pull
+up short at that, why one shouldn't go on into either metaphysics or
+psychology if such an extension is necessary for the understanding of
+the case. At any rate if you'll permit it in this consultation....”
+
+“Go on,” said the bishop, holding on to that promise of comfort. “The
+best thing is to thrash out the case in your own way. And then come to
+what is practical.”
+
+“What is really the matter here--the matter with you that is--is a
+disorganization of your tests of reality. It's one of a group of states
+hitherto confused. Neurasthenia, that comprehensive phrase--well, it is
+one of the neurasthenias. Here, I confess, I begin to talk of work I am
+doing, work still to be published, finished first and then published....
+But I go off from the idea that every living being lives in a state
+not differing essentially from a state of hallucination concerning the
+things about it. Truth, essential truth, is hidden. Always. Of course
+there must be a measure of truth in our working illusions, a working
+measure of truth, or the creature would smash itself up and end itself,
+but beyond that discretion of the fire and the pitfall lies a wide
+margin of error about which we may be deceived for years. So long as it
+doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. I don't know if I make myself clear.”
+
+“I follow you,” said the bishop a little wearily, “I follow you.
+Phenomena and noumena and so on and so on. Kant and so forth.
+Pragmatism. Yes.”
+
+With a sigh.
+
+“And all that,” completed Dr. Dale in a voice that suggested mockery.
+“But you see we grow into a way of life, we settle down among habits and
+conventions, we say 'This is all right' and 'That is always so.' We
+get more and more settled into our life as a whole and more and more
+confident. Unless something happens to shake us out of our sphere of
+illusion. That may be some violent contradictory fact, some accident,
+or it may be some subtle change in one's health and nerves that makes
+us feel doubtful. Or a change of habits. Or, as I believe, some subtle
+quickening of the critical faculty. Then suddenly comes the feeling as
+though we were lost in a strange world, as though we had never really
+seen the world before.”
+
+He paused.
+
+The bishop was reluctantly interested. “That does describe something--of
+the mental side,” he admitted. “I never believe in concealing my own
+thoughts from an intelligent patient,” said Dr. Dale, with a quiet
+offensiveness. “That sort of thing belongs to the dark ages of the
+'pothecary's art. I will tell you exactly my guesses and suppositions
+about you. At the base of it all is a slight and subtle kidney trouble,
+due I suggest to your going to Princhester and drinking the local
+water--”
+
+“But it's excellent water. They boast of it.”
+
+“By all the established tests. As a matter of fact many of our best
+drinking waters have all sorts of unspecified qualities. Burton water,
+for example, is radioactive by Beetham's standards up to the ninth
+degree. But that is by the way. My theory about your case is that this
+produced a change in your blood, that quickened your sensibilities and
+your critical faculties just at a time when a good many bothers--I don't
+of course know what they were, but I can, so to speak, see the marks all
+over you--came into your life.”
+
+The bishop nodded.
+
+“You were uprooted. You moved from house to house, and failed to get
+that curled up safe feeling one has in a real home in any of them.”
+
+“If you saw the fireplaces and the general decoration of the new
+palace!” admitted the bishop. “I had practically no control.”
+
+“That confirms me,” said Dr. Dale. “Insomnia followed, and increased the
+feeling of physical strangeness by increasing the bodily disturbance. I
+suspect an intellectual disturbance.”
+
+He paused.
+
+“There was,” said the bishop.
+
+“You were no longer at home anywhere. You were no longer at home in your
+diocese, in your palace, in your body, in your convictions. And then
+came the war. Quite apart from everything else the mind of the whole
+world is suffering profoundly from the shock of this war--much more
+than is generally admitted. One thing you did that you probably did not
+observe yourself doing, you drank rather more at your meals, you smoked
+a lot more. That was your natural and proper response to the shock.”
+
+“Ah!” said the bishop, and brightened up.
+
+“It was remarked by Tolstoy, I think, that few intellectual men would
+really tolerate the world as it is if it were not for smoking and
+drinking. Even novelists have their moments of lucidity. Certainly these
+things soothe the restlessness in men's minds, deaden their sceptical
+sensibilities. And just at the time when you were getting most
+dislodged--you gave them up.”
+
+“And the sooner I go back to them the better,” said the bishop brightly.
+“I quite see that.”
+
+“I wouldn't say that,” said Dr. Dale....
+
+(3)
+
+
+“That,” said Dr. Dale, “is just where my treatment of this case differs
+from the treatment of “--he spoke the name reluctantly as if he disliked
+the mere sound of it--“Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.”
+
+“Hitherto, of course,” said the bishop, “I've been in his hands.”
+
+“He,” said Dr. Dale, “would certainly set about trying to restore your
+old sphere of illusion, your old familiar sensations and ideas and
+confidences. He would in fact turn you back. He would restore all your
+habits. He would order you a rest. He would send you off to some holiday
+resort, fresh in fact but familiar in character, the High lands, North
+Italy, or Switzerland for example. He would forbid you newspapers and
+order you to botanize and prescribe tranquillizing reading; Trollope's
+novels, the Life of Gladstone, the works of Mr. A. C. Benson, memoirs
+and so on. You'd go somewhere where there was a good Anglican chaplain,
+and you'd take some of the services yourself. And we'd wash out the
+effects of the Princhester water with Contrexeville, and afterwards
+put you on Salutaris or Perrier. I don't know whether I shouldn't have
+inclined to some such treatment before the war began. Only--”
+
+He paused.
+
+“You think--?”
+
+Dr. Dale's face betrayed a sudden sombre passion. “It won't do now,” he
+said in a voice of quiet intensity. “It won't do now.”
+
+He remained darkly silent for so long that at last the bishop spoke.
+“Then what,” he asked, “do you suggest?
+
+“Suppose we don't try to go back,” said Dr. Dale. “Suppose we go on and
+go through.”
+
+“Where?”
+
+“To reality.
+
+“I know it's doubtful, I know it's dangerous,” he went on, “but I am
+convinced that now we can no longer keep men's minds and souls in these
+feathered nests, these spheres of illusion. Behind these veils there is
+either God or the Darkness.... Why should we not go on?”
+
+The bishop was profoundly perplexed. He heard himself speaking. “It
+would be unworthy of my cloth,” he was saying.
+
+Dr. Dale completed the sentence: “to go back.”
+
+“Let me explain a little more,” he said, “what I mean by 'going on.' I
+think that this loosening of the ties of association that bind a man to
+his everyday life and his everyday self is in nine cases out of ten a
+loosening of the ties that bind him to everyday sanity. One common form
+of this detachment is the form you have in those cases of people who
+are found wandering unaware of their names, unaware of their places
+of residence, lost altogether from themselves. They have not only lost
+their sense of identity with themselves, but all the circumstances of
+their lives have faded out of their minds like an idle story in a book
+that has been read and put aside. I have looked into hundreds of such
+cases. I don't think that loss of identity is a necessary thing; it's
+just another side of the general weakening of the grip upon reality, a
+kind of anaemia of the brain so that interest fades and fails. There
+is no reason why you should forget a story because you do not believe
+it--if your brain is strong enough to hold it. But if your brain is
+tired and weak, then so soon as you lose faith in your records, your
+mind is glad to let them go. When you see these lost identity people
+that is always your first impression, a tired brain that has let go.”
+
+The bishop felt extremely like letting go.
+
+“But how does this apply to my case?”
+
+“I come to that,” said Dr. Dale, holding up a long large hand. “What
+if we treat this case of yours in a new way? What if we give you not
+narcotics but stimulants and tonics? What if we so touch the blood that
+we increase your sense of physical detachment while at the same time
+feeding up your senses to a new and more vivid apprehension of things
+about you?” He looked at his patient's hesitation and added: “You'd lose
+all that craving feeling, that you fancy at present is just the need
+of a smoke. The world might grow a trifle--transparent, but you'd keep
+real. Instead of drugging oneself back to the old contentment--”
+
+“You'd drug me on to the new,” said the bishop.
+
+“But just one word more!” said Dr. Dale. “Hear why I would do this! It
+was easy and successful to rest and drug people back to their old states
+of mind when the world wasn't changing, wasn't spinning round in the
+wildest tornado of change that it has ever been in. But now--Where can
+I send you for a rest? Where can I send you to get you out of sight and
+hearing of the Catastrophe? Of course old Brighton-Pomfrey would go on
+sending people away for rest and a nice little soothing change if the
+Day of Judgment was coming in the sky and the earth was opening and the
+sea was giving up its dead. He'd send 'em to the seaside. Such things as
+that wouldn't shake his faith in the Channel crossing. My idea is that
+it's not only right for you to go through with this, but that it's the
+only thing to do. If you go right on and right through with these doubts
+and intimations--”
+
+He paused.
+
+“You may die like a madman,” he said, “but you won't die like a tame
+rabbit.”
+
+(4)
+
+
+The bishop sat reflecting. What fascinated and attracted him was the
+ending of all the cravings and uneasinesses and restlessness that had
+distressed his life for over four years; what deterred him was the
+personality of this gaunt young man with his long grey face, his excited
+manner, his shock of black hair. He wanted that tonic--with grave
+misgivings. “If you think this tonic is the wiser course,” he began.
+“I'd give it you if you were my father,” said Dr. Dale. “I've got
+everything for it,” he added.
+
+“You mean you can make it up--without a prescription.”
+
+“I can't give you a prescription. The essence of it--It's a distillate I
+have been trying. It isn't in the Pharmacopeia.”
+
+Again the bishop had a twinge of misgiving.
+
+But in the end he succumbed. He didn't want to take the stuff, but also
+he did not want to go without his promised comfort.
+
+Presently Dale had given him a little phial--and was holding up to the
+window a small medicine glass into which he was pouring very carefully
+twenty drops of the precious fluid. “Take it only,” he said, “when you
+feel you must.”
+
+“It is the most golden of liquids,” said the bishop, peering at it.
+
+“When you want more I will make you more. Later of course, it will be
+possible to write a prescription. Now add the water--so.
+
+“It becomes opalescent. How beautifully the light plays in it!
+
+“Take it.”
+
+The bishop dismissed his last discretion and drank.
+
+“Well?” said Dr. Dale.
+
+“I am still here,” said the bishop, smiling, and feeling a joyous
+tingling throughout his body. “It stirs me.”
+
+(5)
+
+
+The bishop stood on the pavement outside Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's house.
+The massive door had closed behind him.
+
+It had been an act of courage, of rashness if you will, to take this
+draught. He was acutely introspective, ready for anything, for the most
+disagreeable or the most bizarre sensations. He was asking himself, Were
+his feet steady? Was his head swimming?
+
+His doubts glowed into assurance.
+
+Suddenly he perceived that he was sure of God.
+
+Not perhaps of the God of Nicaea, but what did these poor little
+quibblings and definitions of the theologians matter? He had been
+worrying about these definitions and quibblings for four long restless
+years. Now they were just failures to express--what surely every one
+knew--and no one would ever express exactly. Because here was God, and
+the kingdom of God was manifestly at hand. The visible world hung before
+him as a mist might hang before the rising sun. He stood proudly and
+masterfully facing a universe that had heretofore bullied him into doubt
+and apologetics, a universe that had hitherto been opaque and was now
+betrayed translucent.
+
+That was the first effect of the new tonic, complete reassurance,
+complete courage. He turned to walk towards Mount Street and Berkeley
+Square as a sultan might turn to walk among his slaves.
+
+But the tonic was only beginning.
+
+Before he had gone a dozen steps he was aware that he seemed more solid
+and larger than the people about him. They had all a curious miniature
+effect, as though he was looking at them through the wrong end of an
+opera glass. The houses on either side of the street and the traffic
+shared this quality in an equal measure. It was as if he was looking at
+the world through apertures in a miniature cinematograph peep-show. This
+surprised him and a little dashed his first glow of satisfaction.
+
+He passed a man in khaki who, he fancied, looked at him with an odd
+expression. He observed the next passers-by narrowly and suspiciously, a
+couple of smartish young men, a lady with a poodle, a grocer's boy with
+a basket, but none seemed to observe anything remarkable about him. Then
+he caught the eye of a taxi-driver and became doubtful again.
+
+He had a feeling that this tonic was still coming in like a tide. It
+seemed to be filling him and distending him, in spite of the fact that
+he was already full. After four years of flaccidity it was pleasant to
+be distended again, but already he felt more filled than he had ever
+been before. At present nothing was showing, but all his body seemed
+braced and uplifted. He must be careful not to become inflated in his
+bearing.
+
+And yet it was difficult not to betray a little inflation. He was so
+filled with assurance that things were right with him and that God was
+there with him. After all it was not mere fancy; he was looking through
+the peepholes of his eyes at the world of illusion and appearance. The
+world that was so intent upon its immediate business, so regardless of
+eternal things, that had so dominated him but a little while ago, was
+after all a thing more mortal than himself.
+
+Another man in khaki passed him.
+
+For the first time he saw the war as something measurable, as something
+with a beginning and an end, as something less than the immortal spirit
+in man. He had been too much oppressed by it. He perceived all these
+people in the street were too much oppressed by it. He wanted to tell
+them as much, tell them that all was well with them, bid them be of good
+cheer. He wanted to bless them. He found his arm floating up towards
+gestures of benediction. Self-control became increasingly difficult.
+
+All the way down Berkeley Square the bishop was in full-bodied struggle
+with himself. He was trying to control himself, trying to keep within
+bounds. He felt that he was stepping too high, that his feet were not
+properly reaching the ground, that he was walking upon cushions of air.
+
+The feeling of largeness increased, and the feeling of transparency in
+things about him. He avoided collision with passers-by--excessively. And
+he felt his attention was being drawn more and more to something that
+was going on beyond the veil of visible things. He was in Piccadilly
+now, but at the same time Piccadilly was very small and he was walking
+in the presence of God.
+
+He had a feeling that God was there though he could not see him. And at
+the same time he was in this transitory world, with people going to and
+fro, men with umbrellas tucked dangerously under their arms, men in a
+hurry, policemen, young women rattling Red Cross collecting boxes, smart
+people, loafers. They distracted one from God.
+
+He set out to cross the road just opposite Prince's, and jumping
+needlessly to give way to an omnibus had the narrowest escape from a
+taxicab.
+
+He paused on the pavement edge to recover himself. The shock of his near
+escape had, as people say, pulled him together.
+
+What was he to do? Manifestly this opalescent draught was overpowering
+him. He ought never to have taken it. He ought to have listened to the
+voice of his misgivings. It was clear that he was not in a fit state to
+walk about the streets. He was--what had been Dr. Dale's term?--losing
+his sense of reality. What was he to do? He was alarmed but not
+dismayed. His thoughts were as full-bodied as the rest of his being,
+they came throbbing and bumping into his mind. What was he to do?
+
+Brighton-Pomfrey ought never to have left his practice in the hands of
+this wild-eyed experimenter.
+
+Strange that after a lifetime of discretion and men's respect one should
+be standing on the Piccadilly pavement--intoxicated!
+
+It came into his head that he was not so very far from the Athenaeum,
+and surely there if anywhere a bishop may recover his sense of
+being--ordinary.
+
+And behind everything, behind the tall buildings and the swarming people
+there was still the sense of a wide illuminated space, of a light of
+wonder and a Presence. But he must not give way to that again! He had
+already given way altogether too much. He repeated to himself in a
+whisper, “I am in Piccadilly.”
+
+If he kept tight hold upon himself he felt he might get to the Athenaeum
+before--before anything more happened.
+
+He murmured directions to himself. “Keep along the pavement. Turn to
+the right at the Circus. Now down the hill. Easily down the hill. Don't
+float! Junior Army and Navy Stores. And the bookseller.”
+
+And presently he had a doubt of his name and began to repeat it.
+
+“Edward Princhester. Edward Scrope, Lord Bishop of Princhester.”
+
+And all the while voices within him were asserting, “You are in the
+kingdom of Heaven. You are in the presence of God. Place and time are a
+texture of illusion and dreamland. Even now, you are with God.”
+
+(6)
+
+
+The porter of the Athenaeum saw him come in, looking well--flushed
+indeed--but queer in expression; his blue eyes were wide open and
+unusually vague and blue.
+
+He wandered across towards the dining-room, hesitated, went to look at
+the news, seemed in doubt whether he would not go into the smoking-room,
+and then went very slowly upstairs, past the golden angel up to the
+great drawing-room.
+
+In the drawing-room he found only Sir James Mounce, the man who knew
+the novels of Sir Walter Scott by heart and had the minutest and most
+unsparing knowledge of every detail in the life of that supreme giant of
+English literature. He had even, it was said, acquired a Scotch burr in
+the enthusiasm of his hero-worship. It was usually sufficient only to
+turn an ear towards him for him to talk for an hour or so. He was now
+studying Bradshaw.
+
+The bishop snatched at him desperately. He felt that if he went away
+there would be no hold left upon the ordinary things of life.
+
+“Sir James,” he said, “I was wondering the other day when was the exact
+date of the earliest public ascription of Waverley to Scott.”
+
+“Eh!” said Sir James, “but I'd like to talk that over with ye. Indeed
+I would. It would be depending very largely on what ye called 'public.'
+But--”
+
+He explained something about an engagement in Birmingham that night, a
+train to catch. Reluctantly but relentlessly he abandoned the proffered
+ear. But he promised that the next time they met in the club he would go
+into the matter “exhausteevely.”
+
+The door closed upon him. The bishop was alone. He was flooded with
+the light of the world that is beyond this world. The things about him
+became very small and indistinct.
+
+He would take himself into a quiet corner in the library of this doll's
+house, and sit his little body down in one of the miniature armchairs.
+Then if he was going to faint or if the trancelike feeling was to become
+altogether a trance--well, a bishop asleep in an armchair in the library
+of the Athenaeum is nothing to startle any one.
+
+He thought of that convenient hidden room, the North Library, in which
+is the bust of Croker. There often one can be quite alone.... It was
+empty, and he went across to the window that looks out upon Pall Mall
+and sat down in the little uncomfortable easy chair by the desk with its
+back to the Benvenuto Cellini.
+
+And as he sat down, something snapped--like the snapping of a lute
+string--in his brain.
+
+(7)
+
+
+With a sigh of deep relief the bishop realized that this world had
+vanished.
+
+He was in a golden light.
+
+He perceived it as a place, but it was a place without buildings or
+trees or any very definite features. There was a cloudy suggestion of
+distant hills, and beneath his feet were little gem-like flowers, and
+a feeling of divinity and infinite friendliness pervaded his being. His
+impressions grew more definite. His feet seemed to be bare. He was no
+longer a bishop nor clad as a bishop. That had gone with the rest of the
+world. He was seated on a slab of starry rock.
+
+This he knew quite clearly was the place of God.
+
+He was unable to disentangle thoughts from words. He seemed to be
+speaking in his mind.
+
+“I have been very foolish and confused and perplexed. I have been like a
+creature caught among thorns.”
+
+“You served the purpose of God among those thorns.” It seemed to him at
+first that the answer also was among his thoughts.
+
+“I seemed so silly and so little. My wits were clay.”
+
+“Clay full of desires.”
+
+“Such desires!”
+
+“Blind desires. That will presently come to the light.”
+
+“Shall we come to the light?”
+
+“But here it is, and you see it!”
+
+(8)
+
+
+It became clearer in the mind of the bishop that a figure sat beside
+him, a figure of great strength and beauty, with a smiling face and
+kindly eyes. A strange thought and a strange courage came to the bishop.
+
+“Tell me,” he whispered, “are you God?”
+
+“I am the Angel of God.”
+
+The bishop thought over that for some moments.
+
+“I want,” he said, “to know about God.
+
+“I want,” he said, with a deepening passion of the soul, “to know about
+God. Slowly through four long years I have been awakening to the need
+of God. Body and soul I am sick for the want of God and the knowledge of
+God. I did not know what was the matter with me, why my life had become
+so disordered and confused that my very appetites and habits are all
+astray. But I am perishing for God as a waterless man upon a raft
+perishes for drink, and there is nothing but madness if I touch the seas
+about me. Not only in my thoughts but in my under thoughts and in my
+nerves and bones and arteries I have need of God. You see I grew up in
+the delusion that I knew God, I did not know that I was unprovisioned
+and unprovided against the tests and strains and hardships of life. I
+thought that I was secure and safe. I was told that we men--who were
+apes not a quarter of a million years ago, who still have hair upon
+our arms and ape's teeth in our jaws--had come to the full and perfect
+knowledge of God. It was all put into a creed. Not a word of it was to
+be altered, not a sentence was to be doubted any more. They made me a
+teacher of this creed. They seemed to explain it to me. And when I came
+to look into it, when my need came and I turned to my creed, it was old
+and shrivelled up, it was the patched-up speculations of vanished Greeks
+and Egyptians, it was a mummy of ancient disputes, old and dry, that
+fell to dust as I unwrapped it. And I was dressed up in the dress of old
+dead times and put before an altar of forgotten sacrifices, and I went
+through ceremonies as old as the first seedtime; and suddenly I knew
+clearly that God was not there, God was not in my Creed, not in my
+cathedral, not in my ceremonies, nowhere in my life. And at the same
+time I knew, I knew as I had never known before, that certainly there
+was God.”
+
+He paused. “Tell me,” said the friend at his side; “tell me.”
+
+“It was as if a child running beside its mother, looked up and saw that
+he had never seen her face before, that she was not his mother, and that
+the words he had seemed to understand were--now that he listened--words
+in an unknown tongue.
+
+“You see, I am but a common sort of man, dear God; I have neither lived
+nor thought in any way greatly, I have gone from one day to the next day
+without looking very much farther than the end of the day, I have gone
+on as life has befallen; if no great trouble had come into my life, so
+I should have lived to the end of my days. But life which began for me
+easily and safely has become constantly more difficult and strange.
+I could have held my services and given my benedictions, I could have
+believed I believed in what I thought I believed.... But now I am lost
+and astray--crying out for God....”
+
+(9)
+
+
+“Let us talk a little about your troubles,” said the Angel. “Let us talk
+about God and this creed that worries you and this church of yours.”
+
+“I feel as though I had been struggling to this talk through all the
+years--since my doubts began.”
+
+“The story your Creed is trying to tell is much the same story that
+all religions try to tell. In your heart there is God, beyond the stars
+there is God. Is it the same God?”
+
+“I don't know,” said the bishop.
+
+“Does any one know?”
+
+“I thought I knew.”
+
+“Your creed is full of Levantine phrases and images, full of the patched
+contradictions of the human intelligence utterly puzzled. It is about
+those two Gods, the God beyond the stars and the God in your heart. It
+says that they are the same God, but different. It says that they have
+existed together for all time, and that one is the Son of the other. It
+has added a third Person--but we won't go into that.”
+
+The bishop was reminded suddenly of the dispute at Mrs. Garstein
+Fellows'. “We won't go into that,” he agreed. “No!”
+
+“Other religions have told the story in a different way. The Cathars and
+Gnostics did. They said that the God in your heart is a rebel against
+the God beyond the stars, that the Christ in your heart is like
+Prometheus--or Hiawatha--or any other of the sacrificial gods, a rebel.
+He arises out of man. He rebels against that high God of the stars and
+crystals and poisons and monsters and of the dead emptiness of space....
+The Manicheans and the Persians made out our God to be fighting
+eternally against that Being of silence and darkness beyond the stars.
+The Buddhists made the Lord Buddha the leader of men out of the futility
+and confusion of material existence to the great peace beyond. But it is
+all one story really, the story of the two essential Beings, always the
+same story and the same perplexity cropping up under different names,
+the story of one being who stirs us, calls to us, and leads us, and
+of another who is above and outside and in and beneath all things,
+inaccessible and incomprehensible. All these religions are trying to
+tell something they do not clearly know--of a relationship between these
+two, that eludes them, that eludes the human mind, as water escapes from
+the hand. It is unity and opposition they have to declare at the same
+time; it is agreement and propitiation, it is infinity and effort.”
+
+“And the truth?” said the bishop in an eager whisper. “You can tell me
+the truth.”
+
+The Angel's answer was a gross familiarity. He thrust his hand through
+the bishop's hair and ruffled it affectionately, and rested for a moment
+holding the bishop's cranium in his great palm.
+
+“But can this hold it?” he said....
+
+“Not with this little box of brains,” said the Angel. “You could as soon
+make a meal of the stars and pack them into your belly. You haven't the
+things to do it with inside this.”
+
+He gave the bishop's head a little shake and relinquished it.
+
+He began to argue as an elder brother might.
+
+“Isn't it enough for you to know something of the God that comes down to
+the human scale, who has been born on your planet and arisen out of Man,
+who is Man and God, your leader? He's more than enough to fill your mind
+and use up every faculty of your being. He is courage, he is adventure,
+he is the King, he fights for you and with you against death....”
+
+“And he is not infinite? He is not the Creator?” asked the bishop.
+
+“So far as you are concerned, no,” said the Angel.
+
+“So far as I am concerned?”
+
+“What have you to do with creation?”
+
+And at that question it seemed that a great hand swept carelessly across
+the blackness of the farther sky, and smeared it with stars and suns and
+shining nebulas as a brush might smear dry paint across a canvas.
+
+The bishop stared in front of him. Then slowly he bowed his head, and
+covered his face with his hands.
+
+“And I have been in orders,” he murmured; “I have been teaching people
+the only orthodox and perfect truth about these things for seven and
+twenty years.”
+
+And suddenly he was back in his gaiters and his apron and his shovel
+hat, a little black figure exceedingly small in a very great space....
+
+(10)
+
+
+It was a very great space indeed because it was all space, and the roof
+was the ebony of limitless space from which the stars swung flaming,
+held by invisible ties, and the soil beneath his feet was a dust of
+atoms and the little beginnings of life. And long before the bishop
+bared his face again, he knew that he was to see his God.
+
+He looked up slowly, fearing to be dazzled.
+
+But he was not dazzled. He knew that he saw only the likeness and
+bodying forth of a being inconceivable, of One who is greater than the
+earth and stars and yet no greater than a man. He saw a being for ever
+young, for ever beginning, for ever triumphant. The quality and texture
+of this being was a warm and living light like the effulgence at
+sunrise; He was hope and courage like a sunlit morning in spring. He
+was adventure for ever, and His courage and adventure flowed into and
+submerged and possessed the being of the man who beheld him. And this
+presence of God stood over the bishop, and seemed to speak to him in a
+wordless speech.
+
+He bade him surrender himself. He bade him come out upon the Adventure
+of Life, the great Adventure of the earth that will make the atoms our
+bond-slaves and subdue the stars, that will build up the white fires of
+ecstasy to submerge pain for ever, that will overcome death. In Him
+the spirit of creation had become incarnate, had joined itself to men,
+summoning men to Him, having need of them, having need of them, having
+need of their service, even as great kings and generals and leaders need
+and use men. For a moment, for an endless age, the bishop bowed himself
+in the being and glory of God, felt the glow of the divine courage and
+confidence in his marrow, felt himself one with God.
+
+For a timeless interval....
+
+Never had the bishop had so intense a sense of reality. It seemed that
+never before had he known anything real. He knew certainly that God was
+his King and master, and that his unworthy service could be acceptable
+to God. His mind embraced that idea with an absolute conviction that was
+also absolute happiness.
+
+(11)
+
+
+The thoughts and sensations of the bishop seemed to have lifted for
+a time clean away from the condition of time, and then through a vast
+orbit to be returning to that limitation.
+
+He was aware presently that things were changing, that the light was
+losing its diviner rays, that in some indescribable manner the glory and
+the assurance diminished.
+
+The onset of the new phase was by imperceptible degrees. From a glowing,
+serene, and static realization of God, everything relapsed towards
+change and activity. He was in time again and things were happening, it
+was as if the quicksands of time poured by him, and it was as if God
+was passing away from him. He fell swiftly down from the heaven
+of self-forgetfulness to a grotesque, pathetic and earthly
+self-consciousness.
+
+He became acutely aware of his episcopal livery. And that God was
+passing away from him.
+
+It was as if God was passing, and as if the bishop was unable to rise up
+and follow him.
+
+Then it was as if God had passed, and as if the bishop was in headlong
+pursuit of him and in a great terror lest he should be left behind. And
+he was surely being left behind.
+
+He discovered that in some unaccountable way his gaiters were loose;
+most of their buttons seemed to have flown off, and his episcopal
+sash had slipped down about his feet. He was sorely impeded. He kept
+snatching at these things as he ran, in clumsy attempts to get them off.
+
+At last he had to stop altogether and kneel down and fumble with the
+last obstinate button.
+
+“Oh God!” he cried, “God my captain! Wait for me! Be patient with me!”
+
+And as he did so God turned back and reached out his hand. It was indeed
+as if he stood and smiled. He stood and smiled as a kind man might do;
+he dazzled and blinded his worshipper, and yet it was manifest that he
+had a hand a man might clasp.
+
+Unspeakable love and joy irradiated the whole being of the bishop as he
+seized God's hand and clasped it desperately with both his own. It was
+as if his nerves and arteries and all his substance were inundated with
+golden light....
+
+It was again as if he merged with God and became God....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SIXTH - EXEGETICAL
+
+(1)
+
+
+WITHOUT any sense of transition the bishop found himself seated in the
+little North Library of the Athenaeum club and staring at the bust of
+John Wilson Croker. He was sitting motionless and musing deeply. He was
+questioning with a cool and steady mind whether he had seen a vision
+or whether he had had a dream. If it had been a dream it had been an
+extraordinarily vivid and convincing dream. He still seemed to be in the
+presence of God, and it perplexed him not at all that he should also
+be in the presence of Croker. The feeling of mental rottenness and
+insecurity that had weakened his thought through the period of his
+illness, had gone. He was secure again within himself.
+
+It did not seem to matter fundamentally whether it was an experience of
+things without or of things within him that had happened to him. It was
+clear to him that much that he had seen was at most expressive, that
+some was altogether symbolical. For example, there was that sudden
+absurd realization of his sash and gaiters, and his perception of them
+as encumbrances in his pursuit of God. But the setting and essential of
+the whole thing remained in his mind neither expressive nor symbolical,
+but as real and immediately perceived, and that was the presence and
+kingship of God. God was still with him and about him and over him and
+sustaining him. He was back again in his world and his ordinary life,
+in his clothing and his body and his club, but God had been made and
+remained altogether plain and manifest.
+
+Whether an actual vision had made his conviction, or whether the
+conviction of his own subconscious mind had made the dream, seemed but
+a small matter beside the conviction that this was indeed the God he had
+desired and the God who must rule his life.
+
+“The stuff? The stuff had little to do with it. It just cleared my
+head.... I have seen. I have seen really. I know.”
+
+(2)
+
+
+For a long time as it seemed the bishop remained wrapped in clouds of
+luminous meditation. Dream or vision it did not matter; the essential
+thing was that he had made up his mind about God, he had found God.
+Moreover, he perceived that his theological perplexities had gone. God
+was higher and simpler and nearer than any theological God, than the
+God of the Three Creeds. Those creeds lay about in his mind now like
+garments flung aside, no trace nor suspicion of divinity sustained them
+any longer. And now--Now he would go out into the world.
+
+The little Library of the Athenaeum has no visible door. He went to the
+book-masked entrance in the corner, and felt among the bookshelves
+for the hidden latch. Then he paused, held by a curious thought. What
+exactly was the intention of that symbolical struggle with his sash and
+gaiters, and why had they impeded his pursuit of God?
+
+To what particularly significant action was he going out?
+
+The Three Creeds were like garments flung aside. But he was still
+wearing the uniform of a priest in the service of those three creeds.
+
+After a long interval he walked into the big reading-room. He ordered
+some tea and dry toast and butter, and sat down very thoughtfully in a
+corner. He was still sitting and thinking at half-past eight.
+
+It may seem strange to the reader that this bishop who had been doubting
+and criticizing the church and his system of beliefs for four long
+years had never before faced the possibility of a severance from his
+ecclesiastical dignity. But he had grown up in the church, his life had
+been so entirely clerical and Anglican, that the widest separation he
+had hitherto been able to imagine from this past had left him still a
+bishop, heretical perhaps, innovating in the broadening of beliefs and
+the liberalizing of practice, defensive even as Chasters was defensive,
+but still with the palace and his dignities, differing in opinion rather
+than in any tangible reality from his previous self. For a bishop,
+disbelief in the Church is a far profounder scepticism than mere
+disbelief in God. God is unseen, and in daily things unfelt; but
+the Church is with the predestined bishop always. His concept of the
+extremest possible departure from orthodoxy had been something that
+Chasters had phrased as “a restatement of Christ.” It was a new idea, an
+idea that had come with an immense effect of severance and novelty, that
+God could be other than the God of the Creed, could present himself
+to the imagination as a figure totally unlike the white, gentle, and
+compromising Redeemer of an Anglican's thought. That the bishop should
+treat the whole teaching of the church and the church itself as wrong,
+was an idea so new that it fell upon him now like a thunderbolt out of a
+cloudless sky. But here, clear in his mind now, was a feeling, amounting
+to conviction, that it was the purpose and gesture of the true God that
+he should come right out of the church and all his professions.
+
+And in the first glow of his vision he felt this gesture imperative. He
+must step right out.... Whither? how? And when?
+
+To begin with it seemed to him that an immediate renunciation was
+demanded. But it was a momentous step. He wanted to think. And to go
+on thinking. Rather than to act precipitately. Although the imperative
+seemed absolute, some delaying and arresting instinct insisted that he
+must “think” If he went back to Princhester, the everyday duties of
+his position would confront him at once with an effect of a definite
+challenge. He decided to take one of the Reform club bedrooms for two or
+three days, and wire to Princhester that he was “unavoidably delayed in
+town,” without further explanations. Then perhaps this inhibitory force
+would give way.
+
+It did not, however, give way. His mind sat down for two days in a blank
+amazement at the course before him, and at the end of that time this
+reasonless and formless institution was as strong as ever. During that
+time, except for some incidental exchanges at his clubs, he talked to no
+one. At first he did not want to talk to any one. He remained mentally
+and practically active, with a still intensely vivid sense that God,
+the true God, stood watching him and waiting for him to follow. And to
+follow meant slipping right out of all the world he had ever known.
+To thrust his foot right over the edge of a cliff would scarcely have
+demanded more from the bishop's store of resolution. He stood on the
+very verge. The chief secretion of his mind was a shadowy experiment or
+so in explanation of why he did not follow.
+
+(3)
+
+
+Insensibly the extreme vividness of his sense of God's nearness
+decreased. But he still retained a persuasion of the reality of an
+immediate listener waiting, and of the need of satisfying him.
+
+On the third day he found his mind still further changed. He no longer
+felt that God was in Pall Mall or St. James's Park, whither he
+resorted to walk and muse. He felt now that God was somewhere about the
+horizon....
+
+He felt too no longer that he thought straight into the mind of God. He
+thought now of what he would presently say to God. He turned over and
+rehearsed phrases. With that came a desire to try them first on some
+other hearer. And from that to the attentive head of Lady Sunderbund,
+prettily bent towards him, was no great leap. She would understand,
+if any one could understand, the great change that had happened in his
+mind.
+
+He found her address in the telephone book. She could be quite alone
+to him if he wouldn't mind “just me.” It was, he said, exactly what he
+desired.
+
+But when he got to her great airy flat overlooking Hyde Park, with its
+Omega Workshop furniture and its arresting decoration, he was not so
+sure whether this encounter was so exactly the thing he had desired as
+he had supposed.
+
+The world had become opaque and real again as he walked up St. James's
+Street and past the Ritz. He had a feeling that he was taking an
+afternoon off from God. The adventurous modernity of the room in which
+he waited intensified that. One whole white wall was devoted to a small
+picture by Wyndham Lewis. It was like a picture of an earthquake in a
+city of aniline pink and grey and keen green cardboard, and he wished it
+had never existed.
+
+He turned his back upon it and stared out of the window over the trees
+and greenery. The balcony was decorated with white and pink geraniums in
+pots painted black and gold, and the railings of the balcony were black
+and gold with crimson shape like squares wildly out of drawing.
+
+Lady Sunderbund kept him waiting perhaps five minutes. Then she came
+sailing in to him.
+
+She was dressed in a way and moved across the room in a way that was
+more reminiscent of Botticelli's Spring than ever--only with a kind
+of superadded stiffish polonaise of lace--and he did not want to be
+reminded of Botticelli's Spring or wonder why she had taken to stiff
+lace polonaises. He did not enquire whether he had met Lady Sunderbund
+to better advantage at Mrs. Garstein Fellows' or whether his memory had
+overrated her or whether anything had happened to his standard of taste,
+but his feeling now was decidedly one of disappointment, and all the
+talk and self-examination he had promised himself seemed to wither and
+hide away within him. For a time he talked of her view, and then
+admired her room and its arrangement, which he thought really were quite
+unbecomingly flippant and undignified for a room. Then came the black
+tea-things on their orange tray, and he searched in his mind for small
+talk to sustain their interview.
+
+But he had already betrayed his disposition to “go on with our talk”
+ in his telephone enquiry, and Lady Sunderbund, perceiving his shyness,
+began to make openings for him, at first just little hinting openings,
+and then larger and larger ones, until at last one got him.
+
+“I'm so glad,” she said, “to see you again. I'm so glad to go on with
+our talk. I've thought about it and thought about it.”
+
+She beamed at him happily.
+
+“I've thought ova ev'y wo'd you said,” she went on, when she had
+finished conveying her pretty bliss to him. “I've been so helped by
+thinking the k'eeds are symbols. And all you said. And I've felt time
+after time, you couldn't stay whe' you we'. That what you we' saying to
+me, would have to be said 'ight out.”
+
+That brought him in. He could not very well evade that opening without
+incivility. After all he had asked to see her, and it was a foolish
+thing to let little decorative accidentals put him off his friendly
+purpose. A woman may have flower-pots painted gold with black checkers
+and still be deeply understanding. He determined to tell her what was in
+his mind. But he found something barred him from telling that he had
+had an actual vision of God. It was as if that had been a private and
+confidential meeting. It wasn't, he felt, for him either to boast a
+privilege or tell others of things that God had not chosen to show them.
+
+“Since I saw you,” he said, “I have thought a great deal--of the subject
+of our conversation.”
+
+“I have been t'ying to think,” she said in a confirmatory tone, as if
+she had co-operated.
+
+“My faith in God grows,” he said.
+
+She glowed. Her lips fell apart. She flamed attention.
+
+“But it grows less like the faith of the church, less and less. I was
+born and trained in Anglicanism, and it is with a sort of astonishment I
+find myself passing now out of every sort of Catholicism--seeing it from
+the outside....”
+
+“Just as one might see Buddhism,” she supplied.
+
+“And yet feeling nearer, infinitely nearer to God,” he said.
+
+“Yes,” she panted; “yes.”
+
+“I thought if one went out, one went out just to doubt and darkness.”
+
+“And you don't?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“You have gone at one step to a new 'iligion!”
+
+He stared for a moment at the phrase.
+
+“To religion,” he said.
+
+“It is so wondyful,” she said, with her hands straight down upon the
+couch upon which she was sitting, and leaning forward at him, so as to
+seem almost as much out of drawing as a modern picture.
+
+“It seems,” he reflected; “--as if it were a natural thing.”
+
+She came back to earth very slowly. She turned to the tea-things with
+hushed and solemn movements as though she administered a ceremony of
+peculiar significance. The bishop too rose slowly out of the profundity
+of his confession. “No sugar please,” he said, arresting the lump in mid
+air.
+
+It was only when they were embarked upon cups of tea and had a little
+refreshed themselves, that she carried the talk further.
+
+“Does it mean that you must leave the church?” she asked.
+
+“It seemed so at first,” he said. “But now I do not know. I do not know
+what I ought to do.”
+
+She awaited his next thought.
+
+“It is as if one had lived in a room all one's life and thought it the
+world--and then suddenly walked out through a door and discovered the
+sea and the mountains and stars. So it was with me and the Anglican
+Church. It seems so extraordinary now--and it would have seemed the
+most natural thing a year ago--to think that I ever believed that the
+Anglican Compromise was the final truth of religion, that nothing more
+until the end of the world could ever be known that Cosmo Gordon Lang
+did not know, that there could be no conception of God and his quality
+that Randall Davidson did not possess.”
+
+He paused.
+
+“I did,” he said.
+
+“I did,” she responded with round blue eyes of wonder.
+
+“At the utmost the Church of England is a tabernacle on a road.”
+
+“A 'oad that goes whe'?” she rhetorized.
+
+“Exactly,” said the bishop, and put down his cup.
+
+“You see, my dear Lady Sunderbund,” he resumed, “I am exactly in the
+same position of that man at the door.”
+
+She quoted aptly and softly: “The wo'ld was all befo' them whe' to
+choose.”
+
+He was struck by the aptness of the words.
+
+“I feel I have to come right out into the bare truth. What exactly then
+do I become? Do I lose my priestly function because I discover how great
+God is? But what am I to do?”
+
+He opened a new layer of his thoughts to her.
+
+“There is a saying,” he remarked, “once a priest, always a priest. I
+cannot imagine myself as other than what I am.”
+
+“But o'thodox no maw,” she said.
+
+“Orthodox--self-satisfied, no longer. A priest who seeks, an exploring
+priest.”
+
+“In a Chu'ch of P'og'ess and B'othe'hood,” she carried him on.
+
+“At any rate, in a progressive and learning church.”
+
+She flashed and glowed assent.
+
+“I have been haunted,” he said, “by those words spoken at Athens. 'Whom
+therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.' That comes
+to me with an effect of--guidance is an old-fashioned word--shall I
+say suggestion? To stand by the altar bearing strange names and ancient
+symbols, speaking plainly to all mankind of the one true God--!”
+
+(4)
+
+
+He did not get much beyond this point at the time, though he remained
+talking with Lady Sunderbund for nearly an hour longer. The rest was
+merely a beating out of what had already been said. But insensibly she
+renewed her original charm, and as he became accustomed to her he forgot
+a certain artificiality in her manner and the extreme modernity of her
+costume and furniture. She was a wonderful listener; nobody else could
+have helped him to expression in quite the same way, and when he left
+her he felt that now he was capable of stating his case in a coherent
+and acceptable form to almost any intelligent hearer. He had a point of
+view now that was no longer embarrassed by the immediate golden
+presence of God; he was no longer dazzled nor ecstatic; his problem had
+diminished to the scale of any other great human problem, to the scale
+of political problems and problems of integrity and moral principle,
+problems about which there is no such urgency as there is about a house
+on fire, for example.
+
+And now the desire for expression was running strong. He wanted to
+state his situation; if he did not state he would have to act; and as he
+walked back to the club dinner he turned over possible interlocutors
+in his thoughts. Lord Rampound sat with him at dinner, and he came near
+broaching the subject with him. But Lord Rampound that evening had
+that morbid running of bluish legal anecdotes which is so common an
+affliction with lawyers, and theology sinks and dies in that turbid
+stream.
+
+But as he lay in bed that night he thought of his old friend and helper
+Bishop Likeman, and it was borne in upon him that he should consult him.
+And this he did next day.
+
+Since the days when the bishop had been only plain Mr. Scrope, the
+youngest and most helpful of Likeman's historical band of curates, their
+friendship had continued. Likeman had been a second father to him; in
+particular his tact and helpfulness had shone during those days of doubt
+and anxiety when dear old Queen Victoria, God's representative on earth,
+had obstinately refused, at the eleventh hour, to make him a bishop. She
+had those pigheaded fits, and she was touchy about the bishops. She had
+liked Scrope on account of the excellence of his German pronunciation,
+but she had been irritated by newspaper paragraphs--nobody could ever
+find out who wrote them and nobody could ever find out who showed them
+to the old lady--anticipating his elevation. She had gone very red
+in the face and stiffened in the Guelphic manner whenever Scrope was
+mentioned, and so a rich harvest of spiritual life had remained untilled
+for some months. Likeman had brought her round.
+
+It seemed arguable that Scrope owed some explanation to Likeman before
+he came to any open breach with the Establishment.
+
+He found Likeman perceptibly older and more shrivelled on account of the
+war, but still as sweet and lucid and subtle as ever. His voice sounded
+more than ever like a kind old woman's.
+
+He sat buried in his cushions--for “nowadays I must save every scrap
+of vitality”--and for a time contented himself with drawing out his
+visitor's story.
+
+Of course, one does not talk to Likeman of visions or intuitions. “I am
+disturbed, I find myself getting out of touch;” that was the bishop's
+tone.
+
+Occasionally Likeman nodded slowly, as a physician might do at the
+recital of familiar symptoms. “Yes,” he said, “I have been through most
+of this.... A little different in the inessentials.... How clear you
+are!”
+
+“You leave our stupid old Trinities--as I left them long ago,” said old
+Likeman, with his lean hand feeling and clawing at the arm of his chair.
+
+“But--!”
+
+The old man raised his hand and dropped it. “You go away from it
+all--straight as a line. I did. You take the wings of the morning and
+fly to the uttermost parts of the earth. And there you find--”
+
+He held up a lean finger, and inclined it to tick off each point.
+
+“Fate--which is God the Father, the Power of the Heart, which is God
+the Son, and that Light which comes in upon us from the inaccessible
+Godhead, which is God the Holy Spirit.”
+
+“But I know of no God the Holy Spirit, and Fate is not God at all. I
+saw in my vision one sole God, uncrucified, militant--conquering and to
+conquer.”
+
+Old Likeman stared. “You saw!”
+
+The Bishop of Princhester had not meant to go so far. But he stuck to
+his words. “As if I saw with my eyes. A God of light and courage.”
+
+“You have had visions, Scrope?”
+
+“I seemed to see.”
+
+“No, you have just been dreaming dreams.”
+
+“But why should one not see?”
+
+“See! The things of the spirit. These symbols as realities! These
+metaphors as men walking!”
+
+“You talk like an agnostic.”
+
+“We are all agnostics. Our creeds are expressions of ourselves and our
+attitude and relationship to the unknown. The triune God is just the
+form of our need and disposition. I have always assumed that you took
+that for granted. Who has ever really seen or heard or felt God? God
+is neither of the senses nor of the mind; he is of the soul. You are
+realistic, you are materialistic....”
+
+His voice expostulated.
+
+The Bishop of Princhester reflected. The vision of God was far off
+among his memories now, and difficult to recall. But he said at last: “I
+believe there is a God and that he is as real a person as you or I. And
+he is not the theological God we set out before the world.”
+
+“Personification,” said Likeman. “In the eighteenth century they used to
+draw beautiful female figures as Science and Mathematics. Young men have
+loved Science--and Freedom--as Pygmalion loved Galatea. Have it so
+if you will. Have a visible person for your Deity. But let me keep up
+my--spirituality.”
+
+“Your spirituality seems as thin as a mist. Do you really
+believe--anything?”
+
+“Everything!” said Likeman emphatically, sitting up with a transitory
+vigour. “Everything we two have ever professed together. I believe that
+the creeds of my church do express all that can possibly be expressed in
+the relationship of--That”--he made a comprehensive gesture with a twist
+of his hand upon its wrist--“to the human soul. I believe that they
+express it as well as the human mind can express it. Where they seem
+to be contradictory or absurd, it is merely that the mystery is
+paradoxical. I believe that the story of the Fall and of the Redemption
+is a complete symbol, that to add to it or to subtract from it or to
+alter it is to diminish its truth; if it seems incredible at this point
+or that, then simply I admit my own mental defect. And I believe in our
+Church, Scrope, as the embodied truth of religion, the divine instrument
+in human affairs. I believe in the security of its tradition, in
+the complete and entire soundness of its teaching, in its essential
+authority and divinity.”
+
+He paused, and put his head a little on one side and smiled sweetly.
+“And now can you say I do not believe?”
+
+“But the historical Christ, the man Jesus?”
+
+“A life may be a metaphor. Why not? Yes, I believe it all. All.”
+
+The Bishop of Princhester was staggered by this complete acceptance. “I
+see you believe all you profess,” he said, and remained for a moment or
+so rallying his forces.
+
+“Your vision--if it was a vision--I put it to you, was just some single
+aspect of divinity,” said Likeman. “We make a mistake in supposing that
+Heresy has no truth in it. Most heresies are only a disproportionate
+apprehension of some essential truth. Most heretics are men who have
+suddenly caught a glimpse through the veil of some particular verity....
+They are dazzled by that aspect. All the rest has vanished.... They are
+obsessed. You are obsessed clearly by this discovery of the militancy of
+God. God the Son--as Hero. And you want to go out to the simple worship
+of that one aspect. You want to go out to a Dissenter's tent in the
+wilderness, instead of staying in the Great Temple of the Ages.”
+
+Was that true?
+
+For some moments it sounded true.
+
+The Bishop of Princhester sat frowning and looking at that. Very far
+away was the vision now of that golden Captain who bade him come. Then
+at a thought the bishop smiled.
+
+“The Great Temple of the Ages,” he repeated. “But do you remember the
+trouble we had when the little old Queen was so pigheaded?”
+
+“Oh! I remember, I remember,” said Likeman, smiling with unshaken
+confidence. “Why not?”
+
+“For sixty years all we bishops in what you call the Great Temple of
+the Ages, were appointed and bullied and kept in our places by that
+pink irascible bit of dignity. I remember how at the time I didn't dare
+betray my boiling indignation even to you--I scarcely dared admit it to
+myself....”
+
+He paused.
+
+“It doesn't matter at all,” and old Likeman waved it aside.
+
+“Not at all,” he confirmed, waving again.
+
+“I spoke of the whole church of Christ on earth,” he went on.
+“These things, these Victorias and Edwards and so on, are temporary
+accidents--just as the severance of an Anglican from a Roman communion
+and a Greek orthodox communion are temporary accidents. You will remark
+that wise men in all ages have been able to surmount the difficulty of
+these things. Why? Because they knew that in spite of all these splits
+and irregularities and defacements--like the cracks and crannies and
+lichens on a cathedral wall--the building held good, that it was shelter
+and security. There is no other shelter and security. And so I come to
+your problem. Suppose it is true that you have this incidental vision
+of the militant aspect of God, and he isn't, as you see him now that
+is,--he isn't like the Trinity, he isn't like the Creed, he doesn't seem
+to be related to the Church, then comes the question, are you going out
+for that? And whither do you go if you do go out? The Church remains. We
+alter doctrines not by changing the words but by shifting the accent. We
+can under-accentuate below the threshold of consciousness.”
+
+“But can we?”
+
+“We do. Where's Hell now? Eighty years ago it warmed the whole Church.
+It was--as some atheist or other put it the other day--the central
+heating of the soul. But never mind that point now. Consider the
+essential question, the question of breaking with the church. Ask
+yourself, whither would you go? To become an oddity! A Dissenter. A
+Negative. Self emasculated. The spirit that denies. You would just go
+out. You would just cease to serve Religion. That would be all. You
+wouldn't do anything. The Church would go on; everything else would go
+on. Only you would be lost in the outer wilderness.
+
+“But then--”
+
+Old Likeman leant forward and pointed a bony finger. “Stay in the Church
+and modify it. Bring this new light of yours to the altar.”
+
+There was a little pause.
+
+“No man,” the bishop thought aloud, “putteth new wine into old bottles.”
+
+Old Likeman began to speak and had a fit of coughing. “Some of these
+texts--whuff, whuff--like a conjuror's hat--whuff--make 'em--fit
+anything.”
+
+A man-servant appeared and handed a silver box of lozenges into which
+the old bishop dipped with a trembling hand.
+
+“Tricks of that sort,” he said, “won't do, Scrope--among professionals.
+
+“And besides,” he was inspired; “true religion is old wine--as old as
+the soul.
+
+“You are a bishop in the Church of Christ on Earth,” he summed it up.
+“And you want to become a detached and wandering Ancient Mariner from
+your shipwreck of faith with something to explain--that nobody wants to
+hear. You are going out I suppose you have means?”
+
+The old man awaited the answer to his abrupt enquiry with a handful of
+lozenges.
+
+“No,” said the Bishop of Princhester, “practically--I haven't.”
+
+“My dear boy!” it was as if they were once more rector and curate.
+“My dear brother! do you know what the value of an ex-bishop is in the
+ordinary labour market?”
+
+“I have never thought of that.”
+
+“Evidently. You have a wife and children?”
+
+“Five daughters.”
+
+“And your wife married you--I remember, she married you soon after you
+got that living in St. John's Wood. I suppose she took it for granted
+that you were fixed in an ecclesiastical career. That was implicit in
+the transaction.”
+
+“I haven't looked very much at that side of the matter yet,” said the
+Bishop of Princhester.
+
+“It shouldn't be a decisive factor,” said Bishop Likeman, “not decisive.
+But it will weigh. It should weigh....”
+
+The old man opened out fresh aspects of the case. His argument was for
+delay, for deliberation. He went on to a wider set of considerations. A
+man who has held the position of a bishop for some years is, he held, no
+longer a free man in matters of opinion. He has become an official part
+of a great edifice which supports the faith of multitudes of simple
+and dependant believers. He has no right to indulge recklessly in
+intellectual and moral integrities. He may understand, but how is the
+flock to understand? He may get his own soul clear, but what will happen
+to them? He will just break away their supports, astonish them, puzzle
+them, distress them, deprive them of confidence, convince them of
+nothing.
+
+“Intellectual egotism may be as grave a sin,” said Bishop Likeman, “as
+physical selfishness.
+
+“Assuming even that you are absolutely right,” said Bishop Likeman,
+“aren't you still rather in the position of a man who insists upon
+Swedish exercises and a strengthening dietary on a raft?”
+
+“I think you have made out a case for delay,” said his hearer.
+
+“Three months.”
+
+The Bishop of Princhester conceded three months.
+
+“Including every sort of service. Because, after all, even supposing
+it is damnable to repeat prayers and creeds you do not believe in, and
+administer sacraments you think superstition, nobody can be damned
+but yourself. On the other hand if you express doubts that are not yet
+perfectly digested--you experiment with the souls of others....”
+
+(5)
+
+
+The bishop found much to ponder in his old friend's counsels. They were
+discursive and many-fronted, and whenever he seemed to be penetrating or
+defeating the particular considerations under examination the others
+in the background had a way of appearing invincible. He had a strong
+persuasion that Likeman was wrong--and unanswerable. And the true God
+now was no more than the memory of a very vividly realized idea. It
+was clear to the bishop that he was no longer a churchman or in the
+generally accepted sense of the word a Christian, and that he was bound
+to come out of the church. But all sense of urgency had gone. It was a
+matter demanding deliberation and very great consideration for others.
+
+He took no more of Dale's stuff because he felt bodily sound and slept
+well. And he was now a little shy of this potent fluid. He went down
+to Princhester the next day, for his compromise of an interval of three
+months made it seem possible to face his episcopal routine again. It
+was only when he was back in his own palace that the full weight of
+his domestic responsibilities in the discussion of the course he had to
+take, became apparent.
+
+Lady Ella met him with affection and solicitude.
+
+“I was tired and mentally fagged,” he said. “A day or so in London had
+an effect of change.”
+
+She agreed that he looked much better, and remained for a moment or so
+scrutinizing him with the faint anxiety of one resolved to be completely
+helpful.
+
+He regarded her with a renewed sense of her grace and dignity and
+kindliness. She was wearing a grey dress of soft silky material, touched
+with blue and covered with what seemed to him very rich and beautiful
+lace; her hair flowed back very graciously from her broad brow, and
+about her wrist and neck were delicate lines of gold. She seemed
+tremendously at home and right just where she was, in that big
+hospitable room, cultured but Anglican, without pretensions or
+novelties, with a glow of bound books, with the grand piano that Miriam,
+his third daughter, was beginning to play so well, with the tea equipage
+of shining silver and fine porcelain.
+
+He sat down contentedly in the low armchair beside her.
+
+It wasn't a setting that one would rashly destroy....
+
+And that evening at dinner this sense of his home as a complex of finely
+adjusted things not to be rashly disturbed was still more in the mind of
+the bishop. At dinner he had all his domesticities about him. It was the
+family time, from eight until ten, at which latter hour he would usually
+go back from the drawing-room to his study. He surveyed the table.
+Eleanor was at home for a few days, looking a little thin and bright
+but very keen and happy. She had taken a first in the first part of
+the Moral Science Tripos, and she was working hard now for part two.
+Clementina was to go back to Newnham with her next September. She
+aspired to history. Miriam's bent was musical. She and Phoebe and Daphne
+and Clementina were under the care of skilful Mademoiselle Lafarge,
+most tactful of Protestant French-women, Protestant and yet not too
+Protestant, one of those rare French Protestants in whom a touch of
+Bergson and the Pasteur Monod
+
+     “scarce suspected, animates the whole.”
+
+And also they had lessons, so high are our modern standards of
+education, from Mr. Blent, a brilliant young mathematician in orders,
+who sat now next to Lady Ella. Mr. Whippham, the chaplain, was at the
+bishop's right hand, ready for any chance of making arrangements to
+clear off the small arrears of duty the little holiday in London had
+accumulated. The bishop surveyed all these bright young people between
+himself and the calm beauty of his wife. He spoke first to one and then
+another upon the things that interested them. It rejoiced his heart to
+be able to give them education and opportunity, it pleased him to see
+them in clothes that he knew were none the less expensive because of
+their complete simplicity. Miriam and Mr. Blent wrangled pleasantly
+about Debussy, and old Dunk waited as though in orders of some rare and
+special sort that qualified him for this service.
+
+All these people, the bishop reflected, counted upon him that this would
+go on....
+
+Eleanor was answering some question of her mother's. They were so oddly
+alike and so curiously different, and both in their several ways so
+fine. Eleanor was dark like his own mother. Perhaps she did a little
+lack Lady Ella's fine reserves; she could express more, she could feel
+more acutely, she might easily be very unhappy or very happy....
+
+All these people counted on him. It was indeed acutely true, as Likeman
+had said, that any sudden breach with his position would be a breach of
+faith--so far as they were concerned.
+
+And just then his eye fell upon the epergne, a very old and beautiful
+piece of silver, that graced the dinner-table. It had been given him,
+together with an episcopal ring, by his curates and choristers at the
+Church of the Holy Innocents, when he became bishop of Pinner. When they
+gave it him, had any one of them dreamt that some day he might be moved
+to strike an ungracious blow at the mother church that had reared them
+all?
+
+It was his custom to join the family in the drawing-room after dinner.
+To-night he was a little delayed by Whippham, with some trivialities
+about next month's confirmations in Pringle and Princhester. When he
+came in he found Miriam playing, and playing very beautifully one of
+those later sonatas of Beethoven, he could never remember whether it
+was Of. 109 or Of. 111, but he knew that he liked it very much; it
+was solemn and sombre with phases of indescribable sweetness--while
+Clementina, Daphne and Mademoiselle Lafarge went on with their war
+knitting and Phoebe and Mr. Blent bent their brows over chess. Eleanor
+was reading the evening paper. Lady Ella sat on a high chair by the
+coffee things, and he stood in the doorway surveying the peaceful scene
+for a moment or so, before he went across the room and sat down on the
+couch close to her.
+
+“You look tired,” she whispered softly.
+
+“Worries.”
+
+“That Chasters case?”
+
+“Things developing out of that. I must tell you later.” It would be, he
+felt, a good way of breaking the matter to her.
+
+“Is the Chasters case coming on again, Daddy?” asked Eleanor.
+
+He nodded.
+
+“It's a pity,” she said.
+
+“What?
+
+“That he can't be left alone.”
+
+“It's Sir Reginald Phipps. The Church would be much more tolerant if
+it wasn't for the House of Laymen. But they--they feel they must do
+something.”
+
+He seized the opportunity of the music ceasing to get away from the
+subject. “Miriam dear,” he asked, raising his voice; “is that 109 or
+111? I can never tell.”
+
+“That is always 111, Daddy,” said Miriam. “It's the other one is 109.”
+ And then evidently feeling that she had been pert: “Would you like me to
+play you 109, Daddy?”
+
+“I should love it, my dear.” And he leant back and prepared to listen in
+such a thorough way that Eleanor would have no chance of discussing the
+Chasters' heresies. But this was interrupted by the consummation of the
+coffee, and Mr. Blent, breaking a long silence with “Mate in three, if
+I'm not mistaken,” leapt to his feet to be of service. Eleanor, with the
+rough seriousness of youth, would not leave the Chasters case alone.
+
+“But need you take action against Mr. Chasters?” she asked at once.
+
+“It's a very complicated subject, my dear,” he said.
+
+“His arguments?”
+
+“The practical considerations.”
+
+“But what are practical considerations in such a case?”
+
+“That's a post-graduate subject, Norah,” her father said with a smile
+and a sigh.
+
+“But,” began Eleanor, gathering fresh forces.
+
+“Daddy is tired,” Lady Ella intervened, patting him on the head.
+
+“Oh, terribly!--of that,” he said, and so escaped Eleanor for the
+evening.
+
+But he knew that before very long he would have to tell his wife of
+the changes that hung over their lives; it would be shabby to let the
+avalanche fall without giving the longest possible warning; and before
+they parted that night he took her hands in his and said: “There is much
+I have to tell you, dear. Things change, the whole world changes. The
+church must not live in a dream....
+
+“No,” she whispered. “I hope you will sleep to-night,” and held up her
+grave sweet face to be kissed.
+
+(6)
+
+
+But he did not sleep perfectly that night.
+
+He did not sleep indeed very badly, but he lay for some time thinking,
+thinking not onward but as if he pressed his mind against very strong
+barriers that had closed again. His vision of God which had filled the
+heavens, had become now gem-like, a minute, hard, clear-cut conviction
+in his mind that he had to disentangle himself from the enormous
+complications of symbolism and statement and organization and
+misunderstanding in the church and achieve again a simple and living
+worship of a simple and living God. Likeman had puzzled and silenced
+him, only upon reflection to convince him that amidst such intricacies
+of explanation the spirit cannot live. Creeds may be symbolical, but
+symbols must not prevaricate. A church that can symbolize everything and
+anything means nothing.
+
+It followed from this that he ought to leave the church. But there came
+the other side of this perplexing situation. His feelings as he lay in
+his bed were exactly like those one has in a dream when one wishes to
+run or leap or shout and one can achieve no movement, no sound. He could
+not conceive how he could possibly leave the church.
+
+His wife became as it were the representative of all that held him
+helpless. She and he had never kept secret from one another any plan of
+action, any motive, that affected the other. It was clear to him that
+any movement towards the disavowal of doctrinal Christianity and the
+renunciation of his see must be first discussed with her. He must tell
+her before he told the world.
+
+And he could not imagine his telling her except as an incredibly
+shattering act.
+
+So he left things from day to day, and went about his episcopal
+routines. He preached and delivered addresses in such phrases as he knew
+people expected, and wondered profoundly why it was that it should be
+impossible for him to discuss theological points with Lady Ella. And one
+afternoon he went for a walk with Eleanor along the banks of the Prin,
+and found himself, in response to certain openings of hers, talking to
+her in almost exactly the same terms as Likeman had used to him.
+
+Then suddenly the problem of this theological eclaircissement was
+complicated in an unexpected fashion.
+
+He had just been taking his Every Second Thursday Talk with Diocesan
+Men Helpers. He had been trying to be plain and simple upon the needless
+narrowness of enthusiastic laymen. He was still in the Bishop Andrews
+cap and purple cassock he affected on these occasions; the Men Helpers
+loved purple; and he was disentangling himself from two or three
+resolute bores--for our loyal laymen can be at times quite superlative
+bores--when Miriam came to him.
+
+“Mummy says, 'Come to the drawing-room if you can.' There is a Lady
+Sunderbund who seems particularly to want to see you.”
+
+He hesitated for a moment, and then decided that this was a conversation
+he ought to control.
+
+He found Lady Sunderbund looking very tall and radiantly beautiful in
+a sheathlike dress of bright crimson trimmed with snow-white fur and a
+white fur toque. She held out a long white-gloved hand to him and
+cried in a tone of comradeship and profound understanding: “I've come,
+Bishop!”
+
+“You've come to see me?” he said without any sincerity in his polite
+pleasure.
+
+“I've come to P'inchesta to stay!” she cried with a bright triumphant
+rising note.
+
+She evidently considered Lady Ella a mere conversational stop-gap, to
+be dropped now that the real business could be commenced. She turned
+her pretty profile to that lady, and obliged the bishop with a compact
+summary of all that had preceded his arrival. “I have been telling
+Lady Ella,” she said, “I've taken a house, fu'nitua and all! Hea.
+In P'inchesta! I've made up my mind to sit unda you--as they say
+in Clapham. I've come 'ight down he' fo' good. I've taken a little
+house--oh! a sweet little house that will be all over 'oses next month.
+I'm living f'om 'oom to 'oom and having the othas done up. It's in that
+little quiet st'eet behind you' ga'den wall. And he' I am!”
+
+“Is it the old doctor's house?” asked Lady Ella.
+
+“Was it an old docta?” cried Lady Sunderbund. “How delightful! And now I
+shall be a patient!”
+
+She concentrated upon the bishop.
+
+“Oh, I've been thinking all the time of all the things you told me. Ova
+and ova. It's all so wondyful and so--so like a G'ate Daw opening. New
+light. As if it was all just beginning.”
+
+She clasped her hands.
+
+The bishop felt that there were a great number of points to this
+situation, and that it was extremely difficult to grasp them all
+at once. But one that seemed of supreme importance to his whirling
+intelligence was that Lady Ella should not know that he had gone to
+relieve his soul by talking to Lady Sunderbund in London. It had never
+occurred to him at the time that there was any shadow of disloyalty to
+Lady Ella in his going to Lady Sunderbund, but now he realized that this
+was a thing that would annoy Lady Ella extremely. The conversation had
+in the first place to be kept away from that. And in the second place it
+had to be kept away from the abrupt exploitation of the new theological
+developments.
+
+He felt that something of the general tension would be relieved if they
+could all three be got to sit down.
+
+“I've been talking for just upon two hours,” he said to Lady Ella. “It's
+good to see the water boiling for tea.”
+
+He put a chair for Lady Sunderbund to the right of Lady Ella, got her
+into it by infusing an ecclesiastical insistence into his manner, and
+then went and sat upon the music-stool on his wife's left, so as to
+establish a screen of tea-things and cakes and so forth against her more
+intimate enthusiasm. Meanwhile he began to see his way clearer and to
+develop his line.
+
+“Well, Lady Sunderbund,” he said, “I can assure you that I think you
+will be no small addition to the church life of Princhester. But I warn
+you this is a hard-working and exacting diocese. We shall take your
+money, all we can get of it, we shall take your time, we shall work you
+hard.”
+
+“Wo'k me hard!” cried Lady Sunderbund with passion.
+
+“We will, we will,” said the bishop in a tone that ignored her
+passionate note.
+
+“I am sure Lady Sunderbund will be a great help to us,” said Lady Ella.
+“We want brightening. There's a dinginess....”
+
+Lady Sunderbund beamed an acknowledgment. “I shall exact a 'eturn,” she
+said. “I don't mind wo'king, but I shall wo'k like the poo' students in
+the Middle Ages did, to get my teaching. I've got my own soul to save as
+well as help saving othas. Since oua last talk--”
+
+She found the bishop handing her bread and butter. For a time the bishop
+fought a delaying action with the tea-things, while he sought eagerly
+and vainly in his mind for some good practical topic in which he could
+entangle and suppress Lady Sunderbund's enthusiasms. From this she broke
+away by turning suddenly to Lady Ella.
+
+“Youa husband's views,” she said, “we'e a 'eal 'evelation to me. It was
+like not being blind--all at once.”
+
+Lady Ella was always pleased to hear her husband praised. Her colour
+brightened a little. “They seem very ordinary views,” she said modestly.
+
+“You share them?” cried Lady Sunderbund.
+
+“But of course,” said Lady Ella.
+
+“Wondyful!” cried Lady Sunderbund.
+
+“Tell me, Lady Sunderbund,” said the bishop, “are you going to alter the
+outer appearance of the old doctor's house?” And found that at last he
+had discovered the saving topic.
+
+“Ha'dly at all,” she said. “I shall just have it pointed white and do
+the doa--I'm not su' how I shall do the doa. Whetha I shall do the doa
+gold or a vehy, vehy 'itch blue.”
+
+For a time she and Lady Ella, to whom these ideas were novel, discussed
+the animation of grey and sombre towns by house painting. In such matter
+Lady Sunderbund had a Russian mind. “I can't bea' g'ey,” she said. “Not
+in my su'oundings, not in my k'eed, nowhe'e.” She turned to the bishop.
+“If I had my way I would paint you' cathed'al inside and out.”
+
+“They used to be painted,” said the bishop. “I don't know if you have
+seen Ely. There the old painting has been largely restored....”
+
+From that to the end there was no real danger, and at last the bishop
+found himself alone with his wife again.
+
+“Remarkable person,” he said tentatively. “I never met any one whose
+faults were more visible. I met her at Wimbush House.”
+
+He glanced at his watch.
+
+“What did she mean,” asked Lady Ella abruptly, “by talking of your new
+views? And about revelations?”
+
+“She probably misunderstood something I said at the Garstein Fellows',”
+ he said. “She has rather a leaping mind.”
+
+He turned to the window, looked at his nails, and appeared to be
+suddenly reminded of duties elsewhere....
+
+It was chiefly manifest to him that the difficulties in explaining the
+changes of his outlook to Lady Ella had now increased enormously.
+
+(7)
+
+
+A day or so after Lady Sunderbund's arrival in Princhester the bishop
+had a letter from Likeman. The old man was manifestly in doubt about the
+effect of their recent conversation.
+
+“My dear Scrope,” it began. “I find myself thinking continually about
+our interview and the difficulties you laid bare so frankly to me.
+We touched upon many things in that talk, and I find myself full of
+afterthoughts, and not perfectly sure either quite of what I said or
+of what I failed to say. I feel that in many ways I was not perhaps so
+clear and convincing as the justice of my case should have made me, and
+you are one of my own particular little company, you were one of the
+best workers in that band of good workers, your life and your career
+are very much my concern. I know you will forgive me if I still mingle
+something of the paternal with my fraternal admonitions. I watched you
+closely. I have still my old diaries of the St. Matthew's days, and I
+have been looking at them to remind me of what you once were. It was my
+custom to note my early impressions of all the men who worked with me,
+because I have a firm belief in the soundness of first impressions and
+the considerable risk one runs of having them obscured by the accidents
+and habituations of constant intercourse. I found that quite early in
+your days at St. Matthew's I wrote against your name 'enthusiastic, but
+a saving delicacy.' After all our life-long friendship I would not write
+anything truer. I would say of you to-day, 'This man might have been a
+revivalist, if he were not a gentleman.' There is the enthusiast,
+there is the revivalist, in you. It seems to me that the stresses and
+questions of this great crisis in the world's history have brought it
+nearer to the surface than I had ever expected it to come.
+
+“I quite understand and I sympathize with your impatience with
+the church at the present time; we present a spectacle of pompous
+insignificance hard to bear with. We are doing very little, and we are
+giving ourselves preposterous airs. There seems to be an opinion abroad
+that in some quasi-automatic way the country is going to collapse after
+the war into the arms of the church and the High Tories; a possibility
+I don't accept for a moment. Why should it? These forcible-feeble
+reactionaries are much more likely to explode a revolution that
+will disestablish us. And I quite understand your theological
+difficulties--quite. The creeds, if their entire symbolism is for a
+moment forgotten, if they are taken as opaque statements of fact, are
+inconsistent, incredible. So incredible that no one believes them;
+not even the most devout. The utmost they do is to avert their
+minds--reverentially. Credo quia impossibile. That is offensive to a
+Western mind. I can quite understand the disposition to cry out at such
+things, 'This is not the Church of God!'--to run out from it--
+
+“You have some dream, I suspect, of a dramatic dissidence.
+
+“Now, my dear Brother and erstwhile pupil, I ask you not to do this
+thing. Wait, I implore you. Give me--and some others, a little time. I
+have your promise for three months, but even after that, I ask you
+to wait. Let the reform come from within the church. The church is
+something more than either its creeds, its clergy, or its laymen. Look
+at your cathedral rising out of and dominating Princhester. It stands
+not simply for Athanasius; it stands but incidentally for Athanasius; it
+stands for all religion. Within that fabric--let me be as frank here
+as in our private conversation--doctrine has altered again and again.
+To-day two distinct religions worship there side by side; one that fades
+and one that grows brighter. There is the old quasi-materialistic belief
+of the barbarians, the belief in such things, for example, as that
+Christ the physical Son of God descended into hell and stayed there,
+seeing the sights I suppose like any tourist and being treated with
+diplomatic civilities for three terrestrial days; and on the other
+hand there is the truly spiritual belief that you and I share, which
+is absolutely intolerant of such grotesque ideas. My argument to you
+is that the new faith, the clearer vision, gains ground; that the
+only thing that can prevent or delay the church from being altogether
+possessed by what you call and I admit is, the true God, is that such
+men as yourself, as the light breaks upon you, should be hasty and leave
+the church. You see my point of view, do you not? It is not one that
+has been assumed for our discussion; it is one I came to long years ago,
+that I was already feeling my way to in my St. Matthew's Lenton sermons.
+
+“A word for your private ear. I am working. I cannot tell you fully
+because I am not working alone. But there are movements afoot in which
+I hope very shortly to be able to ask you to share. That much at least I
+may say at this stage. Obscure but very powerful influences are at
+work for the liberalizing of the church, for release from many
+narrow limitations, for the establishment of a modus vivendi with the
+nonconformist and dissentient bodies in Britain and America, and with
+the churches of the East. But of that no more now.
+
+“And in conclusion, my dear Scrope, let me insist again upon the eternal
+persistence of the essential Religious Fact:”
+
+(Greek Letters Here)
+
+(Rev. i. 18. “Fear not. I am the First and Last thing, the Living
+thing.”)
+
+And these promises which, even if we are not to take them as promises in
+the exact sense in which, let us say, the payment of five sovereigns
+is promised by a five-pound note, are yet assertions of practically
+inevitable veracity:
+
+(Greek Letters Here)
+
+(Phil. i. 6. “He who began... will perfect.” Eph. v. 14. “He will
+illuminate.”)
+
+
+The old man had written his Greek tags in shakily resolute capitals. It
+was his custom always to quote the Greek Testament in his letters,
+never the English version. It is a practice not uncommon with the more
+scholarly of our bishops. It is as if some eminent scientific man were
+to insist upon writing H2O instead of “water,” and “sodium chloride”
+ instead of “table salt” in his private correspondence. Or upon hanging
+up a stuffed crocodile in his hall to give the place tone. The Bishop
+of Princhester construed these brief dicta without serious exertion, he
+found them very congenial texts, but there were insuperable difficulties
+in the problem why Likeman should suppose they had the slightest weight
+upon his side of their discussion. The more he thought the less they
+seemed to be on Likeman's side, until at last they began to take on a
+complexion entirely opposed to the old man's insidious arguments, until
+indeed they began to bear the extraordinary interpretation of a special
+message, unwittingly delivered.
+
+(8)
+
+
+The bishop was still thinking over this communication when he was
+interrupted by Lady Ella. She came with a letter in her hand to ask him
+whether she might send five-and-twenty pounds to a poor cousin of his,
+a teacher in a girls' school, who had been incapacitated from work by
+a dislocation of the cartilage of her knee. If she could go to that
+unorthodox but successful practitioner, Mr. Barker, the bone-setter, she
+was convinced she could be restored to efficiency. But she had no ready
+money. The bishop agreed without hesitation. His only doubt was the
+certainty of the cure, but upon that point Lady Ella was convinced;
+there had been a great experience in the Walshingham family.
+
+“It is pleasant to be able to do things like this,” said Lady Ella,
+standing over him when this matter was settled.
+
+“Yes,” the bishop agreed; “it is pleasant to be in a position to do
+things like this....”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SEVENTH - THE SECOND VISION
+
+(1)
+
+
+A MONTH later found the bishop's original state of perplexity and
+insomnia returned and intensified. He had done none of all the things
+that had seemed so manifestly needing to be done after his vision in the
+Athenaeum. All the relief and benefit of his experience in London had
+vanished out of his life. He was afraid of Dr. Dale's drug; he knew
+certainly that it would precipitate matters; and all his instincts
+in the state of moral enfeeblement to which he had relapsed, were to
+temporize.
+
+Although he had said nothing further about his changed beliefs to Lady
+Ella, yet he perceived clearly that a shadow had fallen between them.
+She had a wife's extreme sensitiveness to fine shades of expression and
+bearing, and manifestly she knew that something was different. Meanwhile
+Lady Sunderbund had become a frequent worshipper in the cathedral, she
+was a figure as conspicuous in sombre Princhester as a bird of paradise
+would have been; common people stood outside her very very rich blue
+door on the chance of seeing her; she never missed an opportunity of
+hearing the bishop preach or speak, she wrote him several long
+and thoughtful letters with which he did not bother Lady Ella, she
+communicated persistently, and manifestly intended to become a very
+active worker in diocesan affairs.
+
+It was inevitable that she and the bishop should meet and talk
+occasionally in the cathedral precincts, and it was inevitable that he
+should contrast the flexibility of her rapid and very responsive mind
+with a certain defensiveness, a stoniness, in the intellectual bearing
+of Lady Ella.
+
+If it had been Lady Sunderbund he had had to explain to, instead of Lady
+Ella, he could have explained a dozen times a day.
+
+And since his mind was rehearsing explanations it was not unnatural they
+should overflow into this eagerly receptive channel, and that the less
+he told Lady Ella the fuller became his spiritual confidences to Lady
+Sunderbund.
+
+She was clever in realizing that they were confidences and treating them
+as such, more particularly when it chanced that she and Lady Ella and
+the bishop found themselves in the same conversation.
+
+She made great friends with Miriam, and initiated her by a whole
+collection of pretty costume plates into the mysteries of the “Ussian
+Ballet” and the works of Mousso'gski and “Imsky Ko'zakof.”
+
+The bishop liked a certain religiosity in the texture of Moussorgski's
+music, but failed to see the “significance “--of many of the costumes.
+
+(2)
+
+
+It was on a Sunday night--the fourth Sunday after Easter--that the
+supreme crisis of the bishop's life began. He had had a feeling all day
+of extreme dulness and stupidity; he felt his ministrations unreal, his
+ceremonies absurd and undignified. In the night he became bleakly and
+painfully awake. His mind occupied itself at first chiefly with the
+tortuousness and weakness of his own character. Every day he perceived
+that the difficulty of telling Lady Ella of the change in his faith
+became more mountainous. And every day he procrastinated. If he had
+told her naturally and simply on the evening of his return from
+London--before anything material intervened--everything would have been
+different, everything would have been simpler....
+
+He groaned and rolled over in his bed.
+
+There came upon him the acutest remorse and misery. For he saw that
+amidst these petty immediacies he had lost touch with God. The last
+month became incredible. He had seen God. He had touched God's hand. God
+had been given to him, and he had neglected the gift. He was still lost
+amidst the darkness and loneliness, the chaotic ends and mean shifts,
+of an Erastian world. For a month now and more, after a vision of God so
+vivid and real and reassuring that surely no saint nor prophet had ever
+had a better, he had made no more than vague responsive movements; he
+had allowed himself to be persuaded into an unreasonable and cowardly
+delay, and the fetters of association and usage and minor interests
+were as unbroken as they had been before ever the vision shone. Was it
+credible that there had ever been such a vision in a life so entirely
+dictated by immediacy and instinct as his? We are all creatures of the
+dark stream, we swim in needs and bodily impulses and small vanities; if
+ever and again a bubble of spiritual imaginativeness glows out of us, it
+breaks and leaves us where we were.
+
+“Louse that I am!” he cried.
+
+He still believed in God, without a shadow of doubt; he believed in the
+God that he had seen, the high courage, the golden intention, the light
+that had for a moment touched him. But what had he to do with God, he,
+the loiterer, the little thing?
+
+He was little, he was funny. His prevarications with his wife, for
+example, were comic. There was no other word for him but “funny.”
+
+He rolled back again and lay staring.
+
+“Who will deliver me from the body of this death?” What right has a
+little bishop in a purple stock and doeskin breeches, who hangs back in
+his palace from the very call of God, to a phrase so fine and tragic as
+“the body of this death?”
+
+He was the most unreal thing in the universe. He was a base insect
+giving himself airs. What advantage has a bishop over the Praying
+Mantis, that cricket which apes the attitude of piety? Does he matter
+more--to God?
+
+“To the God of the Universe, who can tell? To the God of man,--yes.”
+
+He sat up in bed struck by his own answer, and full of an indescribable
+hunger for God and an indescribable sense of his complete want of
+courage to make the one simple appeal that would satisfy that hunger.
+He tried to pray. “O God!” he cried, “forgive me! Take me!” It seemed to
+him that he was not really praying but only making believe to pray. It
+seemed to him that he was not really existing but only seeming to exist.
+He seemed to himself to be one with figures on a china plate, with
+figures painted on walls, with the flimsy imagined lives of men in
+stories of forgotten times. “O God!” he said, “O God,” acting a gesture,
+mimicking appeal.
+
+“Anaemic,” he said, and was given an idea.
+
+He got out of bed, he took his keys from the night-table at the bed head
+and went to his bureau.
+
+He stood with Dale's tonic in his hand. He remained for some time
+holding it, and feeling a curious indisposition to go on with the thing
+in his mind.
+
+He turned at last with an effort. He carried the little phial to his
+bedside, and into the tumbler of his water-bottle he let the drops fall,
+drop by drop, until he had counted twenty. Then holding it to the bulb
+of his reading lamp he added the water and stood watching the slow
+pearly eddies in the mixture mingle into an opalescent uniformity. He
+replaced the water-bottle and stood with the glass in his hand. But he
+did not drink.
+
+He was afraid.
+
+He knew that he had only to drink and this world of confusion would grow
+transparent, would roll back and reveal the great simplicities behind.
+And he was afraid.
+
+He was afraid of that greatness. He was afraid of the great imperatives
+that he knew would at once take hold of his life. He wanted to muddle
+on for just a little longer. He wanted to stay just where he was, in
+his familiar prison-house, with the key of escape in his hand. Before he
+took the last step into the very presence of truth, he would--think.
+
+He put down the glass and lay down upon his bed....
+
+(3)
+
+
+He awoke in a mood of great depression out of a dream of wandering
+interminably in an endless building of innumerable pillars, pillars so
+vast and high that the ceiling was lost in darkness. By the scale of
+these pillars he felt himself scarcely larger than an ant. He was always
+alone in these wanderings, and always missing something that passed
+along distant passages, something desirable, something in the nature
+of a procession or of a ceremony, something of which he was in futile
+pursuit, of which he heard faint echoes, something luminous of which he
+seemed at times to see the last fading reflection, across vast halls
+and wildernesses of shining pavement and through Cyclopaean archways. At
+last there was neither sound nor gleam, but the utmost solitude, and a
+darkness and silence and the uttermost profundity of sorrow....
+
+It was bright day. Dunk had just come into the room with his tea, and
+the tumbler of Dr. Dale's tonic stood untouched upon the night-table.
+The bishop sat up in bed. He had missed his opportunity. To-day was a
+busy day, he knew.
+
+“No,” he said, as Dunk hesitated whether to remove or leave the tumbler.
+“Leave that.”
+
+Dunk found room for it upon the tea-tray, and vanished softly with the
+bishop's evening clothes.
+
+The bishop remained motionless facing the day. There stood the draught
+of decision that he had lacked the decision even to touch.
+
+From his bed he could just read the larger items that figured upon the
+engagement tablet which it was Whippham's business to fill over-night
+and place upon his table. He had two confirmation services, first
+the big one in the cathedral and then a second one in the evening at
+Pringle, various committees and an interview with Chasters. He had not
+yet finished his addresses for these confirmation services....
+
+The task seemed mountainous--overwhelming.
+
+With a gesture of desperation he seized the tumblerful of tonic and
+drank it off at a gulp.
+
+(4)
+
+
+For some moments nothing seemed to happen.
+
+Then he began to feel stronger and less wretched, and then came a
+throbbing and tingling of artery and nerve.
+
+He had a sense of adventure, a pleasant fear in the thing that he had
+done. He got out of bed, leaving his cup of tea untasted, and began to
+dress. He had the sensation of relief a prisoner may feel who suddenly
+tries his cell door and finds it open upon sunshine, the outside world
+and freedom.
+
+He went on dressing although he was certain that in a few minutes the
+world of delusion about him would dissolve, and that he would find
+himself again in the great freedom of the place of God.
+
+This time the transition came much sooner and much more rapidly. This
+time the phases and quality of the experience were different. He felt
+once again that luminous confusion between the world in which a human
+life is imprisoned and a circumambient and interpenetrating world, but
+this phase passed very rapidly; it did not spread out over nearly half
+an hour as it had done before, and almost immediately he seemed to
+plunge away from everything in this life altogether into that outer
+freedom he sought. And this time there was not even the elemental
+scenery of the former vision. He stood on nothing; there was nothing
+below and nothing above him. There was no sense of falling, no terror,
+but a feeling as though he floated released. There was no light, but as
+it were a clear darkness about him. Then it was manifest to him that he
+was not alone, but that with him was that same being that in his former
+vision had called himself the Angel of God. He knew this without knowing
+why he knew this, and either he spoke and was answered, or he thought
+and his thought answered him back. His state of mind on this occasion
+was altogether different from the first vision of God; before it had
+been spectacular, but now his perception was altogether super-sensuous.
+
+(And nevertheless and all the time it seemed that very faintly he was
+still in his room.)
+
+It was he who was the first to speak. The great Angel whom he felt
+rather than saw seemed to be waiting for him to speak.
+
+“I have come,” he said, “because once more I desire to see God.”
+
+“But you have seen God.”
+
+“I saw God. God was light, God was truth. And I went back to my life,
+and God was hidden. God seemed to call me. He called. I heard him, I
+sought him and I touched his hand. When I went back to my life I was
+presently lost in perplexity. I could not tell why God had called me nor
+what I had to do.”
+
+“And why did you not come here before?”
+
+“Doubt and fear. Brother, will you not lay your hand on mine?”
+
+The figure in the darkness became distincter. But nothing touched the
+bishop's seeking hands.
+
+“I want to see God and to understand him. I want reassurance. I want
+conviction. I want to understand all that God asks me to do. The world
+is full of conflict and confusion and the spirit of war. It is dark and
+dreadful now with suffering and bloodshed. I want to serve God who could
+save it, and I do not know how.”
+
+It seemed to the bishop that now he could distinguish dimly but surely
+the form and features of the great Angel to whom he talked. For a little
+while there was silence, and then the Angel spoke.
+
+“It was necessary first,” said the Angel, “that you should apprehend God
+and desire him. That was the purport of your first vision. Now, since
+you require it, I will tell you and show you certain things about him,
+things that it seems you need to know, things that all men need to know.
+Know then first that the time is at hand when God will come into the
+world and rule it, and when men will know what is required of them.
+This time is close at hand. In a little while God will be made manifest
+throughout the earth. Men will know him and know that he is King. To you
+this truth is to be shown--that you may tell it to others.”
+
+“This is no vision?” said the bishop, “no dream that will pass away?”
+
+“Am I not here beside you?”
+
+(5)
+
+
+The bishop was anxious to be very clear. Things that had been
+shapelessly present in his mind now took form and found words for
+themselves.
+
+“The God I saw in my vision--He is not yet manifest in the world?”
+
+“He comes. He is in the world, but he is not yet manifested. He whom you
+saw in your vision will speedily be manifest in the world. To you this
+vision is given of the things that come. The world is already glowing
+with God. Mankind is like a smouldering fire that will presently, in
+quite a little time, burst out into flame.
+
+“In your former vision I showed you God,” said the Angel. “This time
+I will show you certain signs of the coming of God. And then you will
+understand the place you hold in the world and the task that is required
+of you.”
+
+(6)
+
+
+And as the Angel spoke he lifted up his hands with the palms upward, and
+there appeared above them a little round cloud, that grew denser until
+it had the likeness of a silver sphere. It was a mirror in the form of
+a ball, but a mirror not shining uniformly; it was discoloured with
+greyish patches that had a familiar shape. It circled slowly upon the
+Angel's hands. It seemed no greater than the compass of a human skull,
+and yet it was as great as the earth. Indeed it showed the whole
+earth. It was the earth. The hands of the Angel vanished out of sight,
+dissolved and vanished, and the spinning world hung free. All about the
+bishop the velvet darkness broke into glittering points that shaped out
+the constellations, and nearest to them, so near as to seem only a few
+million miles away in the great emptiness into which everything had
+resolved itself, shone the sun, a ball of red-tongued fires. The Angel
+was but a voice now; the bishop and the Angel were somewhere aloof from
+and yet accessible to the circling silver sphere.
+
+At the time all that happened seemed to happen quite naturally, as
+things happen in a dream. It was only later, when all this was a matter
+of memory, that the bishop realized how strange and incomprehensible his
+vision had been. The sphere was the earth with all its continents and
+seas, its ships and cities, its country-sides and mountain ranges. It
+was so small that he could see it all at once, and so great and full
+that he could see everything in it. He could see great countries like
+little patches upon it, and at the same time he could see the faces of
+the men upon the highways, he could see the feelings in men's hearts and
+the thoughts in their minds. But it did not seem in any way wonderful
+to the bishop that so he should see those things, or that it was to him
+that these things were shown.
+
+“This is the whole world,” he said.
+
+“This is the vision of the world,” the Angel answered.
+
+“It is very wonderful,” said the bishop, and stood for a moment
+marvelling at the compass of his vision. For here was India, here
+was Samarkand, in the light of the late afternoon; and China and the
+swarming cities upon her silvery rivers sinking through twilight to the
+night and throwing a spray and tracery of lantern spots upon the dark;
+here was Russia under the noontide, and so great a battle of artillery
+raging on the Dunajec as no man had ever seen before; whole lines of
+trenches dissolved into clouds of dust and heaps of blood-streaked
+earth; here close to the waiting streets of Constantinople were the
+hills of Gallipoli, the grave of British Imperialism, streaming to
+heaven with the dust and smoke of bursting shells and rifle fire and the
+smoke and flame of burning brushwood. In the sea of Marmora a big ship
+crowded with Turkish troops was sinking; and, purple under the clear
+water, he could see the shape of the British submarine which had
+torpedoed her and had submerged and was going away. Berlin prepared its
+frugal meals, still far from famine. He saw the war in Europe as if he
+saw it on a map, yet every human detail showed. Over hundreds of miles
+of trenches east and west of Germany he could see shells bursting and
+the men below dropping, and the stretcher-bearers going back with
+the wounded. The roads to every front were crowded with reserves and
+munitions. For a moment a little group of men indifferent to all this
+struggle, who were landing amidst the Antarctic wilderness, held his
+attention; and then his eyes went westward to the dark rolling Atlantic
+across which, as the edge of the night was drawn like a curtain, more
+and still more ships became visible beating upon their courses eastward
+or westward under the overtaking day.
+
+The wonder increased; the wonder of the single and infinitely
+multitudinous adventure of mankind.
+
+“So God perhaps sees it,” he whispered.
+
+(7)
+
+
+“Look at this man,” said the Angel, and the black shadow of a hand
+seemed to point.
+
+It was a Chinaman sitting with two others in a little low room separated
+by translucent paper windows from a noisy street of shrill-voiced
+people. The three had been talking of the ultimatum that Japan had sent
+that day to China, claiming a priority in many matters over European
+influences they were by no means sure whether it was a wrong or a
+benefit that had been done to their country. From that topic they had
+passed to the discussion of the war, and then of wars and national
+aggressions and the perpetual thrusting and quarrelling of mankind. The
+older man had said that so life would always be; it was the will of
+Heaven. The little, very yellow-faced, emaciated man had agreed with
+him. But now this younger man, to whose thoughts the Angel had so
+particularly directed the bishop's attention, was speaking. He did not
+agree with his companion.
+
+“War is not the will of Heaven,” he said; “it is the blindness of men.”
+
+“Man changes,” he said, “from day to day and from age to age. The
+science of the West has taught us that. Man changes and war changes and
+all things change. China has been the land of flowery peace, and she may
+yet give peace to all the world. She has put aside that puppet Emperor
+at Peking, she turns her face to the new learning of the West as a man
+lays aside his heavy robes, in order that her task may be achieved.”
+
+The older man spoke, his manner was more than a little incredulous, and
+yet not altogether contemptuous. “You believe that someday there will be
+no more war in the world, that a time will come when men will no longer
+plot and plan against the welfare of men?”
+
+“Even that last,” said the younger man. “Did any of us dream twenty-five
+years ago that here in China we should live to see a republic? The age
+of the republics draws near, when men in every country of the world will
+look straight up to the rule of Right and the empire of Heaven.”
+
+(“And God will be King of the World,” said the Angel. “Is not that
+faith exactly the faith that is coming to you?”)
+
+The two other Chinamen questioned their companion, but without
+hostility.
+
+“This war,” said the Chinaman, “will end in a great harvesting of
+kings.”
+
+“But Japan--” the older man began.
+
+The bishop would have liked to hear more of that conversation, but
+the dark hand of the Angel motioned him to another part of the world.
+“Listen to this,” said the Angel.
+
+He pointed the bishop to where the armies of Britain and Turkey lay in
+the heat of Mesopotamia. Along the sandy bank of a wide, slow-flowing
+river rode two horsemen, an Englishman and a Turk. They were returning
+from the Turkish lines, whither the Englishman had been with a flag of
+truce. When Englishmen and Turks are thrown together they soon
+become friends, and in this case matters had been facilitated by
+the Englishman's command of the Turkish language. He was quite an
+exceptional Englishman. The Turk had just been remarking cheerfully that
+it wouldn't please the Germans if they were to discover how amiably he
+and his charge had got on. “It's a pity we ever ceased to be friends,”
+ he said.
+
+“You Englishmen aren't like our Christians,” he went on.
+
+The Englishmen wanted to know why.
+
+“You haven't priests in robes. You don't chant and worship crosses and
+pictures, and quarrel among yourselves.”
+
+“We worship the same God as you do,” said the Englishman.
+
+“Then why do we fight?”
+
+“That's what we want to know.”
+
+“Why do you call yourselves Christians? And take part against us? All
+who worship the One God are brothers.”
+
+“They ought to be,” said the Englishman, and thought. He was struck by
+what seemed to him an amazingly novel idea.
+
+“If it weren't for religions all men would serve God together,” he
+said. “And then there would be no wars--only now and then perhaps just a
+little honest fighting....”
+
+“And see here,” said the Angel. “Here close behind this frightful
+battle, where the German phalanx of guns pounds its way through the
+Russian hosts. Here is a young German talking to two wounded Russian
+prisoners, who have stopped to rest by the roadside. He is a German of
+East Prussia; he knows and thinks a little Russian. And they too are
+saying, all three of them, that the war is not God's will, but the
+confusion of mankind.
+
+“Here,” he said, and the shadow of his hand hovered over the
+burning-ghats of Benares, where a Brahmin of the new persuasion watched
+the straight spires of funereal smoke ascend into the glow of the late
+afternoon, while he talked to an English painter, his friend, of the
+blind intolerance of race and caste and custom in India.
+
+“Or here.”
+
+The Angel pointed to a group of people who had gathered upon a little
+beach at the head of a Norwegian fiord. There were three lads, an old
+man and two women, and they stood about the body of a drowned German
+sailor which had been washed up that day. For a time they had talked in
+whispers, but now suddenly the old man spoke aloud.
+
+“This is the fourth that has come ashore,” he said. “Poor drowned souls!
+Because men will not serve God.”
+
+“But folks go to church and pray enough,” said one of the women.
+
+“They do not serve God,” said the old man. “They just pray to him as one
+nods to a beggar. They do not serve God who is their King. They set up
+their false kings and emperors, and so all Europe is covered with dead,
+and the seas wash up these dead to us. Why does the world suffer these
+things? Why did we Norwegians, who are a free-spirited people, permit
+the Germans and the Swedes and the English to set up a king over us?
+Because we lack faith. Kings mean secret counsels, and secret counsels
+bring war. Sooner or later war will come to us also if we give the soul
+of our nation in trust to a king.... But things will not always be thus
+with men. God will not suffer them for ever. A day comes, and it is no
+distant day, when God himself will rule the earth, and when men will do,
+not what the king wishes nor what is expedient nor what is customary,
+but what is manifestly right.”....
+
+“But men are saying that now in a thousand places,” said the Angel.
+“Here is something that goes a little beyond that.”
+
+His pointing hand went southward until they saw the Africanders riding
+down to Windhuk. Two men, Boer farmers both, rode side by side and
+talked of the German officer they brought prisoner with them. He had put
+sheep-dip in the wells of drinking-water; his life was fairly forfeit,
+and he was not to be killed. “We want no more hate in South Africa,”
+ they agreed. “Dutch and English and German must live here now side by
+side. Men cannot always be killing.”
+
+“And see his thoughts,” said the Angel.
+
+The German's mind was one amazement. He had been sure of being shot, he
+had meant to make a good end, fierce and scornful, a relentless fighter
+to the last; and these men who might have shot him like a man were going
+to spare him like a dog. His mind was a tumbled muddle of old and
+new ideas. He had been brought up in an atmosphere of the foulest and
+fiercest militarism; he had been trained to relentlessness, ruthlessness
+and so forth; war was war and the bitterer the better, frightfulness
+was your way to victory over every enemy. But these people had found a
+better way. Here were Dutch and English side by side; sixteen years ago
+they had been at war together and now they wore the same uniform and
+rode together, and laughed at him for a queer fellow because he was
+for spitting at them and defying them, and folding his arms and looking
+level at the executioners' rifles. There were to be no executioners'
+rifles.... If it was so with Dutch and English, why shouldn't it be so
+presently with French and Germans? Why someday shouldn't French, German,
+Dutch and English, Russian and Pole, ride together under this new star
+of mankind, the Southern Cross, to catch whatever last mischief-maker
+was left to poison the wells of goodwill?
+
+His mind resisted and struggled against these ideas. “Austere,” he
+whispered. “The ennobling tests of war.” A trooner rode up alongside,
+and offered him a drink of water
+
+“Just a mouthful,” he said apologetically. “We've had to go rather
+short.”...
+
+“There's another brain busy here with the same idea,” the Angel
+interrupted. And the bishop found himself looking into the bedroom of a
+young German attache in Washington, sleepless in the small hours.
+
+“Ach!” cried the young man, and sat up in bed and ran his hands through
+his fair hair.
+
+He had been working late upon this detestable business of the Lusitania;
+the news of her sinking had come to hand two days before, and all
+America was aflame with it. It might mean war. His task had been to pour
+out explanations and justifications to the press; to show that it was an
+act of necessity, to pretend a conviction that the great ship was loaded
+with munitions, to fight down the hostility and anger that blazed across
+a continent. He had worked to his limit. He had taken cup after cup of
+coffee, and had come to bed worked out not two hours ago. Now here he
+was awake after a nightmare of drowning women and children, trying to
+comfort his soul by recalling his own arguments. Never once since the
+war began had he doubted the rightness of the German cause. It seemed
+only a proof of his nervous exhaustion that he could doubt it now.
+Germany was the best organized, most cultivated, scientific and liberal
+nation the earth had ever seen, it was for the good of mankind that she
+should be the dominant power in the world; his patriotism had had the
+passion of a mission. The English were indolent, the French decadent,
+the Russians barbaric, the Americans basely democratic; the rest of the
+world was the “White man's Burthen”; the clear destiny of mankind
+was subservience to the good Prussian eagle. Nevertheless--those
+wet draggled bodies that swirled down in the eddies of the sinking
+Titan--Ach! He wished it could have been otherwise. He nursed his knees
+and prayed that there need not be much more of these things before the
+spirit of the enemy was broken and the great Peace of Germany came upon
+the world.
+
+And suddenly he stopped short in his prayer.
+
+Suddenly out of the nothingness and darkness about him came the
+conviction that God did not listen to his prayers....
+
+Was there any other way?
+
+It was the most awful doubt he had ever had, for it smote at the
+training of all his life. “Could it be possible that after all our old
+German God is not the proper style and title of the true God? Is our old
+German God perhaps only the last of a long succession of bloodstained
+tribal effigies--and not God at all?”
+
+For a long time it seemed that the bishop watched the thoughts that
+gathered in the young attache's mind. Until suddenly he broke into a
+quotation, into that last cry of the dying Goethe, for “Light. More
+Light!”...
+
+“Leave him at that,” said the Angel. “I want you to hear these two young
+women.”
+
+The hand came back to England and pointed to where Southend at the mouth
+of the Thames was all agog with the excitement of an overnight Zeppelin
+raid. People had got up hours before their usual time in order to
+look at the wrecked houses before they went up to their work in town.
+Everybody seemed abroad. Two nurses, not very well trained as nurses go
+nor very well-educated women, were snatching a little sea air upon the
+front after an eventful night. They were too excited still to sleep.
+They were talking of the horror of the moment when they saw the nasty
+thing “up there,” and felt helpless as it dropped its bombs. They had
+both hated it.
+
+“There didn't ought to be such things,” said one.
+
+“They don't seem needed,” said her companion.
+
+“Men won't always go on like this--making wars and all such wickedness.”
+
+“It's 'ow to stop them?”
+
+“Science is going to stop them.”
+
+“Science?”
+
+“Yes, science. My young brother--oh, he's a clever one--he says such
+things! He says that it's science that they won't always go on like
+this. There's more sense coming into the world and more--my young
+brother says so. Says it stands to reason; it's Evolution. It's science
+that men are all brothers; you can prove it. It's science that there
+oughtn't to be war. Science is ending war now by making it horrible like
+this, and making it so that no one is safe. Showing it up. Only when
+nobody is safe will everybody want to set up peace, he says. He says
+it's proved there could easily be peace all over the world now if it
+wasn't for flags and kings and capitalists and priests. They still
+manage to keep safe and out of it. He says the world ought to be just
+one state. The World State, he says it ought to be.”
+
+(“Under God,” said the bishop, “under God.”)
+
+“He says science ought to be King of the whole world.”
+
+“Call it Science if you will,” said the bishop. “God is wisdom.”
+
+“Out of the mouths of babes and elementary science students,” said the
+Angel. “The very children in the board schools are turning against this
+narrowness and nonsense and mischief of nations and creeds and kings.
+You see it at a thousand points, at ten thousand points, look, the
+world is all flashing and flickering; it is like a spinthariscope; it is
+aquiver with the light that is coming to mankind. It is on the verge of
+blazing even now.”
+
+“Into a light.”
+
+“Into the one Kingdom of God. See here! See here! And here! This brave
+little French priest in a helmet of steel who is daring to think for the
+first time in his life; this gentle-mannered emir from Morocco looking
+at the grave-diggers on the battlefield; this mother who has lost her
+son....
+
+“You see they all turn in one direction, although none of them seem to
+dream yet that they are all turning in the same direction. They turn,
+every one, to the rule of righteousness, which is the rule of God. They
+turn to that communism of effort in the world which alone permits men
+to serve God in state and city and their economic lives.... They are all
+coming to the verge of the same salvation, the salvation of one human
+brotherhood under the rule of one Righteousness, one Divine will.... Is
+that the salvation your church offers?”
+
+(8)
+
+
+“And now that we have seen how religion grows and spreads in men's
+hearts, now that the fields are white with harvest, I want you to look
+also and see what the teachers of religion are doing,” said the Angel.
+
+He smiled. His presence became more definite, and the earthly globe
+about them and the sun and the stars grew less distinct and less
+immediately there. The silence invited the bishop to speak.
+
+“In the light of this vision, I see my church plainly for the little
+thing it is,” he said.
+
+He wanted to be perfectly clear with the Angel and himself.
+
+“This church of which I am a bishop is just a part of our poor human
+struggle, small and pitiful as one thinks of it here in the light of the
+advent of God's Kingdom, but very great, very great indeed, ancient and
+high and venerable, in comparison with me. But mostly it is human. It is
+most human. For my story is the church's story, and the church's story
+is mine. Here I could almost believe myself the church itself. The
+world saw a light, the nations that were sitting in darkness saw a great
+light. Even as I saw God. And then the church began to forget and lose
+itself among secondary things. As I have done.... It tried to express
+the truth and lost itself in a maze of theology. It tried to bring order
+into the world and sold its faith to Constantine. These men who had
+professed the Invisible King of the World, shirked his service. It is a
+most terrible disaster that Christianity has sold itself to emperors and
+kings. They forged a saying of the Master's that we should render unto
+Ceasar the things that are Ceasar's and unto God the things that are
+God's....
+
+“Who is this Ceasar to set himself up to share mankind with God? Nothing
+that is Ceasar's can be any the less God's. But Constantine Caesar sat
+in the midst of the council, his guards were all about it, and the poor
+fanatics and trimmers and schemers disputed nervously with their eyes
+on him, disputed about homoousian and homoiousian, and grimaced and
+pretended to be very very fierce and exact to hide how much they were
+frightened and how little they knew, and because they did not dare to
+lay violent hands upon that usurper of the empire of the world....
+
+“And from that day forth the Christian churches have been damned and
+lost. Kept churches. Lackey churches. Roman, Russian, Anglican; it
+matters not. My church indeed was twice sold, for it doubled the sin of
+Nicaea and gave itself over to Henry and Elizabeth while it shammed
+a dispute about the sacraments. No one cared really about
+transubstantiation any more than the earlier betrayers cared about
+consubstantiality; that dispute did but serve to mask the betrayal.”
+
+He turned to the listening Angel. “What can you show me of my church
+that I do not know? Why! we Anglican bishops get our sees as footmen get
+a job. For months Victoria, that old German Frau, delayed me--because of
+some tittle-tattle.... The things we are! Snape, who afterwards became
+Bishop of Burnham, used to waylay the Prince Consort when he was riding
+in Hyde Park and give him, he boasts, 'a good loud cheer,' and then he
+would run very fast across the park so as to catch him as he came round,
+and do it again.... It is to that sort of thing we bearers of the light
+have sunken....
+
+“I have always despised that poor toady,” the bishop went on. “And
+yet here am I, and God has called me and shown me the light of his
+countenance, and for a month I have faltered. That is the mystery of the
+human heart, that it can and does sin against the light. What right have
+I, who have seen the light--and failed, what right have I--to despise
+any other human being? I seem to have been held back by a sort of
+paralysis.
+
+“Men are so small, so small still, that they cannot keep hold of the
+vision of God. That is why I want to see God again.... But if it were
+not for this strange drug that seems for a little while to lift my mind
+above the confusion and personal entanglements of every day, I doubt if
+even now I could be here. I am here, passionate to hold this moment and
+keep the light. As this inspiration passes, I shall go back, I know,
+to my home and my place and my limitations. The littleness of men! The
+forgetfulness of men! I want to know what my chief duty is, to have it
+plain, in terms so plain that I can never forget.
+
+“See in this world,” he said, turning to the globe, “while Chinese
+merchants and Turkish troopers, school-board boys and Norwegian
+fishermen, half-trained nurses and Boer farmers are full of the spirit
+of God, see how the priests of the churches of Nicaea spend their time.”
+
+And now it was the bishop whose dark hands ran over the great silver
+globe, and it was the Angel who stood over him and listened, as a
+teacher might stand over a child who is learning a lesson. The bishop's
+hand rested for a second on a cardinal who was planning a political
+intrigue to produce a reaction in France, then for a moment on a
+Pomeranian pastor who was going out to his well-tilled fields with his
+Sunday sermon, full of fierce hatred of England, still echoing in his
+head. Then he paused at a Mollah preaching the Jehad, in doubt whether
+he too wasn't a German pastor, and then at an Anglican clergyman still
+lying abed and thinking out a great mission of Repentance and Hope that
+should restore the authority of the established church--by incoherent
+missioning--without any definite sin indicated for repentance nor any
+clear hope for anything in particular arising out of such activities.
+The bishop's hand went seeking to and fro, but nowhere could he find
+any religious teacher, any religious body rousing itself to meet the new
+dawn of faith in the world. Some few men indeed seemed thoughtful, but
+within the limitation of their vows. Everywhere it was church and creed
+and nation and king and property and partisanship, and nowhere was it
+the True God that the priests and teachers were upholding. It was always
+the common unhampered man through whom the light of God was breaking; it
+was always the creed and the organization of the religious professionals
+that stood in the way to God....
+
+“God is putting the priests aside,” he cried, “and reaching out to
+common men. The churches do not serve God. They stand between man and
+God. They are like great barricades on the way to God.”
+
+The bishop's hand brushed over Archbishop Pontifex, who was just coming
+down to breakfast in his palace. This pompous old man was dressed in
+a purple garment that set off his tall figure very finely, and he was
+holding out his episcopal ring for his guests to kiss, that being the
+customary morning greeting of Archbishop Pontifex. The thought of that
+ring-kissing had made much hard work at lower levels “worth while”
+ to Archbishop Pontifex. And seventy miles away from him old Likeman
+breakfasted in bed on Benger's food, and searched his Greek Testament
+for tags to put to his letters. And here was the familiar palace at
+Princhester, and in an armchair in his bed-room sat Bishop Scrope
+insensible and motionless, in a trance in which he was dreaming of the
+coming of God.
+
+“I see my futility. I see my vanity. But what am I to do?” he said,
+turning to the darkness that now wrapped about the Angel again, fold
+upon fold. “The implications of yesterday bind me for the morrow. This
+is my world. This is what I am and what I am in. How can I save myself?
+How can I turn from these habits and customs and obligations to the
+service of the one true God? When I see myself, then I understand how it
+is with the others. All we priests and teachers are men caught in nets.
+I would serve God. Easily said! But how am I to serve God? How am I to
+help and forward His coming, to make myself part of His coming?”
+
+He perceived that he was returning into himself, and that the vision of
+the sphere and of the starry spaces was fading into non-existence.
+
+He struggled against this return. He felt that his demand was still
+unanswered. His wife's face had suddenly come very close to him, and he
+realized she intervened between him and that solution.
+
+What was she doing here?
+
+(9)
+
+
+The great Angel seemed still to be near at hand, limitless space was all
+about him, and yet the bishop perceived that he was now sitting in the
+arm-chair in his bedroom in the palace of Princhester. He was both
+there and not there. It seemed now as if he had two distinct yet kindred
+selves, and that the former watched the latter. The latter was now
+awakening to the things about him; the former marked his gestures and
+listened with an entire detachment to the words he was saying. These
+words he was saying to Lady Ella: “God is coming to rule the world, I
+tell you. We must leave the church.”
+
+Close to him sat Lady Ella, watching him with an expression in which
+dismay and resolution mingled. Upon the other side of him, upon a little
+occasional table, was a tray with breakfast things. He was no longer the
+watcher now, but the watched.
+
+Lady Ella bent towards him as he spoke. She seemed to struggle with and
+dismiss his astonishing statement.
+
+“Edward,” she said, “you have been taking a drug.” He looked round at
+his night table to see the little phial. It had gone. Then he saw that
+Lady Ella held it very firmly in her hand.
+
+“Dunk came to me in great distress. He said you were insensible and
+breathing heavily. I came. I realized. I told him to say nothing to any
+one, but to fetch me a tray with your breakfast. I have kept all the
+other servants away and I have waited here by you.... Dunk I think
+is safe.... You have been muttering and moving your head from side to
+side....”
+
+The bishop's mind was confused. He felt as though God must be standing
+just outside the room. “I have failed in my duty,” he said. “But I am
+very near to God.” He laid his hand on her arm. “You know, Ella, He is
+very close to us....”
+
+She looked perplexed.
+
+He sat up in his chair.
+
+“For some months now,” he said, “there have been new forces at work
+in my mind. I have been invaded by strange doubts and still stranger
+realizations. This old church of ours is an empty mask. God is not
+specially concerned in it.”
+
+“Edward!” she cried, “what are you saying?”
+
+“I have been hesitating to tell you. But I see now I must tell you
+plainly. Our church is a cast hull. It is like the empty skin of a
+snake. God has gone out of it.”
+
+She rose to her feet. She was so horrified that she staggered backward,
+pushing her chair behind her. “But you are mad,” she said.
+
+He was astonished at her distress. He stood up also.
+
+“My dear,” he said, “I can assure you I am not mad. I should have
+prepared you, I know....”
+
+She looked at him wild-eyed. Then she glanced at the phial, gripped in
+her hand.
+
+“Oh!” she exclaimed, and going swiftly to the window emptied out the
+contents of the little bottle. He realized what she was doing too late
+to prevent her.
+
+“Don't waste that!” he cried, and stepping forward caught hold of her
+wrist. The phial fell from her white fingers, and crashed upon the rough
+paved garden path below.
+
+“My dear,” he cried, “my dear. You do not understand.”
+
+They stood face to face. “It was a tonic,” he said. “I have been ill. I
+need it.”
+
+“It is a drug,” she answered. “You have been uttering blasphemies.”
+
+He dropped her arm and walked half-way across the room. Then he turned
+and faced her.
+
+“They are not blasphemies,” he said. “But I ought not to have surprised
+you and shocked you as I have done. I want to tell you of changes that
+have happened to my mind.”
+
+“Now!” she exclaimed, and then: “I will not hear them now. Until you are
+better. Until these fumes--”
+
+Her manner changed. “Oh, Edward!” she cried, “why have you done this?
+Why have you taken things secretly? I know you have been sleepless, but
+I have been so ready to help you. I have been willing--you know I have
+been willing--for any help. My life is all to be of use to you....”
+
+“Is there any reason,” she pleaded, “why you should have hidden things
+from me?”
+
+He stood remorseful and distressed. “I should have talked to you,” he
+said lamely.
+
+“Edward,” she said, laying her hands on his shoulders, “will you do one
+thing for me? Will you try to eat a little breakfast? And stay here? I
+will go down to Mr. Whippham and arrange whatever is urgent with him.
+Perhaps if you rest--There is nothing really imperative until the
+confirmation in the afternoon.... I do not understand all this. For some
+time--I have felt it was going on. But of that we can talk. The thing
+now is that people should not know, that nothing should be seen....
+Suppose for instance that horrible White Blackbird were to hear of
+it.... I implore you. If you rest here--And if I were to send for that
+young doctor who attended Miriam.”
+
+“I don't want a doctor,” said the bishop.
+
+“But you ought to have a doctor.”
+
+“I won't have a doctor,” said the bishop.
+
+It was with a perplexed but powerless dissent that the externalized
+perceptions of the bishop witnessed his agreement with the rest of Lady
+Ella's proposals so soon as this point about the doctor was conceded.
+
+(10)
+
+
+For the rest of that day until his breakdown in the cathedral the sense
+of being in two places at the same time haunted the bishop's mind. He
+stood beside the Angel in the great space amidst the stars, and at the
+same time he was back in his ordinary life, he was in his palace at
+Princhester, first resting in his bedroom and talking to his wife
+and presently taking up the routines of his duties again in his study
+downstairs.
+
+His chief task was to finish his two addresses for the confirmation
+services of the day. He read over his notes, and threw them aside
+and remained for a time thinking deeply. The Greek tags at the end
+of Likeman's letter came into his thoughts; they assumed a quality of
+peculiar relevance to this present occasion. He repeated the words:
+“Epitelesei. Epiphausei.”
+
+He took his little Testament to verify them. After some slight trouble
+he located the two texts. The first, from Philippians, ran in the old
+version, “He that hath begun a good work in you will perform it”;
+the second was expressed thus: “Christ shall give thee light.” He was
+dissatisfied with these renderings and resorted to the revised version,
+which gave “perfect” instead of “perform,” and “shall shine upon you”
+ for “give thee light.” He reflected profoundly for a time.
+
+Then suddenly his addresses began to take shape in his mind, and these
+little points lost any significance. He began to write rapidly, and as
+he wrote he felt the Angel stood by his right hand and read and approved
+what he was writing. There were moments when his mind seemed to be
+working entirely beyond his control. He had a transitory questioning
+whether this curious intellectual automatism was not perhaps what people
+meant by “inspiration.”
+
+(11)
+
+
+The bishop had always been sensitive to the secret fount of pathos that
+is hidden in the spectacle of youth. Long years ago when he and Lady
+Ella had been in Florence he had been moved to tears by the beauty
+of the fresh-faced eager Tobit who runs beside the great angel in the
+picture of Botticelli. And suddenly and almost as uncontrollably, that
+feeling returned at the sight of the young congregation below him,
+of all these scores of neophytes who were gathered to make a public
+acknowledgment of God. The war has invested all youth now with the
+shadow of tragedy; before it came many of us were a little envious of
+youth and a little too assured of its certainty of happiness. All that
+has changed. Fear and a certain tender solicitude mingle in our regard
+for every child; not a lad we pass in the street but may presently be
+called to face such pain and stress and danger as no ancient hero ever
+knew. The patronage, the insolent condescension of age, has vanished out
+of the world. It is dreadful to look upon the young.
+
+He stood surveying the faces of the young people as the rector read the
+Preface to the confirmation service. How simple they were, how innocent!
+Some were a little flushed by the excitement of the occasion; some a
+little pallid. But they were all such tender faces, so soft in outline,
+so fresh and delicate in texture and colour. They had soft credulous
+mouths. Some glanced sideways at one another; some listened with a
+forced intentness. The expression of one good-looking boy, sitting in a
+corner scat, struck the bishop as being curiously defiant. He stood
+very erect, he blinked his eyes as though they smarted, his lips were
+compressed bitterly. And then it seemed to the bishop that the Angel
+stood beside him and gave him understanding.
+
+“He is here,” the bishop knew, “because he could not avoid coming. He
+tried to excuse himself. His mother wept. What could he do? But the
+church's teaching nowadays fails even to grip the minds of boys.”
+
+The rector came to the end of his Preface: “They will evermore endeavour
+themselves faithfully to observe such things as they by their own
+confession have assented unto.”
+
+“Like a smart solicitor pinning them down,” said the bishop to himself,
+and then roused himself, unrolled the little paper in his hand, leant
+forward, and straightway began his first address.
+
+Nowadays it is possible to say very unorthodox things indeed in an
+Anglican pulpit unchallenged. There remains no alert doctrinal criticism
+in the church congregations. It was possible, therefore, for the bishop
+to say all that follows without either hindrance or disturbance. The
+only opposition, indeed, came from within, from a sense of dreamlike
+incongruity between the place and the occasion and the things that he
+found himself delivering.
+
+“All ceremonies,” he began, “grow old. All ceremonies are tainted even
+from the first by things less worthy than their first intention, and
+you, my dear sons and daughters, who have gathered to-day in this worn
+and ancient building, beneath these monuments to ancient vanities and
+these symbols of forgotten or abandoned theories about the mystery of
+God, will do well to distinguish in your minds between what is essential
+and what is superfluous and confusing in this dedication you make of
+yourselves to God our Master and King. For that is the real thing you
+seek to do today, to give yourselves to God. This is your spiritual
+coming of age, in which you set aside your childish dependence upon
+teachers and upon taught phrases, upon rote and direction, and stand up
+to look your Master in the face. You profess a great brotherhood when
+you do that, a brotherhood that goes round the earth, that numbers men
+of every race and nation and country, that aims to bring God into
+all the affairs of this world and make him not only the king of your
+individual lives but the king--in place of all the upstarts, usurpers,
+accidents, and absurdities who bear crowns and sceptres today--of an
+united mankind.”
+
+He paused, and in the pause he heard a little rustle as though the
+congregation before him was sitting up in its places, a sound that
+always nerves and reassures an experienced preacher.
+
+“This, my dear children, is the reality of this grave business to-day,
+as indeed it is the real and practical end of all true religion. This is
+your sacrament urn, your soldier's oath. You salute and give your fealty
+to the coming Kingdom of God. And upon that I would have you fix your
+minds to the exclusion of much that, I know only too well, has been
+narrow and evil and sectarian in your preparation for this solemn rite.
+God is like a precious jewel found among much rubble; you must cast the
+rubble from you. The crowning triumph of the human mind is simplicity;
+the supreme significance of God lies in his unity and universality. The
+God you salute to-day is the God of the Jews and Gentiles alike, the
+God of Islam, the God of the Brahmo Somaj, the unknown God of many a
+righteous unbeliever. He is not the God of those felted theologies and
+inexplicable doctrines with which your teachers may have confused your
+minds. I would have it very clear in your minds that having drunken the
+draught you should not reverence unduly the cracked old vessel that has
+brought it to your lips. I should be falling short of my duty if I did
+not make that and everything I mean by that altogether plain to you.”
+
+He saw the lad whose face of dull defiance he had marked before, sitting
+now with a startled interest in his eyes. The bishop leant over the desk
+before him, and continued in the persuasive tone of a man who speaks of
+things too manifest for laboured argument.
+
+“In all ages religion has come from God through broad-minded creative
+men, and in all ages it has fallen very quickly into the hands
+of intense and conservative men. These last--narrow, fearful, and
+suspicious--have sought in every age to save the precious gift of
+religion by putting it into a prison of formulae and asseverations. Bear
+that in mind when you are pressed to definition. It is as if you made a
+box hermetically sealed to save the treasure of a fresh breeze from the
+sea. But they have sought out exact statements and tortuous explanations
+of the plain truth of God, they have tried to take down God in writing,
+to commit him to documents, to embalm his living faith as though it
+would otherwise corrupt. So they have lost God and fallen into endless
+differences, disputes, violence, and darkness about insignificant
+things. They have divided religion between this creed and teacher and
+that. The corruption of the best is the worst, said Aristotle; and the
+great religions of the world, and especially this Christianity of ours,
+are the ones most darkened and divided and wasted by the fussings and
+false exactitudes of the creed-monger and the sectary. There is no lie
+so bad as a stale disfigured truth. There is no heresy so damnable as
+a narrow orthodoxy. All religious associations carry this danger of the
+over-statement that misstates and the over-emphasis that divides and
+betrays. Beware of that danger. Do not imagine, because you are gathered
+in this queerly beautiful old building today, because I preside here in
+this odd raiment of an odder compromise, because you see about you in
+coloured glass and carven stone the emblems of much vain disputation,
+that thereby you cut yourselves off and come apart from the great world
+of faith, Catholic, Islamic, Brahministic, Buddhistic, that grows now
+to a common consciousness of the near Advent of God our King. You enter
+that waiting world fraternity now, you do not leave it. This place, this
+church of ours, should be to you not a seclusion and a fastness but a
+door.
+
+“I could quote you a score of instances to establish that this simple
+universalism was also the teaching of Christ. But now I will only remind
+you that it was Mary who went to her lord simply, who was commended, and
+not Martha who troubled about many things. Learn from the Mary of
+Faith and not from these Marthas of the Creeds. Let us abandon the
+presumptions of an ignorant past. The perfection of doctrine is not
+for finite men. Give yourselves to God. Give yourselves to God. Not to
+churches and uses, but to God. To God simply. He is the first word of
+religion and the last. He is Alpha; he is Omega. Epitelesei; it is He
+who will finish the good work begun.”
+
+The bishop ended his address in a vivid silence. Then he began his
+interrogation.
+
+“Do you here, in the presence of God, and of this congregation, renew
+the solemn promise and vow that was made in your name at your Baptism;
+ratifying and confirming the same in your own persons, and acknowledging
+yourselves--”
+
+He stopped short. The next words were: “bound to believe and do all
+those things, which your Godfathers and Godmothers then undertook for
+you.”
+
+He could not stand those words. He hesitated, and then substituted:
+“acknowledge yourselves to be the true servants of the one God, who is
+the Lord of Mankind?”
+
+For a moment silence hung in the cathedral. Then one voice, a boy's
+voice, led a ragged response. “I do.”
+
+Then the bishop: “Our help is in the Name of the Lord.”
+
+The congregation answered doubtfully, with a glance at its prayer books:
+“Who hath made heaven and earth.”
+
+The bishop: “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
+
+The congregation said with returning confidence: “Henceforth, world
+without end.”
+
+(12)
+
+
+Before his second address the bishop had to listen to Veni Creator
+Spiritus, in its English form, and it seemed to him the worst of all
+possible hymns. Its defects became monstrously exaggerated to his
+hypersensitive mind. It impressed him in its Englished travesty as a
+grotesque, as a veritable Charlie Chaplin among hymns, and in truth it
+does stick out most awkward feet, it misses its accusatives, it catches
+absurdly upon points of abstruse doctrine. The great Angel stood
+motionless and ironical at the bishop's elbow while it was being sung.
+“Your church,” he seemed to say.
+
+“We must end this sort of thing,” whispered the bishop. “We must end
+this sort of thing--absolutely.” He glanced at the faces of the singers,
+and it became beyond all other things urgent, that he should lift them
+once for all above the sectarian dogmatism of that hymn to a simple
+vision of God's light....
+
+He roused himself to the touching business of the laying on of hands.
+While he did so the prepared substance of his second address was running
+through his mind. The following prayer and collects he read without
+difficulty, and so came to his second address. His disposition at first
+was explanatory.
+
+“When I spoke to you just now,” he began, “I fell unintentionally into
+the use of a Greek word, epitelesei. It was written to me in a letter
+from a friend with another word that also I am now going to quote to
+you. This letter touched very closely upon the things I want to say to
+you now, and so these two words are very much in my mind. The former one
+was taken from the Epistle to the Philippians; it signifies, 'He will
+complete the work begun'; the one I have now in mind comes from the
+Epistle to the Ephesians; it is Epiphausei--or, to be fuller, epiphausei
+soi ho Christos, which signifies that He will shine upon us. And this is
+very much in my thoughts now because I do believe that this world, which
+seemed so very far from God a little while ago, draws near now to an
+unexampled dawn. God is at hand.
+
+“It is your privilege, it is your grave and terrible position, that you
+have been born at the very end and collapse of a negligent age, of an
+age of sham kingship, sham freedom, relaxation, evasion, greed, waste,
+falsehood, and sinister preparation. Your lives open out in the midst
+of the breakdown for which that age prepared. To you negligence is no
+longer possible. There is cold and darkness, there is the heat of the
+furnace before you; you will live amidst extremes such as our youth
+never knew; whatever betide, you of your generation will have small
+chance of living untempered lives. Our country is at war and half
+mankind is at war; death and destruction trample through the world;
+men rot and die by the million, food diminishes and fails, there is
+a wasting away of all the hoarded resources, of all the accumulated
+well-being of mankind; and there is no clear prospect yet of any end to
+this enormous and frightful conflict. Why did it ever arise? What made
+it possible? It arose because men had forgotten God. It was possible
+because they worshipped simulacra, were loyal to phantoms of race and
+empire, permitted themselves to be ruled and misled by idiot princes and
+usurper kings. Their minds were turned from God, who alone can rule and
+unite mankind, and so they have passed from the glare and follies of
+those former years into the darkness and anguish of the present day. And
+in darkness and anguish they will remain until they turn to that King
+who comes to rule them, until the sword and indignation of God have
+overthrown their misleaders and oppressors, and the Justice of God, the
+Kingdom of God set high over the republics of mankind, has brought peace
+for ever to the world. It is to this militant and imminent God, to this
+immortal Captain, this undying Law-giver, that you devote yourselves
+to-day.
+
+“For he is imminent now. He comes. I have seen in the east and in the
+west, the hearts and the minds and the wills of men turning to him as
+surely as when a needle is magnetized it turns towards the north. Even
+now as I preach to you here, God stands over us all, ready to receive
+us....”
+
+And as he said these words, the long nave of the cathedral, the shadows
+of its fretted roof, the brown choir with its golden screen, the rows
+of seated figures, became like some picture cast upon a flimsy and
+translucent curtain. Once more it seemed to the bishop that he saw
+God plain. Once more the glorious effulgence poured about him, and the
+beautiful and wonderful conquest of men's hearts and lives was manifest
+to him.
+
+He lifted up his hands and cried to God, and with an emotion so
+profound, an earnestness so commanding, that very many of those who
+were present turned their faces to see the figure to which he looked and
+spoke. And some of the children had a strange persuasion of a presence
+there, as of a divine figure militant, armed, and serene....
+
+“Oh God our Leader and our Master and our Friend,” the bishop prayed,
+“forgive our imperfection and our little motives, take us and make us
+one with thy great purpose, use us and do not reject us, make us all
+here servants of thy kingdom, weave our lives into thy struggle to
+conquer and to bring peace and union to the world. We are small and
+feeble creatures, we are feeble in speech, feebler still in action,
+nevertheless let but thy light shine upon us and there is not one of
+us who cannot be lit by thy fire, and who cannot lose himself in thy
+salvation. Take us into thy purpose, O God. Let thy kingdom come into
+our hearts and into this world.”
+
+His voice ceased, and he stood for a measurable time with his arms
+extended and his face upturned....
+
+The golden clouds that whirled and eddied so splendidly in his brain
+thinned out, his sense of God's immediacy faded and passed, and he was
+left aware of the cathedral pulpit in which he stood so strangely posed,
+and of the astonished congregation below him. His arms sank to his side.
+His eyes fell upon the book in front of him and he felt for and gripped
+the two upper corners of it and, regardless of the common order and
+practice, read out the Benediction, changing the words involuntarily as
+he read:
+
+“The Blessing of God who is the Father, the Son, the Spirit and the King
+of all Mankind, be upon you and remain with you for ever. Amen.”
+
+Then he looked again, as if to look once more upon that radiant vision
+of God, but now he saw only the clear cool space of the cathedral vault
+and the coloured glass and tracery of the great rose window. And then,
+as the first notes of the organ came pealing above the departing stir of
+the congregation, he turned about and descended slowly, like one who is
+still half dreaming, from the pulpit.
+
+(13)
+
+
+In the vestry he found Canon Bliss. “Help me to take off these
+garments,” the bishop said. “I shall never wear them again.”
+
+“You are ill,” said the canon, scrutinizing his face.
+
+“Not ill. But the word was taken out of my mouth. I perceive now that
+I have been in a trance, a trance in which the truth is real. It is a
+fearful thing to find oneself among realities. It is a dreadful thing
+when God begins to haunt a priest.... I can never minister in the church
+again.”
+
+Whippham thrust forward a chair for the bishop to sit down. The bishop
+felt now extraordinarily fatigued. He sat down heavily, and rested his
+wrists on the arms of the chair. “Already,” he resumed presently, “I
+begin to forget what it was I said.”
+
+“You became excited,” said Bliss, “and spoke very loudly and clearly.”
+
+“What did I say?”
+
+“I don't know what you said; I have forgotten. I never want to remember.
+Things about the Second Advent. Dreadful things. You said God was close
+at hand. Happily you spoke partly in Greek. I doubt if any of those
+children understood. And you had a kind of lapse--an aphasia. You
+mutilated the interrogation and you did not pronounce the
+benediction properly. You changed words and you put in words. One sat
+frozen--waiting for what would happen next.”
+
+“We must postpone the Pringle confirmation,” said Whippham. “I wonder to
+whom I could telephone.”
+
+Lady Ella appeared, and came and knelt down by the bishop's chair. “I
+never ought to have let this happen,” she said, taking his wrists in her
+hands. “You are in a fever, dear.”
+
+“It seemed entirely natural to say what I did,” the bishop declared.
+
+Lady Ella looked up at Bliss.
+
+“A doctor has been sent for,” said the canon to Lady Ella.
+
+“I must speak to the doctor,” said Lady Ella as if her husband could
+not hear her. “There is something that will make things clearer to the
+doctor. I must speak to the doctor for a moment before he sees him.”
+
+Came a gust of pretty sounds and a flash of bright colour that shamed
+the rich vestments at hand. Over the shoulder of the rector and quite at
+the back, appeared Lady Sunderbund resolutely invading the vestry. The
+rector intercepted her, stood broad with extended arms.
+
+“I must come in and speak to him. If it is only fo' a moment.”
+
+The bishop looked up and saw Lady Ella's expression. Lady Ella was
+sitting up very stiffly, listening but not looking round.
+
+A vague horror and a passionate desire to prevent the entry of Lady
+Sunderbund at any cost, seized upon the bishop. She would, he felt, be
+the last overwhelming complication. He descended to a base subterfuge.
+He lay back in his chair slowly as though he unfolded himself, he
+covered his eyes with his hand and then groaned aloud.
+
+“Leave me alone!” he cried in a voice of agony. “Leave me alone! I can
+see no one.... I can--no more.”
+
+There was a momentous silence, and then the tumult of Lady Sunderbund
+receded.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE EIGHTH - THE NEW WORLD
+
+(1)
+
+
+THAT night the bishop had a temperature of a hundred and a half. The
+doctor pronounced him to be in a state of intense mental excitement,
+aggravated by some drug. He was a doctor modern and clear-minded enough
+to admit that he could not identify the drug. He overruled, every one
+overruled, the bishop's declaration that he had done with the church,
+that he could never mock God with his episcopal ministrations again,
+that he must proceed at once with his resignation. “Don't think of
+these things,” said the doctor. “Banish them from your mind until your
+temperature is down to ninety-eight. Then after a rest you may go into
+them.”
+
+Lady Ella insisted upon his keeping his room. It was with difficulty
+that he got her to admit Whippham, and Whippham was exasperatingly in
+order. “You need not trouble about anything now, my lord,” he said.
+“Everything will keep until you are ready to attend to it. It's well
+we're through with Easter. Bishop Buncombe of Eastern Blowdesia
+was coming here anyhow. And there is Canon Bliss. There's only two
+ordination candidates because of the war. We'll get on swimmingly.”
+
+The bishop thought he would like to talk to those two ordination
+candidates, but they prevailed upon him not to do so. He lay for the
+best part of one night confiding remarkable things to two imaginary
+ordination candidates.
+
+He developed a marked liking for Eleanor's company. She was home again
+now after a visit to some friends. It was decided that the best thing
+to do with him would be to send him away in her charge. A journey abroad
+was impossible. France would remind him too dreadfully of the war. His
+own mind turned suddenly to the sweet air of Hunstanton. He had gone
+there at times to read, in the old Cambridge days. “It is a terribly
+ugly place,” he said, “but it is wine in the veins.”
+
+Lady Ella was doubtful about Zeppelins. Thrice they had been right over
+Hunstanton already. They came in by the easy landmark of the Wash.
+
+“It will interest him,” said Eleanor, who knew her father better.
+
+(2)
+
+
+One warm and still and sunny afternoon the bishop found himself looking
+out upon the waters of the Wash. He sat where the highest pebble layers
+of the beach reached up to a little cliff of sandy earth perhaps a foot
+high, and he looked upon sands and sea and sky and saw that they were
+beautiful.
+
+He was a little black-gaitered object in a scene of the most exquisite
+and delicate colour. Right and left of him stretched the low grey salted
+shore, pale banks of marly earth surmounted by green-grey wiry grass
+that held and was half buried in fine blown sand. Above, the heavens
+made a complete hemisphere of blue in which a series of remote cumulus
+clouds floated and dissolved. Before him spread the long levels of the
+sands, and far away at its utmost ebb was the sea. Eleanor had gone to
+explore the black ribs of a wrecked fishing-boat that lay at the edge of
+a shallow lagoon. She was a little pink-footed figure, very bright
+and apparently transparent. She had reverted for a time to shameless
+childishness; she had hidden her stockings among the reeds of the bank,
+and she was running to and fro, from star-fish to razor shell and from
+cockle to weed. The shingle was pale drab and purple close at hand, but
+to the westward, towards Hunstanton, the sands became brown and
+purple, and were presently broken up into endless skerries of low flat
+weed-covered boulders and little intensely blue pools. The sea was
+a band of sapphire that became silver to the west; it met the silver
+shining sands in one delicate breathing edge of intensely white foam.
+Remote to the west, very small and black and clear against the afternoon
+sky, was a cart, and about it was a score or so of mussel-gatherers.
+A little nearer, on an apparently empty stretch of shining wet sand, a
+multitude of gulls was mysteriously busy. These two groups of activities
+and Eleanor's flitting translucent movements did but set off and
+emphasize the immense and soothing tranquillity.
+
+For a long time the bishop sat passively receptive to this healing
+beauty. Then a little flow of thought began and gathered in his mind. He
+had come out to think over two letters that he had brought with him.
+He drew these now rather reluctantly from his pocket, and after a long
+pause over the envelopes began to read them.
+
+He reread Likeman's letter first.
+
+Likeman could not forgive him.
+
+“My dear Scrope,” he wrote, “your explanation explains nothing. This
+sensational declaration of infidelity to our mother church, made under
+the most damning and distressing circumstances in the presence of young
+and tender minds entrusted to your ministrations, and in defiance of the
+honourable engagements implied in the confirmation service, confirms my
+worst apprehensions of the weaknesses of your character. I have always
+felt the touch of theatricality in your temperament, the peculiar
+craving to be pseudo-deeper, pseudo-simpler than us all, the need of
+personal excitement. I know that you were never quite contented
+to believe in God at second-hand. You wanted to be taken notice
+of--personally. Except for some few hints to you, I have never breathed
+a word of these doubts to any human being; I have always hoped that
+the ripening that comes with years and experience would give you an
+increasing strength against the dangers of emotionalism and against your
+strong, deep, quiet sense of your exceptional personal importance....”
+
+The bishop read thus far, and then sat reflecting.
+
+Was it just?
+
+He had many weaknesses, but had he this egotism? No; that wasn't
+the justice of the case. The old man, bitterly disappointed, was
+endeavouring to wound. Scrope asked himself whether he was to blame for
+that disappointment. That was a more difficult question....
+
+He dismissed the charge at last, crumpled up the letter in his hand, and
+after a moment's hesitation flung it away.... But he remained acutely
+sorry, not so much for himself as for the revelation of Likeman this
+letter made. He had had a great affection for Likeman and suddenly it
+was turned into a wound.
+
+(3)
+
+
+The second letter was from Lady Sunderbund, and it was an altogether
+more remarkable document. Lady Sunderbund wrote on a notepaper that was
+evidently the result of a perverse research, but she wrote a letter far
+more coherent than her speech, and without that curious falling away
+of the r's that flavoured even her gravest observations with an unjust
+faint aroma of absurdity. She wrote with a thin pen in a rounded boyish
+handwriting. She italicized with slashes of the pen.
+
+He held this letter in both hands between his knees, and considered
+it now with an expression that brought his eyebrows forward until they
+almost met, and that tucked in the corners of his mouth.
+
+“My dear Bishop,” it began.
+
+“I keep thinking and thinking and thinking of that wonderful service, of
+the wonderful, wonderful things you said, and the wonderful choice you
+made of the moment to say them--when all those young lives were coming
+to the great serious thing in life. It was most beautifully done. At any
+rate, dear Bishop and Teacher, it was most beautifully begun. And now we
+all stand to you like creditors because you have given us so much that
+you owe us ever so much more. You have started us and you have to go on
+with us. You have broken the shell of the old church, and here we are
+running about with nowhere to go. You have to make the shelter of a new
+church now for us, purged of errors, looking straight to God. The
+King of Mankind!--what a wonderful, wonderful phrase that is. It says
+everything. Tell us more of him and more. Count me first--not foremost,
+but just the little one that runs in first--among your disciples. They
+say you are resigning your position in the church. Of course that must
+be true. You are coming out of it--what did you call it?--coming out of
+the cracked old vessel from which you have poured the living waters. I
+called on Lady Ella yesterday. She did not tell me very much; I think
+she is a very reserved as well as a very dignified woman, but she said
+that you intended to go to London. In London then I suppose you will set
+up the first altar to the Divine King. I want to help.
+
+“Dear Bishop and Teacher, I want to help tremendously--with all my heart
+and all my soul. I want to be let do things for you.” (The “you” was
+erased by three or four rapid slashes, and “our King” substituted.)
+
+“I want to be privileged to help build that First Church of the World
+Unified under God. It is a dreadful thing to says but, you see, I am
+very rich; this dreadful war has made me ever so much richer--steel and
+shipping and things--it is my trustees have done it. I am ashamed to be
+so rich. I want to give. I want to give and help this great beginning of
+yours. I want you to let me help on the temporal side, to make it
+easy for you to stand forth and deliver your message, amidst suitable
+surroundings and without any horrid worries on account of the sacrifices
+you have made. Please do not turn my offering aside. I have never wanted
+anything so much in all my life as I want to make this gift. Unless I
+can make it I feel that for me there is no salvation! I shall stick with
+my loads and loads of stocks and shares and horrid possessions outside
+the Needle's Eye. But if I could build a temple for God, and just live
+somewhere near it so as to be the poor woman who sweeps out the chapels,
+and die perhaps and be buried under its floor! Don't smile at me. I
+mean every word of it. Years ago I thought of such a thing. After I had
+visited the Certosa di Pavia--do you know it? So beautiful, and those
+two still alabaster figures--recumbent. But until now I could never see
+my way to any such service. Now I do. I am all afire to do it. Help me!
+Tell me! Let me stand behind you and make your mission possible. I feel
+I have come to the most wonderful phase in my life. I feel my call has
+come....
+
+“I have written this letter over three times, and torn each of them up.
+I do so want to say all this, and it is so desperately hard to say. I am
+full of fears that you despise me. I know there is a sort of high colour
+about me. My passion for brightness. I am absurd. But inside of me is
+a soul, a real, living, breathing soul. Crying out to you: 'Oh, let me
+help! Let me help!' I will do anything, I will endure anything if only I
+can keep hold of the vision splendid you gave me in the cathedral. I see
+it now day and night, the dream of the place I can make for you--and you
+preaching! My fingers itch to begin. The day before yesterday I said
+to myself, 'I am quite unworthy, I am a worldly woman, a rich, smart,
+decorated woman. He will never accept me as I am.' I took off all
+my jewels, every one, I looked through all my clothes, and at last I
+decided I would have made for me a very simple straight grey dress, just
+simple and straight and grey. Perhaps you will think that too is absurd
+of me, too self-conscious. I would not tell of it to you if I did not
+want you to understand how alive I am to my utter impossibilities, how
+resolved I am to do anything so that I may be able to serve. But never
+mind about silly me; let me tell you how I see the new church.
+
+“I think you ought to have some place near the centre of London; not too
+west, for you might easily become fashionable, not too east because you
+might easily be swallowed up in merely philanthropic work, but somewhere
+between the two. There must be vacant sites still to be got round about
+Kingsway. And there we must set up your tabernacle, a very plain, very
+simple, very beautifully proportioned building in which you can
+give your message. I know a young man, just the very young man to do
+something of the sort, something quite new, quite modern, and yet solemn
+and serious. Lady Ella seemed to think you wanted to live somewhere in
+the north-west of London--but she would tell me very little. I seem to
+see you not there at all, not in anything between west-end and suburb,
+but yourself as central as your mind, in a kind of clergy house that
+will be part of the building. That is how it is in my dream anyhow. All
+that though can be settled afterwards. My imagination and my desire is
+running away with me. It is no time yet for premature plans. Not that
+I am not planning day and night. This letter is simply to offer. I just
+want to offer. Here I am and all my worldly goods. Take me, I pray you.
+And not only pray you. Take me, I demand of you, in the name of God our
+king. I have a right to be used. And you have no right to refuse me. You
+have to go on with your message, and it is your duty to take me--just as
+you are obliged to step on any steppingstone that lies on your way to
+do God service.... And so I am waiting. I shall be waiting--on thorns.
+I know you will take your time and think. But do not take too much time.
+Think of me waiting.
+
+“Your servant, your most humble helper in God (your God),
+
+“AGATHA SUNDERBUND.”
+
+
+And then scrawled along the margin of the last sheet:
+
+
+“If, when you know--a telegram. Even if you cannot say so much as
+'Agreed,' still such a word as 'Favourable.' I just hang over the Void
+until I hear.
+
+“AGATHA S.”
+
+
+A letter demanding enormous deliberation. She argued closely in spite of
+her italics. It had never dawned upon the bishop before how light is
+the servitude of the disciple in comparison with the servitude of the
+master. In many ways this proposal repelled and troubled him, in many
+ways it attracted him. And the argument of his clear obligation to
+accept her co-operation gripped him; it was a good argument.
+
+And besides it worked in very conveniently with certain other
+difficulties that perplexed him.
+
+(4)
+
+
+The bishop became aware that Eleanor was returning to him across the
+sands. She had made an end to her paddling, she had put on her shoes and
+stockings and become once more the grave and responsible young woman
+who had been taking care of him since his flight from Princhester. He
+replaced the two letters in his pocket, and sat ready to smile as she
+drew near; he admired her open brow, the toss of her hair, and the poise
+of her head upon her neck. It was good to note that her hard reading at
+Cambridge hadn't bent her shoulders in the least....
+
+“Well, old Dad!” she said as she drew near. “You've got back a colour.”
+
+“I've got back everything. It's time I returned to Princhester.”
+
+“Not in this weather. Not for a day or so.” She flung herself at his
+feet. “Consider your overworked little daughter. Oh,how good this is!”
+
+“No,” said the bishop in a grave tone that made her look up into his
+face. “I must go hack.”
+
+He met her clear gaze. “What do you think of all this business,
+Eleanor?” he asked abruptly. “Do you think I had a sort of fit in the
+cathedral?”
+
+He winced as he asked the question.
+
+“Daddy,” she said, after a little pause; “the things you said and did
+that afternoon were the noblest you ever did in your life. I wish I had
+been there. It must have been splendid to be there. I've not told you
+before--I've been dying to.... I'd promised not to say a word--not to
+remind you. I promised the doctor. But now you ask me, now you are well
+again, I can tell you. Kitty Kingdom has told me all about it, how it
+felt. It was like light and order coming into a hopeless dark muddle.
+What you said was like what we have all been trying to think--I mean all
+of us young people. Suddenly it was all clear.”
+
+She stopped short. She was breathless with the excitement of her
+confession.
+
+Her father too remained silent for a little while. He was reminded of
+his weakness; he was, he perceived, still a little hysterical. He felt
+that he might weep at her youthful enthusiasm if he did not restrain
+himself.
+
+“I'm glad,” he said, and patted her shoulder. “I'm glad, Norah.”
+
+She looked away from him out across the lank brown sands and water pools
+to the sea. “It was what we have all been feeling our way towards, the
+absolute simplification of religion, the absolute simplification of
+politics and social duty; just God, just God the King.”
+
+“But should I have said that--in the cathedral?”
+
+She felt no scruples. “You had to,” she said.
+
+“But now think what it means,” he said. “I must leave the church.”
+
+“As a man strips off his coat for a fight.”
+
+“That doesn't dismay you?”
+
+She shook her head, and smiled confidently to sea and sky.
+
+“I'm glad if you're with me,” he said. “Sometimes--I think--I'm not a
+very self-reliant man.”
+
+“You'll have all the world with you,” she was convinced, “in a little
+time.”
+
+“Perhaps rather a longer time than you think, Norah. In the meantime--”
+
+She turned to him once more.
+
+“In the meantime there are a great many things to consider. Young
+people, they say, never think of the transport that is needed to win a
+battle. I have it in my mind that I should leave the church. But I can't
+just walk out into the marketplace and begin preaching there. I see the
+family furniture being carried out of the palace and put into vans. It
+has to go somewhere....”
+
+“I suppose you will go to London.”
+
+“Possibly. In fact certainly. I have a plan. Or at least an
+opportunity.... But that isn't what I have most in mind. These things
+are not done without emotion and a considerable strain upon one's
+personal relationships. I do not think this--I do not think your mother
+sees things as we do.”
+
+“She will,” said young enthusiasm, “when she understands.”
+
+“I wish she did. But I have been unlucky in the circumstances of
+my explanations to her. And of course you understand all this means
+risks--poverty perhaps--going without things--travel, opportunity, nice
+possessions--for all of us. A loss of position too. All this sort of
+thing,” he stuck out a gaitered calf and smiled, “will have to go.
+People, some of them, may be disasagreeable to us....”
+
+“After all, Daddy,” she said, smiling, “it isn't so bad as the cross and
+the lions and burning pitch. And you have the Truth.”
+
+“You do believe--?” He left his sentence unfinished.
+
+She nodded, her face aglow. “We know you have the Truth.”
+
+“Of course in my own mind now it is very clear. I had a kind of
+illumination....” He would have tried to tell her of his vision, and
+he was too shy. “It came to me suddenly that the whole world was in
+confusion because men followed after a thousand different immediate
+aims, when really it was quite easy, if only one could be simple it was
+quite easy, to show that nearly all men could only be fully satisfied
+and made happy in themselves by one single aim, which was also the aim
+that would make the whole world one great order, and that aim was to
+make God King of one's heart and the whole world. I saw that all this
+world, except for a few base monstrous spirits, was suffering hideous
+things because of this war, and before the war it was full of folly,
+waste, social injustice and suspicion for the same reason, because it
+had not realized the kingship of God. And that is so simple; the essence
+of God is simplicity. The sin of this war lies with men like myself, men
+who set up to tell people about God, more than it lies with any other
+class--”
+
+“Kings?” she interjected. “Diplomatists? Finance?”
+
+“Yes. Those men could only work mischief in the world because the
+priests and teachers let them. All things human lie at last at the
+door of the priest and teacher. Who differentiate, who qualify and
+complicate, who make mean unnecessary elaborations, and so divide
+mankind. If it were not for the weakness and wickedness of the priests,
+every one would know and understand God. Every one who was modest enough
+not to set up for particular knowledge. Men disputed whether God is
+Finite or Infinite, whether he has a triple or a single aspect. How
+should they know? All we need to know is the face he turns to us. They
+impose their horrible creeds and distinctions. None of those things
+matter. Call him Christ the God or call him simply God, Allah, Heaven;
+it does not matter. He comes to us, we know, like a Helper and Friend;
+that is all we want to know. You may speculate further if you like, but
+it is not religion. They dispute whether he can set aside nature. But
+that is superstition. He is either master of nature and he knows that it
+is good, or he is part of nature and must obey. That is an argument for
+hair-splitting metaphysicians. Either answer means the same for us. It
+does not matter which way we come to believe that he does not idly set
+the course of things aside. Obviously he does not set the course of
+things aside. What he does do for certain is to give us courage and save
+us from our selfishness and the bitter hell it makes for us. And every
+one knows too what sort of things we want, and for what end we want
+to escape from ourselves. We want to do right. And right, if you think
+clearly, is just truth within and service without, the service of God's
+kingdom, which is mankind, the service of human needs and the increase
+of human power and experience. It is all perfectly plain, it is all
+quite easy for any one to understand, who isn't misled and chattered at
+and threatened and poisoned by evil priests and teachers.”
+
+“And you are going to preach that, Daddy?”
+
+“If I can. When I am free--you know I have still to resign and give
+up--I shall make that my message.”
+
+“And so God comes.”
+
+“God comes as men perceive him in his simplicity.... Let men but see God
+simply, and forthwith God and his kingdom possess the world.”
+
+She looked out to sea in silence for awhile.
+
+Then she turned to her father. “And you think that His Kingdom will
+come--perhaps in quite a little time--perhaps in our lifetimes? And
+that all these ridiculous or wicked little kings and emperors, and
+these political parties, and these policies and conspiracies, and
+this nationalist nonsense and all the patriotism and rowdyism, all the
+private profit-seeking and every baseness in life, all the things that
+it is so horrible and disgusting to be young among and powerless among,
+you think they will fade before him?”
+
+The bishop pulled his faith together.
+
+“They will fade before him--but whether it will take a lifetime or a
+hundred lifetimes or a thousand lifetimes, my Norah--”
+
+He smiled and left his sentence unfinished, and she smiled back at him
+to show she understood.
+
+And then he confessed further, because he did not want to seem merely
+sentimentally hopeful.
+
+“When I was in the cathedral, Norah--and just before that service, it
+seemed to me--it was very real.... It seemed that perhaps the Kingdom of
+God is nearer than we suppose, that it needs but the faith and courage
+of a few, and it may be that we may even live to see the dawning of his
+kingdom, even--who knows?--the sunrise. I am so full of faith and hope
+that I fear to be hopeful with you. But whether it is near or far--”
+
+“We work for it,” said Eleanor.
+
+Eleanor thought, eyes downcast for a little while, and then looked up.
+
+“It is so wonderful to talk to you like this, Daddy. In the old days, I
+didn't dream--Before I went to Newnham. I misjudged you. I thought Never
+mind what I thought. It was silly. But now I am so proud of you. And so
+happy to be back with you, Daddy, and find that your religion is after
+all just the same religion that I have been wanting.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE NINTH - THE THIRD VISION
+
+(1)
+
+
+ONE afternoon in October, four months and more after that previous
+conversation, the card of Mr. Edward Scrope was brought up to Dr.
+Brighton-Pomfrey. The name awakened no memories. The doctor descended to
+discover a man so obviously in unaccustomed plain clothes that he had a
+momentary disagreeable idea that he was facing a detective. Then he saw
+that this secular disguise draped the familiar form of his old friend,
+the former Bishop of Princhester. Scrope was pale and a little untidy;
+he had already acquired something of the peculiar, slightly faded
+quality one finds in a don who has gone to Hampstead and fallen amongst
+advanced thinkers and got mixed up with the Fabian Society. His anxious
+eyes and faintly propitiatory manner suggested an impending appeal.
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey had the savoir-faire of a successful consultant; he
+prided himself on being all things to all men; but just for an instant
+he was at a loss what sort of thing he had to be here. Then he adopted
+the genial, kindly, but by no means lavishly generous tone advisable
+in the case of a man who has suffered considerable social deterioration
+without being very seriously to blame.
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was a little round-faced man with defective
+eyesight and an unsuitable nose for the glasses he wore, and he
+flaunted--God knows why--enormous side-whiskers.
+
+“Well,” he said, balancing the glasses skilfully by throwing back his
+head, “and how are you? And what can I do for you? There's no external
+evidence of trouble. You're looking lean and a little pale, but
+thoroughly fit.”
+
+“Yes,” said the late bishop, “I'm fairly fit--”
+
+“Only--?” said the doctor, smiling his teeth, with something of the
+manner of an old bathing woman who tells a child to jump.
+
+“Well, I'm run down and--worried.”
+
+“We'd better sit down,” said the great doctor professionally, and looked
+hard at him. Then he pulled at the arm of a chair.
+
+The ex-bishop sat down, and the doctor placed himself between his
+patient and the light.
+
+“This business of resigning my bishopric and so forth has involved very
+considerable strains,” Scrope began. “That I think is the essence of the
+trouble. One cuts so many associations.... I did not realize how
+much feeling there would be.... Difficulties too of readjusting one's
+position.”
+
+“Zactly. Zactly. Zactly,” said the doctor, snapping his face and making
+his glasses vibrate. “Run down. Want a tonic or a change?”
+
+“Yes. In fact--I want a particular tonic.”
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey made his eyes and mouth round and interrogative.
+
+“While you were away last spring--”
+
+“Had to go,” said the doctor, “unavoidable. Gas gangrene. Certain
+enquiries. These young investigators all very well in their way. But we
+older reputations--Experience. Maturity of judgment. Can't do without
+us. Yes?”
+
+“Well, I came here last spring and saw, an assistant I suppose he was,
+or a supply,--do you call them supplies in your profession?--named, I
+think--Let me see--D--?”
+
+“Dale!”
+
+The doctor as he uttered this word set his face to the unaccustomed
+exercise of expressing malignity. His round blue eyes sought to blaze,
+small cherubic muscles exerted themselves to pucker his brows. His
+colour became a violent pink. “Lunatic!” he said. “Dangerous Lunatic! He
+didn't do anything--anything bad in your case, did he?”
+
+He was evidently highly charged with grievance in this matter. “That man
+was sent to me from Cambridge with the highest testimonials. The
+very highest. I had to go at twenty-four hours' notice. Enquiry--gas
+gangrene. There was nothing for it but to leave things in his hands.”
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey disavowed responsibility with an open,
+stumpy-fingered hand.
+
+“He did me no particular harm,” said Scrope.
+
+“You are the first he spared,” said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.
+
+“Did he--? Was he unskilful?”
+
+“Unskilful is hardly the word.”
+
+“Were his methods peculiar?”
+
+The little doctor sprang to his feet and began to pace about the room.
+“Peculiar!” he said. “It was abominable that they should send him to me.
+Abominable!”
+
+He turned, with all the round knobs that constituted his face, aglow.
+His side-whiskers waved apart like wings about to flap. He protruded his
+face towards his seated patient. “I am glad that he has been killed,” he
+said. “Glad! There!”
+
+His glasses fell off--shocked beyond measure. He did not heed them. They
+swung about in front of him as if they sought to escape while he poured
+out his feelings.
+
+“Fool!” he spluttered with demonstrative gestures. “Dangerous fool! His
+one idea--to upset everybody. Drugs, Sir! The most terrible drugs! I
+come back. Find ladies. High social position. Morphine-maniacs. Others.
+Reckless use of the most dangerous expedients.... Cocaine not in it.
+Stimulants--violent stimulants. In the highest quarters. Terrible.
+Exalted persons. Royalty! Anxious to be given war work and become
+anonymous.... Horrible! He's been a terrible influence. One idea--to
+disturb soul and body. Minds unhinged. Personal relations deranged.
+Shattered the practice of years. The harm he has done! The harm!”
+
+He looked as though he was trying to burst--as a final expression of
+wrath. He failed. His hands felt trembling to recover his pince-nez.
+Then from his tail pocket he produced a large silk handkerchief and
+wiped the glasses. Replaced them. Wriggled his head in his collar,
+running his fingers round his neck. Patted his tie.
+
+“Excuse this outbreak!” he said. “But Dr. Dale has inflicted injuries!”
+
+Scrope got up, walked slowly to the window, clasping his hands behind
+his back, and turned. His manner still retained much of his episcopal
+dignity. “I am sorry. But still you can no doubt tell from your books
+what it was he gave me. It was a tonic that had a very great effect on
+me. And I need it badly now.”
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was quietly malignant. “He kept no diary at all,”
+ he said. “No diary at all.”
+
+“But
+
+“If he did,” said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey, holding up a flat hand and
+wagging it from side to side, “I wouldn't follow his treatment.”
+ He intensified with the hand going faster. “I wouldn't follow his
+treatment. Not under any circumstances.”
+
+“Naturally,” said Scrope, “if the results are what you say. But in
+my case it wasn't a treatment. I was sleepless, confused in my mind,
+wretched and demoralized; I came here, and he just produced the
+stuff--It clears the head, it clears the mind. One seems to get away
+from the cloud of things, to get through to essentials and fundamentals.
+It straightened me out.... You must know such a stuff. Just now,
+confronted with all sorts of problems arising out of my resignation,
+I want that tonic effect again. I must have it. I have matters to
+decide--and I can't decide. I find myself uncertain, changeable from
+hour to hour. I don't ask you to take up anything of this man Dale's.
+This is a new occasion. But I want that drug.”
+
+At the beginning of this speech Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's hands had fallen
+to his hips. As Scrope went on the doctor's pose had stiffened. His head
+had gone a little on one side; he had begun to play with his glasses.
+At the end he gave vent to one or two short coughs, and then pointed his
+words with his glasses held out.
+
+“Tell me,” he said, “tell me.” (Cough.) “Had this drug that cleared your
+head--anything to do with your resignation?”
+
+And he put on his glasses disconcertingly, and threw his head back to
+watch the reply.
+
+“It did help to clear up the situation.”
+
+“Exactly,” said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey in a tone that defined his own
+position with remorseless clearness. “Exactly.” And he held up a flat,
+arresting hand. .
+
+“My dear Sir,” he said. “How can you expect me to help you to a drug so
+disastrous?--even if I could tell you what it is.”
+
+“But it was not disastrous to me,” said Scrope.
+
+“Your extraordinary resignation--your still more extraordinary way of
+proclaiming it!”
+
+“I don't think those were disasters.”
+
+“But my dear Sir!”
+
+“You don't want to discuss theology with me, I know. So let me tell you
+simply that from my point of view the illumination that came to me--this
+drug of Dr. Dale's helping--has been the great release of my life. It
+crystallized my mind. It swept aside the confusing commonplace things
+about me. Just for a time I saw truth clearly.... I want to do so
+again.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“There is a crisis in my affairs--never mind what. But I cannot see my
+way clear.”
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was meditating now with his eyes on his carpet
+and the corners of his mouth tucked in. He was swinging his glasses
+pendulum-wise. “Tell me,” he said, looking sideways at Scrope, “what
+were the effects of this drug? It may have been anything. How did it
+give you this--this vision of the truth--that led to your resignation?”
+
+Scrope felt a sudden shyness. But he wanted Dale's drug again so badly
+that he obliged himself to describe his previous experiences to the best
+of his ability.
+
+“It was,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, “a golden, transparent
+liquid. Very golden, like a warm-tinted Chablis. When water was added
+it became streaked and opalescent, with a kind of living quiver in it. I
+held it up to the light.”
+
+“Yes? And when you took it?”
+
+“I felt suddenly clearer. My mind--I had a kind of exaltation and
+assurance.”
+
+“Your mind,” Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey assisted, “began to go twenty-nine to
+the dozen.”
+
+“It felt stronger and clearer,” said Scrope, sticking to his quest.
+
+“And did things look as usual?” asked the doctor, protruding his knobby
+little face like a clenched fist.
+
+“No,” said Scrope and regarded him. How much was it possible to tell a
+man of this type?
+
+“They differed?” said the doctor, relaxing.
+
+“Yes.... Well, to be plain.... I had an immediate sense of God. I
+saw the world--as if it were a transparent curtain, and then God
+became--evident.... Is it possible for that to determine the drug?”
+
+“God became--evident,” the doctor said with some distaste, and shook his
+head slowly. Then in a sudden sharp cross-examining tone: “You mean you
+had a vision? Actually saw 'um?”
+
+“It was in the form of a vision.” Scrope was now mentally very
+uncomfortable indeed.
+
+The doctor's lips repeated these words noiselessly, with an effect of
+contempt. “He must have given you something--It's a little like morphia.
+But golden--opalescent? And it was this vision made you astonish us all
+with your resignation?”
+
+“That was part of a larger process,” said Scrope patiently. “I had been
+drifting into a complete repudiation of the Anglican positions long
+before that. All that this drug did was to make clear what was already
+in my mind. And give it value. Act as a developer.”
+
+The doctor suddenly gave way to a botryoidal hilarity. “To think that
+one should be consulted about visions of God--in Mount Street!” he said.
+“And you know, you know you half want to believe that vision was real.
+You know you do.”
+
+So far Scrope had been resisting his realization of failure. Now he
+gave way to an exasperation that made him reckless of Brighton-Pomfrey's
+opinion. “I do think,” he said, “that that drug did in some way make God
+real to me. I think I saw God.”
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey shook his head in a way that made Scrope want to
+hit him.
+
+“I think I saw God,” he repeated more firmly. “I had a sudden
+realization of how great he was and how great life was, and how timid
+and mean and sordid were all our genteel, professional lives. I was
+seized upon, for a time I was altogether possessed by a passion to serve
+him fitly and recklessly, to make an end to compromises with comfort and
+self-love and secondary things. And I want to hold to that. I want to
+get back to that. I am given to lassitudes. I relax. I am by temperament
+an easy-going man. I want to buck myself up, I want to get on with my
+larger purposes, and I find myself tired, muddled, entangled.... The
+drug was a good thing. For me it was a good thing. I want its help
+again.”
+
+“I know no more than you do what it was.”
+
+“Are there no other drugs that you do know, that have a kindred effect?
+If for example I tried morphia in some form?”
+
+“You'd get visions. They wouldn't be divine visions. If you took small
+quantities very discreetly you might get a temporary quickening. But
+the swift result of all repeated drug-taking is, I can assure you,
+moral decay--rapid moral decay. To touch drugs habitually is to become
+hopelessly unpunctual, untruthful, callously selfish and insincere. I am
+talking mere textbook, mere everyday common-places, to you when I tell
+you that.”
+
+“I had an idea. I had a hope....”
+
+“You've a stiff enough fight before you,” said the doctor, “without such
+a handicap as that.”
+
+“You won't help me?”
+
+The doctor walked up and down his hearthrug, and then delivered himself
+with an extended hand and waggling fingers.
+
+“I wouldn't if I could. For your good I wouldn't. And even if I would
+I couldn't, for I don't know the drug. One of his infernal brews,
+no doubt. Something--accidental. It's lost--for good--for your good,
+anyhow....”
+
+(2)
+
+
+Scrope halted outside the stucco portals of the doctor's house. He
+hesitated whether he should turn to the east or the west.
+
+“That door closes,” he said. “There's no getting back that way.”...
+
+He stood for a time on the kerb. He turned at last towards Park Lane and
+Hyde Park. He walked along thoughtfully, inattentively steering a course
+for his new home in Pembury Road, Notting Hill.
+
+(3)
+
+
+At the outset of this new phase in Scrope's life that had followed the
+crisis of the confirmation service, everything had seemed very clear
+before him. He believed firmly that he had been shown God, that he had
+himself stood in the presence of God, and that there had been a plain
+call to him to proclaim God to the world. He had realized God, and it
+was the task of every one who had realized God to help all mankind to
+the same realization. The proposal of Lady Sunderbund had fallen in with
+that idea. He had been steeling himself to a prospect of struggle and
+dire poverty, but her prompt loyalty had come as an immense relief to
+his anxiety for his wife and family. When he had talked to Eleanor
+upon the beach at Hunstanton it had seemed to him that his course was
+manifest, perhaps a little severe but by no means impossible. They had
+sat together in the sunshine, exalted by a sense of fine adventure and
+confident of success, they had looked out upon the future, upon
+the great near future in which the idea of God was to inspire and
+reconstruct the world.
+
+It was only very slowly that this pristine clearness became clouded and
+confused. It had not been so easy as Eleanor had supposed to win over
+the sympathy of Lady Ella with his resignation. Indeed it had not been
+won over. She had become a stern and chilling companion, mute now upon
+the issue of his resignation, but manifestly resentful. He was secretly
+disappointed and disconcerted by her tone. And the same hesitation of
+the mind, instinctive rather than reasoned, that had prevented a frank
+explanation of his earlier doubts to her, now restrained him from
+telling her naturally and at once of the part that Lady Sunderbund was
+to play in his future ministry. In his own mind he felt assured about
+that part, but in order to excuse his delay in being frank with his
+wife, he told himself that he was not as yet definitely committed to
+Lady Sunderbund's project. And in accordance with that idea he set
+up housekeeping in London upon a scale that implied a very complete
+cessation of income. “As yet,” he told Lady Ella, “we do not know where
+we stand. For a time we must not so much house ourselves as camp. We
+must take some quite small and modest house in some less expensive
+district. If possible I would like to take it for a year, until we know
+better how things are with us.”
+
+He reviewed a choice of London districts.
+
+Lady Ella said her bitterest thing. “Does it matter where we hide our
+heads?”
+
+That wrung him to: “We are not hiding our heads.”
+
+She repented at once. “I am sorry, Ted,” she said. “It slipped from
+me.”...
+
+He called it camping, but the house they had found in Pembury Road,
+Notting Hill, was more darkened and less airy than any camp. Neither he
+nor his wife had ever had any experience of middle-class house-hunting
+or middle-class housekeeping before, and they spent three of the most
+desolating days of their lives in looking for this cheap and modest
+shelter for their household possessions. Hitherto life had moved them
+from one established and comfortable home to another; their worst
+affliction had been the modern decorations of the Palace at Princhester,
+and it was altogether a revelation to them to visit house after house,
+ill-lit, ill-planned, with dingy paint and peeling wallpaper, kitchens
+for the most part underground, and either without bathrooms or with
+built-out bathrooms that were manifestly grudging afterthoughts, such
+as harbour the respectable middle classes of London. The house agents
+perceived intimations of helplessness in their manner, adopted a
+“rushing” method with them strange to people who had hitherto lived in
+a glowing halo of episcopal dignity. “Take it or leave it,” was the note
+of those gentlemen; “there are always people ready for houses.” The
+line that property in land and houses takes in England, the ex-bishop
+realized, is always to hold up and look scornful. The position of the
+land-owning, house-owning class in a crowded country like England is
+ultra-regal. It is under no obligation to be of use, and people are
+obliged to get down to the land somewhere. They cannot conduct business
+and rear families in the air. England's necessity is the landlord's
+opportunity....
+
+Scrope began to generalize about this, and develop a new and sincerer
+streak of socialism in his ideas. “The church has been very remiss,”
+ he said, as he and Lady Ella stared at the basement “breakfast room” of
+their twenty-seventh dismal possibility. “It should have insisted far
+more than it has done upon the landlord's responsibility. No one should
+tolerate the offer of such a house as this--at such a rent--to decent
+people. It is unrighteous.”
+
+At the house agent's he asked in a cold, intelligent ruling-class voice,
+the name of the offending landlord.
+
+“It's all the property of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners that side of
+the railway,” said the agent, picking his teeth with a pin. “Lazy
+lot. Dreadfully hard to get 'em to do anything. Own some of the worst
+properties in London.”
+
+Lady Ella saw things differently again. “If you had stayed in the
+church,” she said afterwards, “you might have helped to alter such
+things as that.”
+
+At the time he had no answer.
+
+“But,” he said presently as they went back in the tube to their modest
+Bloomsbury hotel, “if I had stayed in the church I should never have
+realized things like that.”
+
+(4)
+
+
+But it does no justice to Lady Ella to record these two unavoidable
+expressions of regret without telling also of the rallying courage with
+which she presently took over the task of resettling herself and her
+stricken family. Her husband's change of opinion had fallen upon her out
+of a clear sky, without any premonition, in one tremendous day. In one
+day there had come clamouring upon her, with an effect of revelation
+after revelation, the ideas of drugs, of heresy and blasphemy, of an
+alien feminine influence, of the entire moral and material breakdown of
+the man who had been the centre of her life. Never was the whole world
+of a woman so swiftly and comprehensively smashed. All the previous
+troubles of her life seemed infinitesimal in comparison with any single
+item in this dismaying debacle. She tried to consolidate it in the idea
+that he was ill, “disordered.” She assured herself that he would
+return from Hunstanton restored to health and orthodoxy, with all
+his threatenings of a resignation recalled; the man she had loved and
+trusted to succeed in the world and to do right always according to her
+ideas. It was only with extreme reluctance that she faced the fact that
+with the fumes of the drug dispelled and all signs of nervous exhaustion
+gone, he still pressed quietly but resolutely toward a severance from
+the church. She tried to argue with him and she found she could not
+argue. The church was a crystal sphere in which her life was wholly
+contained, her mind could not go outside it even to consider a
+dissentient proposition.
+
+While he was at Hunstanton, every day she had prayed for an hour, some
+days she had prayed for several hours, in the cathedral, kneeling upon
+a harsh hassock that hurt her knees. Even in her prayers she could not
+argue nor vary. She prayed over and over again many hundreds of times:
+“Bring him back, dear Lord. Bring him back again.”
+
+In the past he had always been a very kind and friendly mate to her, but
+sometimes he had been irritable about small things, especially during
+his seasons of insomnia; now he came back changed, a much graver man,
+rather older in his manner, carefully attentive to her, kinder and more
+watchful, at times astonishingly apologetic, but rigidly set upon his
+purpose of leaving the church. “I know you do not think with me in
+this,” he said. “I have to pray you to be patient with me. I have
+struggled with my conscience.... For a time it means hardship, I know.
+Poverty. But if you will trust me I think I shall be able to pull
+through. There are ways of doing my work. Perhaps we shall not have to
+undergo this cramping in this house for very long....”
+
+“It is not the poverty I fear,” said Lady Ella.
+
+And she did face the worldly situation, if a little sadly, at any
+rate with the courage of practical energy. It was she who stood in
+one ungainly house after another and schemed how to make discomforts
+tolerable, while Scrope raged unhelpfully at landlordism and the
+responsibility of the church for economic disorder. It was she who at
+last took decisions into her hands when he was too jaded to do anything
+but generalize weakly, and settled upon the house in Pembury Road which
+became their London home. She got him to visit Hunstanton again for half
+a week while she and Miriam, who was the practical genius of the family,
+moved in and made the new home presentable. At the best it was barely
+presentable. There were many plain hardships. The girls had to share one
+of the chief bedrooms in common instead of their jolly little individual
+dens at Princhester.... One little room was all that could be squeezed
+out as a study for “father”; it was not really a separate room, it was
+merely cut off by closed folding doors from the dining-room, folding
+doors that slowly transmitted the dinner flavours to a sensitive worker,
+and its window looked out upon a blackened and uneventful yard and the
+skylights of a populous, conversational, and high-spirited millinery
+establishment that had been built over the corresponding garden of the
+house in Restharrow Street. Lady Ella had this room lined with open
+shelves, and Clementina (in the absence of Eleanor at Newuham)
+arranged the pick of her father's books. It is to be noted as a fact of
+psychological interest that this cramped, ill-lit little room distressed
+Lady Ella more than any other of the discomforts of their new quarters.
+The bishop's writing-desk filled a whole side of it. Parsimony ruled her
+mind, but she could not resist the impulse to get him at least a seemly
+reading-lamp.
+
+He came back from Hunstanton full of ideas for work in London. He was,
+he thought, going to “write something” about his views. He was very
+grateful and much surprised at what she had done to that forbidding
+house, and full of hints and intimations that it would not be long
+before they moved to something roomier. She was disposed to seek some
+sort of salaried employment for Clementina and Miriam at least, but he
+would not hear of that. “They must go on and get educated,” he said, “if
+I have to give up smoking to do it. Perhaps I may manage even without
+that.” Eleanor, it seemed, had a good prospect of a scholarship at the
+London School of Economics that would practically keep her. There would
+be no Cambridge for Clementina, but London University might still be
+possible with a little pinching, and the move to London had really
+improved the prospects of a good musical training for Miriam. Phoebe and
+Daphne, Lady Ella believed, might get in on special terms at the Notting
+Hill High School.
+
+Scrope found it difficult to guess at what was going on in the heads
+of his younger daughters. None displayed such sympathy as Eleanor had
+confessed. He had a feeling that his wife had schooled them to say
+nothing about the change in their fortunes to him. But they quarrelled
+a good deal, he could hear, about the use of the one bathroom--there was
+never enough hot water after the second bath. And Miriam did not seem to
+enjoy playing the new upright piano in the drawing-room as much as
+she had done the Princhester grand it replaced. Though she was always
+willing to play that thing he liked; he knew now that it was the Adagio
+of Of. 111; whenever he asked for it.
+
+London servants, Lady Ella found, were now much more difficult to get
+than they had been in the Holy Innocents' days in St. John's Wood. And
+more difficult to manage when they were got. The households of the more
+prosperous clergy are much sought after by domestics of a serious and
+excellent type; an unfrocked clergyman's household is by no means
+so attractive. The first comers were young women of unfortunate
+dispositions; the first cook was reluctant and insolent, she went before
+her month was up; the second careless; she made burnt potatoes and
+cindered chops, underboiled and overboiled eggs; a “dropped” look about
+everything, harsh coffee and bitter tea seemed to be a natural aspect of
+the state of being no longer a bishop. He would often after a struggle
+with his nerves in the bedroom come humming cheerfully to breakfast, to
+find that Phoebe, who was a delicate eater, had pushed her plate away
+scarcely touched, while Lady Ella sat at the end of the table in a state
+of dangerous calm, framing comments for delivering downstairs that would
+be sure to sting and yet leave no opening for repartee, and trying at
+the same time to believe that a third cook, if the chances were risked
+again, would certainly be “all right.”
+
+The drawing-room was papered with a morose wallpaper that the landlord,
+in view of the fact that Scrope in his optimism would only take the
+house on a yearly agreement, had refused to replace; it was a design of
+very dark green leaves and grey gothic arches; and the apartment was lit
+by a chandelier, which spilt a pool of light in the centre of the room
+and splashed useless weak patches elsewhere. Lady Ella had to interfere
+to prevent the monopolization of this centre by Phoebe and Daphne for
+their home work. This light trouble was difficult to arrange; the plain
+truth was that there was not enough illumination to go round. In the
+Princhester drawing-room there had been a number of obliging little
+electric pushes. The size of the dining-room, now that the study was
+cut off from it, forbade hospitality. As it was, with only the family at
+home, the housemaid made it a grievance that she could scarcely squeeze
+by on the sideboard side to wait.
+
+The house vibrated to the trains in the adjacent underground railway.
+There was a lady next door but one who was very pluckily training a
+contralto voice that most people would have gladly thrown away. At the
+end of Restharrow Street was a garage, and a yard where chauffeurs were
+accustomed to “tune up” their engines. All these facts were persistently
+audible to any one sitting down in the little back study to think out
+this project of “writing something,” about a change in the government of
+the whole world. Petty inconveniences no doubt all these inconveniences
+were, but they distressed a rather oversensitive mind which was also
+acutely aware that even upon this scale living would cost certainly two
+hundred and fifty pounds if not more in excess of the little private
+income available.
+
+
+(5)
+
+
+These domestic details, irrelevant as they may seem in a spiritual
+history, need to be given because they added an intimate keenness
+to Scrope's readiness for this private chapel enterprise that he was
+discussing with Lady Sunderbund. Along that line and along that line
+alone, he saw the way of escape from the great sea of London dinginess
+that threatened to submerge his family. And it was also, he felt, the
+line of his duty; it was his “call.”
+
+At least that was how he felt at first. And then matters began to grow
+complicated again.
+
+Things had gone far between himself and Lady Sunderbund since that
+letter he had read upon the beach at Old Hunstanton. The blinds of the
+house with the very very blue door in Princhester had been drawn
+from the day when the first vanload of the renegade bishop's private
+possessions had departed from the palace. The lady had returned to
+the brightly decorated flat overlooking Hyde Park. He had seen her
+repeatedly since then, and always with a fairly clear understanding that
+she was to provide the chapel and pulpit in which he was to proclaim to
+London the gospel of the Simplicity and Universality of God. He was to
+be the prophet of a reconsidered faith, calling the whole world from
+creeds and sects, from egotisms and vain loyalties, from prejudices of
+race and custom, to the worship and service of the Divine King of all
+mankind. That in fact had been the ruling resolve in his mind, the
+resolve determining his relations not only with Lady Sunderbund but with
+Lady Ella and his family, his friends, enemies and associates. He had
+set out upon this course unchecked by any doubt, and overriding the
+manifest disapproval of his wife and his younger daughters. Lady
+Sunderbund's enthusiasm had been enormous and sustaining....
+
+Almost imperceptibly that resolve had weakened. Imperceptibly at first.
+Then the decline had been perceived as one sometimes perceives a thing
+in the background out of the corner of one's eye.
+
+In all his early anticipations of the chapel enterprise, he had imagined
+himself in the likeness of a small but eloquent figure standing in a
+large exposed place and calling this lost misled world back to God. Lady
+Sunderbund, he assumed, was to provide the large exposed place (which
+was dimly paved with pews) and guarantee that little matter which was
+to relieve him of sordid anxieties for his family, the stipend. He had
+agreed in an inattentive way that this was to be eight hundred a year,
+with a certain proportion of the subscriptions. “At first, I shall be
+the chief subscriber,” she said. “Before the rush comes.” He had been
+so content to take all this for granted and think no more about it--more
+particularly to think no more about it--that for a time he entirely
+disregarded the intense decorative activities into which Lady Sunderbund
+incontinently plunged. Had he been inclined to remark them he certainly
+might have done so, even though a considerable proportion was being
+thoughtfully veiled for a time from his eyes.
+
+For example, there was the young architect with the wonderful tie whom
+he met once or twice at lunch in the Hyde Park flat. This young man
+pulled the conversation again and again, Lady Sunderbund aiding and
+abetting, in the direction of the “ideal church.” It was his ambition,
+he said, someday, to build an ideal church, “divorced from tradition.”
+
+Scrope had been drawn at last into a dissertation. He said that hitherto
+all temples and places of worship had been conditioned by orientation
+due to the seasonal aspects of religion, they pointed to the west or--as
+in the case of the Egyptian temples--to some particular star, and by
+sacramentalism, which centred everything on a highly lit sacrificial
+altar. It was almost impossible to think of a church built upon other
+lines than that. The architect would be so free that--
+
+“Absolutely free,” interrupted the young architect. “He might, for
+example, build a temple like a star.”
+
+“Or like some wondyful casket,” said Lady Sunderbund....
+
+And also there was a musician with fuzzy hair and an impulsive way of
+taking the salted almonds, who wanted to know about religious music.
+
+Scrope hazarded the idea that a chanting people was a religious people.
+He said, moreover, that there was a fine religiosity about Moussorgski,
+but that the most beautiful single piece of music in the world
+was Beethoven's sonata, Opus 111,--he was thinking, he said, more
+particularly of the Adagio at the end, molto semplice e cantabile. It
+had a real quality of divinity.
+
+The musician betrayed impatience at the name of Beethoven, and thought,
+with his mouth appreciatively full of salted almonds, that nowadays we
+had got a little beyond that anyhow.
+
+“We shall be superhuman before we get beyond either Purcell or
+Beethoven,” said Scrope.
+
+Nor did he attach sufficient importance to Lady Sunderbund's disposition
+to invite Positivists, members of the Brotherhood Church, leaders among
+the Christian Scientists, old followers of the Rev. Charles Voysey,
+Swedenborgians, Moslem converts, Indian Theosophists, psychic phenomena
+and so forth, to meet him. Nevertheless it began to drift into his mind
+that he was by no means so completely in control of the new departure
+as he had supposed at first. Both he and Lady Sunderbund professed
+universalism; but while his was the universalism of one who would
+simplify to the bare fundamentals of a common faith, hers was the
+universalism of the collector. Religion to him was something that
+illuminated the soul, to her it was something that illuminated
+prayer-books. For a considerable time they followed their divergent
+inclinations without any realization of their divergence. None the less
+a vague doubt and dissatisfaction with the prospect before him arose to
+cloud his confidence.
+
+At first there was little or no doubt of his own faith. He was still
+altogether convinced that he had to confess and proclaim God in his
+life. He was as sure that God was the necessary king and saviour of
+mankind and of a man's life, as he was of the truth of the Binomial
+Theorem. But what began first to fade was the idea that he had been
+specially called to proclaim the True God to all the world. He would
+have the most amiable conference with Lady Sunderbund, and then as he
+walked back to Notting Hill he would suddenly find stuck into his
+mind like a challenge, Heaven knows how: “Another prophet?” Even if
+he succeeded in this mission enterprise, he found himself asking, what
+would he be but just a little West-end Mahomet? He would have founded
+another sect, and we have to make an end to all sects. How is there to
+be an end to sects, if there are still to be chapels--richly decorated
+chapels--and congregations, and salaried specialists in God?
+
+That was a very disconcerting idea. It was particularly active at night.
+He did his best to consider it with a cool detachment, regardless of
+the facts that his private income was just under three hundred pounds a
+year, and that his experiments in cultured journalism made it extremely
+improbable that the most sedulous literary work would do more than
+double this scanty sum. Yet for all that these nasty, ugly, sordid facts
+were entirely disregarded, they did somehow persist in coming in and
+squatting down, shapeless in a black corner of his mind--from which
+their eyes shone out, so to speak--whenever his doubt whether he ought
+to set up as a prophet at all was under consideration.
+
+(6)
+
+
+Then very suddenly on this October afternoon the situation had come to a
+crisis.
+
+He had gone to Lady Sunderbund's flat to see the plans and drawings for
+the new church in which he was to give his message to the world. They
+had brought home to him the complete realization of Lady Sunderbund's
+impossibility. He had attempted upon the spur of the moment an
+explanation of just how much they differed, and he had precipitated a
+storm of extravagantly perplexing emotions....
+
+She kept him waiting for perhaps ten minutes before she brought the
+plans to him. He waited in the little room with the Wyndham Lewis
+picture that opened upon the balcony painted with crazy squares of livid
+pink. On a golden table by the window a number of recently bought books
+were lying, and he went and stood over these, taking them up one after
+another. The first was “The Countess of Huntingdon and Her Circle,”
+ that bearder of lightminded archbishops, that formidable harbourer of
+Wesleyan chaplains. For some minutes he studied the grim portrait of
+this inspired lady standing with one foot ostentatiously on her coronet
+and then turned to the next volume. This was a life of Saint Teresa,
+that energetic organizer of Spanish nunneries. The third dealt with
+Madame Guyon. It was difficult not to feel that Lady Sunderbund was
+reading for a part.
+
+She entered.
+
+She was wearing a long simple dress of spangled white with a very high
+waist; she had a bracelet of green jade, a waistband of green silk,
+and her hair was held by a wreath of artificial laurel, very stiff and
+green. Her arms were full of big rolls of cartridge paper and tracing
+paper. “I'm so pleased,” she said. “It's 'eady at last and I can show
+you.”
+
+She banged the whole armful down upon a vivid little table of inlaid
+black and white wood. He rescued one or two rolls and a sheet of tracing
+paper from the floor.
+
+“It's the Temple,” she panted in a significant whisper. “It's the Temple
+of the One T'ue God!”
+
+She scrabbled among the papers, and held up the elevation of a strange
+square building to his startled eyes. “Iszi't it just pe'fect?” she
+demanded.
+
+He took the drawing from her. It represented a building, manifestly an
+enormous building, consisting largely of two great, deeply fluted towers
+flanking a vast archway approached by a long flight of steps. Between
+the towers appeared a dome. It was as if the Mosque of Saint Sophia had
+produced this offspring in a mesalliance with the cathedral of
+Wells. Its enormity was made manifest by the minuteness of the large
+automobiles that were driving away in the foreground after “setting
+down.” “Here is the plan,” she said, thrusting another sheet upon him
+before he could fully take in the quality of the design. “The g'eat Hall
+is to be pe'fectly 'ound, no aisle, no altar, and in lettas of sapphiah,
+'God is ev'ywhe'.'”
+
+She added with a note of solemnity, “It will hold th'ee thousand people
+sitting down.”
+
+“But--!” said Scrope.
+
+“The'e's a sort of g'andeur,” she said. “It's young Venable's wo'k. It's
+his fl'st g'ate oppo'tunity.”
+
+“But--is this to go on that little site in Aldwych?”
+
+“He says the' isn't 'oom the'!” she explained. “He wants to put it out
+at Golda's G'een.”
+
+“But--if it is to be this little simple chapel we proposed, then wasn't
+our idea to be central?”
+
+“But if the' isn't 'oem!” she said--conclusively. “And isn't this--isn't
+it rather a costly undertaking, rather more costly--”
+
+“That doesn't matta. I'm making heaps and heaps of money. Half my
+p'ope'ty is in shipping and a lot of the 'eat in munitions. I'm 'icher
+than eva. Isn't the' a sort of g'andeur?” she pressed.
+
+He put the elevation down. He took the plan from her hands and seemed to
+study it. But he was really staring blankly at the whole situation.
+
+“Lady Sunderbund,” he said at last, with an effort, “I am afraid all
+this won't do.”
+
+“Won't do!”
+
+“No. It isn't in the spirit of my intention. It isn't in a great
+building of this sort--so--so ornate and imposing, that the simple
+gospel of God's Universal Kingdom can be preached.”
+
+“But oughtn't so gate a message to have as g'ate a pulpit?”
+
+And then as if she would seize him before he could go on to further
+repudiations, she sought hastily among the drawings again.
+
+“But look,” she said. “It has ev'ything! It's not only a p'eaching
+place; it's a headquarters for ev'ything.”
+
+With the rapid movements of an excited child she began to thrust the
+remarkable features and merits of the great project upon him. The
+preaching dome was only the heart of it. There were to be a library,
+“'efecto'ies,” consultation rooms, classrooms, a publication department,
+a big underground printing establishment. “Nowadays,” she said, “ev'y
+gate movement must p'int.” There was to be music, she said, “a gate
+invisible o'gan,” hidden amidst the architectural details, and pouring
+out its sounds into the dome, and then she glanced in passing at
+possible “p'ocessions” round the preaching dome. This preaching dome
+was not a mere shut-in drum for spiritual reverberations, around it ran
+great open corridors, and in these corridors there were to be “chapels.”
+
+“But what for?” he asked, stemming the torrent. “What need is there for
+chapels? There are to be no altars, no masses, no sacraments?”
+
+“No,” she said, “but they are to be chapels for special int'ests; a
+chapel for science, a chapel for healing, a chapel for gov'ment. Places
+for peoples to sit and think about those things--with paintings and
+symbols.”
+
+“I see your intention,” he admitted. “I see your intention.”
+
+“The' is to be a gate da'k blue 'ound chapel for sta's and atoms and the
+myst'ry of matta.” Her voice grew solemn. “All still and deep and high.
+Like a k'ystal in a da'k place. You will go down steps to it. Th'ough
+a da'k 'ounded a'ch ma'ked with mathematical symbols and balances and
+scientific app'atus.... And the ve'y next to it, the ve'y next, is to be
+a little b'ight chapel for bi'ds and flowas!”
+
+“Yes,” he said, “it is all very fine and expressive. It is, I see, a
+symbolical building, a great artistic possibility. But is it the place
+for me? What I have to say is something very simple, that God is the
+king of the whole world, king of the ha'penny newspaper and the omnibus
+and the vulgar everyday things, and that they have to worship him and
+serve him as their leader in every moment of their lives. This isn't
+that. This is the old religions over again. This is taking God apart.
+This is putting him into a fresh casket instead of the old one. And....
+I don't like it.”
+
+“Don't like it,” she cried, and stood apart from him with her chin in
+the air, a tall astonishment and dismay.
+
+“I can't do the work I want to do with this.”
+
+“But--Isn't it you' idea?”
+
+“No. It is not in the least my idea. I want to tell the whole world
+of the one God that can alone unite it and save it--and you make this
+extravagant toy.”
+
+He felt as if he had struck her directly he uttered that last word.
+
+“Toy!” she echoed, taking it in, “you call it a Toy!”
+
+A note in her voice reminded him that there were two people who might
+feel strongly in this affair.
+
+“My dear Lady Sunderbund,” he said with a sudden change of manner, “I
+must needs follow the light of my own mind. I have had a vision of God,
+I have seen him as a great leader towering over the little lives of men,
+demanding the little lives of men, prepared to take them and guide them
+to the salvation of mankind and the conquest of pain and death. I have
+seen him as the God of the human affair, a God of politics, a God of
+such muddy and bloody wars as this war, a God of economics, a God of
+railway junctions and clinics and factories and evening schools, a God
+in fact of men. This God--this God here, that you want to worship, is a
+God of artists and poets--of elegant poets, a God of bric-a-brac, a God
+of choice allusions. Oh, it has its grandeur! I don't want you to think
+that what you are doing may not be altogether fine and right for you to
+do. But it is not what I have to do.... I cannot--indeed I cannot--go on
+with this project--upon these lines.”
+
+He paused, flushed and breathless. Lady Sunderbund had heard him to the
+end. Her bright face was brightly flushed, and there were tears in her
+eyes. It was like her that they should seem tears of the largest, most
+expensive sort, tears of the first water.
+
+“But,” she cried, and her red delicate mouth went awry with dismay and
+disappointment, and her expression was the half incredulous expression
+of a child suddenly and cruelly disappointed: “You won't go on with all
+this?”
+
+“No,” he said. “My dear Lady Sunderbund--”
+
+“Oh! don't Lady Sunderbund me!” she cried with a novel rudeness. “Don't
+you see I've done it all for you?”
+
+He winced and felt boorish. He had never liked and disapproved of Lady
+Sunderbund so much as he did at that moment. And he had no words for
+her.
+
+“How can I stop it all at once like this?”
+
+And still he had no answer.
+
+She pursued her advantage. “What am I to do?” she cried.
+
+She turned upon him passionately. “Look what you've done!” She marked
+her points with finger upheld, and gave odd suggestions in her face of
+an angry coster girl. “Eva' since I met you, I've wo'shipped you. I've
+been 'eady to follow you anywhe'--to do anything. Eva' since that night
+when you sat so calm and dignified, and they baited you and wo'id you.
+When they we' all vain and cleva, and you--you thought only of God
+and 'iligion and didn't mind fo' you'self.... Up to then--I'd been
+living--oh! the emptiest life...”
+
+The tears ran. “Pe'haps I shall live it again....” She dashed her grief
+away with a hand beringed with stones as big as beetles.
+
+“I said to myself, this man knows something I don't know. He's got the
+seeds of ete'nal life su'ely. I made up my mind then and the' I'd follow
+you and back you and do all I could fo' you. I've lived fo' you. Eve'
+since. Lived fo' you. And now when all my little plans are 'ipe, you--!
+Oh!”
+
+She made a quaint little gesture with pink fists upraised, and then
+stood with her hand held up, staring at the plans and drawings that were
+littered over the inlaid table. “I've planned and planned. I said, I
+will build him a temple. I will be his temple se'vant.... Just a me'
+se'vant....”
+
+She could not go on.
+
+“But it is just these temples that have confused mankind,” he said.
+
+“Not my temple,” she said presently, now openly weeping over the gay
+rejected drawings. “You could have explained....”
+
+“Oh!” she said petulantly, and thrust them away from her so that they
+went sliding one after the other on to the floor. For some long-drawn
+moments there was no sound in the room but the slowly accelerated slide
+and flop of one sheet of cartridge paper after another.
+
+“We could have been so happy,” she wailed, “se'ving oua God.”
+
+And then this disconcerting lady did a still more disconcerting thing.
+She staggered a step towards Scrape, seized the lapels of his coat,
+bowed her head upon his shoulder, put her black hair against his cheek,
+and began sobbing and weeping.
+
+“My dear lady!” he expostulated, trying weakly to disengage her.
+
+“Let me k'y,” she insisted, gripping more resolutely, and following his
+backward pace. “You must let me k'y. You must let me k'y.”
+
+His resistance ceased. One hand supported her, the other patted her
+shining hair. “My dear child!” he said. “My dear child! I had no idea.
+That you would take it like this....”
+
+(7)
+
+
+That was but the opening of an enormous interview. Presently he had
+contrived in a helpful and sympathetic manner to seat the unhappy lady
+on a sofa, and when after some cramped discourse she stood up before
+him, wiping her eyes with a wet wonder of lace, to deliver herself the
+better, a newborn appreciation of the tactics of the situation made
+him walk to the other side of the table under colour of picking up a
+drawing.
+
+In the retrospect he tried to disentangle the threads of a discussion
+that went to and fro and contradicted itself and began again far
+back among things that had seemed forgotten and disposed of. Lady
+Sunderbund's mind was extravagantly untrained, a wild-grown mental
+thicket. At times she reproached him as if he were a heartless God; at
+times she talked as if he were a recalcitrant servant. Her mingling of
+utter devotion and the completest disregard for his thoughts and wishes
+dazzled and distressed his mind. It was clear that for half a year her
+clear, bold, absurd will had been crystallized upon the idea of giving
+him exactly what she wanted him to want. The crystal sphere of those
+ambitions lay now shattered between them.
+
+She was trying to reconstruct it before his eyes.
+
+She was, she declared, prepared to alter her plans in any way that would
+meet his wishes. She had not understood. “If it is a Toy,” she cried,
+“show me how to make it not a Toy! Make it 'eal!”
+
+He said it was the bare idea of a temple that made it impossible. And
+there was this drawing here; what did it mean? He held it out to her. It
+represented a figure, distressingly like himself, robed as a priest in
+vestments.
+
+She snatched the offending drawing from him and tore it to shreds.
+
+“If you don't want a Temple, have a meeting-house. You wanted a
+meeting-house anyhow.”
+
+“Just any old meeting-house,” he said. “Not that special one. A place
+without choirs and clergy.”
+
+“If you won't have music,” she responded, “don't have music. If God
+doesn't want music it can go. I can't think God does not app'ove of
+music, but--that is for you to settle. If you don't like the' being
+o'naments, we'll make it all plain. Some g'ate g'ey Dome--all g'ey and
+black. If it isn't to be beautiful, it can be ugly. Yes, ugly. It can
+be as ugly”--she sobbed--“as the City Temple. We will get some otha
+a'chitect--some City a'chitect. Some man who has built B'anch Banks or
+'ailway stations. That's if you think it pleases God.... B'eak young
+Venable's hea't.... Only why should you not let me make a place fo' you'
+message? Why shouldn't it be me? You must have a place. You've got 'to
+p'each somewhe'.”
+
+“As a man, not as a priest.”
+
+“Then p'each as a man. You must still wea' something.”
+
+“Just ordinary clothes.”
+
+“O'dina'y clothes a' clothes in the fashion,” she said. “You would
+have to go to you' taila for a new p'eaching coat with b'aid put on
+dif'ently, or two buttons instead of th'ee....”
+
+“One needn't be fashionable.”
+
+“Ev'ybody is fash'nable. How can you help it? Some people wea' old
+fashions; that's all.... A cassock's an old fashion. There's nothing so
+plain as a cassock.”
+
+“Except that it's a clerical fashion. I want to be just as I am now.”
+
+“If you think that--that owoble suit is o'dina'y clothes!” she said, and
+stared at him and gave way to tears of real tenderness.
+
+“A cassock,” she cried with passion. “Just a pe'fectly plain cassock.
+Fo' deecency!... Oh, if you won't--not even that!”
+
+(8)
+
+
+As he walked now after his unsuccessful quest of Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey
+towards the Serpentine he acted that stormy interview with Lady
+Sunderbund over again. At the end, as a condition indeed of his
+departure, he had left things open. He had assented to certain promises.
+He was to make her understand better what it was he needed. He was not
+to let anything that had happened affect that “spi'tual f'enship.”
+ She was to abandon all her plans, she was to begin again “at the ve'y
+beginning.” But he knew that indeed there should be no more beginning
+again with her. He knew that quite beyond these questions of the
+organization of a purified religion, it was time their association
+ended. She had wept upon him; she had clasped both his hands at parting
+and prayed to be forgiven. She was drawing him closer to her by their
+very dissension. She had infected him with the softness of remorse; from
+being a bright and spirited person, she had converted herself into a
+warm and touching person. Her fine, bright black hair against his cheek
+and the clasp of her hand on his shoulder was now inextricably in the
+business. The perplexing, the astonishing thing in his situation was
+that there was still a reluctance to make a conclusive breach.
+
+He was not the first of men who have tried to find in vain how and when
+a relationship becomes an entanglement. He ought to break off now, and
+the riddle was just why he should feel this compunction in breaking off
+now. He had disappointed her, and he ought not to have disappointed
+her; that was the essential feeling. He had never realized before as
+he realized now this peculiar quality of his own mind and the gulf into
+which it was leading him. It came as an illuminating discovery.
+
+He was a social animal. He had an instinctive disposition to act
+according to the expectations of the people about him, whether they were
+reasonable or congenial expectations or whether they were not. That, he
+saw for the first time, had been the ruling motive of his life; it was
+the clue to him. Man is not a reasonable creature; he is a socially
+responsive creature trying to be reasonable in spite of that fact. From
+the days in the rectory nursery when Scrope had tried to be a good boy
+on the whole and just a little naughty sometimes until they stopped
+smiling, through all his life of school, university, curacy, vicarage
+and episcopacy up to this present moment, he perceived now that he had
+acted upon no authentic and independent impulse. His impulse had always
+been to fall in with people and satisfy them. And all the painful
+conflicts of those last few years had been due to a growing realization
+of jarring criticisms, of antagonized forces that required from him
+incompatible things. From which he had now taken refuge--or at any rate
+sought refuge--in God. It was paradoxical, but manifestly in God he not
+only sank his individuality but discovered it.
+
+It was wonderful how much he had thought and still thought of the
+feelings and desires of Lady Sunderbund, and how little he thought of
+God. Her he had been assiduously propitiating, managing, accepting, for
+three months now. Why? Partly because she demanded it, and there was
+a quality in her demand that had touched some hidden spring--of vanity
+perhaps it was--in him, that made him respond. But partly also it was
+because after the evacuation of the palace at Princhester he had felt
+more and more, felt but never dared to look squarely in the face, the
+catastrophic change in the worldly circumstances of his family.
+Only this chapel adventure seemed likely to restore those fallen and
+bedraggled fortunes. He had not anticipated a tithe of the dire quality
+of that change. They were not simply uncomfortable in the Notting Hill
+home. They were miserable. He fancied they looked to him with something
+between reproach and urgency. Why had he brought them here? What next
+did he propose to do? He wished at times they would say it out instead
+of merely looking it. Phoebe's failing appetite chilled his heart.
+
+That concern for his family, he believed, had been his chief motive in
+clinging to Lady Sunderbund's projects long after he had realized how
+little they would forward the true service of God. No doubt there had
+been moments of flattery, moments of something, something rather in the
+nature of an excited affection; some touch of the magnificent in
+her, some touch of the infantile,--both appealed magnetically to his
+imagination; but the real effective cause was his habitual solicitude
+for his wife and children and his consequent desire to prosper
+materially. As his first dream of being something between Mohammed and
+Peter the Hermit in a new proclamation of God to the world lost colour
+and life in his mind, he realized more and more clearly that there was
+no way of living in a state of material prosperity and at the same time
+in a state of active service to God. The Church of the One True God (by
+favour of Lady Sunderbund) was a gaily-coloured lure.
+
+And yet he wanted to go on with it. All his imagination and intelligence
+was busy now with the possibility of in some way subjugating Lady
+Sunderbund, and modifying her and qualifying her to an endurable
+proposition. Why?
+
+Why?
+
+There could be but one answer, he thought. Brought to the test of
+action, he did not really believe in God! He did not believe in God as
+he believed in his family. He did not believe in the reality of either
+his first or his second vision; they had been dreams, autogenous
+revelations, exaltations of his own imaginations. These beliefs were
+upon different grades of reality. Put to the test, his faith in God gave
+way; a sword of plaster against a reality of steel.
+
+And yet he did believe in God. He was as persuaded that there was a
+God as he was that there was another side to the moon. His
+intellectual conviction was complete. Only, beside the living,
+breathing--occasionally coughing--reality of Phoebe, God was something
+as unsubstantial as the Binomial Theorem....
+
+Very like the Binomial Theorem as one thought over that comparison.
+
+By this time he had reached the banks of the Serpentine and was
+approaching the grey stone bridge that crosses just where Hyde Park
+ends and Kensington Gardens begins. Following upon his doubts of his
+religious faith had come another still more extraordinary question:
+“Although there is a God, does he indeed matter more in our ordinary
+lives than that same demonstrable Binomial Theorem? Isn't one's duty to
+Phoebe plain and clear?” Old Likeman's argument came back to him with
+novel and enhanced powers. Wasn't he after all selfishly putting his
+own salvation in front of his plain duty to those about him? What did
+it matter if he told lies, taught a false faith, perjured and damned
+himself, if after all those others were thereby saved and comforted?
+
+“But that is just where the whole of this state of mind is false
+and wrong,” he told himself. “God is something more than a priggish
+devotion, an intellectual formula. He has a hold and a claim--he should
+have a hold and a claim--exceeding all the claims of Phoebe, Miriam,
+Daphne, Clementina--all of them.... But he hasn't'!...”
+
+It was to that he had got after he had left Lady Sunderbund, and to that
+he now returned. It was the thinness and unreality of his thought of God
+that had driven him post-haste to Brighton-Pomfrey in search for that
+drug that had touched his soul to belief.
+
+Was God so insignificant in comparison with his family that after
+all with a good conscience he might preach him every Sunday in Lady
+Sunderbund's church, wearing Lady Sunderbund's vestments?
+
+Before him he saw an empty seat. The question was so immense and
+conclusive, it was so clearly a choice for all the rest of his life
+between God and the dear things of this world, that he felt he could not
+decide it upon his legs. He sat down, threw an arm along the back of the
+seat and drummed with his fingers.
+
+If the answer was “yes” then it was decidedly a pity that he had not
+stayed in the church. It was ridiculous to strain at the cathedral gnat
+and then swallow Lady Sunderbund's decorative Pantechnicon.
+
+For the first time, Scrope definitely regretted his apostasy.
+
+A trivial matter, as it may seem to the reader, intensified that regret.
+Three weeks ago Borrowdale, the bishop of Howeaster, had died, and
+Scrope would have been the next in rotation to succeed him on the
+bench of bishops. He had always looked forward to the House of Lords,
+intending to take rather a new line, to speak more, and to speak more
+plainly and fully upon social questions than had hitherto been the
+practice of his brethren. Well, that had gone....
+
+(9)
+
+
+Regrets were plain now. The question before his mind was growing clear;
+whether he was to persist in this self-imposed martyrdom of himself and
+his family or whether he was to go back upon his outbreak of visionary
+fanaticism and close with this last opportunity that Lady Sunderbund
+offered of saving at least the substance of the comfort and social
+status of his wife and daughters. In which case it was clear to him
+he would have to go to great lengths and exercise very considerable
+subtlety--and magnetism--in the management of Lady Sunderbund....
+
+He found himself composing a peculiar speech to her, very frank and
+revealing, and one that he felt would dominate her thoughts.... She
+attracted him oddly.... At least this afternoon she had attracted
+him....
+
+And repelled him....
+
+A wholesome gust of moral impatience stirred him. He smacked the back of
+the seat hard, as though he smacked himself.
+
+No. He did not like it....
+
+A torn sunset of purple and crimson streamed raggedly up above and
+through the half stripped trecs of Kensington Gardens, and he found
+himself wishing that Heaven would give us fewer sublimities in sky and
+mountain and more in our hearts. Against the background of darkling
+trees and stormily flaming sky a girl was approaching him. There was
+little to be seen of her but her outline. Something in her movement
+caught his eye and carried his memory back to a sundown at Hunstanton.
+Then as she came nearer he saw that it was Eleanor.
+
+It was odd to see her here. He had thought she was at Newnham.
+
+But anyhow it was very pleasant to see her. And there was something in
+Eleanor that promised an answer to his necessity. The girl had a kind
+of instinctive wisdom. She would understand the quality of his situation
+better perhaps than any one. He would put the essentials of that
+situation as fully and plainly as he could to her. Perhaps she, with
+that clear young idealism of hers, would give him just the lift and the
+light of which he stood in need. She would comprehend both sides of it,
+the points about Phoebe as well as the points about God.
+
+When first he saw her she seemed to be hurrying, but now she had fallen
+to a loitering pace. She looked once or twice behind her and then ahead,
+almost as though she expected some one and was not sure whether this
+person would approach from east or west. She did not observe her father
+until she was close upon him.
+
+Then she was so astonished that for a moment she stood motionless,
+regarding him. She made an odd movement, almost as if she would have
+walked on, that she checked in its inception. Then she came up to him
+and stood before him. “It's Dad,” she said.
+
+“I didn't know you were in London, Norah,” he began.
+
+“I came up suddenly.”
+
+“Have you been home?”
+
+“No. I wasn't going home. At least--not until afterwards.”
+
+Then she looked away from him, east and then west, and then met his eye
+again.
+
+“Won't you sit down, Norah?”
+
+“I don't know whether I can.”
+
+She consulted the view again and seemed to come to a decision. “At
+least, I will for a minute.”
+
+She sat down. For a moment neither of them spoke....
+
+“What are you doing here, little Norah?”
+
+She gathered her wits. Then she spoke rather volubly. “I know it looks
+bad, Daddy. I came up to meet a boy I know, who is going to France
+to-morrow. I had to make excuses--up there. I hardly remember what
+excuses I made.”
+
+“A boy you know?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Do we know him?”
+
+“Not yet.”
+
+For a time Scrope forgot the Church of the One True God altogether. “Who
+is this boy?” he asked.
+
+With a perceptible effort Eleanor assumed a tone of commonsense
+conventionality. “He's a boy I met first when we were skating last year.
+His sister has the study next to mine.”
+
+Father looked at daughter, and she met his eyes. “Well?”
+
+“It's all happened so quickly, Daddy,” she said, answering all that was
+implicit in that “Well?” She went on, “I would have told you about him
+if he had seemed to matter. But it was just a friendship. It didn't
+seem to matter in any serious way. Of course we'd been good friends--and
+talked about all sorts of things. And then suddenly you see,”--her tone
+was offhand and matter-of-fact--“he has to go to France.”
+
+She stared at her father with the expression of a hostess who talks
+about the weather. And then the tears gathered and ran down her cheek.
+
+She turned her face to the Serpentine and clenched her fist.
+
+But she was now fairly weeping. “I didn't know he cared. I didn't know I
+cared.”
+
+His next question took a little time in coming.
+
+“And it's love, little Norah?” he asked.
+
+She was comfortably crying now, the defensive altogether abandoned.
+“It's love, Daddy.... Oh! love!.... He's going tomorrow.” For a minute
+or so neither spoke. Scrope's mind was entirely made up in the matter.
+He approved altogether of his daughter. But the traditions of parentage,
+his habit of restrained decision, made him act a judicial part. “I'd
+like just to see this boy,” he said, and added: “If it isn't rather
+interfering....”
+
+“Dear Daddy!” she said. “Dear Daddy!” and touched his hand. “He'll be
+coming here....”
+
+“If you could tell me a few things about him,” said Scrope. “Is he an
+undergraduate?”
+
+“You see,” began Eleanor and paused to marshal her facts. “He graduated
+this year. Then he's been in training at Cambridge. Properly he'd have
+a fellowship. He took the Natural Science tripos, zoology chiefly.
+He's good at philosophy, but of course our Cambridge philosophy is so
+silly--McTaggart blowing bubbles.... His father's a doctor, Sir Hedley
+Riverton.”
+
+As she spoke her eyes had been roving up the path and down. “He's
+coming,” she interrupted. She hesitated. “Would you mind if I went and
+spoke to him first, Daddy?”
+
+“Of course go to him. Go and warn him I'm here,” said Scrope.
+
+Eleanor got up, and was immediately greeted with joyful gestures by an
+approaching figure in khaki. The two young people quickened their paces
+as they drew nearer one another. There was a rapid greeting; they stood
+close together and spoke eagerly. Scrope could tell by their movements
+when he became the subject of their talk. He saw the young man start
+and look over Eleanor's shoulder, and he assumed an attitude of
+philosophical contemplation of the water, so as to give the young man
+the liberty of his profile.
+
+He did not look up until they were quite close to him, and when he did
+he saw a pleasant, slightly freckled fair face a little agitated, and
+very honest blue eyes. “I hope you don't think, Sir, that it's bad form
+of me to ask Eleanor to come up and see me as I've done. I telegraphed
+to her on an impulse, and it's been very kind of her to come up to me.”
+
+“Sit down,” said Scrope, “sit down. You're Mr. Riverton?”
+
+“Yes, Sir,” said the young man. He had the frequent “Sir” of the
+subaltern. Scrope was in the centre of the seat, and the young officer
+sat down on one side of him while Eleanor took up a watching position on
+her father's other hand. “You see, Sir, we've hardly known each other--I
+mean we've been associated over a philosophical society and all that
+sort of thing, but in a more familiar way, I mean....”
+
+He hung for a moment, just a little short of breath. Scrope helped
+him with a grave but sympathetic movement of the head. “It's a little
+difficult to explain,” the young man apologized.
+
+“We hadn't understood, I think, either of us very much. We'd just
+been friendly--and liked each other. And so it went on even when I was
+training. And then when I found I had to go out--I'm going out a little
+earlier than I expected--I thought suddenly I wouldn't ever go to
+Cambridge again at all perhaps--and there was something in one of her
+letters.... I thought of it a lot, Sir, I thought it all over, and I
+thought it wasn't right for me to do anything and I didn't do anything
+until this morning. And then I sort of had to telegraph. I know it was
+frightful cheek and bad form and all that, Sir. It is. It would be
+worse if she wasn't different--I mean, Sir, if she was just an ordinary
+girl.... But I had a sort of feeling--just wanting to see her. I don't
+suppose you've ever felt anything, Sir, as I felt I wanted to see
+her--and just hear her speak to me....”
+
+He glanced across Scrope at Eleanor. It was as if he justified himself
+to them both.
+
+Scrope glanced furtively at his daughter who was leaning forward with
+tender eyes on her lover, and his heart went out to her. But his manner
+remained judicial.
+
+“All this is very sudden,” he said.
+
+“Or you would have heard all about it, Sir,” said young Riverton.
+“It's just the hurry that has made this seem furtive. All that there is
+between us, Sir, is just the two telegrams we've sent, hers and mine.
+I hope you won't mind our having a little time together. We won't do
+anything very committal. It's as much friendship as anything. I go by
+the evening train to-morrow.”
+
+“Mm,” said Serope with his eye on Eleanor.
+
+“In these uncertain times,” he began.
+
+“Why shouldn't I take a risk too, Daddy?” said Eleanor sharply.
+
+“I know there's that side of it,” said the young man. “I oughtn't to
+have telegraphed,” he said.
+
+“Can't I take a risk?” exclaimed Eleanor. “I'm not a doll. I don't want
+to live in wadding until all the world is safe for me.”
+
+Scrope looked at the glowing face of the young man.
+
+“Is this taking care of her?” he asked.
+
+“If you hadn't telegraphed--!” she cried with a threat in her voice, and
+left it at that.
+
+“Perhaps I feel about her--rather as if she was as strong as I am--in
+those ways. Perhaps I shouldn't. I could hardly endure myself, Sir--cut
+off from her. And a sort of blank. Nothing said.”
+
+“You want to work out your own salvation,” said Scrope to his daughter.
+
+“No one else can,” she answered. “I'm--I'm grown up.”
+
+“Even if it hurts?”
+
+“To live is to be hurt somehow,” she said. “This--This--” She flashed
+her love. She intimated by a gesture that it is better to be stabbed
+with a clean knife than to be suffocated or poisoned or to decay....
+
+Scrope turned his eyes to the young man again. He liked him. He liked
+the modelling of his mouth and chin and the line of his brows. He liked
+him altogether. He pronounced his verdict slowly. “I suppose, after
+all,” he said, “that this is better than the tender solicitude of a
+safe and prosperous middleaged man. Eleanor, my dear, I've been thinking
+to-day that a father who stands between his children and hardship, by
+doing wrong, may really be doing them a wrong. You are a dear girl to
+me. I won't stand between you two. Find your own salvation.” He got up.
+“I go west,” he said, “presently. You, I think, go east.”
+
+“I can assure you, Sir,” the young man began.
+
+Scrope held his hand out. “Take your life in your own way,” he said.
+
+He turned to Eleanor. “Talk as you will,” he said.
+
+She clasped his hand with emotion. Then she turned to the waiting young
+man, who saluted.
+
+“You'll come back to supper?” Scrope said, without thinking out the
+implications of that invitation.
+
+She assented as carelessly. The fact that she and her lover were to
+go, with their meeting legalized and blessed, excluded all other
+considerations. The two young people turned to each other.
+
+Scrope stood for a moment or so and then sat down again.
+
+For a time he could think only of Eleanor.... He watched the two young
+people as they went eastward. As they walked their shoulders and elbows
+bumped amicably together.
+
+(10)
+
+
+Presently he sought to resume the interrupted thread of his thoughts.
+He knew that he had been dealing with some very tremendous and urgent
+problem when Eleanor had appeared. Then he remembered that Eleanor at
+the time of her approach had seemed to be a solution rather than an
+interruption. Well, she had her own life. She was making her own life.
+Instead of solving his problems she was solving her own. God bless those
+dear grave children! They were nearer the elemental things than he was.
+That eastward path led to Victoria--and thence to a very probable death.
+The lad was in the infantry and going straight into the trenches.
+
+Love, death, God; this war was bringing the whole world back to
+elemental things, to heroic things. The years of comedy and comfort were
+at an end in Europe; the age of steel and want was here. And he had been
+thinking--What had he been thinking?
+
+He mused, and the scheme of his perplexities reshaped itself in his
+mind. But at that time he did not realize that a powerful new light
+was falling upon it now, cast by the tragic illumination of these young
+lovers whose love began with a parting. He did not see how reality had
+come to all things through that one intense reality. He reverted to
+the question as he had put it to himself, before first he recognized
+Eleanor. Did he believe in God? Should he go on with this Sunderbund
+adventure in which he no longer believed? Should he play for safety and
+comfort, trusting to God's toleration? Or go back to his family and warn
+them of the years of struggle and poverty his renunciation cast upon
+them?
+
+Somehow Lady Sunderbund's chapel was very remote and flimsy now, and the
+hardships of poverty seemed less black than the hardship of a youthful
+death.
+
+Did he believe in God? Again he put that fundamental question to
+himself.
+
+He sat very still in the sunset peace, with his eyes upon the steel
+mirror of the waters. The question seemed to fill the whole scene, to
+wait, even as the water and sky and the windless trees were waiting....
+
+And then by imperceptible degrees there grew in Scrope's mind the
+persuasion that he was in the presence of the living God. This time
+there was no vision of angels nor stars, no snapping of bow-strings, no
+throbbing of the heart nor change of scene, no magic and melodramatic
+drawing back of the curtain from the mysteries; the water and the
+bridge, the ragged black trees, and a distant boat that broke the
+silvery calm with an arrow of black ripples, all these things were still
+before him. But God was there too. God was everywhere about him. This
+persuasion was over him and about him; a dome of protection, a power in
+his nerves, a peace in his heart. It was an exalting beauty; it was a
+perfected conviction.... This indeed was the coming of God, the real
+coming of God. For the first time Scrope was absolutely sure that
+for the rest of his life he would possess God. Everything that had so
+perplexed him seemed to be clear now, and his troubles lay at the foot
+of this last complete realization like a litter of dust and leaves in
+the foreground of a sunlit, snowy mountain range.
+
+It was a little incredible that he could ever have doubted.
+
+(11)
+
+
+It was a phase of extreme intellectual clairvoyance. A multitude of
+things that hitherto had been higgledy-piggledy, contradictory and
+incongruous in his mind became lucid, serene, full and assured. He
+seemed to see all things plainly as one sees things plainly through
+perfectly clear still water in the shadows of a summer noon. His doubts
+about God, his periods of complete forgetfulness and disregard of God,
+this conflict of his instincts and the habits and affections of
+his daily life with the service of God, ceased to be perplexing
+incompatibilities and were manifest as necessary, understandable aspects
+of the business of living.
+
+It was no longer a riddle that little immediate things should seem
+of more importance than great and final things. For man is a creature
+thrusting his way up from the beast to divinity, from the blindness of
+individuality to the knowledge of a common end. We stand deep in
+the engagements of our individual lives looking up to God, and only
+realizing in our moments of exaltation that through God we can escape
+from and rule and alter the whole world-wide scheme of individual lives.
+Only in phases of illumination do we realize the creative powers that
+lie ready to man's hand. Personal affections, immediate obligations,
+ambitions, self-seeking, these are among the natural and essential
+things of our individual lives, as intimate almost as our primordial
+lusts and needs; God, the true God, is a later revelation, a newer, less
+natural thing in us; a knowledge still remote, uncertain, and confused
+with superstition; an apprehension as yet entangled with barbaric
+traditions of fear and with ceremonial surgeries, blood sacrifices, and
+the maddest barbarities of thought. We are only beginning to realize
+that God is here; so far as our minds go he is still not here
+continually; we perceive him and then again we are blind to him. God
+is the last thing added to the completeness of human life. To most His
+presence is imperceptible throughout their lives; they know as little
+of him as a savage knows of the electric waves that beat through us
+for ever from the sun. All this appeared now so clear and necessary
+to Scrope that he was astonished he had ever found the quality of
+contradiction in these manifest facts.
+
+In this unprecedented lucidity that had now come to him, Scrope saw as
+a clear and simple necessity that there can be no such thing as a
+continuous living presence of God in our lives. That is an unreasonable
+desire. There is no permanent exaltation of belief. It is contrary to
+the nature of life. One cannot keep actively believing in and realizing
+God round all the twenty-four hours any more than one can keep awake
+through the whole cycle of night and day, day after day. If it were
+possible so to apprehend God without cessation, life would dissolve in
+religious ecstasy. But nothing human has ever had the power to hold the
+curtain of sense continually aside and retain the light of God always.
+We must get along by remembering our moments of assurance. Even Jesus
+himself, leader of all those who have hailed the coming kingdom of God,
+had cried upon the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
+ The business of life on earth, life itself, is a thing curtained off, as
+it were, from such immediate convictions. That is in the constitution of
+life. Our ordinary state of belief, even when we are free from doubt,
+is necessarily far removed from the intuitive certainty of sight and
+hearing. It is a persuasion, it falls far short of perception....
+
+“We don't know directly,” Scrope said to himself with a checking gesture
+of the hand, “we don't see. We can't. We hold on to the remembered
+glimpse, we go over our reasons.”...
+
+And it was clear too just because God is thus manifest like the
+momentary drawing of a curtain, sometimes to this man for a time and
+sometimes to that, but never continuously to any, and because the
+perception of him depends upon the ability and quality of the perceiver,
+because to the intellectual man God is necessarily a formula, to the
+active man a will and a commandment, and to the emotional man love,
+there can be no creed defining him for all men, and no ritual and
+special forms of service to justify a priesthood. “God is God,” he
+whispered to himself, and the phrase seemed to him the discovery of
+a sufficient creed. God is his own definition; there is no other
+definition of God. Scrope had troubled himself with endless arguments
+whether God was a person, whether he was concerned with personal
+troubles, whether he loved, whether he was finite. It were as reasonable
+to argue whether God was a frog or a rock or a tree. He had imagined God
+as a figure of youth and courage, had perceived him as an effulgence
+of leadership, a captain like the sun. The vision of his drug-quickened
+mind had but symbolized what was otherwise inexpressible. Of that he was
+now sure. He had not seen the invisible but only its sign and visible
+likeness. He knew now that all such presentations were true and that all
+such presentations were false. Just as much and just as little was God
+the darkness and the brightness of the ripples under the bows of the
+distant boat, the black beauty of the leaves and twigs of those trees
+now acid-clear against the flushed and deepening sky. These riddles of
+the profundities were beyond the compass of common living. They were
+beyond the needs of common living. He was but a little earth parasite,
+sitting idle in the darkling day, trying to understand his infinitesimal
+functions on a minor planet. Within the compass of terrestrial living
+God showed himself in its own terms. The life of man on earth was a
+struggle for unity of spirit and for unity with his kind, and the aspect
+of God that alone mattered to man was a unifying kingship without and
+within. So long as men were men, so would they see God. Only when they
+reached the crest could they begin to look beyond. So we knew God, so
+God was to us; since we struggled, he led our struggle, since we were
+finite and mortal he defined an aim, his personality was the answer to
+our personality; but God, except in so far as he was to us, remained
+inaccessible, inexplicable, wonderful, shining through beauty, shining
+beyond research, greater than time or space, above good and evil and
+pain and pleasure.
+
+(12)
+
+
+Serope's mind was saturated as it had never been before by his sense of
+the immediate presence of God. He floated in that realization. He
+was not so much thinking now as conversing starkly with the divine
+interlocutor, who penetrated all things and saw into and illuminated
+every recess of his mind. He spread out his ideas to the test of this
+presence; he brought out his hazards and interpretations that this light
+might judge them.
+
+There came back to his mind the substance of his two former visions;
+they assumed now a reciprocal quality, they explained one another and
+the riddle before him. The first had shown him the personal human aspect
+of God, he had seen God as the unifying captain calling for his personal
+service, the second had set the stage for that service in the spectacle
+of mankind's adventure. He had been shown a great multitude of human
+spirits reaching up at countless points towards the conception of the
+racial unity under a divine leadership, he had seen mankind on the
+verge of awakening to the kingdom of God. “That solves no mystery,”
+ he whispered, gripping the seat and frowning at the water; “mysteries
+remain mysteries; but that is the reality of religion. And now, now,
+what is my place? What have I to do? That is the question I have been
+asking always; the question that this moment now will answer; what have
+I to do?...”
+
+God was coming into the life of all mankind in the likeness of a captain
+and a king; all the governments of men, all the leagues of men, their
+debts and claims and possessions, must give way to the world republic
+under God the king. For five troubled years he had been staring religion
+in the face, and now he saw that it must mean this--or be no more than
+fetishism, Obi, Orphic mysteries or ceremonies of Demeter, a legacy
+of mental dirtiness, a residue of self-mutilation and superstitious
+sacrifices from the cunning, fear-haunted, ape-dog phase of human
+development. But it did mean this. And every one who apprehended as much
+was called by that very apprehension to the service of God's kingdom.
+To live and serve God's kingdom on earth, to help to bring it about, to
+propagate the idea of it, to establish the method of it, to incorporate
+all that one made and all that one did into its growing reality, was the
+only possible life that could be lived, once that God was known.
+
+He sat with his hands gripping his knees, as if he were holding on to
+his idea. “And now for my part,” he whispered, brows knit, “now for my
+part.”
+
+Ever since he had given his confirmation addresses he had been clear
+that his task, or at least a considerable portion of his task, was
+to tell of this faith in God and of this conception of service in his
+kingdom as the form and rule of human life and human society. But up to
+now he had been floundering hopelessly in his search for a method and
+means of telling. That, he saw, still needed to be thought out. For
+example, one cannot run through the world crying, “The Kingdom of God
+is at hand.” Men's minds were still so filled with old theological ideas
+that for the most part they would understand by that only a fantasy of
+some great coming of angels and fiery chariots and judgments, and hardly
+a soul but would doubt one's sanity and turn scornfully away. But one
+must proclaim God not to confuse but to convince men's minds. It was
+that and the habit of his priestly calling that had disposed him towards
+a pulpit. There he could reason and explain. The decorative genius
+of Lady Sunderbund had turned that intention into a vast iridescent
+absurdity.
+
+This sense he had of thinking openly in the sight of God, enabled him to
+see the adventure of Lady Sunderbund without illusion and without shame.
+He saw himself at once honest and disingenuous, divided between two
+aims. He had no doubt now of the path he had to pursue. A stronger man
+of permanently clear aims might possibly turn Lady Sunderbund into a
+useful opportunity, oblige her to provide the rostrum he needed; but for
+himself, he knew he had neither the needed strength nor clearness;
+she would smother him in decoration, overcome him by her picturesque
+persistence. It might be ridiculous to run away from her, but it was
+necessary. And he was equally clear now that for him there must be
+no idea of any pulpit, of any sustained mission. He was a man of
+intellectual moods; only at times, he realized, had he the inspiration
+of truth; upon such uncertain snatches and glimpses he must live; to
+make his life a ministry would be to face phases when he would simply be
+“carrying on,” with his mind blank and his faith asleep.
+
+His thought spread out from this perennial decision to more general
+things again. Had God any need of organized priests at all? Wasn't that
+just what had been the matter with religion for the last three thousand
+years?
+
+His vision and his sense of access to God had given a new courage to
+his mind; in these moods of enlightenment he could see the world as a
+comprehensible ball, he could see history as an understandable drama. He
+had always been on the verge of realizing before, he realized now, the
+two entirely different and antagonistic strands that interweave in the
+twisted rope of contemporary religion; the old strand of the priest,
+the fetishistic element of the blood sacrifice and the obscene rite, the
+element of ritual and tradition, of the cult, the caste, the consecrated
+tribe; and interwoven with this so closely as to be scarcely separable
+in any existing religion was the new strand, the religion of the
+prophets, the unidolatrous universal worship of the one true God. Priest
+religion is the antithesis to prophet religion. He saw that the
+founders of all the great existing religions of the world had been like
+himself--only that he was a weak and commonplace man with no creative
+force, and they had been great men of enormous initiative--men reaching
+out, and never with a complete definition, from the old kind of religion
+to the new. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus, whom the priests killed when
+Pilate would have spared him, Mohammed, Buddha, had this much in common
+that they had sought to lead men from temple worship, idol worship, from
+rites and ceremonies and the rule of priests, from anniversaryism and
+sacramentalism, into a direct and simple relation to the simplicity of
+God. Religious progress had always been liberation and simplification.
+But none of these efforts had got altogether clear. The organizing
+temper in men, the disposition to dogmatic theorizing, the distrust
+of the discretion of the young by the wisdom of age, the fear of
+indiscipline which is so just in warfare and so foolish in education,
+the tremendous power of the propitiatory tradition, had always caught
+and crippled every new gospel before it had run a score of years. Jesus
+for example gave man neither a theology nor a church organization; His
+sacrament was an innocent feast of memorial; but the fearful, limited,
+imitative men he left to carry on his work speedily restored all these
+three abominations of the antiquated religion, theology, priest, and
+sacrifice. Jesus indeed, caught into identification with the ancient
+victim of the harvest sacrifice and turned from a plain teacher into
+a horrible blood bath and a mock cannibal meal, was surely the supreme
+feat of the ironies of chance....
+
+“It is curious how I drift back to Jesus,” said Scrope. “I have never
+seen how much truth and good there was in his teaching until I broke
+away from Christianity and began to see him plain. If I go on as I am
+going, I shall end a Nazarene....”
+
+He thought on. He had a feeling of temerity, but then it seemed as if
+God within him bade him be of good courage.
+
+Already in a glow of inspiration he had said practically as much as
+he was now thinking in his confirmation address, but now he realized
+completely what it was he had then said. There could be no priests,
+no specialized ministers of the one true God, because every man to
+the utmost measure of his capacity was bound to be God's priest and
+minister. Many things one may leave to specialists: surgery, detailed
+administration, chemistry, for example; but it is for every man to think
+his own philosophy and think out his own religion. One man may tell
+another, but no man may take charge of another. A man may avail himself
+of electrician or gardener or what not, but he must stand directly
+before God; he may suffer neither priest nor king. These other things
+are incidental, but God, the kingdom of God, is what he is for.
+
+“Good,” he said, checking his reasoning. “So I must bear witness to
+God--but neither as priest nor pastor. I must write and talk about him
+as I can. No reason why I should not live by such writing and talking if
+it does not hamper my message to do so. But there must be no high place,
+no ordered congregation. I begin to see my way....”
+
+The evening was growing dark and chill about him now, the sky was barred
+with deep bluish purple bands drawn across a chilly brightness that
+had already forgotten the sun, the trees were black and dim, but his
+understanding of his place and duty was growing very definite.
+
+“And this duty to bear witness to God's kingdom and serve it is so plain
+that I must not deflect my witness even by a little, though to do
+so means comfort and security for my wife and children. God comes
+first....”
+
+“They must not come between God and me....”
+
+“But there is more in it than that.”
+
+He had come round at last through the long clearing-up of his mind, to
+his fundamental problem again. He sat darkly reluctant.
+
+“I must not play priest or providence to them,” he admitted at last. “I
+must not even stand between God and them.”
+
+He saw now what he had been doing; it had been the flaw in his faith
+that he would not trust his family to God. And he saw too that this
+distrust has been the flaw in the faith of all religious systems
+hitherto....
+
+(13)
+
+
+In this strange voyage of the spirit which was now drawing to its end,
+in which Scrope had travelled from the confused, unanalyzed formulas and
+assumptions and implications of his rectory upbringing to his present
+stark and simple realization of God, he had at times made some
+remarkable self-identifications. He was naturally much given to analogy;
+every train of thought in his mind set up induced parallel currents. He
+had likened himself to the Anglican church, to the whole Christian body,
+as, for example, in his imagined second conversation with the angel
+of God. But now he found himself associating himself with a still more
+far-reaching section of mankind. This excess of solicitude was traceable
+perhaps in nearly every one in all the past of mankind who had ever had
+the vision of God. An excessive solicitude to shield those others from
+one's own trials and hardships, to preserve the exact quality of the
+revelation, for example, had been the fruitful cause of crippling
+errors, spiritual tyrannies, dogmatisms, dissensions, and futilities.
+“Suffer little children to come unto me”; the text came into his head
+with an effect of contribution. The parent in us all flares out at the
+thought of the younger and weaker minds; we hide difficulties, seek to
+spare them from the fires that temper the spirit, the sharp edge of
+the truth that shapes the soul. Christian is always trying to have a
+carriage sent back from the Celestial City for his family. Why, we ask,
+should they flounder dangerously in the morasses that we escaped, or
+wander in the forest in which we lost ourselves? Catch these souls
+young, therefore, save them before they know they exist, kidnap them to
+heaven; vaccinate them with a catechism they may never understand, lull
+them into comfort and routine. Instinct plays us false here as it plays
+the savage mother false when she snatches her fevered child from the
+doctor's hands. The last act of faith is to trust those we love to
+God....
+
+Hitherto he had seen the great nets of theological overstatement and
+dogma that kept mankind from God as if they were the work of purely evil
+things in man, of pride, of self-assertion, of a desire to possess and
+dominate the minds and souls of others. It was only now that he saw how
+large a share in the obstruction of God's Kingdom had been played by the
+love of the elder and the parent, by the carefulness, the fussy care,
+of good men and women. He had wandered in wildernesses of unbelief, in
+dangerous places of doubt and questioning, but he had left his wife and
+children safe and secure in the self-satisfaction of orthodoxy. To none
+of them except to Eleanor had he ever talked with any freedom of his
+new apprehensions of religious reality. And that had been at Eleanor's
+initiative. There was, he saw now, something of insolence and something
+of treachery in this concealment. His ruling disposition throughout the
+crisis had been to force comfort and worldly well-being upon all those
+dependants even at the price of his own spiritual integrity. In no way
+had he consulted them upon the bargain.... While we have pottered, each
+for the little good of his own family, each for the lessons and clothes
+and leisure of his own children, assenting to this injustice, conforming
+to that dishonest custom, being myopically benevolent and fundamentally
+treacherous, our accumulated folly has achieved this catastrophe. It is
+not so much human wickedness as human weakness that has permitted the
+youth of the world to go through this hell of blood and mud and fire.
+The way to the kingdom of God is the only way to the true safety, the
+true wellbeing of the children of men....
+
+It wasn't fair to them. But now he saw how unfair it was to them in a
+light that has only shone plainly upon European life since the great
+interlude of the armed peace came to an end in August, 1914. Until
+that time it had been the fashion to ignore death and evade poverty and
+necessity for the young. We can shield our young no longer, death has
+broken through our precautions and tender evasions--and his eyes went
+eastward into the twilight that had swallowed up his daughter and her
+lover.
+
+The tumbled darkling sky, monstrous masses of frowning blue, with icy
+gaps of cold light, was like the great confusions of the war. All our
+youth has had to go into that terrible and destructive chaos--because of
+the kings and churches and nationalities sturdier-souled men would have
+set aside.
+
+Everything was sharp and clear in his mind now. Eleanor after all had
+brought him his solution.
+
+He sat quite still for a little while, and then stood up and turned
+northward towards Notting Hill.
+
+The keepers were closing Kensington Gardens, and he would have to skirt
+the Park to Victoria Gate and go home by the Bayswater Road....
+
+(14)
+
+
+As he walked he rearranged in his mind this long-overdue apology for his
+faith that he was presently to make to his family. There was no one to
+interrupt him and nothing to embarrass him, and so he was able to
+set out everything very clearly and convincingly. There was perhaps a
+disposition to digress into rather voluminous subordinate explanations,
+on such themes, for instance, as sacramentalism, whereon he found
+himself summarizing Frazer's Golden Bough, which the Chasters'
+controversy had first obliged him to read, and upon the irrelevance of
+the question of immortality to the process of salvation. But the reality
+of his eclaircissement was very different from anything he prepared in
+these anticipations.
+
+Tea had been finished and put away, and the family was disposed about
+the dining-room engaged in various evening occupations; Phoebe sat at
+the table working at some mathematical problem, Clementina was reading
+with her chin on her fist and a frown on her brow; Lady Ella, Miriam and
+Daphne were busy making soft washing cloths for the wounded; Lady
+Ella had brought home the demand for them from the Red Cross centre
+in Burlington House. The family was all downstairs in the dining-room
+because the evening was chilly, and there were no fires upstairs yet
+in the drawing-room. He came into the room and exchanged greetings with
+Lady Ella. Then he stood for a time surveying his children. Phoebe, he
+noted, was a little flushed; she put passion into her work; on the whole
+she was more like Eleanor than any other of them. Miriam knitted with a
+steady skill. Clementina's face too expressed a tussle. He took up one
+of the rough-knit washing-cloths upon the side-table, and asked how many
+could be made in an hour. Then he asked some idle obvious question
+about the fire upstairs. Clementina made an involuntary movement; he was
+disturbing her. He hovered for a moment longer. He wanted to catch his
+wife's eye and speak to her first. She looked up, but before he could
+convey his wish for a private conference with her, she smiled at him and
+then bent over her work again.
+
+He went into the back study and lit his gas fire. Hitherto he had always
+made a considerable explosion when he did so, but this time by taking
+thought and lighting his match before he turned on the gas he did it
+with only a gentle thud. Then he lit his reading-lamp and pulled down
+the blind--pausing for a time to look at the lit dressmaker's opposite.
+Then he sat down thoughtfully before the fire. Presently Ella would come
+in and he would talk to her. He waited a long time, thinking only weakly
+and inconsecutively, and then he became restless. Should he call her?
+
+But he wanted their talk to begin in a natural-seeming way. He did not
+want the portentousness of “wanting to speak” to her and calling her out
+to him. He got up at last and went back into the other room. Clementina
+had gone upstairs, and the book she had been reading was lying closed on
+the sideboard. He saw it was one of Chasters' books, he took it up, it
+was “The Core of Truth in Christianity,” and he felt an irrational
+shock at the idea of Clementina reading it. In spite of his own
+immense changes of opinion he had still to revise his conception of the
+polemical Chasters as an evil influence in religion. He fidgeted
+past his wife to the mantel in search of an imaginary mislaid pencil.
+Clementina came down with some bandage linen she was cutting out. He
+hung over his wife in a way that he felt must convey his desire for a
+conversation. Then he picked up Chasters' book again. “Does any one want
+this?” he asked.
+
+“Not if I may have it again,” consented Clementina.
+
+He took it back with him and began to read again those familiar
+controversial pages. He read for the best part of an hour with his knees
+drying until they smoked over the gas. What curious stuff it was! How
+it wrangled! Was Chasters a religious man? Why did he write these
+books? Had he really a passion for truth or only a Swift-like hatred
+of weakly-thinking people? None of this stuff in his books was really
+wrong, provided it was religious-spirited. Much of it had been indeed
+destructively illuminating to its reader. It let daylight through all
+sorts of walls. Indeed, the more one read the more vividly true its
+acid-bit lines became.... And yet, and yet, there was something hateful
+in the man's tone. Scrope held the book and thought. He had seen
+Chasters once or twice. Chasters had the sort of face, the sort of
+voice, the sort of bearing that made one think of his possibly saying
+upon occasion, rudely and rejoicing, “More fool you!” Nevertheless
+Scrope perceived now with an effort of discovery that it was from
+Chasters that he had taken all the leading ideas of the new faith that
+was in him. Here was the stuff of it. He had forgotten how much of it
+was here. During those months of worried study while the threat of
+a Chasters prosecution hung over him his mind had assimilated almost
+unknowingly every assimilable element of the Chasters doctrine; he
+had either assimilated and transmuted it by the alchemy of his own
+temperament, or he had reacted obviously and filled in Chasters' gaps
+and pauses. Chasters could beat a road to the Holy of Holies, and shy
+at entering it. But in spite of all the man's roughness, in spite of a
+curious flavour of baseness and malice about him, the spirit of truth
+had spoken through him. God has a use for harsh ministers. In one man
+God lights the heart, in another the reason becomes a consuming fire.
+God takes his own where he finds it. He does not limit himself to nice
+people. In these matters of evidence and argument, in his contempt for
+amiable, demoralizing compromise, Chasters served God as Scrope could
+never hope to serve him. Scrope's new faith had perhaps been altogether
+impossible if the Chasters controversy had not ploughed his mind.
+
+For a time Scrope dwelt upon this remarkable realization. Then as
+he turned over the pages his eyes rested on a passage of uncivil and
+ungenerous sarcasm. Against old Likeman of all people!...
+
+What did a girl like Clementina make of all this? How had she got the
+book? From Eleanor? The stuff had not hurt Eleanor. Eleanor had been
+able to take the good that Chasters taught, and reject the evil of his
+spirit....
+
+He thought of Eleanor, gallantly working out her own salvation. The
+world was moving fast to a phase of great freedom--for the young and the
+bold.... He liked that boy....
+
+His thoughts came back with a start to his wife. The evening was
+slipping by and he had momentous things to say to her. He went and just
+opened the door.
+
+“Ella!” he said.
+
+“Did you want me?”
+
+“Presently.”
+
+She put a liberal interpretation upon that “presently,” so that after
+what seemed to him a long interval he had to call again, “Ella!”
+
+“Just a minute,” she answered.
+
+(15)
+
+
+Lady Ella was still, so to speak, a little in the other room when she
+came to him.
+
+“Shut that door, please,” he said, and felt the request had just that
+flavour of portentousness he wished to avoid.
+
+“What is it?” she asked.
+
+“I wanted to talk to you--about some things. I've done something rather
+serious to-day. I've made an important decision.”
+
+Her face became anxious. “What do you mean?” she asked.
+
+“You see,” he said, leaning upon the mantelshelf and looking down at the
+gas flames, “I've never thought that we should all have to live in this
+crowded house for long.”
+
+“All!” she interrupted in a voice that made him look up sharply. “You're
+not going away, Ted?”
+
+“Oh, no. But I hoped we should all be going away in a little time. It
+isn't so.”
+
+“I never quite understood why you hoped that.”
+
+“It was plain enough.”
+
+“How?”
+
+“I thought I should have found something to do that would have enabled
+us to live in better style. I'd had a plan.”
+
+“What plan?”
+
+“It's fallen through.”
+
+“But what plan was it?”
+
+“I thought I should be able to set up a sort of broad church chapel. I
+had a promise.”
+
+Her voice was rich with indignation. “And she has betrayed you?”
+
+“No,” he said, “I have betrayed her.”
+
+Lady Ella's face showed them still at cross purposes. He looked down
+again and frowned. “I can't do that chapel business,” he said. “I've had
+to let her down. I've got to let you all down. There's no help for it.
+It isn't the way. I can't have anything to do with Lady Sunderbund and
+her chapel.”
+
+“But,” Lady Ella was still perplexed.
+
+“It's too great a sacrifice.”
+
+“Of us?”
+
+“No, of myself. I can't get into her pulpit and do as she wants and keep
+my conscience. It's been a horrible riddle for me. It means plunging
+into all this poverty for good. But I can't work with her, Ella. She's
+impossible.”
+
+“You mean--you're going to break with Lady Sunderbund?”
+
+“I must.”
+
+“Then, Teddy!”--she was a woman groping for flight amidst intolerable
+perplexities--“why did you ever leave the church?”
+
+“Because I have ceased to believe--”
+
+“But had it nothing to do with Lady Sunderbund?”
+
+He stared at her in astonishment.
+
+“If it means breaking with that woman,” she said.
+
+“You mean,” he said, beginning for the first time to comprehend her,
+“that you don't mind the poverty?”
+
+“Poverty!” she cried. “I cared for nothing but the disgrace.”
+
+“Disgrace?”
+
+“Oh, never mind, Ted! If it isn't true, if I've been dreaming....”
+
+Instead of a woman stunned by a life sentence of poverty, he saw his
+wife rejoicing as if she had heard good news.
+
+Their minds were held for a minute by the sound of some one knocking
+at the house door; one of the girls opened the door, there was a brief
+hubbub in the passage and then they heard a cry of “Eleanor!” through
+the folding doors.
+
+“There's Eleanor,” he said, realizing he had told his wife nothing of
+the encounter in Hyde Park.
+
+They heard Eleanor's clear voice: “Where's Mummy? Or Daddy?” and then:
+“Can't stay now, dears. Where's Mummy or Daddy?”
+
+“I ought to have told you,” said Scrope quickly. “I met Eleanor in the
+Park. By accident. She's come up unexpectedly. To meet a boy going to
+the front. Quite a nice boy. Son of Riverton the doctor. The parting had
+made them understand one another. It's all right, Ella. It's a little
+irregular, but I'd stake my life on the boy. She's very lucky.”
+
+Eleanor appeared through the folding doors. She came to business at
+once.
+
+“I promised you I'd come back to supper here, Daddy,” she said. “But I
+don't want to have supper here. I want to stay out late.”
+
+She saw her mother look perplexed. “Hasn't Daddy told you?”
+
+“But where is young Riverton?”
+
+“He's outside.”
+
+Eleanor became aware of a broad chink in the folding doors that was
+making the dining-room an auditorium for their dialogue. She shut them
+deftly.
+
+“I have told Mummy,” Scrope explained. “Bring him in to supper. We ought
+to see him.”
+
+Eleanor hesitated. She indicated her sisters beyond the folding doors.
+“They'll all be watching us, Mummy,” she said. “We'd be uncomfortable.
+And besides--”
+
+“But you can't go out and dine with him alone!”
+
+“Oh, Mummy! It's our only chance.”
+
+“Customs are changing,” said Scrope.
+
+“But can they?” asked Lady Ella.
+
+“I don't see why not.”
+
+The mother was still doubtful, but she was in no mood to cross her
+husband that night. “It's an exceptional occasion,” said Scrope, and
+Eleanor knew her point was won. She became radiant. “I can be late?”
+
+Scrope handed her his latch-key without a word.
+
+“You dear kind things,” she said, and went to the door. Then turned and
+came back and kissed her father. Then she kissed her mother. “It is
+so kind of you,” she said, and was gone. They listened to her passage
+through a storm of questions in the dining-room.
+
+“Three months ago that would have shocked me,” said Lady Ella.
+
+“You haven't seen the boy,” said Scrope.
+
+“But the appearances!”
+
+“Aren't we rather breaking with appearances?” he said.
+
+“And he goes to-morrow--perhaps to get killed,” he added. “A lad like
+a schoolboy. A young thing. Because of the political foolery that we
+priests and teachers have suffered in the place of the Kingdom of God,
+because we have allowed the religion of Europe to become a lie; because
+no man spoke the word of God. You see--when I see that--see those two,
+those children of one-and-twenty, wrenched by tragedy, beginning with
+a parting.... It's like a knife slashing at all our appearances and
+discretions.... Think of our lovemaking....”
+
+The front door banged.
+
+He had some idea of resuming their talk. But his was a scattered mind
+now.
+
+“It's a quarter to eight,” he said as if in explanation.
+
+“I must see to the supper,” said Lady Ella.
+
+(16)
+
+
+There was an air of tension at supper as though the whole family felt
+that momentous words impended. But Phoebe had emerged victorious from
+her mathematical struggle, and she seemed to eat with better appetite
+than she had shown for some time. It was a cold meat supper; Lady Ella
+had found it impossible to keep up the regular practice of a cooked
+dinner in the evening, and now it was only on Thursdays that the
+Scropes, to preserve their social tradition, dressed and dined; the rest
+of the week they supped. Lady Ella never talked very much at supper;
+this evening was no exception. Clementina talked of London University
+and Bedford College; she had been making enquiries; Daphne described
+some of the mistresses at her new school. The feeling that something was
+expected had got upon Scrope's nerves. He talked a little in a flat and
+obvious way, and lapsed into thoughtful silences. While supper was being
+cleared away he went back into his study.
+
+Thence he returned to the dining-room hearthrug as his family resumed
+their various occupations.
+
+He tried to speak in a casual conversational tone.
+
+“I want to tell you all,” he said, “of something that has happened
+to-day.”
+
+He waited. Phoebe had begun to figure at a fresh sheet of computations.
+Miriam bent her head closer over her work, as though she winced at what
+was coming. Daphne and Clementina looked at one another. Their eyes said
+“Eleanor!” But he was too full of his own intention to read that glance.
+Only his wife regarded him attentively.
+
+“It concerns you all,” he said.
+
+He looked at Phoebe. He saw Lady Ella's hand go out and touch the girl's
+hand gently to make her desist. Phoebe obeyed, with a little sigh.
+
+“I want to tell you that to-day I refused an income that would certainly
+have exceeded fifteen hundred pounds a year.”
+
+Clementina looked up now. This was not what she expected. Her expression
+conveyed protesting enquiry.
+
+“I want you all to understand why I did that and why we are in the
+position we are in, and what lies before us. I want you to know what has
+been going on in my mind.”
+
+He looked down at the hearthrug, and tried to throw off a memory of his
+Princhester classes for young women, that oppressed him. His manner
+he forced to a more familiar note. He stuck his hands into his trouser
+pockets.
+
+“You know, my dears, I had to give up the church. I just simply didn't
+believe any more in orthodox Church teaching. And I feel I've never
+explained that properly to you. Not at all clearly. I want to explain
+that now. It's a queer thing, I know, for me to say to you, but I want
+you to understand that I am a religious man. I believe that God matters
+more than wealth or comfort or position or the respect of men, that he
+also matters more than your comfort and prosperity. God knows I have
+cared for your comfort and prosperity. I don't want you to think that in
+all these changes we have been through lately, I haven't been aware of
+all the discomfort into which you have come--the relative discomfort.
+Compared with Princhester this is dark and crowded and poverty-stricken.
+I have never felt crowded before, but in this house I know you are
+horribly crowded. It is a house that seems almost contrived for small
+discomforts. This narrow passage outside; the incessant going up and
+down stairs. And there are other things. There is the blankness of our
+London Sundays. What is the good of pretending? They are desolating.
+There's the impossibility too of getting good servants to come into our
+dug-out kitchen. I'm not blind to all these sordid consequences. But all
+the same, God has to be served first. I had to come to this. I felt I
+could not serve God any longer as a bishop in the established church,
+because I did not believe that the established church was serving God.
+I struggled against that conviction--and I struggled against it largely
+for your sakes. But I had to obey my conviction.... I haven't talked
+to you about these things as much as I should have done, but partly at
+least that is due to the fact that my own mind has been changing and
+reconsidering, going forward and going back, and in that fluid state
+it didn't seem fair to tell you things that I might presently find
+mistaken. But now I begin to feel that I have really thought out things,
+and that they are definite enough to tell you....”
+
+He paused and resumed. “A number of things have helped to change the
+opinions in which I grew up and in which you have grown up. There were
+worries at Princhester; I didn't let you know much about them, but there
+were. There was something harsh and cruel in that atmosphere. I saw for
+the first time--it's a lesson I'm still only learning--how harsh and
+greedy rich people and employing people are to poor people and working
+people, and how ineffective our church was to make things better. That
+struck me. There were religious disputes in the diocese too, and they
+shook me. I thought my faith was built on a rock, and I found it was
+built on sand. It was slipping and sliding long before the war. But the
+war brought it down. Before the war such a lot of things in England and
+Europe seemed like a comedy or a farce, a bad joke that one tolerated.
+One tried half consciously, half avoiding the knowledge of what one was
+doing, to keep one's own little circle and life civilized. The war shook
+all those ideas of isolation, all that sort of evasion, down. The world
+is the rightful kingdom of God; we had left its affairs to kings and
+emperors and suchlike impostors, to priests and profit-seekers and
+greedy men. We were genteel condoners. The war has ended that. It
+thrusts into all our lives. It brings death so close--A fortnight ago
+twenty-seven people were killed and injured within a mile of this by
+Zeppelin bombs.... Every one loses some one.... Because through all that
+time men like myself were going through our priestly mummeries, abasing
+ourselves to kings and politicians, when we ought to have been crying
+out: 'No! No! There is no righteousness in the world, there is no right
+government, except it be the kingdom of God.'”
+
+He paused and looked at them. They were all listening to him now. But he
+was still haunted by a dread of preaching in his own family. He dropped
+to the conversational note again.
+
+“You see what I had in mind. I saw I must come out of this, and preach
+the kingdom of God. That was my idea. I don't want to force it upon you,
+but I want you to understand why I acted as I did. But let me come to
+the particular thing that has happened to-day. I did not think when I
+made my final decision to leave the church that it meant such poverty as
+this we are living in--permanently. That is what I want to make clear to
+you. I thought there would be a temporary dip into dinginess, but that
+was all. There was a plan; at the time it seemed a right and reasonable
+plan; for setting up a chapel in London, a very plain and simple
+undenominational chapel, for the simple preaching of the world kingdom
+of God. There was some one who seemed prepared to meet all the immediate
+demands for such a chapel.”
+
+“Was it Lady Sunderbund?” asked Clementina.
+
+Scrope was pulled up abruptly. “Yes,” he said. “It seemed at first a
+quite hopeful project.”
+
+“We'd have hated that,” said Clementina, with a glance as if for assent,
+at her mother. “We should all have hated that.”
+
+“Anyhow it has fallen through.”
+
+“We don't mind that,” said Clementina, and Daphne echoed her words.
+
+“I don't see that there is any necessity to import this note
+of--hostility to Lady Sunderbund into this matter.” He addressed
+himself rather more definitely to Lady Ella. “She's a woman of a very
+extraordinary character, highly emotional, energetic, generous to an
+extraordinary extent....”
+
+Daphne made a little noise like a comment.
+
+A faint acerbity in her father's voice responded.
+
+“Anyhow you make a mistake if you think that the personality of Lady
+Sunderbund has very much to do with this thing now. Her quality may have
+brought out certain aspects of the situation rather more sharply than
+they might have been brought out under other circumstances, but if
+this chapel enterprise had been suggested by quite a different sort of
+person, by a man, or by a committee, in the end I think I should have
+come to the same conclusion. Leave Lady Sunderbund out. Any chapel was
+impossible. It is just this specialization that has been the trouble
+with religion. It is just this tendency to make it the business of
+a special sort of man, in a special sort of building, on a special
+day--Every man, every building, every day belongs equally to God.
+That is my conviction. I think that the only possible existing sort of
+religions meeting is something after the fashion of the Quaker meeting.
+In that there is no professional religious man at all; not a trace of
+the sacrifices to the ancient gods.... And no room for a professional
+religions man....” He felt his argument did a little escape him. He
+snatched, “That is what I want to make clear to you. God is not a
+speciality; he is a universal interest.”
+
+He stopped. Both Daphne and Clementina seemed disposed to say something
+and did not say anything.
+
+Miriam was the first to speak. “Daddy,” she said, “I know I'm stupid.
+But are we still Christians?”
+
+“I want you to think for yourselves.”
+
+“But I mean,” said Miriam, “are we--something like Quakers--a sort of
+very broad Christians?”
+
+“You are what you choose to be. If you want to keep in the church, then
+you must keep in the church. If you feel that the Christian doctrine is
+alive, then it is alive so far as you are concerned.”
+
+“But the creeds?” asked Clementina.
+
+He shook his head. “So far as Christianity is defined by its creeds,
+I am not a Christian. If we are going to call any sort of religious
+feeling that has a respect for Jesus, Christianity, then no doubt I am
+a Christian. But so was Mohammed at that rate. Let me tell you what I
+believe. I believe in God, I believe in the immediate presence of God in
+every human life, I believe that our lives have to serve the Kingdom of
+God....”
+
+“That practically is what Mr. Chasters calls 'The Core of Truth in
+Christianity.'”
+
+“You have been reading him?”
+
+“Eleanor lent me the book. But Mr. Chasters keeps his living.”
+
+“I am not Chasters,” said Scrope stiffly, and then relenting: “What he
+does may be right for him. But I could not do as he does.”
+
+Lady Ella had said no word for some time.
+
+“I would be ashamed,” she said quietly, “if you had not done as you
+have done. I don't mind--The girls don't mind--all this.... Not when we
+understand--as we do now.”
+
+That was the limit of her eloquence.
+
+“Not now that we understand, Daddy,” said Clementina, and a faint
+flavour of Lady Sunderbund seemed to pass and vanish.
+
+There was a queer little pause. He stood rather distressed and
+perplexed, because the talk had not gone quite as he had intended it
+to go. It had deteriorated towards personal issues. Phoebe broke the
+awkwardness by jumping up and coming to her father. “Dear Daddy,” she
+said, and kissed him.
+
+“We didn't understand properly,” said Clementina, in the tone of one who
+explains away much--that had never been spoken....
+
+“Daddy,” said Miriam with an inspiration, “may I play something to you
+presently?”
+
+“But the fire!” interjected Lady Ella, disposing of that idea.
+
+“I want you to know, all of you, the faith I have,” he said.
+
+Daphne had remained seated at the table.
+
+“Are we never to go to church again?” she asked, as if at a loss.
+
+(17)
+
+
+Scrope went back into his little study. He felt shy and awkward with his
+daughters now. He felt it would be difficult to get back to usualness
+with them. To-night it would be impossible. To-morrow he must come
+down to breakfast as though their talk had never occurred.... In his
+rehearsal of this deliverance during his walk home he had spoken much
+more plainly of his sense of the coming of God to rule the world and end
+the long age of the warring nations and competing traders, and he had
+intended to speak with equal plainness of the passionate subordination
+of the individual life to this great common purpose of God and man, an
+aspect he had scarcely mentioned at all. But in that little room, in the
+presence of those dear familiar people, those great horizons of life
+had vanished. The room with its folding doors had fixed the scale.
+The wallpaper had smothered the Kingdom of God; he had been, he felt,
+domestic; it had been an after-supper talk. He had been put out, too, by
+the mention of Lady Sunderbund and the case of Chasters....
+
+In his study he consoled himself for this diminution of his intention.
+It had taken him five years, he reflected, to get to his present real
+sense of God's presence and to his personal subordination to God's
+purpose. It had been a little absurd, he perceived, to expect these
+girls to leap at once to a complete understanding of the halting hints,
+the allusive indications of the thoughts that now possessed his soul. He
+tried like some maiden speaker to recall exactly what it was he had said
+and what it was he had forgotten to say.... This was merely a beginning,
+merely a beginning.
+
+After the girls had gone to bed, Lady Ella came to him and she was
+glowing and tender; she was in love again as she had not been since the
+shadow had first fallen between them. “I was so glad you spoke to them,”
+ she said. “They had been puzzled. But they are dear loyal girls.”
+
+He tried to tell her rather more plainly what he felt about the whole
+question of religion in their lives, but eloquence had departed from
+him.
+
+“You see, Ella, life cannot get out of tragedy--and sordid
+tragedy--until we bring about the Kingdom of God. It's no unreality that
+has made me come out of the church.”
+
+“No, dear. No,” she said soothingly and reassuringly. “With all these
+mere boys going to the most dreadful deaths in the trenches, with death,
+hardship and separation running amok in the world--”
+
+“One has to do something,” she agreed.
+
+“I know, dear,” he said, “that all this year of doubt and change has
+been a dreadful year for you.”
+
+“It was stupid of me,” she said, “but I have been so unhappy. It's
+over now--but I was wretched. And there was nothing I could say....
+I prayed.... It isn't the poverty I feared ever, but the disgrace.
+Now--I'm happy. I'm happy again.
+
+“But how far do you come with me?”
+
+“I'm with you.”
+
+“But,” he said, “you are still a churchwoman?”
+
+“I don't know,” she said. “I don't mind.”
+
+He stared at her.
+
+“But I thought always that was what hurt you most, my breach with the
+church.”
+
+“Things are so different now,” she said.
+
+Her heart dissolved within her into tender possessiveness. There came
+flooding into her mind the old phrases of an ancient story: “Whither
+thou goest I will go... thy people shall be my people and thy God my
+God.... The Lord do so to me and more also if aught but death part thee
+and me.”
+
+Just those words would Lady Ella have said to her husband now, but she
+was capable of no such rhetoric.
+
+“Whither thou goest,” she whispered almost inaudibly, and she could get
+no further. “My dear,” she said.
+
+(18)
+
+
+At two o'clock the next morning Scrope was still up. He was sitting over
+the snoring gas fire in his study. He did not want to go to bed. His
+mind was too excited, he knew, for any hope of sleep. In the last twelve
+hours, since he had gone out across the park to his momentous talk with
+Lady Sunderbund, it seemed to him that his life had passed through its
+cardinal crisis and come to its crown and decision. The spiritual voyage
+that had begun five years ago amidst a stormy succession of theological
+nightmares had reached harbour at last. He was established now in the
+sure conviction of God's reality, and of his advent to unify the lives
+of men and to save mankind. Some unobserved process in his mind had
+perfected that conviction, behind the cloudy veil of his vacillations
+and moods. Surely that work was finished now, and the day's experience
+had drawn the veil and discovered God established for ever.
+
+He contrasted this simple and overruling knowledge of God as the supreme
+fact in a practical world with that vague and ineffective subject for
+sentiment who had been the “God” of his Anglican days. Some theologian
+once spoke of God as “the friend behind phenomena”; that Anglican deity
+had been rather a vague flummery behind court and society, wealth,
+“respectability,” and the comfortable life. And even while he had lived
+in lipservice to that complaisant compromise, this true God had been
+here, this God he now certainly professed, waiting for his allegiance,
+waiting to take up the kingship of this distraught and bloodstained
+earth. The finding of God is but the stripping of bandages from the
+eyes. Seek and ye shall find....
+
+He whispered four words very softly: “The Kingdom of God!”
+
+He was quite sure he had that now, quite sure.
+
+The Kingdom of God!
+
+That now was the form into which all his life must fall. He recalled his
+vision of the silver sphere and of ten thousand diverse minds about the
+world all making their ways to the same one conclusion. Here at last was
+a king and emperor for mankind for whom one need have neither contempt
+nor resentment; here was an aim for which man might forge the steel
+and wield the scalpel, write and paint and till and teach. Upon this
+conception he must model all his life. Upon this basis he must found
+friendships and co-operations. All the great religions, Christianity,
+Islam, in the days of their power and honesty, had proclaimed the advent
+of this kingdom of God. It had been their common inspiration. A religion
+surrenders when it abandons the promise of its Millennium. He had
+recovered that ancient and immortal hope. All men must achieve it, and
+with their achievement the rule of God begins. He muttered his faith. It
+made it more definite to put it into words and utter it. “It comes.
+It surely comes. To-morrow I begin. I will do no work that goes not
+Godward. Always now it shall be the truth as near as I can put it.
+Always now it shall be the service of the commonweal as well as I can
+do it. I will live for the ending of all false kingship and priestcraft,
+for the eternal growth of the spirit of man....”
+
+He was, he knew clearly, only one common soldier in a great army that
+was finding its way to enlistment round and about the earth. He was not
+alone. While the kings of this world fought for dominion these others
+gathered and found themselves and one another, these others of the faith
+that grows plain, these men who have resolved to end the bloodstained
+chronicles of the Dynasts and the miseries of a world that trades in
+life, for ever. They were many men, speaking divers tongues. He was
+but one who obeyed the worldwide impulse. He could smile at the artless
+vanity that had blinded him to the import of his earlier visions, that
+had made him imagine himself a sole discoverer, a new Prophet, that had
+brought him so near to founding a new sect. Every soldier in the new
+host was a recruiting sergeant according to his opportunity.... And none
+was leader. Only God was leader....
+
+“The achievement of the Kingdom of God;” this was his calling.
+Henceforth this was his business in life....
+
+For a time he indulged in vague dreams of that kingdom of God on earth
+of which he would be one of the makers; it was a dream of a shadowy
+splendour of cities, of great scientific achievements, of a universal
+beauty, of beautiful people living in the light of God, of a splendid
+adventure, thrusting out at last among the stars. But neither his
+natural bent nor his mental training inclined him to mechanical or
+administrative explicitness. Much more was his dream a vision of
+men inwardly ennobled and united in spirit. He saw history growing
+reasonable and life visibly noble as mankind realized the divine aim.
+All the outward peace and order, the joy of physical existence finely
+conceived, the mounting power and widening aim were but the expression
+and verification of the growth of God within. Then we would bear
+children for finer ends than the blood and mud of battlefields. Life
+would tower up like a great flame. By faith we reached forward to that.
+The vision grew more splendid as it grew more metaphorical. And the
+price one paid for that; one gave sham dignities, false honour, a
+Levitical righteousness, immediate peace, one bartered kings and
+churches for God.... He looked at the mean, poverty-struck room, he
+marked the dinginess and tawdriness of its detail and all the sordid
+evidences of ungracious bargaining and grudging service in its
+appointments. For all his life now he would have to live in such rooms.
+He who had been one of the lucky ones.... Well, men were living in
+dug-outs and dying gaily in muddy trenches, they had given limbs and
+lives, eyes and the joy of movement, prosperity and pride, for a smaller
+cause and a feebler assurance than this that he had found....
+
+(19)
+
+
+Presently his thoughts were brought back to his family by the sounds of
+Eleanor's return. He heard her key in the outer door; he heard her move
+about in the hall and then slip lightly up to bed. He did not go out to
+speak to her, and she did not note the light under his door.
+
+He would talk to her later when this discovery of her own emotions no
+longer dominated her mind. He recalled her departing figure and how she
+had walked, touching and looking up to her young mate, and he a little
+leaning to her....
+
+“God bless them and save them,” he said....
+
+He thought of her sisters. They had said but little to his clumsy
+explanations. He thought of the years and experience that they must
+needs pass through before they could think the fulness of his present
+thoughts, and so he tempered his disappointment. They were a gallant
+group, he felt. He had to thank Ella and good fortune that so they were.
+There was Clementina with her odd quick combatant sharpness, a harder
+being than Eleanor, but nevertheless a fine-spirited and even more
+independent. There was Miriam, indefatigably kind. Phoebe too had a real
+passion of the intellect and Daphne an innate disposition to service.
+But it was strange how they had taken his proclamation of a conclusive
+breach with the church as though it was a command they must, at least
+outwardly, obey. He had expected them to be more deeply shocked; he had
+thought he would have to argue against objections and convert them to
+his views. Their acquiescence was strange. They were content he should
+think all this great issue out and give his results to them. And his
+wife, well as he knew her, had surprised him. He thought of her words:
+“Whither thou goest--”
+
+He was dissatisfied with this unconditional agreement. Why could not
+his wife meet God as he had met God? Why must Miriam put the fantastic
+question--as though it was not for her to decide: “Are we still
+Christians?” And pursuing this thought, why couldn't Lady Sunderbund set
+up in religion for herself without going about the world seeking for
+a priest and prophet. Were women Undines who must get their souls from
+mortal men? And who was it tempted men to set themselves up as priests?
+It was the wife, the disciple, the lover, who was the last, the most
+fatal pitfall on the way to God.
+
+He began to pray, still sitting as he prayed.
+
+“Oh God!” he prayed. “Thou who has shown thyself to me, let me never
+forget thee again. Save me from forgetfulness. And show thyself to those
+I love; show thyself to all mankind. Use me, O God, use me; but keep my
+soul alive. Save me from the presumption of the trusted servant; save me
+from the vanity of authority....
+
+“And let thy light shine upon all those who are so dear to me.... Save
+them from me. Take their dear loyalty....”
+
+He paused. A flushed, childishly miserable face that stared indignantly
+through glittering tears, rose before his eyes. He forgot that he had
+been addressing God.
+
+“How can I help you, you silly thing?” he said. “I would give my own
+soul to know that God had given his peace to you. I could not do as you
+wished. And I have hurt you!... You hurt yourself.... But all the time
+you would have hampered me and tempted me--and wasted yourself. It was
+impossible.... And yet you are so fine!”
+
+He was struck by another aspect.
+
+“Ella was happy--partly because Lady Sunderbund was hurt and left
+desolated....”
+
+“Both of them are still living upon nothings. Living for nothings. A
+phantom way of living....”
+
+He stared blankly at the humming blue gas jets amidst the incandescent
+asbestos for a space.
+
+“Make them understand,” he pleaded, as though he spoke confidentially of
+some desirable and reasonable thing to a friend who sat beside him. “You
+see it is so hard for them until they understand. It is easy enough when
+one understands. Easy--” He reflected for some moments--“It is as if
+they could not exist--except in relationship to other definite people.
+I want them to exist--as now I exist--in relationship to God. Knowing
+God....”
+
+But now he was talking to himself again.
+
+“So far as one can know God,” he said presently.
+
+For a while he remained frowning at the fire. Then he bent forward,
+turned out the gas, arose with the air of a man who relinquishes a
+difficult task. “One is limited,” he said. “All one's ideas must fall
+within one's limitations. Faith is a sort of tour de force. A feat of
+the imagination. For such things as we are. Naturally--naturally.... One
+perceives it clearly only in rare moments.... That alters nothing....”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:
+
+     LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
+     KIPPS
+     MR. POLLY
+     THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
+     THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
+     ANN VERONICA
+     TONO BUNGAY
+     MARRIAGE
+     BEALBY
+     THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
+     THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
+     THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+     MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
+
+     The following fantastic and imaginative romances:
+     THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
+     THE TIME MACHINE
+     THE WONDERFUL VISIT
+     THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
+     THE SEA LADY
+     THE SLEEPER AWAKES
+     THE FOOD OF THE GODS
+     THE WAR IN THE AIR
+     THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
+     IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
+     THE WORLD SET FREE
+
+     And numerous Short Stories now collected in
+     One Volume under the title of
+     THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
+
+     A Series of books upon Social, Religious and
+     Political questions:
+     ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
+     MANKIND IN THE MAKING
+     FIRST AND LAST THINGS (RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY)
+     NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
+     A MODERN UTOPIA
+     THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
+     AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
+     WHAT IS COMING?
+     WAR AND THE FUTURE
+     GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
+
+     And two little books about children's play, called:
+     FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Soul of a Bishop, by H. G. Wells
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1269 ***
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+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Soul of a Bishop, by H. G. Wells
+    </title>
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+
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+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
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+  </head>
+  <body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1269 ***</div>
+
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By H. G. Wells
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <big><b>THE SOUL OF A BISHOP</b></big> </a>
+    </p>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER THE FIRST </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE DREAM
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER THE SECOND</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER THE THIRD</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          INSOMNIA
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER THE FOURTH</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER THE FIFTH</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE FIRST VISION
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER THE SIXTH</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          EXEGETICAL
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER THE SEVENTH&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE SECOND VISION
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER THE EIGHTH</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE NEW WORLD
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER THE NINTH</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE THIRD VISION
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FIRST - THE DREAM
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      IT was a scene of bitter disputation. A hawk-nosed young man with a
+      pointing finger was prominent. His face worked violently, his lips moved
+      very rapidly, but what he said was inaudible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Behind him the little rufous man with the big eyes twitched at his robe
+      and offered suggestions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And behind these two clustered a great multitude of heated, excited,
+      swarthy faces....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The emperor sat on his golden throne in the midst of the gathering,
+      commanding silence by gestures, speaking inaudibly to them in a tongue the
+      majority did not use, and then prevailing. They ceased their
+      interruptions, and the old man, Arius, took up the debate. For a time all
+      those impassioned faces were intent upon him; they listened as though they
+      sought occasion, and suddenly as if by a preconcerted arrangement they
+      were all thrusting their fingers into their ears and knitting their brows
+      in assumed horror; some were crying aloud and making as if to fly. Some
+      indeed tucked up their garments and fled. They spread out into a pattern.
+      They were like the little monks who run from St. Jerome's lion in the
+      picture by Carpaccio. Then one zealot rushed forward and smote the old man
+      heavily upon the mouth....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hall seemed to grow vaster and vaster, the disputing, infuriated
+      figures multiplied to an innumerable assembly, they drove about like
+      snowflakes in a gale, they whirled in argumentative couples, they spun in
+      eddies of contradiction, they made extraordinary patterns, and then amidst
+      the cloudy darkness of the unfathomable dome above them there appeared and
+      increased a radiant triangle in which shone an eye. The eye and the
+      triangle filled the heavens, sent out flickering rays, glowed to a
+      blinding incandescence, seemed to be speaking words of thunder that were
+      nevertheless inaudible. It was as if that thunder filled the heavens, it
+      was as if it were nothing but the beating artery in the sleeper's ear. The
+      attention strained to hear and comprehend, and on the very verge of
+      comprehension snapped like a fiddle-string.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nicoea!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The word remained like a little ash after a flare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sleeper had awakened and lay very still, oppressed by a sense of
+      intellectual effort that had survived the dream in which it had arisen.
+      Was it so that things had happened? The slumber-shadowed mind, moving
+      obscurely, could not determine whether it was so or not. Had they indeed
+      behaved in this manner when the great mystery was established? Who said
+      they stopped their ears with their fingers and fled, shouting with horror?
+      Shouting? Was it Eusebius or Athanasius? Or Sozomen.... Some letter or
+      apology by Athanasius?... And surely it was impossible that the Trinity
+      could have appeared visibly as a triangle and an eye. Above such an
+      assembly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was mere dreaming, of course. Was it dreaming after Raphael? After
+      Raphael? The drowsy mind wandered into a side issue. Was the picture that
+      had suggested this dream the one in the Vatican where all the Fathers of
+      the Church are shown disputing together? But there surely God and the Son
+      themselves were painted with a symbol&mdash;some symbol&mdash;also? But
+      was that disputation about the Trinity at all? Wasn't it rather about a
+      chalice and a dove? Of course it was a chalice and a dove! Then where did
+      one see the triangle and the eye? And men disputing? Some such picture
+      there was....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What a lot of disputing there had been! What endless disputing! Which had
+      gone on. Until last night. When this very disagreeable young man with the
+      hawk nose and the pointing finger had tackled one when one was sorely
+      fagged, and disputed; disputed. Rebuked and disputed. &ldquo;Answer me this,&rdquo; he
+      had said.... And still one's poor brains disputed and would not rest....
+      About the Trinity....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The brain upon the pillow was now wearily awake. It was at once hopelessly
+      awake and active and hopelessly unprogressive. It was like some floating
+      stick that had got caught in an eddy in a river, going round and round and
+      round. And round. Eternally&mdash;eternally&mdash;eternally begotten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what possible meaning do you attach then to such a phrase as
+      eternally begotten?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The brain upon the pillow stared hopelessly at this question, without an
+      answer, without an escape. The three repetitions spun round and round,
+      became a swiftly revolving triangle, like some electric sign that had got
+      beyond control, in the midst of which stared an unwinking and resentful
+      eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every one knows that expedient of the sleepless, the counting of sheep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You lie quite still, you breathe regularly, you imagine sheep jumping over
+      a gate, one after another, you count them quietly and slowly until you
+      count yourself off through a fading string of phantom numbers to number
+      Nod....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But sheep, alas! suggest an episcopal crook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And presently a black sheep had got into the succession and was struggling
+      violently with the crook about its leg, a hawk-nosed black sheep full of
+      reproof, with disordered hair and a pointing finger. A young man with a
+      most disagreeable voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At which the other sheep took heart and, deserting the numbered
+      succession, came and sat about the fire in a big drawing-room and argued
+      also. In particular there was Lady Sunderbund, a pretty fragile tall woman
+      in the corner, richly jewelled, who sat with her pretty eyes watching and
+      her lips compressed. What had she thought of it? She had said very little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is an unusual thing for a mixed gathering of this sort to argue about
+      the Trinity. Simply because a tired bishop had fallen into their party. It
+      was not fair to him to pretend that the atmosphere was a liberal and
+      inquiring one, when the young man who had sat still and dormant by the
+      table was in reality a keen and bitter Irish Roman Catholic. Then the
+      question, a question-begging question, was put quite suddenly, without
+      preparation or prelude, by surprise. &ldquo;Why, Bishop, was the Spermaticos
+      Logos identified with the Second and not the Third Person of the Trinity?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was indiscreet, it was silly, to turn upon the speaker and affect an
+      air of disengagement and modernity and to say: &ldquo;Ah, that indeed is the
+      unfortunate aspect of the whole affair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whereupon the fierce young man had exploded with: &ldquo;To that, is it, that
+      you Anglicans have come?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole gathering had given itself up to the disputation, Lady
+      Sunderbund, an actress, a dancer&mdash;though she, it is true, did not say
+      very much&mdash;a novelist, a mechanical expert of some sort, a railway
+      peer, geniuses, hairy and Celtic, people of no clearly definable position,
+      but all quite unequal to the task of maintaining that air of reverent
+      vagueness, that tenderness of touch, which is by all Anglican standards
+      imperative in so deep, so mysterious, and, nowadays, in mixed society at
+      least, so infrequent a discussion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was like animals breaking down a fence about some sacred spot. Within a
+      couple of minutes the affair had become highly improper. They had raised
+      their voices, they had spoken with the utmost familiarity of almost
+      unspeakable things. There had been even attempts at epigram. Athanasian
+      epigrams. Bent the novelist had doubted if originally there had been a
+      Third Person in the Trinity at all. He suggested a reaction from a
+      too-Manichaean dualism at some date after the time of St. John's Gospel.
+      He maintained obstinately that that Gospel was dualistic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The unpleasant quality of the talk was far more manifest in the retrospect
+      than it had been at the time. It had seemed then bold and strange, but not
+      impossible; now in the cold darkness it seemed sacrilegious. And the
+      bishop's share, which was indeed only the weak yielding of a tired man to
+      an atmosphere he had misjudged, became a disgraceful display of levity and
+      bad faith. They had baited him. Some one had said that nowadays every one
+      was an Arian, knowingly or unknowingly. They had not concealed their
+      conviction that the bishop did not really believe in the Creeds he
+      uttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that unfortunate first admission stuck terribly in his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh! Why had he made it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sleep had gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The awakened sleeper groaned, sat up in the darkness, and felt gropingly
+      in this unaccustomed bed and bedroom first for the edge of the bed and
+      then for the electric light that was possibly on the little bedside table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The searching hand touched something. A water-bottle. The hand resumed its
+      exploration. Here was something metallic and smooth, a stem. Either above
+      or below there must be a switch....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The switch was found, grasped, and turned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The darkness fled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a mirror the sleeper saw the reflection of his face and a corner of the
+      bed in which he lay. The lamp had a tilted shade that threw a slanting bar
+      of shadow across the field of reflection, lighting a right-angled triangle
+      very brightly and leaving the rest obscure. The bed was a very great one,
+      a bed for the Anakim. It had a canopy with yellow silk curtains,
+      surmounted by a gilded crown of carved wood. Between the curtains was a
+      man's face, clean-shaven, pale, with disordered brown hair and weary,
+      pale-blue eyes. He was clad in purple pyjamas, and the hand that now ran
+      its fingers through the brown hair was long and lean and shapely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beside the bed was a convenient little table bearing the light, a
+      water-bottle and glass, a bunch of keys, a congested pocket-book, a
+      gold-banded fountain pen, and a gold watch that indicated a quarter past
+      three. On the lower edge of the picture in the mirror appeared the back of
+      a gilt chair, over which a garment of peculiar construction had been
+      carelessly thrown. It was in the form of that sleeveless cassock of
+      purple, opening at the side, whose lower flap is called a bishop's apron;
+      the corner of the frogged coat showed behind the chair-back, and the sash
+      lay crumpled on the floor. Black doeskin breeches, still warmly lined with
+      their pants, lay where they had been thrust off at the corner of the bed,
+      partly covering black hose and silver-buckled shoes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment the tired gaze of the man in the bed rested upon these
+      evidences of his episcopal dignity. Then he turned from them to the watch
+      at the bedside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He groaned helplessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These country doctors were no good. There wasn't a physician in the
+      diocese. He must go to London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked into the weary eyes of his reflection and said, as one makes a
+      reassuring promise, &ldquo;London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was being worried. He was being intolerably worried, and he was ill and
+      unable to sustain his positions. This doubt, this sudden discovery of
+      controversial unsoundness, was only one aspect of his general
+      neurasthenia. It had been creeping into his mind since the &ldquo;Light Unden
+      the Altar&rdquo; controversy. Now suddenly it had leapt upon him from his own
+      unwary lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The immediate trouble arose from his loyalty. He had followed the King's
+      example; he had become a total abstainer and, in addition, on his own
+      account he had ceased to smoke. And his digestion, which Princhester had
+      first made sensitive, was deranged. He was suffering chemically, suffering
+      one of those nameless sequences of maladjustments that still defy our
+      ordinary medical science. It was afflicting him with a general malaise, it
+      was affecting his energy, his temper, all the balance and comfort of his
+      nerves. All day he was weary; all night he was wakeful. He was estranged
+      from his body. He was distressed by a sense of detachment from the things
+      about him, by a curious intimation of unreality in everything he
+      experienced. And with that went this levity of conscience, a heaviness of
+      soul and a levity of conscience, that could make him talk as though the
+      Creeds did not matter&mdash;as though nothing mattered....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If only he could smoke!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was persuaded that a couple of Egyptian cigarettes, or three at the
+      outside, a day, would do wonders in restoring his nervous calm. That, and
+      just a weak whisky and soda at lunch and dinner. Suppose now&mdash;!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His conscience, his sense of honour, deserted him. Latterly he had had
+      several of these conscience-blanks; it was only when they were over that
+      he realized that they had occurred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One might smoke up the chimney, he reflected. But he had no cigarettes!
+      Perhaps if he were to slip downstairs....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why had he given up smoking?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He groaned aloud. He and his reflection eyed one another in mutual
+      despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There came before his memory the image of a boy's face, a swarthy little
+      boy, grinning, grinning with a horrible knowingness and pointing his
+      finger&mdash;an accusing finger. It had been the most exasperating,
+      humiliating, and shameful incident in the bishop's career. It was the
+      afternoon for his fortnightly address to the Shop-girls' Church
+      Association, and he had been seized with a panic fear, entirely irrational
+      and unjustifiable, that he would not be able to deliver the address. The
+      fear had arisen after lunch, had gripped his mind, and then as now had
+      come the thought, &ldquo;If only I could smoke!&rdquo; And he had smoked. It seemed
+      better to break a vow than fail the Association. He had fallen to the
+      temptation with a completeness that now filled him with shame and horror.
+      He had stalked Dunk, his valet-butler, out of the dining-room, had
+      affected to need a book from the book-case beyond the sideboard, had gone
+      insincerely to the sideboard humming &ldquo;From Greenland's icy mountains,&rdquo; and
+      then, glancing over his shoulder, had stolen one of his own cigarettes,
+      one of the fatter sort. With this and his bedroom matches he had gone off
+      to the bottom of the garden among the laurels, looked everywhere except
+      above the wall to be sure that he was alone, and at last lit up, only as
+      he raised his eyes in gratitude for the first blissful inhalation to
+      discover that dreadful little boy peeping at him from the crotch in the
+      yew-tree in the next garden. As though God had sent him to be a witness!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their eyes had met. The bishop recalled with an agonized distinctness
+      every moment, every error, of that shameful encounter. He had been too
+      surprised to conceal the state of affairs from the pitiless scrutiny of
+      those youthful eyes. He had instantly made as if to put the cigarette
+      behind his back, and then as frankly dropped it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His soul would not be more naked at the resurrection. The little boy had
+      stared, realized the state of affairs slowly but surely, pointed his
+      finger....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never had two human beings understood each other more completely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A dirty little boy! Capable no doubt of a thousand kindred scoundrelisms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed ages before the conscience-stricken bishop could tear himself
+      from the spot and walk back, with such a pretence of dignity as he could
+      muster, to the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And instead of the discourse he had prepared for the Shop-girls' Church
+      Association, he had preached on temptation and falling, and how he knew
+      they had all fallen, and how he understood and could sympathize with the
+      bitterness of a secret shame, a moving but unsuitable discourse that had
+      already been subjected to misconstruction and severe reproof in the local
+      press of Princhester.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the haunting thing in the bishop's memory was the face and gesture of
+      the little boy. That grubby little finger stabbed him to the heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, God!&rdquo; he groaned. &ldquo;The meanness of it! How did I bring myself&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned out the light convulsively, and rolled over in the bed, making a
+      sort of cocoon of himself. He bored his head into the pillow and groaned,
+      and then struggled impatiently to throw the bed-clothes off himself. Then
+      he sat up and talked aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must go to Brighton-Pomfrey,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And get a medical dispensation.
+      If I do not smoke&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused for a long time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then his voice sounded again in the darkness, speaking quietly, speaking
+      with a note almost of satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall go mad. I must smoke or I shall go mad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a long time he sat up in the great bed with his arms about his knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fearful things came to him; things at once dreadfully blasphemous and
+      entirely weak-minded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The triangle and the eye became almost visible upon the black background
+      of night. They were very angry. They were spinning round and round faster
+      and faster. Because he was a bishop and because really he did not believe
+      fully and completely in the Trinity. At one and the same time he did not
+      believe in the Trinity and was terrified by the anger of the Trinity at
+      his unbelief.... He was afraid. He was aghast.... And oh! he was weary....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rubbed his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I could have a cup of tea!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he perceived with surprise that he had not thought of praying. What
+      should he say? To what could he pray?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried not to think of that whizzing Triangle, that seemed now to be
+      nailed like a Catherine wheel to the very centre of his forehead, and yet
+      at the same time to be at the apex of the universe. Against that&mdash;for
+      protection against that&mdash;he was praying. It was by a great effort
+      that at last he pronounced the words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord ....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently he had turned up his light, and was prowling about the room. The
+      clear inky dinginess that comes before the raw dawn of a spring morning,
+      found his white face at the window, looking out upon the great terrace and
+      the park.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE SECOND - THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      IT was only in the last few years that the bishop had experienced these
+      nervous and mental crises. He was a belated doubter. Whatever questionings
+      had marked his intellectual adolescence had either been very slight or had
+      been too adequately answered to leave any serious scars upon his
+      convictions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And even now he felt that he was afflicted physically rather than
+      mentally, that some protective padding of nerve-sheath or brain-case had
+      worn thin and weak, and left him a prey to strange disturbances, rather
+      than that any new process of thought was eating into his mind. These
+      doubts in his mind were still not really doubts; they were rather alien
+      and, for the first time, uncontrolled movements of his intelligence. He
+      had had a sheltered upbringing; he was the well-connected son of a
+      comfortable rectory, the only son and sole survivor of a family of three;
+      he had been carefully instructed and he had been a willing learner; it had
+      been easy and natural to take many things for granted. It had been very
+      easy and pleasant for him to take the world as he found it and God as he
+      found Him. Indeed for all his years up to manhood he had been able to take
+      life exactly as in his infancy he took his carefully warmed and prepared
+      bottle&mdash;unquestioningly and beneficially.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And indeed that has been the way with most bishops since bishops began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a busy continuous process that turns boys into bishops, and it will
+      stand few jars or discords. The student of ecclesiastical biography will
+      find that an early vocation has in every age been almost universal among
+      them; few are there among these lives that do not display the incipient
+      bishop from the tenderest years. Bishop How of Wakefield composed hymns
+      before he was eleven, and Archbishop Benson when scarcely older possessed
+      a little oratory in which he conducted services and&mdash;a pleasant touch
+      of the more secular boy&mdash;which he protected from a too inquisitive
+      sister by means of a booby trap. It is rare that those marked for
+      episcopal dignities go so far into the outer world as Archbishop Lang of
+      York, who began as a barrister. This early predestination has always been
+      the common episcopal experience. Archbishop Benson's early attempts at
+      religious services remind one both of St. Thomas a Becket, the &ldquo;boy
+      bishop,&rdquo; and those early ceremonies of St. Athanasius which were observed
+      and inquired upon by the good bishop Alexander. (For though still a tender
+      infant, St. Athanasius with perfect correctness and validity was baptizing
+      a number of his innocent playmates, and the bishop who &ldquo;had paused to
+      contemplate the sports of the child remained to confirm the zeal of the
+      missionary.&rdquo;) And as with the bishop of the past, so with the bishop of
+      the future; the Rev. H. J. Campbell, in his story of his soul's
+      pilgrimage, has given us a pleasant picture of himself as a child stealing
+      out into the woods to build himself a little altar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such minds as these, settled as it were from the outset, are either
+      incapable of real scepticism or become sceptical only after catastrophic
+      changes. They understand the sceptical mind with difficulty, and their
+      beliefs are regarded by the sceptical mind with incredulity. They have
+      determined their forms of belief before their years of discretion, and
+      once those forms are determined they are not very easily changed. Within
+      the shell it has adopted the intelligence may be active and lively enough,
+      may indeed be extraordinarily active and lively, but only within the
+      shell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is an entire difference in the mental quality of those who are
+      converts to a faith and those who are brought up in it. The former know it
+      from outside as well as from within. They know not only that it is, but
+      also that it is not. The latter have a confidence in their creed that is
+      one with their apprehension of sky or air or gravitation. It is a primary
+      mental structure, and they not only do not doubt but they doubt the good
+      faith of those who do. They think that the Atheist and Agnostic really
+      believe but are impelled by a mysterious obstinacy to deny. So it had been
+      with the Bishop of Princhester; not of cunning or design but in simple
+      good faith he had accepted all the inherited assurances of his native
+      rectory, and held by Church, Crown, Empire, decorum, respectability,
+      solvency&mdash;and compulsory Greek at the Little Go&mdash;as his father
+      had done before him. If in his undergraduate days he had said a thing or
+      two in the modern vein, affected the socialism of William Morris and
+      learnt some Swinburne by heart, it was out of a conscious wildness. He did
+      not wish to be a prig. He had taken a far more genuine interest in the
+      artistry of ritual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through all the time of his incumbency of the church of the Holy
+      Innocents, St. John's Wood, and of his career as the bishop suffragan of
+      Pinner, he had never faltered from his profound confidence in those
+      standards of his home. He had been kind, popular, and endlessly active.
+      His undergraduate socialism had expanded simply and sincerely into a
+      theory of administrative philanthropy. He knew the Webbs. He was as
+      successful with working-class audiences as with fashionable congregations.
+      His home life with Lady Ella (she was the daughter of the fifth Earl of
+      Birkenholme) and his five little girls was simple, beautiful, and happy as
+      few homes are in these days of confusion. Until he became Bishop of
+      Princhester&mdash;he followed Hood, the first bishop, as the reign of his
+      Majesty King Edward the Peacemaker drew to its close&mdash;no anticipation
+      of his coming distress fell across his path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came to Princhester an innocent and trustful man. The home life at the
+      old rectory of Otteringham was still his standard of truth and reality.
+      London had not disillusioned him. It was a strange waste of people, it
+      made him feel like a missionary in infidel parts, but it was a kindly
+      waste. It was neither antagonistic nor malicious. He had always felt there
+      that if he searched his Londoner to the bottom, he would find the
+      completest recognition of the old rectory and all its data and
+      implications.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Princhester was different.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Princhester made one think that recently there had been a second and much
+      more serious Fall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Princhester was industrial and unashamed. It was a countryside savagely
+      invaded by forges and mine shafts and gaunt black things. It was scarred
+      and impeded and discoloured. Even before that invasion, when the heather
+      was not in flower it must have been a black country. Its people were dour
+      uncandid individuals, who slanted their heads and knitted their brows to
+      look at you. Occasionally one saw woods brown and blistered by the gases
+      from chemical works. Here and there remained old rectories, closely
+      reminiscent of the dear old home at Otteringham, jostled and elbowed and
+      overshadowed by horrible iron cylinders belching smoke and flame. The fine
+      old abbey church of Princhester, which was the cathedral of the new
+      diocese, looked when first he saw it like a lady Abbess who had taken to
+      drink and slept in a coal truck. She minced apologetically upon the
+      market-place; the parvenu Town Hall patronized and protected her as if she
+      were a poor relation....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old aristocracy of the countryside was unpicturesquely decayed. The
+      branch of the Walshinghams, Lady Ella's cousins, who lived near Pringle,
+      was poor, proud and ignoble. And extremely unpopular. The rich people of
+      the country were self-made and inclined to nonconformity, the
+      working-people were not strictly speaking a &ldquo;poor,&rdquo; they were highly paid,
+      badly housed, and deeply resentful. They went in vast droves to football
+      matches, and did not care a rap if it rained. The prevailing wind was
+      sarcastic. To come here from London was to come from atmospheric
+      blue-greys to ashen-greys, from smoke and soft smut to grime and black
+      grimness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop had been charmed by the historical associations of Princhester
+      when first the see was put before his mind. His realization of his diocese
+      was a profound shock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only one hint had he had of what was coming. He had met during his season
+      of congratulations Lord Gatling dining unusually at the Athenaeum. Lord
+      Gatling and he did not talk frequently, but on this occasion the great
+      racing peer came over to him. &ldquo;You will feel like a cherub in a
+      stokehole,&rdquo; Lord Gatling had said....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They used to heave lumps of slag at old Hood's gaiters,&rdquo; said Lord
+      Gatling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In London a bishop's a lord and a lark and nobody minds him,&rdquo; said Lord
+      Gatling, &ldquo;but Princhester is different. It isn't used to bishops.... Well,&mdash;I
+      hope you'll get to like 'em.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Trouble began with a fearful row about the position of the bishop's
+      palace. Hood had always evaded this question, and a number of
+      strong-willed self-made men of wealth and influence, full of local
+      patriotism and that competitive spirit which has made England what it is,
+      already intensely irritated by Hood's prevarications, were resolved to pin
+      his successor to an immediate decision. Of this the new bishop was
+      unaware. Mindful of a bishop's constant need to travel, he was disposed to
+      seek a home within easy reach of Pringle Junction, from which nearly every
+      point in the diocese could be simply and easily reached. This fell in with
+      Lady Ella's liking for the rare rural quiet of the Kibe valley and the
+      neighbourhood of her cousins the Walshinghams. Unhappily it did not fall
+      in with the inflexible resolution of each and every one of the six leading
+      towns of the see to put up, own, obtrude, boast, and swagger about the
+      biggest and showiest thing in episcopal palaces in all industrial England,
+      and the new bishop had already taken a short lease and gone some way
+      towards the acquisition of Ganford House, two miles from Pringle, before
+      he realized the strength and fury of these local ambitions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first the magnates and influences seemed to be fighting only among
+      themselves, and he was so ill-advised as to broach the Ganford House
+      project as a compromise that would glorify no one unfairly, and leave the
+      erection of an episcopal palace for some future date when he perhaps would
+      have the good fortune to have passed to &ldquo;where beyond these voices there
+      is peace,&rdquo; forgetting altogether among other oversights the importance of
+      architects and builders in local affairs. His proposal seemed for a time
+      to concentrate the rich passions of the whole countryside upon himself and
+      his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Because they did not leave Lady Ella alone. The Walshinghams were already
+      unpopular in their county on account of a poverty and shyness that made
+      them seem &ldquo;stuck up&rdquo; to successful captains of industry only too ready
+      with the hand of friendship, the iron grip indeed of friendship,
+      consciously hospitable and eager for admission and endorsements. And
+      Princhester in particular was under the sway of that enterprising weekly,
+      The White Blackbird, which was illustrated by, which indeed monopolized
+      the gifts of, that brilliant young caricaturist &ldquo;The Snicker.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It had seemed natural for Lady Ella to acquiesce in the proposals of the
+      leading Princhester photographer. She had always helped where she could in
+      her husband's public work, and she had been popular upon her own merits in
+      Wealdstone. The portrait was abominable enough in itself; it dwelt on her
+      chin, doubled her age, and denied her gentleness, but it was a mere
+      starting-point for the subtle extravagance of The Snicker's poisonous
+      gift.... The thing came upon the bishop suddenly from the book-stall at
+      Pringle Junction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kept it carefully from Lady Ella.... It was only later that he found
+      that a copy of The White Blackbird had been sent to her, and that she was
+      keeping the horror from him. It was in her vein that she should reproach
+      herself for being a vulnerable side to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even when the bishop capitulated in favour of Princhester, that decision
+      only opened a fresh trouble for him. Princhester wanted the palace to be a
+      palace; it wanted to combine all the best points of Lambeth and Fulham
+      with the marble splendours of a good modern bank. The bishop's
+      architectural tastes, on the other hand, were rationalistic. He was all
+      for building a useful palace in undertones, with a green slate roof and
+      long horizontal lines. What he wanted more than anything else was a quite
+      remote wing with a lot of bright little bedrooms and a sitting-room and so
+      on, complete in itself, examination hall and everything, with a long
+      intricate connecting passage and several doors, to prevent the ordination
+      candidates straying all over the place and getting into the talk and the
+      tea. But the diocese wanted a proud archway&mdash;and turrets, and did not
+      care a rap if the ordination candidates slept about on the carpets in the
+      bishop's bedroom. Ordination candidates were quite outside the sphere of
+      its imagination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he disappointed Princhester with his equipage. Princhester had a
+      feeling that it deserved more for coming over to the church from
+      nonconformity as it was doing. It wanted a bishop in a mitre and a gilt
+      coach. It wanted a pastoral crook. It wanted something to go with its mace
+      and its mayor. And (obsessed by The Snicker) it wanted less of Lady Ella.
+      The cruelty and unreason of these attacks upon his wife distressed the
+      bishop beyond measure, and baffled him hopelessly. He could not see any
+      means of checking them nor of defending or justifying her against them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The palace was awaiting its tenant, but the controversies and bitternesses
+      were still swinging and swaying and developing when King George was being
+      crowned. Close upon that event came a wave of social discontent, the great
+      railway strike, a curious sense of social and political instability, and
+      the first beginnings of the bishop's ill health.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There came a day of exceptional fatigue and significance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The industrial trouble was a very real distress to the bishop. He had a
+      firm belief that it is a function of the church to act as mediator between
+      employer and employed. It was a common saying of his that the aim of
+      socialism&mdash;the right sort of socialism&mdash;was to Christianize
+      employment. Regardless of suspicion on either hand, regardless of very
+      distinct hints that he should &ldquo;mind his own business,&rdquo; he exerted himself
+      in a search for methods of reconciliation. He sought out every one who
+      seemed likely to be influential on either side, and did his utmost to
+      discover the conditions of a settlement. As far as possible and with the
+      help of a not very efficient chaplain he tried to combine such interviews
+      with his more normal visiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At times, and this was particularly the case on this day, he seemed to be
+      discovering nothing but the incurable perversity and militancy of human
+      nature. It was a day under an east wind, when a steely-blue sky full of
+      colourless light filled a stiff-necked world with whitish high lights and
+      inky shadows. These bright harsh days of barometric high pressure in
+      England rouse and thwart every expectation of the happiness of spring. And
+      as the bishop drove through the afternoon in a hired fly along a rutted
+      road of slag between fields that were bitterly wired against the Sunday
+      trespasser, he fell into a despondent meditation upon the political and
+      social outlook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His thoughts were of a sort not uncommon in those days. The world was
+      strangely restless. Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had been
+      an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact
+      and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people's ideas, and as if
+      at once they had begun to blow about anyhow. Not that Queen Victoria had
+      really been a paper-weight or any weight at all, but it happened that she
+      died as an epoch closed, an epoch of tremendous stabilities. Her son,
+      already elderly, had followed as the selvedge follows the piece, he had
+      passed and left the new age stripped bare. In nearly every department of
+      economic and social life now there was upheaval, and it was an upheaval
+      very different in character from the radicalism and liberalism of the
+      Victorian days. There were not only doubt and denial, but now there were
+      also impatience and unreason. People argued less and acted quicker. There
+      was a pride in rebellion for its own sake, an indiscipline and disposition
+      to sporadic violence that made it extremely hard to negotiate any
+      reconciliations or compromises. Behind every extremist it seemed stood a
+      further extremist prepared to go one better....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop had spent most of the morning with one of the big employers, a
+      tall dark man, lean and nervous, and obviously tired and worried by the
+      struggle. He did not conceal his opinion that the church was meddling with
+      matters quite outside its sphere. Never had it been conveyed to the bishop
+      before how remote a rich and established Englishman could consider the
+      church from reality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've got no hold on them,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It isn't your sphere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And again: &ldquo;They'll listen to you&mdash;if you speak well. But they don't
+      believe you know anything about it, and they don't trust your good
+      intentions. They won't mind a bit what you say unless you drop something
+      they can use against us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop tried a few phrases. He thought there might be something in
+      co-operation, in profit-sharing, in some more permanent relationship
+      between the business and the employee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There isn't,&rdquo; said the employer compactly. &ldquo;It's just the malice of being
+      inferior against the man in control. It's just the spirit of
+      insubordination and boredom with duty. This trouble's as old as the
+      Devil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that is exactly the business of the church,&rdquo; said the bishop
+      brightly, &ldquo;to reconcile men to their duty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By chanting the Athanasian creed at 'em, I suppose,&rdquo; said the big
+      employer, betraying the sneer he had been hiding hitherto.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This thing is a fight,&rdquo; said the big employer, carrying on before the
+      bishop could reply. &ldquo;Religion had better get out of the streets until this
+      thing is over. The men won't listen to reason. They don't mean to. They're
+      bit by Syndicalism. They're setting out, I tell you, to be unreasonable
+      and impossible. It isn't an argument; it's a fight. They don't want to
+      make friends with the employer. They want to make an end to the employer.
+      Whatever we give them they'll take and press us for more. Directly we make
+      terms with the leaders the men go behind it.... It's a raid on the whole
+      system. They don't mean to work the system&mdash;anyhow. I'm the
+      capitalist, and the capitalist has to go. I'm to be bundled out of my
+      works, and some&mdash;some &ldquo;&mdash;he seemed to be rejecting unsuitable
+      words&mdash;&ldquo;confounded politician put in. Much good it would do them. But
+      before that happens I'm going to fight. You would.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop walked to the window and stood staring at the brilliant spring
+      bulbs in the big employer's garden, and at a long vista of newly-mown lawn
+      under great shapely trees just budding into green.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't admit,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that these troubles lie outside the sphere of
+      the church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The employer came and stood beside him. He felt he was being a little hard
+      on the bishop, but he could not see any way of making things easier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One doesn't want Sacred Things,&rdquo; he tried, &ldquo;in a scrap like this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've got to mend things or end things,&rdquo; continued the big employer.
+      &ldquo;Nothing goes on for ever. Things can't last as they are going on now....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he went on abruptly to something that for a time he had been keeping
+      back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course just at present the church may do a confounded lot of harm.
+      Some of you clerical gentlemen are rather too fond of talking socialism
+      and even preaching socialism. Don't think I want to be overcritical. I
+      admit there's no end of things to be said for a proper sort of socialism,
+      Ruskin, and all that. We're all Socialists nowadays. Ideals&mdash;excellent.
+      But&mdash;it gets misunderstood. It gives the men a sense of moral
+      support. It makes them fancy that they are It. Encourages them to forget
+      duties and set up preposterous claims. Class war and all that sort of
+      thing. You gentlemen of the clergy don't quite realize that socialism may
+      begin with Ruskin and end with Karl Marx. And that from the Class War to
+      the Commune is just one step.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this conversation the bishop had made his way to the vicarage of
+      Mogham Banks. The vicar of Mogham Banks was a sacerdotal socialist of the
+      most advanced type, with the reputation of being closely in touch with the
+      labour extremists. He was a man addicted to banners, prohibited ornaments,
+      special services at unusual hours, and processions in the streets. His
+      taste in chasubles was loud, he gardened in a cassock and, it was said, he
+      slept in his biretta; he certainly slept in a hair shirt, and he littered
+      his church with flowers, candles, side altars, confessional boxes,
+      requests for prayers for the departed, and the like. There had already
+      been two Kensitite demonstrations at his services, and altogether he was a
+      source of considerable anxiety to the bishop. The bishop did his best not
+      to know too exactly what was going on at Mogham Banks. Sooner or later he
+      felt he would be forced to do something&mdash;and the longer he could put
+      that off the better. But the Rev. Morrice Deans had promised to get
+      together three or four prominent labour leaders for tea and a frank talk,
+      and the opportunity was one not to be missed. So the bishop, after a hasty
+      and not too digestible lunch in the refreshment room at Pringle, was now
+      in a fly that smelt of straw and suggested infectious hospital patients,
+      on his way through the industry-scarred countryside to this second
+      conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The countryside had never seemed so scarred to him as it did that day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was probably the bright hard spring sunshine that emphasized the
+      contrast between that dear England of hedges and homes and the south-west
+      wind in which his imagination lived, and the crude presences of a
+      mechanical age. Never before had the cuttings and heapings, the smashing
+      down of trees, the obtrusion of corrugated iron and tar, the belchings of
+      smoke and the haste, seemed so harsh and disregardful of all the bishop's
+      world. Across the fields a line of gaunt iron standards, abominably
+      designed, carried an electric cable to some unknown end. The curve of the
+      hill made them seem a little out of the straight, as if they hurried and
+      bent forward furtively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where are they going?&rdquo; asked the bishop, leaning forward to look out of
+      the window of the fly, and then: &ldquo;Where is it all going?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And presently the road was under repair, and was being done at a great
+      pace with a huge steam-roller, mechanically smashed granite, and kettles
+      of stinking stuff, asphalt or something of that sort, that looked and
+      smelt like Milton's hell. Beyond, a gaunt hoarding advertised extensively
+      the Princhester Music Hall, a mean beastly place that corrupted boys and
+      girls; and also it clamoured of tyres and potted meats....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The afternoon's conference gave him no reassuring answer to his question,
+      &ldquo;Where is it all going?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The afternoon's conference did no more than intensify the new and strange
+      sense of alienation from the world that the morning's talk had evoked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The three labour extremists that Morrice Deans had assembled obviously
+      liked the bishop and found him picturesque, and were not above a certain
+      snobbish gratification at the purple-trimmed company they were in, but it
+      was clear that they regarded his intervention in the great dispute as if
+      it were a feeble waving from the bank across the waters of a great river.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's an incurable misunderstanding between the modern employer and the
+      modern employed,&rdquo; the chief labour spokesman said, speaking in a broad
+      accent that completely hid from him and the bishop and every one the fact
+      that he was by far the best-read man of the party. &ldquo;Disraeli called them
+      the Two Nations, but that was long ago. Now it's a case of two species.
+      Machinery has made them into different species. The employer lives away
+      from his work-people, marries a wife foreign, out of a county family or
+      suchlike, trains his children from their very birth in a different manner.
+      Why, the growth curve is different for the two species. They haven't even
+      a common speech between them. One looks east and the other looks west. How
+      can you expect them to agree? Of course they won't agree. We've got to
+      fight it out. They say we're their slaves for ever. Have you ever read
+      Lady Bell's 'At the Works'? A well-intentioned woman, but she gives the
+      whole thing away. We say, No! It's our sort and not your sort. We'll do
+      without you. We'll get a little more education and then we'll do without
+      you. We're pressing for all we can get, and when we've got that we'll take
+      breath and press for more. We're the Morlocks. Coming up. It isn't our
+      fault that we've differentiated.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you haven't understood the drift of Christianity,&rdquo; said the bishop.
+      &ldquo;It's just to assert that men are One community and not two.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's not much of that in the Creeds,&rdquo; said a second labour leader who
+      was a rationalist. &ldquo;There's not much of that in the services of the
+      church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The vicar spoke before his bishop, and indeed he had plenty of time to
+      speak before his bishop. &ldquo;Because you will not set yourselves to
+      understand the symbolism of her ritual,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If the church chooses to speak in riddles,&rdquo; said the rationalist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Symbols,&rdquo; said Morrice Deans, &ldquo;need not be riddles,&rdquo; and for a time the
+      talk eddied about this minor issue and the chief labour spokesman and the
+      bishop looked at one another. The vicar instanced and explained certain
+      apparently insignificant observances, his antagonist was contemptuously
+      polite to these explanations. &ldquo;That's all very pratty,&rdquo; he said....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop wished that fine points of ceremonial might have been left out
+      of the discussion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something much bigger than that was laying hold of his intelligence, the
+      realization of a world extravagantly out of hand. The sky, the wind, the
+      telegraph poles, had been jabbing in the harsh lesson of these men's
+      voices, that the church, as people say, &ldquo;wasn't in it.&rdquo; And that at the
+      same time the church held the one remedy for all this ugliness and
+      contention in its teaching of the universal fatherhood of God and the
+      universal brotherhood of men. Only for some reason he hadn't the phrases
+      and he hadn't the voice to assert this over their wrangling and their
+      stiff resolution. He wanted to think the whole business out thoroughly,
+      for the moment he had nothing to say, and there was the labour leader
+      opposite waiting smilingly to hear what he had to say so soon as the bout
+      between the vicar and the rationalist was over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (6)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That morning in the long galleries of the bishop's imagination a fresh
+      painting had been added. It was a big wall painting rather in the manner
+      of Puvis de Chavannes. And the central figure had been the bishop of
+      Princhester himself. He had been standing upon the steps of the great door
+      of the cathedral that looks upon the marketplace where the tram-lines
+      meet, and he had been dressed very magnificently and rather after the
+      older use. He had been wearing a tunicle and dalmatic under a chasuble, a
+      pectoral cross, purple gloves, sandals and buskins, a mitre and his
+      presentation ring. In his hand he had borne his pastoral staff. And the
+      clustering pillars and arches of the great doorway were painted with a
+      loving flat particularity that omitted nothing but the sooty tinge of the
+      later discolourations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On his right hand had stood a group of employers very richly dressed in
+      the fashion of the fifteenth century, and on the left a rather more
+      numerous group of less decorative artisans. With them their wives and
+      children had been shown, all greatly impressed by the canonicals. Every
+      one had been extremely respectful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had been reconciling the people and blessing them and calling them his
+      &ldquo;sheep&rdquo; and his &ldquo;little children.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But all this was so different.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither party resembled sheep or little children in the least degree. .
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The labour leader became impatient with the ritualistic controversy; he
+      set his tea-cup aside out of danger and leant across the corner of the
+      table to the bishop and spoke in a sawing undertone. &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; he said,
+      &ldquo;the church does not talk our language. I doubt if it understands our
+      language. I doubt if we understand clearly where we are ourselves. These
+      things have to be fought out and hammered out. It's a big dusty dirty
+      noisy job. It may be a bloody job before it's through. You can't suddenly
+      call a halt in the middle of the scrap and have a sort of millennium just
+      because you want it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course if the church had a plan,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;if it had a proposal to
+      make, if it had anything more than a few pious palliatives to suggest,
+      that might be different. But has it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop had a bankrupt feeling. On the spur of the moment he could say
+      no more than: &ldquo;It offers its mediation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (7)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Full as he was with the preoccupation of these things and so a little slow
+      and inattentive in his movements, the bishop had his usual luck at Pringle
+      Junction and just missed the 7.27 for Princhester. He might perhaps have
+      got it by running through the subway and pushing past people, but bishops
+      must not run through subways and push past people. His mind swore at the
+      mischance, even if his lips refrained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was hungry and, tired; he would not get to the palace now until long
+      after nine; dinner would be over and Lady Ella would naturally suppose he
+      had dined early with the Rev. Morrice Deans. Very probably there would be
+      nothing ready for him at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to think he was exercising self-control, but indeed all his
+      sub-conscious self was busy in a manner that would not have disgraced
+      Tertullian with the eternal welfare of those city fathers whose obstinacy
+      had fixed the palace at Princhester. He walked up and down the platform,
+      gripping his hands very tightly behind him, and maintaining a serene
+      upcast countenance by a steadfast effort. It seemed a small matter to him
+      that the placards of the local evening papers should proclaim &ldquo;Lloyd
+      George's Reconciliation Meeting at Wombash Broken up by Suffragettes.&rdquo; For
+      a year now he had observed a strict rule against buying the products of
+      the local press, and he saw no reason for varying this protective
+      regulation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mind was full of angry helplessness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was he to blame, was the church to blame, for its powerlessness in these
+      social disputes? Could an abler man with a readier eloquence have done
+      more?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He envied the cleverness of Cardinal Manning. Manning would have got right
+      into the front of this affair. He would have accumulated credit for his
+      church and himself....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But would he have done much?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop wandered along the platform to its end, and stood contemplating
+      the convergent ways that gather together beyond the station and plunge
+      into the hillside and the wilderness of sidings and trucks, signal-boxes,
+      huts, coal-pits, electric standards, goods sheds, turntables, and
+      engine-houses, that ends in a bluish bricked-up cliff against the hill. A
+      train rushed with a roar and clatter into the throat of the great tunnel
+      and was immediately silenced; its rear lights twinkled and vanished, and
+      then out of that huge black throat came wisps of white steam and curled
+      slowly upward like lazy snakes until they caught the slanting sunshine.
+      For the first time the day betrayed a softness and touched this scene of
+      black energy to gold. All late afternoons are beautiful, whatever the day
+      has been&mdash;if only there is a gleam of sun. And now a kind of
+      mechanical greatness took the place of mere black disorder in the bishop's
+      perception of his see. It was harsh, it was vast and strong, it was no
+      lamb he had to rule but a dragon. Would it ever be given to him to
+      overcome his dragon, to lead it home, and bless it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood at the very end of the platform, with his gaitered legs wide
+      apart and his hands folded behind him, staring beyond all visible things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Should he do something very bold and striking? Should he invite both men
+      and masters to the cathedral, and preach tremendous sermons to them upon
+      these living issues?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Short sermons, of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But stating the church's attitude with a new and convincing vigour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a vision of the great aisle strangely full and alive and astir. The
+      organ notes still echoed in the fretted vaulting, as the preacher made his
+      way from the chancel to the pulpit. The congregation was tense with
+      expectation, and for some reason his mind dwelt for a long time upon the
+      figure of the preacher ascending the steps of the pulpit. Outside the day
+      was dark and stormy, so that the stained-glass windows looked absolutely
+      dead. For a little while the preacher prayed. Then in the attentive
+      silence the tenor of the preacher would begin, a thin jet of sound, a ray
+      of light in the darkness, speaking to all these men as they had never been
+      spoken to before....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Surely so one might call a halt to all these harsh conflicts. So one might
+      lay hands afresh upon these stubborn minds, one might win them round to
+      look at Christ the Master and Servant....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That, he thought, would be a good phrase: &ldquo;Christ the Master and
+      Servant.&rdquo;....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Members of one Body,&rdquo; that should be his text.... At last it was
+      finished. The big congregation, which had kept so still, sighed and
+      stirred. The task of reconciliation was as good as done. &ldquo;And now to God
+      the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Outside the day had become suddenly bright, the threatening storm had
+      drifted away, and great shafts of coloured light from the pictured windows
+      were smiting like arrows amidst his hearers....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This idea of a great sermon upon capital and labour did so powerfully grip
+      the bishop's imagination that he came near to losing the 8.27 train also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He discovered it when it was already in the station. He had to walk down
+      the platform very quickly. He did not run, but his gaiters, he felt,
+      twinkled more than a bishop's should.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (8)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Directly he met his wife he realized that he had to hear something
+      important and unpleasant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood waiting for him in the inner hall, looking very grave and still.
+      The light fell upon her pale face and her dark hair and her long white
+      silken dress, making her seem more delicate and unworldly than usual and
+      making the bishop feel grimy and sordid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must have a wash,&rdquo; he said, though before he had thought of nothing but
+      food. &ldquo;I have had nothing to eat since tea-time&mdash;and that was mostly
+      talk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella considered. &ldquo;There are cold things.... You shall have a tray in
+      the study. Not in the dining-room. Eleanor is there. I want to tell you
+      something. But go upstairs first and wash your poor tired face.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing serious, I hope?&rdquo; he asked, struck by an unusual quality in her
+      voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will tell you,&rdquo; she evaded, and after a moment of mutual scrutiny he
+      went past her upstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since they had come to Princhester Lady Ella had changed very markedly.
+      She seemed to her husband to have gained in dignity; she was stiller and
+      more restrained; a certain faint arrogance, a touch of the &ldquo;ruling class&rdquo;
+       manner had dwindled almost to the vanishing point. There had been a time
+      when she had inclined to an authoritative hauteur, when she had seemed
+      likely to develop into one of those aggressive and interfering old ladies
+      who play so overwhelming a part in British public affairs. She had been
+      known to initiate adverse judgments, to exercise the snub, to cut and
+      humiliate. Princhester had done much to purge her of such tendencies.
+      Princhester had made her think abundantly, and had put a new and subtler
+      quality into her beauty. It had taken away the least little disposition to
+      rustle as she moved, and it had softened her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, when presently she stood in the study, she showed a new
+      circumspection in her treatment of her husband. She surveyed the tray
+      before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ought not to drink that Burgundy,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I can see you are
+      dog-tired. It was uncorked yesterday, and anyhow it is not very
+      digestible. This cold meat is bad enough. You ought to have one of those
+      quarter bottles of champagne you got for my last convalescence. There's
+      more than a dozen left over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop felt that this was a pretty return of his own kindly thoughts
+      &ldquo;after many days,&rdquo; and soon Dunk, his valet-butler, was pouring out the
+      precious and refreshing glassful....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now, dear?&rdquo; said the bishop, feeling already much better.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella had come round to the marble fireplace. The mantel-piece was a
+      handsome work by a Princhester artist in the Gill style&mdash;with
+      contemplative ascetics as supporters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am worried about Eleanor,&rdquo; said Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is in the dining-room now,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;having some dinner. She came
+      in about a quarter past eight, half way through dinner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where had she been?&rdquo; asked the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her dress was torn&mdash;in two places. Her wrist had been twisted and a
+      little sprained.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her face&mdash;Grubby! And she had been crying.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, my dear, what had happened to her? You don't mean&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Husband and wife stared at one another aghast. Neither of them said the
+      horrid word that flamed between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Merciful heaven!&rdquo; said the bishop, and assumed an attitude of despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know she knew any of them. But it seems it is the second
+      Walshingham girl&mdash;Phoebe. It's impossible to trace a girl's thoughts
+      and friends. She persuaded her to go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But did she understand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's the serious thing,&rdquo; said Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to consider whether he could bear the blow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She understands all sorts of things. She argues.... I am quite unable to
+      argue with her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About this vote business?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About all sorts of things. Things I didn't imagine she had heard of. I
+      knew she had been reading books. But I never imagined that she could have
+      understood....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop laid down his knife and fork.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One may read in books, one may even talk of things, without fully
+      understanding,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella tried to entertain this comforting thought. &ldquo;It isn't like
+      that,&rdquo; she said at last. &ldquo;She talks like a grown-up person. This&mdash;this
+      escapade is just an accident. But things have gone further than that. She
+      seems to think&mdash;that she is not being educated properly here, that
+      she ought to go to a College. As if we were keeping things from her....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop reconsidered his plate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what things?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She says we get all round her,&rdquo; said Lady Ella, and left the implications
+      of that phrase to unfold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (9)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time the bishop said very little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella had found it necessary to make her first announcement standing
+      behind him upon the hearthrug, but now she sat upon the arm of the great
+      armchair as close to him as possible, and spoke in a more familiar tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing, she said, had come to her as a complete surprise. Everything
+      had seemed so safe. Eleanor had been thoughtful, it was true, but it had
+      never occurred to her mother that she had really been thinking&mdash;about
+      such things as she had been thinking about. She had ranged in the library,
+      and displayed a disposition to read the weekly papers and the monthly
+      reviews. But never a sign of discontent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I don't understand,&rdquo; said the bishop. &ldquo;Why is she discontented? What
+      is there that she wants different?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has got this idea that life here is secluded in some way,&rdquo; she
+      expanded. &ldquo;She used words like 'secluded' and 'artificial' and&mdash;what
+      was it?&mdash;'cloistered.' And she said&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella paused with an effect of exact retrospection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Out there,' she said, 'things are alive. Real things are happening.' It
+      is almost as if she did not fully believe&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella paused again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop sat with his arm over the back of his chair, and his face
+      downcast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The ferment of youth,&rdquo; he said at last. &ldquo;The ferment of youth. Who has
+      given her these ideas?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella did not know. She could have thought a school like St. Aubyns
+      would have been safe, but nowadays nothing was safe. It was clear the
+      girls who went there talked as girls a generation ago did not talk. Their
+      people at home encouraged them to talk and profess opinions about
+      everything. It seemed that Phoebe Walshingham and Lady Kitty Kingdom were
+      the leaders in these premature mental excursions. Phoebe aired religious
+      doubts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But little Phoebe!&rdquo; said the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kitty,&rdquo; said Lady Ella, &ldquo;has written a novel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Already!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With elopements in it&mdash;and all sorts of things. She's had it typed.
+      You'd think Mary Crosshampton would know better than to let her daughter
+      go flourishing the family imagination about in that way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eleanor told you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By way of showing that they think of&mdash;things in general.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop reflected. &ldquo;She wants to go to College.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They want to go in a set.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder if college can be much worse than school.... She's eighteen&mdash;?
+      But I will talk to her....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (10)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All our children are changelings. They are perpetually fresh strangers.
+      Every day they vanish and a new person masquerades as yesterday's child
+      until some unexpected development betrays the cheat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop had still to learn this perennial newness of the young. He
+      learnt it in half an hour at the end of a fatiguing day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went into the dining-room. He went in as carelessly as possible and
+      smoking a cigarette. He had an honourable dread of being portentous in his
+      family; almost ostentatiously he laid the bishop aside. Eleanor had
+      finished her meal, and was sitting in the arm-chair by the fire with one
+      hand holding her sprained wrist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, and strolled to the hearthrug. He had had an odd idea
+      that he would find her still dirty, torn, and tearful, as her mother had
+      described her, a little girl in a scrape. But she had changed into her
+      best white evening frock and put up her hair, and became in the firelight
+      more of a lady, a very young lady but still a lady, than she had ever been
+      to him before. She was dark like her mother, but not of the same willowy
+      type; she had more of her father's sturdy build, and she had developed her
+      shoulders at hockey and tennis. The firelight brought out the gracious
+      reposeful lines of a body that ripened in adolescence. And though there
+      was a vibration of resolution in her voice she spoke like one who is under
+      her own control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother has told you that I have disgraced myself,&rdquo; she began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the bishop, weighing it. &ldquo;No. But you seem to have been
+      indiscreet, little Norah.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I got excited,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;They began turning out the other women&mdash;roughly.
+      I was indignant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn't go to interrupt?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She considered. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;But I went.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He liked her disposition to get it right. &ldquo;On that side,&rdquo; he assisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't the same thing as really meaning, Daddy,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then things happened?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said to the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A pause followed. If they had been in a law-court, her barrister would
+      have said, &ldquo;That is my case, my lord.&rdquo; The bishop prepared to open the
+      next stage in the proceedings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think, Norah, you shouldn't have been there at all,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother says that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man in my position is apt to be judged by his family. You commit more
+      than yourself when you commit an indiscretion. Apart from that, it wasn't
+      the place for a girl to be at. You are not a child now. We give you
+      freedom&mdash;more freedom than most girls get&mdash;because we think you
+      will use it wisely. You knew&mdash;enough to know that there was likely to
+      be trouble.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl looked into the fire and spoke very carefully. &ldquo;I don't think
+      that I oughtn't to know the things that are going on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop studied her face for an instant. It struck him that they had
+      reached something very fundamental as between parent and child. His
+      modernity showed itself in the temperance of his reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think, my dear, that on the whole your mother and I, who have
+      lived longer and know more, are more likely to know when it is best that
+      you should begin to know&mdash;this or that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl knitted her brows and seemed to be reading her answer out of the
+      depths of the coals. She was on the verge of speaking, altered her mind
+      and tried a different beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think that every one must do their thinking&mdash;his thinking&mdash;for&mdash;oneself,&rdquo;
+       she said awkwardly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean you can't trust&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't trusting. But one knows best for oneself when one is hungry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you find yourself hungry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to find out for myself what all this trouble about votes and
+      things means.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And we starve you&mdash;intellectually?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know I don't think that. But you are busy....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren't you being perhaps a little impatient, Eleanor? After all&mdash;you
+      are barely eighteen.... We have given you all sorts of liberties.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her silence admitted it. &ldquo;But still,&rdquo; she said after a long pause, &ldquo;there
+      are other girls, younger than I am, in these things. They talk about&mdash;oh,
+      all sorts of things. Freely....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've been awfully good to me,&rdquo; she said irrelevantly. &ldquo;And of course
+      this meeting was all pure accident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father and daughter remained silent for awhile, seeking a better grip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What exactly do you want, Eleanor?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up at him. &ldquo;Generally?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your mother has the impression that you are discontented.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Discontented is a horrid word.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;unsatisfied.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She remained still for a time. She felt the moment had come to make her
+      demand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would like to go to Newnham or Somerville&mdash;and work. I feel&mdash;so
+      horribly ignorant. Of all sorts of things. If I were a son I should go&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye&mdash;es,&rdquo; said the bishop and reflected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had gone rather far in the direction of the Woman Suffrage people; he
+      had advocated equality of standard in all sorts of matters, and the memory
+      of these utterances hampered him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could read here,&rdquo; he tried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I were a son, you wouldn't say that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His reply was vague. &ldquo;But in this home,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;we have a certain
+      atmosphere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He left her to imply her differences in sensibility and response from the
+      hardier male.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her hesitation marked the full gravity of her reply. &ldquo;It's just that,&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;One feels&mdash;&rdquo; She considered it further. &ldquo;As if we were living
+      in a kind of magic world&mdash;not really real. Out there&mdash;&rdquo; she
+      glanced over her shoulder at the drawn blind that hid the night. &ldquo;One
+      meets with different sorts of minds and different&mdash;atmospheres. All
+      this is very beautiful. I've had the most wonderful home. But there's a
+      sort of feeling as though it couldn't really go on, as though all these
+      strikes and doubts and questionings&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped short at questionings, for the thing was said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop took her meaning gallantly and honestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The church of Christ, little Norah, is built upon a rock.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no answer. She moved her head very slightly so that he could not
+      see her face, and remained sitting rather stiffly and awkwardly with her
+      eyes upon the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her silence was the third and greatest blow the bishop received that
+      day....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed very long indeed before either of them spoke. At last he said:
+      &ldquo;We must talk about these things again, Norah, when we are less tired and
+      have more time.... You have been reading books.... When Caxton set up his
+      printing-press he thrust a new power between church and disciple and
+      father and child.... And I am tired. We must talk it over a little later.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl stood up. She took her father's hands. &ldquo;Dear, dear Daddy,&rdquo; she
+      said, &ldquo;I am so sorry to be a bother. I am so sorry I went to that
+      meeting.... You look tired out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must talk&mdash;properly,&rdquo; said the bishop, patting one hand, then
+      discovering from her wincing face that it was the sprained one. &ldquo;Your poor
+      wrist,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's so hard to talk, but I want to talk to you, Daddy. It isn't that I
+      have hidden things....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She kissed him, and the bishop had the odd fancy that she kissed him as
+      though she was sorry for him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It occurred to him that really there could be no time like the present for
+      discussing these &ldquo;questionings&rdquo; of hers, and then his fatigue and shyness
+      had the better of him again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (11)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The papers got hold of Eleanor's share in the suffragette disturbance. The
+      White Blackbird said things about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It did not attack her. It did worse. It admired her ...impudently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It spoke of her once as &ldquo;Norah,&rdquo; and once as &ldquo;the Scrope Flapper.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Its headline proclaimed: &ldquo;Plucky Flappers Hold Up L. G.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE THIRD - INSOMNIA
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      THE night after his conversation with Eleanor was the first night of the
+      bishop's insomnia. It was the definite beginning of a new phase in his
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doctors explain to us that the immediate cause of insomnia is always some
+      poisoned or depleted state of the body, and no doubt the fatigues and
+      hasty meals of the day had left the bishop in a state of unprecedented
+      chemical disorder, with his nerves irritated by strange compounds and
+      unsoothed by familiar lubricants. But chemical disorders follow mental
+      disturbances, and the core and essence of his trouble was an intellectual
+      distress. For the first time in his life he was really in doubt, about
+      himself, about his way of living, about all his persuasions. It was a
+      general doubt. It was not a specific suspicion upon this point or that. It
+      was a feeling of detachment and unreality at once extraordinarily vague
+      and extraordinarily oppressive. It was as if he discovered himself flimsy
+      and transparent in a world of minatory solidity and opacity. It was as if
+      he found himself made not of flesh and blood but of tissue paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this intellectual insecurity extended into his physical sensations. It
+      affected his feeling in his skin, as if it were not absolutely his own
+      skin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as he lay there, a weak phantom mentally and bodily, an endless
+      succession and recurrence of anxieties for which he could find no
+      reassurance besieged him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chief of this was his distress for Eleanor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was the central figure in this new sense of illusion in familiar and
+      trusted things. It was not only that the world of his existence which had
+      seemed to be the whole universe had become diaphanous and betrayed vast
+      and uncontrollable realities beyond it, but his daughter had as it were
+      suddenly opened a door in this glassy sphere of insecurity that had been
+      his abiding refuge, a door upon the stormy rebel outer world, and she
+      stood there, young, ignorant, confident, adventurous, ready to step out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could it be possible that she did not believe?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw her very vividly as he had seen her in the dining-room, slender and
+      upright, half child, half woman, so fragile and so fearless. And the door
+      she opened thus carelessly gave upon a stormy background like one of the
+      stormy backgrounds that were popular behind portrait Dianas in eighteenth
+      century paintings. Did she believe that all he had taught her, all the
+      life he led was&mdash;what was her phrase?&mdash;a kind of magic world,
+      not really real?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He groaned and turned over and repeated the words: &ldquo;A kind of magic world&mdash;not
+      really real!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The wind blew through the door she opened, and scattered everything in the
+      room. And still she held the door open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was astonished at himself. He started up in swift indignation. Had he
+      not taught the child? Had he not brought her up in an atmosphere of faith?
+      What right had she to turn upon him in this matter? It was&mdash;indeed it
+      was&mdash;a sort of insolence, a lack of reverence....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was strange he had not perceived this at the time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But indeed at the first mention of &ldquo;questionings&rdquo; he ought to have
+      thundered. He saw that quite clearly now. He ought to have cried out and
+      said, &ldquo;On your knees, my Norah, and ask pardon of God!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Because after all faith is an emotional thing....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to think very rapidly and copiously of things he ought to have
+      said to Eleanor. And now the eloquence of reverie was upon him. In a
+      little time he was also addressing the tea-party at Morrice Deans'. Upon
+      them too he ought to have thundered. And he knew now also all that he
+      should have said to the recalcitrant employer. Thunder also. Thunder is
+      surely the privilege of the higher clergy&mdash;under Jove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But why hadn't he thundered?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gesticulated in the darkness, thrust out a clutching hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are situations that must be gripped&mdash;gripped firmly. And
+      without delay. In the middle ages there had been grip enough in a purple
+      glove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From these belated seizures of the day's lost opportunities the bishop
+      passed to such a pessimistic estimate of the church as had never entered
+      his mind before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was as if he had fallen suddenly out of a spiritual balloon into a
+      world of bleak realism. He found himself asking unprecedented and
+      devastating questions, questions that implied the most fundamental
+      shiftings of opinion. Why was the church such a failure? Why had it no
+      grip upon either masters or men amidst this vigorous life of modern
+      industrialism, and why had it no grip upon the questioning young? It was a
+      tolerated thing, he felt, just as sometimes he had felt that the Crown was
+      a tolerated thing. He too was a tolerated thing; a curious survival....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was not as things should be. He struggled to recover a proper
+      attitude. But he remained enormously dissatisfied....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The church was no Levite to pass by on the other side away from the
+      struggles and wrongs of the social conflict. It had no right when the
+      children asked for the bread of life to offer them Gothic stone....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to make interminable weak plans for fulfilling his duty to his
+      diocese and his daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What could he do to revivify his clergy? He wished he had more personal
+      magnetism, he wished he had a darker and a larger presence. He wished he
+      had not been saddled with Whippham's rather futile son as his chaplain. He
+      wished he had a dean instead of being his own dean. With an unsympathetic
+      rector. He wished he had it in him to make some resounding appeal. He
+      might of course preach a series of thumping addresses and sermons, rather
+      on the lines of &ldquo;Fors Clavigera,&rdquo; to masters and men, in the Cathedral.
+      Only it was so difficult to get either masters or men into the Cathedral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, if the people will not come to the bishop the bishop must go out to
+      the people. Should he go outside the Cathedral&mdash;to the place where
+      the trains met?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Interweaving with such thoughts the problem of Eleanor rose again into his
+      consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Weren't there books she ought to read? Weren't there books she ought to be
+      made to read? And books&mdash;and friends&mdash;that ought to be
+      imperatively forbidden? Imperatively!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But how to define the forbidden?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to compose an address on Modern Literature (so-called).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It became acrimonious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before dawn the birds began to sing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mind had seemed to be a little tranquillized, there had been a
+      distinct feeling of subsidence sleepwards, when first one and then another
+      little creature roused itself and the bishop to greet the gathering
+      daylight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It became a little clamour, a misty sea of sound in which individuality
+      appeared and disappeared. For a time a distant cuckoo was very
+      perceptible, like a landmark looming up over a fog, like the cuckoo in the
+      Pastoral Symphony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop tried not to heed these sounds, but they were by their very
+      nature insistent sounds. He lay disregarding them acutely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently he pulled the coverlet over his ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little later he sat up in bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again in a slight detail he marked his strange and novel detachment from
+      the world of his upbringing. His hallucination of disillusionment had
+      spread from himself and his church and his faith to the whole animate
+      creation. He knew that these were the voices of &ldquo;our feathered songsters,&rdquo;
+       that this was &ldquo;a joyous chorus&rdquo; greeting the day. He knew that a wakeful
+      bishop ought to bless these happy creatures, and join with them by
+      reciting Ken's morning hymn. He made an effort that was more than half
+      habit, to repeat and he repeated with a scowling face and the voice of a
+      schoolmaster:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Awake my soul, and with the sun Thy daily stage of duty run....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got no further. He stopped short, sat still, thinking what utterly
+      detestable things singing birds were. A. blackbird had gripped his
+      attention. Never had he heard such vain repetitions. He struggled against
+      the dark mood of criticism. &ldquo;He prayeth best who loveth best&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No, he did not love the birds. It was useless to pretend. Whatever one may
+      say about other birds a cuckoo is a low detestable cad of a bird.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the bishop began to be particularly tormented by a bird that made a
+      short, insistent, wheezing sound at regular intervals of perhaps twenty
+      seconds. If a bird could have whooping-cough, that, he thought, was the
+      sort of whoop it would have. But even if it had whooping-cough he could
+      not pity it. He hung in its intervals waiting for the return of the
+      wheeze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then that blackbird reasserted itself. It had a rich boastful note; it
+      seemed proud of its noisy reiteration of simple self-assertion. For some
+      obscure reason the phrase &ldquo;oleographic sounds&rdquo; drifted into the bishop's
+      thoughts. This bird produced the peculiar and irrational impression that
+      it had recently made a considerable sum of money by shrewd industrialism.
+      It was, he thought grimly, a genuine Princhester blackbird.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This wickedly uncharitable reference to his diocese ran all unchallenged
+      through the bishop's mind. And others no less wicked followed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once during his summer holidays in Florence he and Lady Ella had
+      subscribed to an association for the protection of song-birds. He recalled
+      this now with a mild wonder. It seemed to him that perhaps after all it
+      was as well to let fruit-growers and Italians deal with singing-birds in
+      their own way. Perhaps after all they had a wisdom....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He passed his hands over his face. The world after all is not made
+      entirely for singing-birds; there is such a thing as proportion.
+      Singing-birds may become a luxury, an indulgence, an excess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Did the birds eat the fruit in Paradise?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps there they worked for some collective musical effect, had some
+      sort of conductor in the place of this&mdash;hullabaloo....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He decided to walk about the room for a time and then remake his bed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sunrise found the bishop with his head and shoulders out of the window
+      trying to see that blackbird. He just wanted to look at it. He was
+      persuaded it was a quite exceptional blackbird.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again came that oppressive sense of the futility of the contemporary
+      church, but this time it came in the most grotesque form. For hanging half
+      out of the casement he was suddenly reminded of St. Francis of Assisi, and
+      how at his rebuke the wheeling swallow stilled their cries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was all so different then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only after he had passed four similar nights, with intervening days
+      of lassitude and afternoon siestas, that the bishop realized that he was
+      in the grip of insomnia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not go at once to a doctor, but he told his trouble to every one he
+      met and received much tentative advice. He had meant to have his talk with
+      Eleanor on the morning next after their conversation in the dining-room,
+      but his bodily and spiritual anaemia prevented him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fifth night was the beginning of the Whitsuntide Ember week, and he
+      wore a red cassock and had a distracting and rather interesting day
+      welcoming his ordination candidates. They had a good effect upon him; we
+      spiritualize ourselves when we seek to spiritualize others, and he went to
+      bed in a happier frame of mind than he had done since the day of the
+      shock. He woke in the night, but he woke much more himself than he had
+      been since the trouble began. He repeated that verse of Ken's:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When in the night I sleepless lie, My soul with heavenly thoughts supply;
+      Let no ill dreams disturb my rest, No powers of darkness me molest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost immediately after these there floated into his mind, as if it were
+      a message, the dear familiar words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He giveth his Beloved sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These words irradiated and soothed him quite miraculously, the clouds of
+      doubt seemed to dissolve and vanish and leave him safe and calm under a
+      clear sky; he knew those words were a promise, and very speedily he fell
+      asleep and slept until he was called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the next day was a troubled one. Whippham had muddled his timetable
+      and crowded his afternoon; the strike of the transport workers had begun,
+      and the ugly noises they made at the tramway depot, where they were booing
+      some one, penetrated into the palace. He had to snatch a meal between
+      services, and the sense of hurry invaded his afternoon lectures to the
+      candidates. He hated hurry in Ember week. His ideal was one of quiet
+      serenity, of grave things said slowly, of still, kneeling figures, of a
+      sort of dark cool spiritual germination. But what sort of dark cool
+      spiritual germination is possible with an ass like Whippham about?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the fresh courage of the morning the bishop had arranged for that talk
+      with Eleanor he had already deferred too long, and this had proved less
+      satisfactory than he had intended it to be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop's experience with the ordination candidates was following the
+      usual course. Before they came there was something bordering upon distaste
+      for the coming invasion; then always there was an effect of surprise at
+      the youth and faith of the neophytes and a real response of the spirit to
+      the occasion. Throughout the first twenty-four hours they were all simply
+      neophytes, without individuality to break up their uniformity of
+      self-devotion. Then afterwards they began to develop little personal
+      traits, and scarcely ever were these pleasing traits. Always one or two of
+      them would begin haunting the bishop, giving way to an appetite for
+      special words, special recognitions. He knew the expression of that
+      craving on their faces. He knew the way-laying movements in room and
+      passage that presently began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This time in particular there was a freckled underbred young man who
+      handed in what was evidently a carefully prepared memorandum upon what he
+      called &ldquo;my positions.&rdquo; Apparently he had a muddle of doubts about the
+      early fathers and the dates of the earlier authentic copies of the
+      gospels, things of no conceivable significance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop glanced through this bale of papers&mdash;it had of course no
+      index and no synopsis, and some of the pages were not numbered&mdash;handed
+      it over to Whippham, and when he proved, as usual, a broken reed, the
+      bishop had the brilliant idea of referring the young man to Canon Bliss
+      (of Pringle), &ldquo;who has a special knowledge quite beyond my own in this
+      field.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he knew from the young man's eye even as he said this that it was not
+      going to put him off for more than a day or so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The immediate result of glancing over these papers was, however, to
+      enhance in the bishop's mind a growing disposition to minimize the
+      importance of all dated and explicit evidences and arguments for orthodox
+      beliefs, and to resort to vague symbolic and liberal interpretations, and
+      it was in this state that he came to his talk with Eleanor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not give her much time to develop her objections. He met her half
+      way and stated them for her, and overwhelmed her with sympathy and
+      understanding. She had been &ldquo;too literal.&rdquo; &ldquo;Too literal&rdquo; was his keynote.
+      He was a little astonished at the liberality of his own views. He had been
+      getting along now for some years without looking into his own opinions too
+      closely and he was by no means prepared to discover how far he had come to
+      meet his daughter's scepticisms. But he did meet them. He met them so
+      thoroughly that he almost conveyed that hers was a needlessly conservative
+      and oldfashioned attitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Occasionally he felt he was being a little evasive, but she did not seem
+      to notice it. As she took his drift, her relief and happiness were
+      manifest. And he had never noticed before how clear and pretty her eyes
+      were; they were the most honest eyes he had ever seen. She looked at him
+      very steadily as he explained, and lit up at his points. She brightened
+      wonderfully as she realized that after all they were not apart, they had
+      not differed; simply they had misunderstood....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And before he knew where he was, and in a mere parenthetical declaration
+      of liberality, he surprised himself by conceding her demand for Newnham
+      even before she had repeated it. It helped his case wonderfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Call in every exterior witness you can. The church will welcome them....
+      No, I want you to go, my dear....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But his mind was stirred again to its depths by this discussion. And in
+      particular he was surprised and a little puzzled by this Newnham
+      concession and the necessity of making his new attitude clear to Lady
+      Ella....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was with a sense of fatality that he found himself awake again that
+      night, like some one lying drowned and still and yet perfectly conscious
+      at the bottom of deep cold water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He repeated, &ldquo;He giveth his Beloved sleep,&rdquo; but all the conviction had
+      gone out of the words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither the bishop's insomnia nor his incertitudes about himself and his
+      faith developed in a simple and orderly manner. There were periods of
+      sustained suffering and periods of recovery; it was not for a year or so
+      that he regarded these troubles as more than acute incidental
+      interruptions of his general tranquillity or realized that he was passing
+      into a new phase of life and into a new quality of thought. He told every
+      one of the insomnia and no one of his doubts; these he betrayed only by an
+      increasing tendency towards vagueness, symbolism, poetry and toleration.
+      Eleanor seemed satisfied with his exposition; she did not press for
+      further enlightenment. She continued all her outward conformities except
+      that after a time she ceased to communicate; and in September she went
+      away to Newnham. Her doubts had not visibly affected Clementina or her
+      other sisters, and the bishop made no further attempts to explore the
+      spiritual life of his family below the surface of its formal acquiescence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a matter of fact his own spiritual wrestlings were almost exclusively
+      nocturnal. During his spells of insomnia he led a curiously double
+      existence. In the daytime he was largely the self he had always been,
+      able, assured, ecclesiastical, except that he was a little jaded and
+      irritable or sleepy instead of being quick and bright; he believed in God
+      and the church and the Royal Family and himself securely; in the wakeful
+      night time he experienced a different and novel self, a bare-minded self,
+      bleakly fearless at its best, shamelessly weak at its worst, critical,
+      sceptical, joyless, anxious. The anxiety was quite the worst element of
+      all. Something sat by his pillow asking grey questions: &ldquo;What are you
+      doing? Where are you going? Is it really well with the children? Is it
+      really well with the church? Is it really well with the country? Are you
+      indeed doing anything at all? Are you anything more than an actor wearing
+      a costume in an archaic play? The people turn their backs on you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He would twist over on his pillow. He would whisper hymns and prayers that
+      had the quality of charms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He giveth his Beloved sleep&rdquo;; that answered many times, and many times it
+      failed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The labour troubles of 1912 eased off as the year wore on, and the
+      bitterness of the local press over the palace abated very considerably.
+      Indeed there was something like a watery gleam of popularity when he
+      brought down his consistent friend, the dear old Princess Christiana of
+      Hoch and Unter, black bonnet, deafness, and all, to open a new wing of the
+      children's hospital. The Princhester conservative paper took the occasion
+      to inform the diocese that he was a fluent German scholar and consequently
+      a persona grata with the royal aunts, and that the Princess Christiana was
+      merely just one of a number of royalties now practically at the beck and
+      call of Princhester. It was not true, but it was very effective locally,
+      and seemed to justify a little the hauteur of which Lady Ella was so
+      unjustly suspected. Yet it involved a possibility of disappointments in
+      the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went to Brighton-Pomfrey too upon the score of his general health, and
+      Brighton-Pomfrey revised his general regimen, discouraged indiscreet
+      fasting, and suggested a complete abstinence from red wine except white
+      port, if indeed that can be called a red wine, and a moderate use of
+      Egyptian cigarettes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But 1913 was a strenuous year. The labour troubles revived, the
+      suffragette movement increased greatly in violence and aggressiveness, and
+      there sprang up no less than three ecclesiastical scandals in the diocese.
+      First, the Kensitites set themselves firmly to make presentations and
+      prosecutions against Morrice Deans, who was reserving the sacrament,
+      wearing, they said, &ldquo;Babylonish garments,&rdquo; going beyond all reason in the
+      matter of infant confession, and generally brightening up Mogham Banks;
+      next, a popular preacher in Wombash, published a book under the
+      exasperating title, &ldquo;The Light Under the Altar,&rdquo; in which he showed
+      himself as something between an Arian and a Pantheist, and treated the
+      dogma of the Trinity with as little respect as one would show to an
+      intrusive cat; while thirdly, an obscure but overworked missioner of a tin
+      mission church in the new working-class district at Pringle, being
+      discovered in some sort of polygamous relationship, had seen fit to
+      publish in pamphlet form a scandalous admission and defence, a pamphlet
+      entitled &ldquo;Marriage True and False,&rdquo; taking the public needlessly into his
+      completest confidence and quoting the affairs of Abraham and Hosea,
+      reviving many points that are better forgotten about Luther, and appealing
+      also to such uncanonical authorities as Milton, Plato, and John Humphrey
+      Noyes. This abnormal concurrence of indiscipline was extremely unlucky for
+      the bishop. It plunged him into strenuous controversy upon three fronts,
+      so to speak, and involved a great number of personal encounters far too
+      vivid for his mental serenity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pringle polygamist was the most moving as Morrice Deans was the most
+      exacting and troublesome and the Wombash Pantheist the most insidiously
+      destructive figure in these three toilsome disputes. The Pringle man's
+      soul had apparently missed the normal distribution of fig-leaves; he was
+      an illiterate, open-eyed, hard-voiced, freckled, rational-minded creature,
+      with large expository hands, who had come by a side way into the church
+      because he was an indefatigable worker, and he insisted upon telling the
+      bishop with an irrepressible candour and completeness just exactly what
+      was the matter with his intimate life. The bishop very earnestly did not
+      want these details, and did his utmost to avoid the controversial
+      questions that the honest man pressed respectfully but obstinately upon
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even St. Paul, my lord, admitted that it is better to marry than burn,&rdquo;
+       said the Pringle misdemeanant, &ldquo;and here was I, my lord, married and still
+      burning!&rdquo; and, &ldquo;I think you would find, my lord, considering all
+      Charlotte's peculiarities, that the situation was really much more trying
+      than the absolute celibacy St. Paul had in view.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop listened to these arguments as little as possible, and did not
+      answer them at all. But afterwards the offender came and wept and said he
+      was ruined and heartbroken and unfairly treated because he wasn't a
+      gentleman, and that was distressing. It was so exactly true&mdash;and so
+      inevitable. He had been deprived, rather on account of his voice and
+      apologetics than of his offence, and public opinion was solidly with the
+      sentence. He made a gallant effort to found what he called a Labour Church
+      in Pringle, and after some financial misunderstandings departed with his
+      unambiguous menage to join the advanced movement on the Clyde.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Morrice Deans enquiry however demanded an amount of erudition that
+      greatly fatigued the bishop. He had a very fair general knowledge of
+      vestments, but he had never really cared for anything but the poetry of
+      ornaments, and he had to work strenuously to master the legal side of the
+      question. Whippham, his chaplain, was worse than useless as a helper. The
+      bishop wanted to end the matter as quickly, quietly, and favourably to
+      Morrice Deans as possible; he thought Morrice Deans a thoroughly good man
+      in his parish, and he believed that the substitution of a low churchman
+      would mean a very complete collapse of church influence in Mogham Banks,
+      where people were now thoroughly accustomed to a highly ornate service.
+      But Morrice Deans was intractable and his pursuers indefatigable, and on
+      several occasions the bishop sat far into the night devising compromises
+      and equivocations that should make the Kensitites think that Morrice Deans
+      wasn't wearing vestments when he was, and that should make Morrice Deans
+      think he was wearing vestments when he wasn't. And it was Whippham who
+      first suggested green tea as a substitute for coffee, which gave the
+      bishop indigestion, as his stimulant for these nocturnal bouts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now green tea is the most lucid of poisons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And while all this extra activity about Morrice Deans, these vigils and
+      crammings and writings down, were using all and more energy than the
+      bishop could well spare, he was also doing his quiet utmost to keep &ldquo;The
+      Light under the Altar&rdquo; ease from coming to a head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This man he hated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he dreaded him as well as hated him. Chasters, the author of &ldquo;The
+      Light under the Altar,&rdquo; was a man who not only reasoned closely but
+      indelicately. There was a demonstrating, jeering, air about his preaching
+      and writing, and everything he said and did was saturated by the spirit of
+      challenge. He did not so much imitate as exaggerate the style of Matthew
+      Arnold. And whatever was done publicly against him would have to be done
+      very publicly because his book had got him a London reputation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the bishop's point of view Chasters was one of nature's ignoblemen.
+      He seemed to have subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles and passed all
+      the tests and taken all the pledges that stand on the way to ordination,
+      chiefly for the pleasure of attacking them more successfully from the
+      rear; he had been given the living of Wombash by a cousin, and filled it
+      very largely because it was not only more piquant but more remunerative
+      and respectable to be a rationalist lecturer in a surplice. And in a hard
+      kind of ultra-Protestant way his social and parochial work was not badly
+      done. But his sermons were terrible. &ldquo;He takes a text,&rdquo; said one
+      informant, &ldquo;and he goes on firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly, like
+      somebody tearing the petals from a flower. 'Finally,' he says, and throws
+      the bare stalk into the dustbin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop avoided &ldquo;The Light under the Altar&rdquo; for nearly a year. It was
+      only when a second book was announced with the winning title of &ldquo;The Core
+      of Truth in Christianity&rdquo; that he perceived he must take action. He sat up
+      late one night with a marked copy, a very indignantly marked copy, of the
+      former work that an elderly colonel, a Wombash parishioner, an orthodox
+      Layman of the most virulent type, had sent him. He perceived that he had
+      to deal with a dialectician of exceptional ability, who had concentrated a
+      quite considerable weight of scholarship upon the task of explaining away
+      every scrap of spiritual significance in the Eucharist. From Chasters the
+      bishop was driven by reference to the works of Legge and Frazer, and for
+      the first time he began to measure the dimensions and power of the modern
+      criticism of church doctrine and observance. Green tea should have lit his
+      way to refutation; instead it lit up the whole inquiry with a light of
+      melancholy confirmation. Neither by night nor by day could the bishop find
+      a proper method of opening a counter attack upon Chasters, who was
+      indisputably an intellectually abler man and a very ruthless beast indeed
+      to assail, and meanwhile the demand that action should be taken increased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The literature of church history and the controversies arising out of
+      doctrinal development became the employment of the bishop's leisure and a
+      commanding preoccupation. He would have liked to discuss with some one
+      else the network of perplexities in which he was entangling himself, and
+      more particularly with Canon Bliss, but his own positions were becoming so
+      insecure that he feared to betray them by argument. He had grown up with a
+      kind of intellectual modesty. Some things he had never yet talked about;
+      it made his mind blench to think of talking about them. And his great
+      aching gaps of wakefulness began now, thanks to the green tea, to be
+      interspersed with theological dreams and visions of an extravagant
+      vividness. He would see Frazer's sacrificial kings butchered picturesquely
+      and terribly amidst strange and grotesque rituals; he would survey long
+      and elaborate processions and ceremonials in which the most remarkable
+      symbols were borne high in the sight of all men; he would cower before a
+      gigantic and threatening Heaven. These green-tea dreams and visions were
+      not so much phases of sleep as an intensification and vivid furnishing
+      forth of insomnia. It added greatly to his disturbance that&mdash;exceeding
+      the instructions of Brighton-Pomfrey&mdash;he had now experimented
+      ignorantly and planlessly with one or two narcotics and sleeping mixtures
+      that friends and acquaintances had mentioned in his hearing. For the first
+      time in his life he became secretive from his wife. He knew he ought not
+      to take these things, he knew they were physically and morally evil, but a
+      tormenting craving drove him to them. Subtly and insensibly his character
+      was being undermined by the growing nervous trouble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He astonished himself by the cunning and the hypocritical dignity he could
+      display in procuring these drugs. He arranged to have a tea-making set in
+      his bedroom, and secretly substituted green tea, for which he developed a
+      powerful craving, in the place of the delicate China tea Lady Ella
+      procured him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These doctrinal and physical anxieties and distresses were at their worst
+      in the spring and early summer of 1914. That was a time of great mental
+      and moral disturbance. There was premonition in the air of those days. It
+      was like the uneasiness sensitive people experience before a thunderstorm.
+      The moral atmosphere was sullen and close. The whole world seemed
+      irritable and mischievous. The suffragettes became extraordinarily
+      malignant; the democratic movement went rotten with sabotage and with a
+      cant of being &ldquo;rebels&rdquo;; the reactionary Tories and a crew of noisy old
+      peeresses set themselves to create incurable confusion again in the
+      healing wounds of Ireland, and feuds and frantic folly broke out at every
+      point of the social and political edifice. And then a bomb burst at
+      Sarajevo that silenced all this tumult. The unstable polity of Europe
+      heeled over like a ship that founders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the swiftest, tensest week in history Europe capsized into war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (6)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first effect of the war upon the mind of the bishop, as upon most
+      imaginative minds, was to steady and exalt it. Trivialities and
+      exasperations seemed swept out of existence. Men lifted up their eyes from
+      disputes that had seemed incurable and wrangling that promised to be
+      interminable, and discovered a plain and tragic issue that involved every
+      one in a common call for devotion. For a great number of men and women who
+      had been born and bred in security, the August and September of 1914 were
+      the supremely heroic period of their lives. Myriads of souls were born
+      again to ideas of service and sacrifice in those tremendous days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Black and evil thing as the war was, it was at any rate a great thing; it
+      did this much for countless minds that for the first time they realized
+      the epic quality of history and their own relationship to the destinies of
+      the race. The flimsy roof under which we had been living our lives of
+      comedy fell and shattered the floor under our feet; we saw the stars above
+      and the abyss below. We perceived that life was insecure and adventurous,
+      part of one vast adventure in space and time....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently the smoke and dust of battle hid the great distances again, but
+      they could not altogether destroy the memories of this revelation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the first two months the bishop's attention was so detached from his
+      immediate surroundings and employments, so absorbed by great events, that
+      his history if it were told in detail would differ scarcely at all from
+      the histories of most comparatively unemployed minds during those first
+      dramatic days, the days when the Germans made their great rush upon Paris
+      and it seemed that France was down, France and the whole fabric of liberal
+      civilization. He emerged from these stunning apprehensions after the
+      Battle of the Marne, to find himself busy upon a score of dispersed and
+      disconnected war jobs, and trying to get all the new appearances and
+      forces and urgencies of the war into relations with himself. One thing
+      became very vivid indeed, that he wasn't being used in any real and
+      effective way in the war. There was a mighty going to and fro upon Red
+      Cross work and various war committees, a vast preparation for wounded men
+      and for the succour of dislocated families; a preparation, that proved to
+      be needless, for catastrophic unemployment. The war problem and the puzzle
+      of German psychology ousted for a time all other intellectual interests;
+      like every one else the bishop swam deep in Nietzsche, Bernhardi, Houston
+      Stewart Chamberlain, and the like; he preached several sermons upon German
+      materialism and the astonishing decay of the German character. He also
+      read every newspaper he could lay his hands on&mdash;like any secular man.
+      He signed an address to the Russian Orthodox church, beginning &ldquo;Brethren,&rdquo;
+       and he revised his impressions of the Filioque controversy. The idea of a
+      reunion of the two great state churches of Russia and England had always
+      attracted him. But hitherto it had been a thing quite out of scale,
+      visionary, utopian. Now in this strange time of altered perspectives it
+      seemed the most practicable of suggestions. The mayor and corporation and
+      a detachment of the special reserve in uniform came to a great
+      intercession service, and in the palace there were two conferences of
+      local influential people, people of the most various types, people who had
+      never met tolerantly before, expressing now opinions of unprecedented
+      breadth and liberality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this sort of thing was fresh and exciting at first, and then it began
+      to fall into a routine and became habitual, and as it became habitual he
+      found that old sense of detachment and futility was creeping back again.
+      One day he realized that indeed the whole flood and tumult of the war
+      would be going on almost exactly as it was going on now if there had been
+      neither cathedral nor bishop in Princhester. It came to him that if
+      archbishops were rolled into patriarchs and patriarchs into archbishops,
+      it would matter scarcely more in the world process that was afoot than if
+      two men shook hands while their house was afire. At times all of us have
+      inappropriate thoughts. The unfortunate thought that struck the bishop as
+      a bullet might strike a man in an exposed trench, as he was hurrying
+      through the cloisters to a special service and address upon that doubly
+      glorious day in our English history, the day of St. Crispin, was of
+      Diogenes rolling his tub.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a poisonous thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It arose perhaps out of an article in a weekly paper at which he had
+      glanced after lunch, an article written by one of those sceptical spirits
+      who find all too abundant expression in our periodical literature. The
+      writer boldly charged the &ldquo;Christian churches&rdquo; with absolute
+      ineffectiveness. This war, he declared, was above all other wars a war of
+      ideas, of material organization against rational freedom, of violence
+      against law; it was a war more copiously discussed than any war had ever
+      been before, the air was thick with apologetics. And what was the voice of
+      the church amidst these elemental issues? Bishops and divines who were
+      patriots one heard discordantly enough, but where were the bishops and
+      divines who spoke for the Prince of Peace? Where was the blessing of the
+      church, where was the veto of the church? When it came to that one
+      discovered only a broad preoccupied back busied in supplementing the Army
+      Medical Corps with Red Cross activities, good work in its way&mdash;except
+      that the canonicals seemed superfluous. Who indeed looked to the church
+      for any voice at all? And so to Diogenes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop's mind went hunting for an answer to that indictment. And came
+      back and came back to the image of Diogenes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was with that image dangling like a barbed arrow from his mind that the
+      bishop went into the pulpit to preach upon St. Crispin's day, and looked
+      down upon a thin and scattered congregation in which the elderly, the
+      childless, and the unoccupied predominated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night insomnia resumed its sway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course the church ought to be controlling this great storm, the
+      greatest storm of war that had ever stirred mankind. It ought to be
+      standing fearlessly between the combatants like a figure in a wall
+      painting, with the cross of Christ uplifted and the restored memory of
+      Christendom softening the eyes of the armed nations. &ldquo;Put down those
+      weapons and listen to me,&rdquo; so the church should speak in irresistible
+      tones, in a voice of silver trumpets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instead it kept a long way from the fighting, tucked up its vestments, and
+      was rolling its local tubs quite briskly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (7)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then came the aggravation of all these distresses by an abrupt
+      abandonment of smoking and alcohol. Alcoholic relaxation, a necessary
+      mitigation of the unreality of peacetime politics, becomes a grave danger
+      in war, and it was with an understandable desire to forward the interests
+      of his realm that the King decided to set his statesmen an example&mdash;which
+      unhappily was not very widely followed&mdash;by abstaining from alcohol
+      during the continuance of the struggle. It did however swing over the
+      Bishop of Princhester to an immediate and complete abandonment of both
+      drink and tobacco. At that time he was finding comfort for his nerves in
+      Manila cheroots, and a particularly big and heavy type of Egyptian
+      cigarette with a considerable amount of opium, and his disorganized system
+      seized upon this sudden change as a grievance, and set all his jangling
+      being crying aloud for one cigarette&mdash;just one cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cheroots, it seemed, he could better spare, but a cigarette became his
+      symbol for his lost steadiness and ease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It brought him low.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reader has already been told the lamentable incident of the stolen
+      cigarette and the small boy, and how the bishop, tormented by that
+      shameful memory, cried aloud in the night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop rolled his tub, and is there any tub-rolling in the world more
+      busy and exacting than a bishop's? He rolled in it spite of ill-health and
+      insomnia, and all the while he was tormented by the enormous background of
+      the world war, by his ineffective realization of vast national needs, by
+      his passionate desire, for himself and his church, not to be ineffective.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The distressful alternation between nights of lucid doubt and days of dull
+      acquiescence was resumed with an intensification of its contrasts. The
+      brief phase of hope that followed the turn of the fighting upon the Maine,
+      the hope that after all the war would end swiftly, dramatically, and
+      justly, and everything be as it had been before&mdash;but pleasanter, gave
+      place to a phase that bordered upon despair. The fall of Antwerp and the
+      doubts and uncertainties of the Flanders situation weighed terribly upon
+      the bishop. He was haunted for a time by nightmares of Zeppelins presently
+      raining fire upon London. These visions became Apocalyptic. The Zeppelins
+      came to England with the new year, and with the close of the year came the
+      struggle for Ypres that was so near to being a collapse of the allied
+      defensive. The events of the early spring, the bloody failure of British
+      generalship at Neuve Chapelle, the naval disaster in the Dardanelles, the
+      sinking of the Falaba, the Russian defeat in the Masurian Lakes, all
+      deepened the bishop's impression of the immensity of the nation's
+      difficulties and of his own unhelpfulness. He was ashamed that the church
+      should hold back its curates from enlistment while the French priests were
+      wearing their uniforms in the trenches; the expedition of the Bishop of
+      London to hold open-air services at the front seemed merely to accentuate
+      the tub-rolling. It was rolling the tub just where it was most in the way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was wrong? What was wanting?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Westminster Gazette, The Spectator, and several other of the most
+      trusted organs of public opinion were intermittently discussing the same
+      question. Their discussions implied at once the extreme need that was felt
+      for religion by all sorts of representative people, and the universal
+      conviction that the church was in some way muddling and masking her
+      revelation. &ldquo;What is wrong with the Churches?&rdquo; was, for example, the
+      general heading of The Westminster Gazette's correspondence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day the bishop skimmed a brief incisive utterance by Sir Harry
+      Johnston that pierced to the marrow of his own shrinking convictions. Sir
+      Harry is one of those people who seem to write as well as speak in a quick
+      tenor. &ldquo;Instead of propounding plainly and without the acereted mythology
+      of Asia Minor, Greece and Rome, the pure Gospel of Christ.... they present
+      it overloaded with unbelievable myths (such as, among a thousand others,
+      that Massacre of the Innocents which never took place).... bore their
+      listeners by a Tibetan repetition of creeds that have ceased to be
+      credible.... Mutually contradictory propositions.... Prayers and litanies
+      composed in Byzantine and mediaeval times.... the want of actuality, the
+      curious silliness which has, ever since the destruction of Jerusalem, hung
+      about the exposition of Christianity.... But if the Bishops continue to
+      fuss about the trappings of religion.... the maintenance of codes compiled
+      by people who lived sixteen hundred or two thousand five hundred years
+      ago.... the increasingly educated and practical-minded working classes
+      will not come to church, weekday or Sunday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop held the paper in his hand, and with a mind that he felt to be
+      terribly open, asked himself how true that sharp indictment might be, and,
+      granting its general truth, what was the duty of the church, that is to
+      say of the bishops, for as Cyprian says, ecelesia est in episcopo. We say
+      the creeds; how far may we unsay them?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far he had taken no open action against Chasters. Suppose now he were
+      to side with Chasters and let the whole diocese, the church of
+      Princhester, drift as far as it chose under his inaction towards an
+      extreme modernism, risking a conflict with, and if necessary fighting, the
+      archbishop.... It was but for a moment that his mind swung to this
+      possibility and then recoiled. The Laymen, that band of bigots, would
+      fight. He could not contemplate litigation and wrangling about the
+      teaching of the church. Besides, what were the &ldquo;trappings of religion&rdquo; and
+      what the essentials? What after all was &ldquo;the pure gospel of Christ&rdquo; of
+      which this writer wrote so glibly? He put the paper down and took a New
+      Testament from his desk and opened it haphazard. He felt a curious wish
+      that he could read it for the first time. It was over-familiar. Everything
+      latterly in his theology and beliefs had become over-familiar. It had all
+      become mechanical and dead and unmeaning to his tired mind....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whippham came with a reminder of more tub-rolling, and the bishop's
+      speculations were broken off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FOURTH - THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      THAT night when he cried aloud at the memory of his furtive cigarette, the
+      bishop was staying with a rich man named Garstein Fellows. These Garstein
+      Fellows people were steel people with a financial side to them; young
+      Garstein Fellows had his fingers in various chemical businesses, and the
+      real life of the firm was in various minor partners called Hartstein and
+      Blumenhart and so forth, who had acquired a considerable amount of
+      ungentlemanly science and energy in Germany and German Switzerland. But
+      the Fellows element was good old Princhester stuff. There had been a
+      Fellows firm in Princhester in 1819. They were not people the bishop liked
+      and it was not a house the bishop liked staying at, but it had become part
+      of his policy to visit and keep in touch with as many of the local
+      plutocracy as he could, to give and take with them, in order to make the
+      presence of the church a reality to them. It had been not least among the
+      negligences and evasions of the sainted but indolent Hood that he had
+      invariably refused overnight hospitality whenever it was possible for him
+      to get back to his home. The morning was his working time. His books and
+      hymns had profited at the cost of missing many a generous after-dinner
+      subscription, and at the expense of social unity. From the outset Scrope
+      had set himself to alter this. A certain lack of enthusiasm on Lady Ella's
+      part had merely provoked him to greater effort on his own. His ideal of
+      what was needed with the people was something rather jolly and familiar,
+      something like a very good and successful French or Irish priest,
+      something that came easily and readily into their homes and laid a
+      friendly hand on their shoulders. The less he liked these rich people
+      naturally the more familiar his resolution to be successfully intimate
+      made him. He put down the names and brief characteristics of their sons
+      and daughters in a little note-book and consulted it before every visit so
+      as to get his most casual enquiries right. And he invited himself to the
+      Garstein Fellows house on this occasion by telegram.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A special mission and some business in Wombash may I have a scrap of
+      supper and a bed?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now Mrs. Garstein Fellows was a thoroughly London woman; she was one of
+      the banking Grunenbaums, the fair tall sort, and she had a very decided
+      tendency to smartness. She had a little party in the house, a sort of long
+      week-end party, that made her hesitate for a minute or so before she
+      framed a reply to the bishop's request.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the intention of Mrs. Garstein Fellows to succeed very
+      conspicuously in the British world, and the British world she felt was a
+      complicated one; it is really not one world but several, and if you would
+      surely succeed you must keep your peace with all the systems and be a
+      source of satisfaction to all of them. So at least Mrs. Garstein Fellows
+      saw it, and her method was to classify her acquaintances according to
+      their systems, to keep them in their proper bundles, and to give every one
+      the treatment he or she was accustomed to receive. And since all things
+      British are now changing and passing away, it may not be uninteresting to
+      record the classification Mrs. Garstein Fellows adopted. First she set
+      apart as most precious and desirable, and requiring the most careful
+      treatment, the &ldquo;court dowdies &ldquo;&mdash;for so it was that the dignity and
+      quiet good taste that radiated from Buckingham Palace impressed her
+      restless, shallow mind&mdash;the sort of people who prefer pair horse
+      carriages to automobiles, have quiet friendships in the highest quarters,
+      quietly do not know any one else, busy themselves with charities, dress
+      richly rather than impressively, and have either little water-colour
+      accomplishments or none at all, and no other relations with &ldquo;art.&rdquo; At the
+      skirts of this crowning British world Mrs. Garstein Fellows tugged
+      industriously and expensively. She did not keep a carriage and pair and an
+      old family coachman because that, she felt, would be considered pushing
+      and presumptuous; she had the sense to stick to her common unpretending 80
+      h.p. Daimler; but she wore a special sort of blackish hat-bonnet for such
+      occasions as brought her near the centre of honour, which she got from a
+      little good shop known only to very few outside the inner ring, which
+      hat-bonnet she was always careful to sit on for a few minutes before
+      wearing. And it was to this first and highest and best section of her
+      social scheme that she considered that bishops properly belonged. But some
+      bishops, and in particular such a comparatively bright bishop as the
+      Bishop of Princhester, she also thought of as being just as comfortably
+      accommodated in her second system, the &ldquo;serious liberal lot,&rdquo; which was
+      more fatiguing and less boring, which talked of books and things, visited
+      the Bells, went to all first-nights when Granville Barker was the
+      producer, and knew and valued people in the grey and earnest plains
+      between the Cecils and the Sidney Webbs. And thirdly there were the smart
+      intellectual lot, again not very well marked off, and on the whole
+      practicable to bishops, of whom fewer particulars are needed because
+      theirs is a perennial species, and then finally there was that fourth
+      world which was paradoxically at once very brilliant and a little shady,
+      which had its Night Club side, and seemed to set no limit to its
+      eccentricities. It seemed at times to be aiming to shock and yet it had
+      its standards, but here it was that the dancers and actresses and forgiven
+      divorcees came in&mdash;and the bishops as a rule, a rule hitherto always
+      respected, didn't. This was the ultimate world of Mrs. Garstein Fellows;
+      she had no use for merely sporting people and the merely correct smart and
+      the duller county families, sets that led nowhere, and it was from her
+      fourth system of the Glittering Doubtfuls that this party which made her
+      hesitate over the bishop's telegram, was derived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She ran over their names as she sat considering her reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was there for a bishop to object to? There was that admirable
+      American widow, Lady Sunderbund. She was enormously rich, she was
+      enthusiastic. She was really on probation for higher levels; it was her
+      decolletage delayed her. If only she kept off theosophy and the Keltic
+      renascence and her disposition to profess wild intellectual passions,
+      there would be no harm in her. Provided she didn't come down to dinner in
+      anything too fantastically scanty&mdash;but a word in season was possible.
+      No! there was no harm in Lady Sunderbund. Then there were Ridgeway Kelso
+      and this dark excitable Catholic friend of his, Paidraig O'Gorman. Mrs.
+      Garstein Fellows saw no harm in them. Then one had to consider Lord
+      Gatling and Lizzie Barusetter. But nothing showed, nothing was likely to
+      show even if there was anything. And besides, wasn't there a Church and
+      Stage Guild?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Except for those people there seemed little reason for alarm. Mrs.
+      Garstein Fellows did not know that Professor Hoppart, who so amusingly
+      combined a professorship of political economy with the writing of
+      music-hall lyrics, was a keen amateur theologian, nor that Bent, the
+      sentimental novelist, had a similar passion. She did not know that her own
+      eldest son, a dark, romantic-looking youngster from Eton, had also come to
+      the theological stage of development. She did however weigh the
+      possibilities of too liberal opinions on what are called social questions
+      on the part of Miss Sharsper, the novelist, and decided that if that lady
+      was watched nothing so terrible could be said even in an undertone; and as
+      for the Mariposa, the dancer, she had nothing but Spanish and bad French,
+      she looked all right, and it wasn't very likely she would go out of her
+      way to startle an Anglican bishop. Simply she needn't dance. Besides which
+      even if a man does get a glimpse of a little something&mdash;it isn't as
+      if it was a woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But of course if the party mustn't annoy the bishop, the bishop must do
+      his duty by the party. There must be the usual purple and the silver
+      buckles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She wired back:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A little party but it won't put you out send your man with your change.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In making that promise Mrs. Garstein Fellows reckoned without the morbid
+      sensibility of the bishop's disorganized nervous system and the
+      unsuspected theological stirrings beneath the apparent worldliness of
+      Hoppart and Bent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The trouble began in the drawing-room after dinner. Out of deference to
+      the bishop's abstinence the men did not remain to smoke, but came in to
+      find the Mariposa and Lady Sunderbund smoking cigarettes, which these
+      ladies continued to do a little defiantly. They had hoped to finish them
+      before the bishop came up. The night was chilly, and a cheerful wood fire
+      cracking and banging on the fireplace emphasized the ordinary heating.
+      Mrs. Garstein Fellows, who had not expected so prompt an appearance of the
+      men, had arranged her chairs in a semicircle for a little womanly gossip,
+      and before she could intervene she found her party, with the exception of
+      Lord Gatling, who had drifted just a little too noticeably with Miss
+      Barnsetter into a window, sitting round with a conscious air, that was
+      perhaps just a trifle too apparent, of being &ldquo;good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Mr. Bent plunged boldly into general conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you reading anything now, Mrs. Garstein Fellows?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;I'm an
+      interested party.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was standing at the side of the fireplace. She bit her lip and looked
+      at the cornice and meditated with a girlish expression. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said.
+      &ldquo;I am reading again. I didn't think I should but I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For a time,&rdquo; said Hoppart, &ldquo;I read nothing but the papers. I bought from
+      a dozen to twenty a day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is wearing off,&rdquo; said the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The first thing I began to read again,&rdquo; said Mrs. Garstein Fellows, &ldquo;&mdash;I'm
+      not saying it for your sake, Bishop&mdash;was the Bible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went to the Bible,&rdquo; said Bent as if he was surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've heard that before,&rdquo; said Ridgeway Kelso, in that slightly explosive
+      manner of his. &ldquo;All sorts of people who don't usually read the Bible&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Mr. Kelso!&rdquo; protested their hostess with raised eyebrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was thinking of Bent. But anyhow there's been a great wave of
+      seriousness, a sudden turning to religion and religious things. I don't
+      know if it comes your way, Bishop....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've had no rows of penitents yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We may be coming,&rdquo; said Hoppart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned sideways to face the bishop. &ldquo;I think we should be coming if&mdash;if
+      it wasn't for old entangled difficulties. I don't know if you will mind my
+      saying it to you, but....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop returned his frank glance. &ldquo;I'd like to know above all things,&rdquo;
+       he said. &ldquo;If Mrs. Garstein Fellow will permit us. It's my business to
+      know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We all want to know,&rdquo; said Lady Sunderbund, speaking from the low chair
+      on the other side of the fireplace. There was a vibration in her voice and
+      a sudden gleam of enthusiasm in her face. &ldquo;Why shouldn't people talk
+      se'iously sometimes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, take my own case,&rdquo; said Hoppart. &ldquo;In the last few weeks, I've been
+      reading not only in the Bible but in the Fathers. I've read most of
+      Athanasius, most of Eusebius, and&mdash;I'll confess it&mdash;Gibbon. I
+      find all my old wonder come back. Why are we pinned to&mdash;to the amount
+      of creed we are pinned to? Why for instance must you insist on the
+      Trinity?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the Eton boy explosively, and flushed darkly to find he had
+      spoken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is a time when men ask for God,&rdquo; said Hoppart. &ldquo;And you give them
+      three!&rdquo; cried Bent rather cheaply. &ldquo;I confess I find the way encumbered by
+      these Alexandrian elaborations,&rdquo; Hoppart completed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Need it be?&rdquo; whispered Lady Sunderbund very softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the bishop, and leant back in his armchair and knitted his
+      brow at the fire. &ldquo;I do not think,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that men coming to God think
+      very much of the nature of God. Nevertheless,&rdquo; he spoke slowly and patted
+      the arm of his chair, &ldquo;nevertheless the church insists that certain
+      vitally important truths have to be conveyed, certain mortal errors are
+      best guarded against, by these symbols.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You admit they are symbols.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So the church has always called them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hoppart showed by a little movement and grimace that he thought the bishop
+      quibbled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In every sense of the word,&rdquo; the bishop hastened to explain, &ldquo;the creeds
+      are symbolical. It is clear they seek to express ineffable things by at
+      least an extended use of familiar words. I suppose we are all agreed
+      nowadays that when we speak of the Father and of the Son we mean something
+      only in a very remote and exalted way parallel with&mdash;with biological
+      fatherhood and sonship.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Sunderbund nodded eagerly. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;oh, yes,&rdquo; and held up an
+      expectant face for more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our utmost words, our most elaborately phrased creeds, can at the best be
+      no better than the shadow of something unseen thrown upon the screen of
+      experience.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He raised his rather weary eyes to Hoppart as if he would know what else
+      needed explanation. He was gratified by Lady Sunderbund's approval, but he
+      affected not to see or hear it. But it was Bent who spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke in the most casual way. He made the thing seem the most
+      incidental of observations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What puzzles me,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is why the early Christians identified the
+      Spermaticos Logos of the Stoics with the second and not with the third
+      person of the Trinity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To which the bishop, rising artlessly to the bait, replied, &ldquo;Ah! that
+      indeed is the unfortunate aspect of the whole affair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then the Irish Catholic came down on him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How the bishop awakened in the night after this dispute has been told
+      already in the opening section of this story. To that night of discomfort
+      we now return after this comprehensive digression. He awoke from
+      nightmares of eyes and triangles to bottomless remorse and perplexity. For
+      the first time he fully measured the vast distances he had travelled from
+      the beliefs and attitudes of his early training, since his coming to
+      Princhester. Travelled&mdash;or rather slipped and fallen down the long
+      slopes of doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That clear inky dimness that comes before dawn found his white face at the
+      window looking out upon the great terrace and the park.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a bout of mental distress and sleeplessness the bishop would
+      sometimes wake in the morning not so much exhausted as in a state of thin
+      mental and bodily activity. This was more particularly so if the night had
+      produced anything in the nature of a purpose. So it was on this occasion.
+      The day was clear before him; at least it could be cleared by sending
+      three telegrams; his man could go back to Princhester and so leave him
+      perfectly free to go to Brighton-Pomfrey in London and secure that
+      friendly dispensation to smoke again which seemed the only alternative to
+      a serious mental breakdown. He would take his bag, stay the night in
+      London, smoke, sleep well, and return the next morning. Dunk, his
+      valet-butler, found him already bathed and ready for a cup of tea and a
+      Bradshaw at half-past seven. He went on dressing although the good train
+      for London did not start until 10.45.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Garstein Fellows was by nature and principle a late riser; the
+      breakfast-room showed small promise yet of the repast, though the table
+      was set and bright with silver and fresh flowers, and a wood fire popped
+      and spurted to greet and encourage the March sunshine. But standing in the
+      doorway that led to the promise and daffodils and crocuses of Mrs.
+      Garstein Fellows' garden stood Lady Sunderbund, almost with an effect of
+      waiting, and she greeted the bishop very cheerfully, doubted the immediate
+      appearance of any one else, and led him in the most natural manner into
+      the new but already very pleasant shrubbery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In some indefinable special way the bishop had been aware of Lady
+      Sunderbund's presence since first he had met her, but it was only now that
+      he could observe her with any particularity. She was tall like his own
+      Lady Ella but not calm and quiet; she was electric, her eyes, her smiles,
+      her complexion had as it were an established brightness that exceeded the
+      common lustre of things. This morning she was dressed in grey that was
+      nevertheless not grey but had an effect of colour, and there was a thread
+      of black along the lines of her body and a gleam of gold. She carried her
+      head back with less dignity than pride; there was a little frozen movement
+      in her dark hair as if it flamed up out of her head. There were silver
+      ornaments in her hair. She spoke with a pretty little weakness of the r's
+      that had probably been acquired abroad. And she lost no time in telling
+      him, she was eager to tell him, that she had been waylaying him. &ldquo;I did so
+      want to talk to you some maw,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I was shy last night and they
+      we' all so noisy and eaga'. I p'ayed that you might come down early.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's an oppo'tunity I've longed for,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did her very pretty best to convey what it was had been troubling her.
+      'iligion bad been worrying her for years. Life was&mdash;oh&mdash;just
+      ornaments and games and so wea'isome, so wea'isome, unless it was
+      'iligious. And she couldn't get it 'iligious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop nodded his head gravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You unde'stand?&rdquo; she pressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand too well&mdash;the attempt to get hold&mdash;and keep hold.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I knew you would!&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She went on with an impulsive rapidity. O'thodoxy had always 'ipelled her,&mdash;always.
+      She had felt herself confronted by the most insurmountable difficulties,
+      and yet whenever she had gone away from Christianity&mdash;she had gone
+      away from Christianity, to the Theosophists and the Christian Scientists&mdash;she
+      had felt she was only &ldquo;st'aying fu'tha.&rdquo; And then suddenly when he was
+      speaking last night, she had felt he knew. It was so wonderful to hear the
+      &ldquo;k'eed was only a symbol.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Symbol is the proper name for it,&rdquo; said the bishop. &ldquo;It wasn't for
+      centuries it was called the Creed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, and so what it really meant was something quite different from what
+      it did mean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop felt that this sentence also was only a symbol, and nodded
+      encouragingly&mdash;but gravely, warily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there she was, and the point was there were thousands and thousands
+      and thousands of educated people like her who were dying to get through
+      these old-fashioned symbols to the true faith that lay behind them. That
+      they knew lay behind them. She didn't know if he had read &ldquo;The Light under
+      the Altar&rdquo;?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's vicar of Wombash&mdash;in my diocese,&rdquo; said the bishop with
+      restraint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's wonde'ful stuff,&rdquo; said Lady Sunderbund. &ldquo;It's spi'tually cold, but
+      it's intellectually wonde'ful. But we want that with spi'tuality. We want
+      it so badly. If some one&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She became daring. She bit her under lip and flashed her spirit at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you&mdash;&rdquo; she said and paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could think aloud,&rdquo; said the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, nodding rapidly, and became breathless to hear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would certainly be an astonishing end to the Chasters difficulty if the
+      bishop went over to the heretic, the bishop reflected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear lady, I won't disguise,&rdquo; he began; &ldquo;in fact I don't see how I
+      could, that for some years I have been growing more and more discontented
+      with some of our most fundamental formulae. But it's been very largely a
+      shapeless discontent&mdash;hitherto. I don't think I've said a word to a
+      single soul. No, not a word. You are the first person to whom I've ever
+      made the admission that even my feelings are at times unorthodox.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She lit up marvellously at his words. &ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But she did not need to tell him to go on. Now that he had once broached
+      the casket of his reserves he was only too glad of a listener. He talked
+      as if they were intimate and loving friends, and so it seemed to both of
+      them they were. It was a wonderful release from a long and painful
+      solitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To certain types it is never quite clear what has happened to them until
+      they tell it. So that now the bishop, punctuated very prettily by Lady
+      Sunderbund, began to measure for the first time the extent of his
+      departure from the old innate convictions of Otteringham Rectory. He said
+      that it was strange to find doubt coming so late in life, but perhaps it
+      was only in recent years that his faith had been put to any really severe
+      tests. It had been sheltered and unchallenged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This fearful wa',&rdquo; Lady Sunderbund interjected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Princhester had been a critical and trying change, and &ldquo;The Light
+      under the Altar&rdquo; case had ploughed him deeply. It was curious that his
+      doubts always seemed to have a double strand; there was a moral objection
+      based on the church's practical futility and an intellectual strand
+      subordinated to this which traced that futility largely to its
+      unconvincing formulae.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet you know,&rdquo; said the bishop, &ldquo;I find I can't go with Chasters. He
+      beats at the church; he treats her as though she were wrong. I feel like a
+      son, growing up, who finds his mother isn't quite so clear-spoken nor
+      quite so energetic as she seemed to be once. She's right, I feel sure.
+      I've never doubted her fundamental goodness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Lady Sunderbund, very eagerly, &ldquo;yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet there's this futility.... You know, my dear lady, I don't know
+      what to do. One feels on the one hand, that here is a cloud of witnesses,
+      great men, sainted men, subtle men, figures permanently historical, before
+      whom one can do nothing but bow down in the utmost humility, here is a
+      great instrument and organization&mdash;what would the world be without
+      the witness of the church?&mdash;and on the other hand here are our masses
+      out of hand and hostile, our industrial leaders equally hostile; there is
+      a failure to grip, and that failure to grip is so clearly traceable to the
+      fact that our ideas are not modern ideas, that when we come to profess our
+      faith we find nothing in our mouths but antiquated Alexandrian subtleties
+      and phrases and ideas that may have been quite alive, quite significant,
+      quite adequate in Asia Minor or Egypt, among men essentially orientals,
+      fifteen hundred years ago, but which now&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He expressed just what they came to now by a gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She echoed his gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Probably I'm not alone among my brethren,&rdquo; he went on, and then: &ldquo;But
+      what is one to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With her hands she acted her sense of his difficulty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One may be precipitate,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;There's a kind of loyalty and
+      discipline that requires one to keep the ranks until one's course of
+      action is perfectly clear. One owes so much to so many. One has to
+      consider how one may affect&mdash;oh! people one has never seen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was lugging things now into speech that so far had been scarcely above
+      the threshold of his conscious thought. He went on to discuss the entire
+      position of the disbelieving cleric. He discovered a fine point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If there was something else, an alternative, another religion, another
+      Church, to which one could go, the whole case would be different. But to
+      go from the church to nothingness isn't to go from falsehood to truth.
+      It's to go from truth, rather badly expressed, rather conservatively
+      hidden by its protections, truth in an antiquated costume, to the blackest
+      lie&mdash;in the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took that point very brightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One must hold fast to 'iligion,&rdquo; she said, and looked earnestly at him
+      and gripped fiercely, pink thumbs out, with her beautiful hands held up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was it, exactly. He too was gripping. But while on the outside the
+      Midianites of denial were prowling for these clinging souls, within the
+      camp they were assailed by a meticulous orthodoxy that was only too eager
+      to cast them forth. The bishop dwelt for a time upon the curious
+      fierceness orthodoxy would sometimes display. Nowadays atheism can be
+      civil, can be generous; it is orthodoxy that trails a scurrilous fringe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who was that young man with a strong Irish accent&mdash;who contradicted
+      me so suddenly?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The dark young man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The noisy young man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was Mist' Pat'ick O'Go'man. He is a Kelt and all that. Spells
+      Pat'ick with eva so many letters. You know. They say he spends ouas and
+      ouas lea'ning E'se. He wo'ies about it. They all t'y to lea'n E'se, and it
+      wo'ies them and makes them hate England moa and moa.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is orthodox. He&mdash;is what I call orthodox to the ridiculous
+      extent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'idiculous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A deep-toned gong proclaimed breakfast over a square mile or so of
+      territory, and Lady Sunderbund turned about mechanically towards the
+      house. But they continued their discussion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She started indeed a new topic. &ldquo;Shall we eva, do 'ou think, have a new
+      'iligion&mdash;t'ua and betta?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was a revolutionary idea to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was still fending it off from him when a gap in the shrubs brought them
+      within sight of the house and of Mrs. Garstein Fellows on the portico
+      waving a handkerchief and crying &ldquo;Break-fast.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish we could talk for houas,&rdquo; said Lady Sunderbund.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been glad of this talk,&rdquo; said the bishop. &ldquo;Very glad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She lifted her soft abundant skirts and trotted briskly across the still
+      dewy lawn towards the house door. The bishop followed gravely and slowly
+      with his hands behind his back and an unusually peaceful expression upon
+      his face. He was thinking how rare and precious a thing it is to find
+      intelligent friendship in women. More particularly when they were
+      dazzlingly charming and pretty. It was strange, but this was really his
+      first woman friend. If, as he hoped, she became his friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Sunderbund entered the breakfast room in a gusty abundance like
+      Botticelli's Primavera, and kissed Mrs. Garstein Fellows good-morning. She
+      exhaled a glowing happiness. &ldquo;He is wondyful,&rdquo; she panted. &ldquo;He is most
+      wondyful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Hidgeway Kelso?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, the dee' bishop! I love him. Are those the little sausages I like?
+      May I take th'ee? I've been up houas.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The dee' bishop appeared in the sunlit doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop felt more contentment in the London train than he had felt for
+      many weeks. He had taken two decisive and relieving steps. One was that he
+      had stated his case to another human being, and that a very charming and
+      sympathetic human being, he was no longer a prey to a current of secret
+      and concealed thoughts running counter to all the appearances of his
+      outward life; and the other was that he was now within an hour or so of
+      Brighton-Pomfrey and a cigarette. He would lunch on the train, get to
+      London about two, take a taxi at once to the wise old doctor, catch him
+      over his coffee in a charitable and understanding mood, and perhaps be
+      smoking a cigarette publicly and honourably and altogether satisfyingly
+      before three.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far as Brighton-Pomfrey's door this program was fulfilled without a
+      hitch. The day was fine and he had his taxi opened, and noted with a
+      patriotic satisfaction as he rattled through the streets, the glare of the
+      recruiting posters on every vacant piece of wall and the increasing number
+      of men in khaki in the streets. But at the door he had a disappointment.
+      Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was away at the front&mdash;of all places; he had
+      gone for some weeks; would the bishop like to see Dr. Dale?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop hesitated. He had never set eyes on this Dr. Dale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, he had never heard of Dr. Dale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Seeing his old friend Brighton-Pomfrey and being gently and tactfully told
+      to do exactly what he was longing to do was one thing; facing some strange
+      doctor and going slowly and elaborately through the whole story of his
+      illness, his vow and his breakdown, and perhaps having his reaction time
+      tested and all sorts of stripping and soundings done, was quite another.
+      He was within an ace of turning away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If he had turned away his whole subsequent life would have been different.
+      It was the very slightest thing in the world tipped the beam. It was the
+      thought that, after all, whatever inconvenience and unpleasantness there
+      might be in this interview, there was at the end of it a very reasonable
+      prospect of a restored and legitimate cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FIFTH - THE FIRST VISION
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Dr. DALE exceeded the bishop's worst apprehensions. He was a lean, lank,
+      dark young man with long black hair and irregular, rather prolonged
+      features; his chin was right over to the left; he looked constantly at the
+      bishop's face with a distinctly sceptical grey eye; he could not have
+      looked harder if he had been a photographer or a portrait painter. And his
+      voice was harsh, and the bishop was particularly sensitive to voices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began by understanding far too much of the bishop's illness, and he
+      insisted on various familiarities with the bishop's heart and tongue and
+      eye and knee that ruffled the bishop's soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brighton-Pomfrey talked of neurasthenia?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;That was his
+      diagnosis,&rdquo; said the bishop. &ldquo;Neurasthenia,&rdquo; said the young man as though
+      he despised the word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop went on buttoning up his coat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't of course want to break your vows about drinking and smoking,&rdquo;
+       said the young man with the very faintest suggestion of derision in his
+      voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not if it can possibly be avoided,&rdquo; the bishop asserted. &ldquo;Without a loss,
+      that is, of practical efficiency,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;For I have much to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think that it is possible to keep your vow,&rdquo; said the young man, and
+      the bishop could have sworn at him. &ldquo;I think we can manage that all
+      right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop sat at the table resting his arm upon it and awaiting the next
+      development of this unsatisfactory interview. He was on the verge of
+      asking as unpleasantly as possible when Brighton-Pomfrey would return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man stood upon Brighton-Pomfrey's hearth-rug and was evidently
+      contemplating dissertations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; he said, as though he discussed a problem with himself, &ldquo;you
+      must have some sort of comfort. You must get out of this state, one way or
+      another.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop nodded assent. He had faint hopes of this young man's ideas of
+      comfort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Dale reflected. Then he went off away from the question of comfort
+      altogether. &ldquo;You see, the trouble in such a case as this is peculiarly
+      difficult to trace to its sources because it comes just upon the
+      border-line of bodily and mental things. You may take a drug or alter your
+      regimen and it disturbs your thoughts, you may take an idea and it
+      disturbs your health. It is easy enough to say, as some do, that all ideas
+      have a physical substratum; it is almost as easy to say with the Christian
+      Scientist that all bodily states are amenable to our ideas. The truth
+      doesn't, I think, follow the border between those opposite opinions very
+      exactly on either side. I can't, for instance, tell you to go home and
+      pray against these uncertainties and despairs, because it is just these
+      uncertainties and despairs that rob you of the power of efficient prayer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not seem to expect anything from the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see that because a case brings one suddenly right up against the
+      frontier of metaphysics, why a doctor should necessarily pull up short at
+      that, why one shouldn't go on into either metaphysics or psychology if
+      such an extension is necessary for the understanding of the case. At any
+      rate if you'll permit it in this consultation....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; said the bishop, holding on to that promise of comfort. &ldquo;The best
+      thing is to thrash out the case in your own way. And then come to what is
+      practical.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is really the matter here&mdash;the matter with you that is&mdash;is
+      a disorganization of your tests of reality. It's one of a group of states
+      hitherto confused. Neurasthenia, that comprehensive phrase&mdash;well, it
+      is one of the neurasthenias. Here, I confess, I begin to talk of work I am
+      doing, work still to be published, finished first and then published....
+      But I go off from the idea that every living being lives in a state not
+      differing essentially from a state of hallucination concerning the things
+      about it. Truth, essential truth, is hidden. Always. Of course there must
+      be a measure of truth in our working illusions, a working measure of
+      truth, or the creature would smash itself up and end itself, but beyond
+      that discretion of the fire and the pitfall lies a wide margin of error
+      about which we may be deceived for years. So long as it doesn't matter, it
+      doesn't matter. I don't know if I make myself clear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I follow you,&rdquo; said the bishop a little wearily, &ldquo;I follow you. Phenomena
+      and noumena and so on and so on. Kant and so forth. Pragmatism. Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And all that,&rdquo; completed Dr. Dale in a voice that suggested mockery. &ldquo;But
+      you see we grow into a way of life, we settle down among habits and
+      conventions, we say 'This is all right' and 'That is always so.' We get
+      more and more settled into our life as a whole and more and more
+      confident. Unless something happens to shake us out of our sphere of
+      illusion. That may be some violent contradictory fact, some accident, or
+      it may be some subtle change in one's health and nerves that makes us feel
+      doubtful. Or a change of habits. Or, as I believe, some subtle quickening
+      of the critical faculty. Then suddenly comes the feeling as though we were
+      lost in a strange world, as though we had never really seen the world
+      before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop was reluctantly interested. &ldquo;That does describe something&mdash;of
+      the mental side,&rdquo; he admitted. &ldquo;I never believe in concealing my own
+      thoughts from an intelligent patient,&rdquo; said Dr. Dale, with a quiet
+      offensiveness. &ldquo;That sort of thing belongs to the dark ages of the
+      'pothecary's art. I will tell you exactly my guesses and suppositions
+      about you. At the base of it all is a slight and subtle kidney trouble,
+      due I suggest to your going to Princhester and drinking the local water&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it's excellent water. They boast of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By all the established tests. As a matter of fact many of our best
+      drinking waters have all sorts of unspecified qualities. Burton water, for
+      example, is radioactive by Beetham's standards up to the ninth degree. But
+      that is by the way. My theory about your case is that this produced a
+      change in your blood, that quickened your sensibilities and your critical
+      faculties just at a time when a good many bothers&mdash;I don't of course
+      know what they were, but I can, so to speak, see the marks all over you&mdash;came
+      into your life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were uprooted. You moved from house to house, and failed to get that
+      curled up safe feeling one has in a real home in any of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you saw the fireplaces and the general decoration of the new palace!&rdquo;
+       admitted the bishop. &ldquo;I had practically no control.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That confirms me,&rdquo; said Dr. Dale. &ldquo;Insomnia followed, and increased the
+      feeling of physical strangeness by increasing the bodily disturbance. I
+      suspect an intellectual disturbance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was,&rdquo; said the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were no longer at home anywhere. You were no longer at home in your
+      diocese, in your palace, in your body, in your convictions. And then came
+      the war. Quite apart from everything else the mind of the whole world is
+      suffering profoundly from the shock of this war&mdash;much more than is
+      generally admitted. One thing you did that you probably did not observe
+      yourself doing, you drank rather more at your meals, you smoked a lot
+      more. That was your natural and proper response to the shock.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said the bishop, and brightened up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was remarked by Tolstoy, I think, that few intellectual men would
+      really tolerate the world as it is if it were not for smoking and
+      drinking. Even novelists have their moments of lucidity. Certainly these
+      things soothe the restlessness in men's minds, deaden their sceptical
+      sensibilities. And just at the time when you were getting most dislodged&mdash;you
+      gave them up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the sooner I go back to them the better,&rdquo; said the bishop brightly.
+      &ldquo;I quite see that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wouldn't say that,&rdquo; said Dr. Dale....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; said Dr. Dale, &ldquo;is just where my treatment of this case differs
+      from the treatment of &ldquo;&mdash;he spoke the name reluctantly as if he
+      disliked the mere sound of it&mdash;&ldquo;Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hitherto, of course,&rdquo; said the bishop, &ldquo;I've been in his hands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He,&rdquo; said Dr. Dale, &ldquo;would certainly set about trying to restore your old
+      sphere of illusion, your old familiar sensations and ideas and
+      confidences. He would in fact turn you back. He would restore all your
+      habits. He would order you a rest. He would send you off to some holiday
+      resort, fresh in fact but familiar in character, the High lands, North
+      Italy, or Switzerland for example. He would forbid you newspapers and
+      order you to botanize and prescribe tranquillizing reading; Trollope's
+      novels, the Life of Gladstone, the works of Mr. A. C. Benson, memoirs and
+      so on. You'd go somewhere where there was a good Anglican chaplain, and
+      you'd take some of the services yourself. And we'd wash out the effects of
+      the Princhester water with Contrexeville, and afterwards put you on
+      Salutaris or Perrier. I don't know whether I shouldn't have inclined to
+      some such treatment before the war began. Only&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Dale's face betrayed a sudden sombre passion. &ldquo;It won't do now,&rdquo; he
+      said in a voice of quiet intensity. &ldquo;It won't do now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He remained darkly silent for so long that at last the bishop spoke. &ldquo;Then
+      what,&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;do you suggest?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose we don't try to go back,&rdquo; said Dr. Dale. &ldquo;Suppose we go on and go
+      through.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To reality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know it's doubtful, I know it's dangerous,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;but I am
+      convinced that now we can no longer keep men's minds and souls in these
+      feathered nests, these spheres of illusion. Behind these veils there is
+      either God or the Darkness.... Why should we not go on?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop was profoundly perplexed. He heard himself speaking. &ldquo;It would
+      be unworthy of my cloth,&rdquo; he was saying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Dale completed the sentence: &ldquo;to go back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me explain a little more,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;what I mean by 'going on.' I
+      think that this loosening of the ties of association that bind a man to
+      his everyday life and his everyday self is in nine cases out of ten a
+      loosening of the ties that bind him to everyday sanity. One common form of
+      this detachment is the form you have in those cases of people who are
+      found wandering unaware of their names, unaware of their places of
+      residence, lost altogether from themselves. They have not only lost their
+      sense of identity with themselves, but all the circumstances of their
+      lives have faded out of their minds like an idle story in a book that has
+      been read and put aside. I have looked into hundreds of such cases. I
+      don't think that loss of identity is a necessary thing; it's just another
+      side of the general weakening of the grip upon reality, a kind of anaemia
+      of the brain so that interest fades and fails. There is no reason why you
+      should forget a story because you do not believe it&mdash;if your brain is
+      strong enough to hold it. But if your brain is tired and weak, then so
+      soon as you lose faith in your records, your mind is glad to let them go.
+      When you see these lost identity people that is always your first
+      impression, a tired brain that has let go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop felt extremely like letting go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how does this apply to my case?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I come to that,&rdquo; said Dr. Dale, holding up a long large hand. &ldquo;What if we
+      treat this case of yours in a new way? What if we give you not narcotics
+      but stimulants and tonics? What if we so touch the blood that we increase
+      your sense of physical detachment while at the same time feeding up your
+      senses to a new and more vivid apprehension of things about you?&rdquo; He
+      looked at his patient's hesitation and added: &ldquo;You'd lose all that craving
+      feeling, that you fancy at present is just the need of a smoke. The world
+      might grow a trifle&mdash;transparent, but you'd keep real. Instead of
+      drugging oneself back to the old contentment&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd drug me on to the new,&rdquo; said the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But just one word more!&rdquo; said Dr. Dale. &ldquo;Hear why I would do this! It was
+      easy and successful to rest and drug people back to their old states of
+      mind when the world wasn't changing, wasn't spinning round in the wildest
+      tornado of change that it has ever been in. But now&mdash;Where can I send
+      you for a rest? Where can I send you to get you out of sight and hearing
+      of the Catastrophe? Of course old Brighton-Pomfrey would go on sending
+      people away for rest and a nice little soothing change if the Day of
+      Judgment was coming in the sky and the earth was opening and the sea was
+      giving up its dead. He'd send 'em to the seaside. Such things as that
+      wouldn't shake his faith in the Channel crossing. My idea is that it's not
+      only right for you to go through with this, but that it's the only thing
+      to do. If you go right on and right through with these doubts and
+      intimations&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You may die like a madman,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but you won't die like a tame
+      rabbit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop sat reflecting. What fascinated and attracted him was the
+      ending of all the cravings and uneasinesses and restlessness that had
+      distressed his life for over four years; what deterred him was the
+      personality of this gaunt young man with his long grey face, his excited
+      manner, his shock of black hair. He wanted that tonic&mdash;with grave
+      misgivings. &ldquo;If you think this tonic is the wiser course,&rdquo; he began. &ldquo;I'd
+      give it you if you were my father,&rdquo; said Dr. Dale. &ldquo;I've got everything
+      for it,&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean you can make it up&mdash;without a prescription.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't give you a prescription. The essence of it&mdash;It's a
+      distillate I have been trying. It isn't in the Pharmacopeia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the bishop had a twinge of misgiving.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the end he succumbed. He didn't want to take the stuff, but also he
+      did not want to go without his promised comfort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently Dale had given him a little phial&mdash;and was holding up to
+      the window a small medicine glass into which he was pouring very carefully
+      twenty drops of the precious fluid. &ldquo;Take it only,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;when you
+      feel you must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the most golden of liquids,&rdquo; said the bishop, peering at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you want more I will make you more. Later of course, it will be
+      possible to write a prescription. Now add the water&mdash;so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It becomes opalescent. How beautifully the light plays in it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop dismissed his last discretion and drank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; said Dr. Dale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am still here,&rdquo; said the bishop, smiling, and feeling a joyous tingling
+      throughout his body. &ldquo;It stirs me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop stood on the pavement outside Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's house. The
+      massive door had closed behind him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had been an act of courage, of rashness if you will, to take this
+      draught. He was acutely introspective, ready for anything, for the most
+      disagreeable or the most bizarre sensations. He was asking himself, Were
+      his feet steady? Was his head swimming?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His doubts glowed into assurance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he perceived that he was sure of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not perhaps of the God of Nicaea, but what did these poor little
+      quibblings and definitions of the theologians matter? He had been worrying
+      about these definitions and quibblings for four long restless years. Now
+      they were just failures to express&mdash;what surely every one knew&mdash;and
+      no one would ever express exactly. Because here was God, and the kingdom
+      of God was manifestly at hand. The visible world hung before him as a mist
+      might hang before the rising sun. He stood proudly and masterfully facing
+      a universe that had heretofore bullied him into doubt and apologetics, a
+      universe that had hitherto been opaque and was now betrayed translucent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the first effect of the new tonic, complete reassurance, complete
+      courage. He turned to walk towards Mount Street and Berkeley Square as a
+      sultan might turn to walk among his slaves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the tonic was only beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before he had gone a dozen steps he was aware that he seemed more solid
+      and larger than the people about him. They had all a curious miniature
+      effect, as though he was looking at them through the wrong end of an opera
+      glass. The houses on either side of the street and the traffic shared this
+      quality in an equal measure. It was as if he was looking at the world
+      through apertures in a miniature cinematograph peep-show. This surprised
+      him and a little dashed his first glow of satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He passed a man in khaki who, he fancied, looked at him with an odd
+      expression. He observed the next passers-by narrowly and suspiciously, a
+      couple of smartish young men, a lady with a poodle, a grocer's boy with a
+      basket, but none seemed to observe anything remarkable about him. Then he
+      caught the eye of a taxi-driver and became doubtful again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a feeling that this tonic was still coming in like a tide. It
+      seemed to be filling him and distending him, in spite of the fact that he
+      was already full. After four years of flaccidity it was pleasant to be
+      distended again, but already he felt more filled than he had ever been
+      before. At present nothing was showing, but all his body seemed braced and
+      uplifted. He must be careful not to become inflated in his bearing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet it was difficult not to betray a little inflation. He was so
+      filled with assurance that things were right with him and that God was
+      there with him. After all it was not mere fancy; he was looking through
+      the peepholes of his eyes at the world of illusion and appearance. The
+      world that was so intent upon its immediate business, so regardless of
+      eternal things, that had so dominated him but a little while ago, was
+      after all a thing more mortal than himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another man in khaki passed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the first time he saw the war as something measurable, as something
+      with a beginning and an end, as something less than the immortal spirit in
+      man. He had been too much oppressed by it. He perceived all these people
+      in the street were too much oppressed by it. He wanted to tell them as
+      much, tell them that all was well with them, bid them be of good cheer. He
+      wanted to bless them. He found his arm floating up towards gestures of
+      benediction. Self-control became increasingly difficult.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the way down Berkeley Square the bishop was in full-bodied struggle
+      with himself. He was trying to control himself, trying to keep within
+      bounds. He felt that he was stepping too high, that his feet were not
+      properly reaching the ground, that he was walking upon cushions of air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The feeling of largeness increased, and the feeling of transparency in
+      things about him. He avoided collision with passers-by&mdash;excessively.
+      And he felt his attention was being drawn more and more to something that
+      was going on beyond the veil of visible things. He was in Piccadilly now,
+      but at the same time Piccadilly was very small and he was walking in the
+      presence of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a feeling that God was there though he could not see him. And at
+      the same time he was in this transitory world, with people going to and
+      fro, men with umbrellas tucked dangerously under their arms, men in a
+      hurry, policemen, young women rattling Red Cross collecting boxes, smart
+      people, loafers. They distracted one from God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He set out to cross the road just opposite Prince's, and jumping
+      needlessly to give way to an omnibus had the narrowest escape from a
+      taxicab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused on the pavement edge to recover himself. The shock of his near
+      escape had, as people say, pulled him together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was he to do? Manifestly this opalescent draught was overpowering
+      him. He ought never to have taken it. He ought to have listened to the
+      voice of his misgivings. It was clear that he was not in a fit state to
+      walk about the streets. He was&mdash;what had been Dr. Dale's term?&mdash;losing
+      his sense of reality. What was he to do? He was alarmed but not dismayed.
+      His thoughts were as full-bodied as the rest of his being, they came
+      throbbing and bumping into his mind. What was he to do?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brighton-Pomfrey ought never to have left his practice in the hands of
+      this wild-eyed experimenter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Strange that after a lifetime of discretion and men's respect one should
+      be standing on the Piccadilly pavement&mdash;intoxicated!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It came into his head that he was not so very far from the Athenaeum, and
+      surely there if anywhere a bishop may recover his sense of being&mdash;ordinary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And behind everything, behind the tall buildings and the swarming people
+      there was still the sense of a wide illuminated space, of a light of
+      wonder and a Presence. But he must not give way to that again! He had
+      already given way altogether too much. He repeated to himself in a
+      whisper, &ldquo;I am in Piccadilly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      If he kept tight hold upon himself he felt he might get to the Athenaeum
+      before&mdash;before anything more happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He murmured directions to himself. &ldquo;Keep along the pavement. Turn to the
+      right at the Circus. Now down the hill. Easily down the hill. Don't float!
+      Junior Army and Navy Stores. And the bookseller.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And presently he had a doubt of his name and began to repeat it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Edward Princhester. Edward Scrope, Lord Bishop of Princhester.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And all the while voices within him were asserting, &ldquo;You are in the
+      kingdom of Heaven. You are in the presence of God. Place and time are a
+      texture of illusion and dreamland. Even now, you are with God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (6)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The porter of the Athenaeum saw him come in, looking well&mdash;flushed
+      indeed&mdash;but queer in expression; his blue eyes were wide open and
+      unusually vague and blue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wandered across towards the dining-room, hesitated, went to look at the
+      news, seemed in doubt whether he would not go into the smoking-room, and
+      then went very slowly upstairs, past the golden angel up to the great
+      drawing-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the drawing-room he found only Sir James Mounce, the man who knew the
+      novels of Sir Walter Scott by heart and had the minutest and most
+      unsparing knowledge of every detail in the life of that supreme giant of
+      English literature. He had even, it was said, acquired a Scotch burr in
+      the enthusiasm of his hero-worship. It was usually sufficient only to turn
+      an ear towards him for him to talk for an hour or so. He was now studying
+      Bradshaw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop snatched at him desperately. He felt that if he went away there
+      would be no hold left upon the ordinary things of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir James,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I was wondering the other day when was the exact
+      date of the earliest public ascription of Waverley to Scott.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh!&rdquo; said Sir James, &ldquo;but I'd like to talk that over with ye. Indeed I
+      would. It would be depending very largely on what ye called 'public.' But&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He explained something about an engagement in Birmingham that night, a
+      train to catch. Reluctantly but relentlessly he abandoned the proffered
+      ear. But he promised that the next time they met in the club he would go
+      into the matter &ldquo;exhausteevely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The door closed upon him. The bishop was alone. He was flooded with the
+      light of the world that is beyond this world. The things about him became
+      very small and indistinct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would take himself into a quiet corner in the library of this doll's
+      house, and sit his little body down in one of the miniature armchairs.
+      Then if he was going to faint or if the trancelike feeling was to become
+      altogether a trance&mdash;well, a bishop asleep in an armchair in the
+      library of the Athenaeum is nothing to startle any one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of that convenient hidden room, the North Library, in which is
+      the bust of Croker. There often one can be quite alone.... It was empty,
+      and he went across to the window that looks out upon Pall Mall and sat
+      down in the little uncomfortable easy chair by the desk with its back to
+      the Benvenuto Cellini.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as he sat down, something snapped&mdash;like the snapping of a lute
+      string&mdash;in his brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (7)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a sigh of deep relief the bishop realized that this world had
+      vanished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was in a golden light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He perceived it as a place, but it was a place without buildings or trees
+      or any very definite features. There was a cloudy suggestion of distant
+      hills, and beneath his feet were little gem-like flowers, and a feeling of
+      divinity and infinite friendliness pervaded his being. His impressions
+      grew more definite. His feet seemed to be bare. He was no longer a bishop
+      nor clad as a bishop. That had gone with the rest of the world. He was
+      seated on a slab of starry rock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This he knew quite clearly was the place of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was unable to disentangle thoughts from words. He seemed to be speaking
+      in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been very foolish and confused and perplexed. I have been like a
+      creature caught among thorns.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You served the purpose of God among those thorns.&rdquo; It seemed to him at
+      first that the answer also was among his thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I seemed so silly and so little. My wits were clay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Clay full of desires.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Such desires!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Blind desires. That will presently come to the light.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall we come to the light?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But here it is, and you see it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (8)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It became clearer in the mind of the bishop that a figure sat beside him,
+      a figure of great strength and beauty, with a smiling face and kindly
+      eyes. A strange thought and a strange courage came to the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; he whispered, &ldquo;are you God?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am the Angel of God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop thought over that for some moments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to know about God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want,&rdquo; he said, with a deepening passion of the soul, &ldquo;to know about
+      God. Slowly through four long years I have been awakening to the need of
+      God. Body and soul I am sick for the want of God and the knowledge of God.
+      I did not know what was the matter with me, why my life had become so
+      disordered and confused that my very appetites and habits are all astray.
+      But I am perishing for God as a waterless man upon a raft perishes for
+      drink, and there is nothing but madness if I touch the seas about me. Not
+      only in my thoughts but in my under thoughts and in my nerves and bones
+      and arteries I have need of God. You see I grew up in the delusion that I
+      knew God, I did not know that I was unprovisioned and unprovided against
+      the tests and strains and hardships of life. I thought that I was secure
+      and safe. I was told that we men&mdash;who were apes not a quarter of a
+      million years ago, who still have hair upon our arms and ape's teeth in
+      our jaws&mdash;had come to the full and perfect knowledge of God. It was
+      all put into a creed. Not a word of it was to be altered, not a sentence
+      was to be doubted any more. They made me a teacher of this creed. They
+      seemed to explain it to me. And when I came to look into it, when my need
+      came and I turned to my creed, it was old and shrivelled up, it was the
+      patched-up speculations of vanished Greeks and Egyptians, it was a mummy
+      of ancient disputes, old and dry, that fell to dust as I unwrapped it. And
+      I was dressed up in the dress of old dead times and put before an altar of
+      forgotten sacrifices, and I went through ceremonies as old as the first
+      seedtime; and suddenly I knew clearly that God was not there, God was not
+      in my Creed, not in my cathedral, not in my ceremonies, nowhere in my
+      life. And at the same time I knew, I knew as I had never known before,
+      that certainly there was God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused. &ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; said the friend at his side; &ldquo;tell me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was as if a child running beside its mother, looked up and saw that he
+      had never seen her face before, that she was not his mother, and that the
+      words he had seemed to understand were&mdash;now that he listened&mdash;words
+      in an unknown tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, I am but a common sort of man, dear God; I have neither lived
+      nor thought in any way greatly, I have gone from one day to the next day
+      without looking very much farther than the end of the day, I have gone on
+      as life has befallen; if no great trouble had come into my life, so I
+      should have lived to the end of my days. But life which began for me
+      easily and safely has become constantly more difficult and strange. I
+      could have held my services and given my benedictions, I could have
+      believed I believed in what I thought I believed.... But now I am lost and
+      astray&mdash;crying out for God....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (9)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us talk a little about your troubles,&rdquo; said the Angel. &ldquo;Let us talk
+      about God and this creed that worries you and this church of yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel as though I had been struggling to this talk through all the years&mdash;since
+      my doubts began.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The story your Creed is trying to tell is much the same story that all
+      religions try to tell. In your heart there is God, beyond the stars there
+      is God. Is it the same God?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; said the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does any one know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I knew.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your creed is full of Levantine phrases and images, full of the patched
+      contradictions of the human intelligence utterly puzzled. It is about
+      those two Gods, the God beyond the stars and the God in your heart. It
+      says that they are the same God, but different. It says that they have
+      existed together for all time, and that one is the Son of the other. It
+      has added a third Person&mdash;but we won't go into that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop was reminded suddenly of the dispute at Mrs. Garstein Fellows'.
+      &ldquo;We won't go into that,&rdquo; he agreed. &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Other religions have told the story in a different way. The Cathars and
+      Gnostics did. They said that the God in your heart is a rebel against the
+      God beyond the stars, that the Christ in your heart is like Prometheus&mdash;or
+      Hiawatha&mdash;or any other of the sacrificial gods, a rebel. He arises
+      out of man. He rebels against that high God of the stars and crystals and
+      poisons and monsters and of the dead emptiness of space.... The Manicheans
+      and the Persians made out our God to be fighting eternally against that
+      Being of silence and darkness beyond the stars. The Buddhists made the
+      Lord Buddha the leader of men out of the futility and confusion of
+      material existence to the great peace beyond. But it is all one story
+      really, the story of the two essential Beings, always the same story and
+      the same perplexity cropping up under different names, the story of one
+      being who stirs us, calls to us, and leads us, and of another who is above
+      and outside and in and beneath all things, inaccessible and
+      incomprehensible. All these religions are trying to tell something they do
+      not clearly know&mdash;of a relationship between these two, that eludes
+      them, that eludes the human mind, as water escapes from the hand. It is
+      unity and opposition they have to declare at the same time; it is
+      agreement and propitiation, it is infinity and effort.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the truth?&rdquo; said the bishop in an eager whisper. &ldquo;You can tell me the
+      truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Angel's answer was a gross familiarity. He thrust his hand through the
+      bishop's hair and ruffled it affectionately, and rested for a moment
+      holding the bishop's cranium in his great palm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But can this hold it?&rdquo; he said....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not with this little box of brains,&rdquo; said the Angel. &ldquo;You could as soon
+      make a meal of the stars and pack them into your belly. You haven't the
+      things to do it with inside this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave the bishop's head a little shake and relinquished it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to argue as an elder brother might.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn't it enough for you to know something of the God that comes down to
+      the human scale, who has been born on your planet and arisen out of Man,
+      who is Man and God, your leader? He's more than enough to fill your mind
+      and use up every faculty of your being. He is courage, he is adventure, he
+      is the King, he fights for you and with you against death....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he is not infinite? He is not the Creator?&rdquo; asked the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So far as you are concerned, no,&rdquo; said the Angel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So far as I am concerned?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have you to do with creation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And at that question it seemed that a great hand swept carelessly across
+      the blackness of the farther sky, and smeared it with stars and suns and
+      shining nebulas as a brush might smear dry paint across a canvas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop stared in front of him. Then slowly he bowed his head, and
+      covered his face with his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I have been in orders,&rdquo; he murmured; &ldquo;I have been teaching people the
+      only orthodox and perfect truth about these things for seven and twenty
+      years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And suddenly he was back in his gaiters and his apron and his shovel hat,
+      a little black figure exceedingly small in a very great space....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (10)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a very great space indeed because it was all space, and the roof
+      was the ebony of limitless space from which the stars swung flaming, held
+      by invisible ties, and the soil beneath his feet was a dust of atoms and
+      the little beginnings of life. And long before the bishop bared his face
+      again, he knew that he was to see his God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked up slowly, fearing to be dazzled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he was not dazzled. He knew that he saw only the likeness and bodying
+      forth of a being inconceivable, of One who is greater than the earth and
+      stars and yet no greater than a man. He saw a being for ever young, for
+      ever beginning, for ever triumphant. The quality and texture of this being
+      was a warm and living light like the effulgence at sunrise; He was hope
+      and courage like a sunlit morning in spring. He was adventure for ever,
+      and His courage and adventure flowed into and submerged and possessed the
+      being of the man who beheld him. And this presence of God stood over the
+      bishop, and seemed to speak to him in a wordless speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He bade him surrender himself. He bade him come out upon the Adventure of
+      Life, the great Adventure of the earth that will make the atoms our
+      bond-slaves and subdue the stars, that will build up the white fires of
+      ecstasy to submerge pain for ever, that will overcome death. In Him the
+      spirit of creation had become incarnate, had joined itself to men,
+      summoning men to Him, having need of them, having need of them, having
+      need of their service, even as great kings and generals and leaders need
+      and use men. For a moment, for an endless age, the bishop bowed himself in
+      the being and glory of God, felt the glow of the divine courage and
+      confidence in his marrow, felt himself one with God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a timeless interval....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never had the bishop had so intense a sense of reality. It seemed that
+      never before had he known anything real. He knew certainly that God was
+      his King and master, and that his unworthy service could be acceptable to
+      God. His mind embraced that idea with an absolute conviction that was also
+      absolute happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (11)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thoughts and sensations of the bishop seemed to have lifted for a time
+      clean away from the condition of time, and then through a vast orbit to be
+      returning to that limitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was aware presently that things were changing, that the light was
+      losing its diviner rays, that in some indescribable manner the glory and
+      the assurance diminished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The onset of the new phase was by imperceptible degrees. From a glowing,
+      serene, and static realization of God, everything relapsed towards change
+      and activity. He was in time again and things were happening, it was as if
+      the quicksands of time poured by him, and it was as if God was passing
+      away from him. He fell swiftly down from the heaven of self-forgetfulness
+      to a grotesque, pathetic and earthly self-consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He became acutely aware of his episcopal livery. And that God was passing
+      away from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was as if God was passing, and as if the bishop was unable to rise up
+      and follow him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then it was as if God had passed, and as if the bishop was in headlong
+      pursuit of him and in a great terror lest he should be left behind. And he
+      was surely being left behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He discovered that in some unaccountable way his gaiters were loose; most
+      of their buttons seemed to have flown off, and his episcopal sash had
+      slipped down about his feet. He was sorely impeded. He kept snatching at
+      these things as he ran, in clumsy attempts to get them off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last he had to stop altogether and kneel down and fumble with the last
+      obstinate button.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh God!&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;God my captain! Wait for me! Be patient with me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And as he did so God turned back and reached out his hand. It was indeed
+      as if he stood and smiled. He stood and smiled as a kind man might do; he
+      dazzled and blinded his worshipper, and yet it was manifest that he had a
+      hand a man might clasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unspeakable love and joy irradiated the whole being of the bishop as he
+      seized God's hand and clasped it desperately with both his own. It was as
+      if his nerves and arteries and all his substance were inundated with
+      golden light....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was again as if he merged with God and became God....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE SIXTH - EXEGETICAL
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      WITHOUT any sense of transition the bishop found himself seated in the
+      little North Library of the Athenaeum club and staring at the bust of John
+      Wilson Croker. He was sitting motionless and musing deeply. He was
+      questioning with a cool and steady mind whether he had seen a vision or
+      whether he had had a dream. If it had been a dream it had been an
+      extraordinarily vivid and convincing dream. He still seemed to be in the
+      presence of God, and it perplexed him not at all that he should also be in
+      the presence of Croker. The feeling of mental rottenness and insecurity
+      that had weakened his thought through the period of his illness, had gone.
+      He was secure again within himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It did not seem to matter fundamentally whether it was an experience of
+      things without or of things within him that had happened to him. It was
+      clear to him that much that he had seen was at most expressive, that some
+      was altogether symbolical. For example, there was that sudden absurd
+      realization of his sash and gaiters, and his perception of them as
+      encumbrances in his pursuit of God. But the setting and essential of the
+      whole thing remained in his mind neither expressive nor symbolical, but as
+      real and immediately perceived, and that was the presence and kingship of
+      God. God was still with him and about him and over him and sustaining him.
+      He was back again in his world and his ordinary life, in his clothing and
+      his body and his club, but God had been made and remained altogether plain
+      and manifest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether an actual vision had made his conviction, or whether the
+      conviction of his own subconscious mind had made the dream, seemed but a
+      small matter beside the conviction that this was indeed the God he had
+      desired and the God who must rule his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The stuff? The stuff had little to do with it. It just cleared my
+      head.... I have seen. I have seen really. I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a long time as it seemed the bishop remained wrapped in clouds of
+      luminous meditation. Dream or vision it did not matter; the essential
+      thing was that he had made up his mind about God, he had found God.
+      Moreover, he perceived that his theological perplexities had gone. God was
+      higher and simpler and nearer than any theological God, than the God of
+      the Three Creeds. Those creeds lay about in his mind now like garments
+      flung aside, no trace nor suspicion of divinity sustained them any longer.
+      And now&mdash;Now he would go out into the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little Library of the Athenaeum has no visible door. He went to the
+      book-masked entrance in the corner, and felt among the bookshelves for the
+      hidden latch. Then he paused, held by a curious thought. What exactly was
+      the intention of that symbolical struggle with his sash and gaiters, and
+      why had they impeded his pursuit of God?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To what particularly significant action was he going out?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Three Creeds were like garments flung aside. But he was still wearing
+      the uniform of a priest in the service of those three creeds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a long interval he walked into the big reading-room. He ordered some
+      tea and dry toast and butter, and sat down very thoughtfully in a corner.
+      He was still sitting and thinking at half-past eight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may seem strange to the reader that this bishop who had been doubting
+      and criticizing the church and his system of beliefs for four long years
+      had never before faced the possibility of a severance from his
+      ecclesiastical dignity. But he had grown up in the church, his life had
+      been so entirely clerical and Anglican, that the widest separation he had
+      hitherto been able to imagine from this past had left him still a bishop,
+      heretical perhaps, innovating in the broadening of beliefs and the
+      liberalizing of practice, defensive even as Chasters was defensive, but
+      still with the palace and his dignities, differing in opinion rather than
+      in any tangible reality from his previous self. For a bishop, disbelief in
+      the Church is a far profounder scepticism than mere disbelief in God. God
+      is unseen, and in daily things unfelt; but the Church is with the
+      predestined bishop always. His concept of the extremest possible departure
+      from orthodoxy had been something that Chasters had phrased as &ldquo;a
+      restatement of Christ.&rdquo; It was a new idea, an idea that had come with an
+      immense effect of severance and novelty, that God could be other than the
+      God of the Creed, could present himself to the imagination as a figure
+      totally unlike the white, gentle, and compromising Redeemer of an
+      Anglican's thought. That the bishop should treat the whole teaching of the
+      church and the church itself as wrong, was an idea so new that it fell
+      upon him now like a thunderbolt out of a cloudless sky. But here, clear in
+      his mind now, was a feeling, amounting to conviction, that it was the
+      purpose and gesture of the true God that he should come right out of the
+      church and all his professions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the first glow of his vision he felt this gesture imperative. He
+      must step right out.... Whither? how? And when?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To begin with it seemed to him that an immediate renunciation was
+      demanded. But it was a momentous step. He wanted to think. And to go on
+      thinking. Rather than to act precipitately. Although the imperative seemed
+      absolute, some delaying and arresting instinct insisted that he must
+      &ldquo;think&rdquo; If he went back to Princhester, the everyday duties of his
+      position would confront him at once with an effect of a definite
+      challenge. He decided to take one of the Reform club bedrooms for two or
+      three days, and wire to Princhester that he was &ldquo;unavoidably delayed in
+      town,&rdquo; without further explanations. Then perhaps this inhibitory force
+      would give way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It did not, however, give way. His mind sat down for two days in a blank
+      amazement at the course before him, and at the end of that time this
+      reasonless and formless institution was as strong as ever. During that
+      time, except for some incidental exchanges at his clubs, he talked to no
+      one. At first he did not want to talk to any one. He remained mentally and
+      practically active, with a still intensely vivid sense that God, the true
+      God, stood watching him and waiting for him to follow. And to follow meant
+      slipping right out of all the world he had ever known. To thrust his foot
+      right over the edge of a cliff would scarcely have demanded more from the
+      bishop's store of resolution. He stood on the very verge. The chief
+      secretion of his mind was a shadowy experiment or so in explanation of why
+      he did not follow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Insensibly the extreme vividness of his sense of God's nearness decreased.
+      But he still retained a persuasion of the reality of an immediate listener
+      waiting, and of the need of satisfying him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the third day he found his mind still further changed. He no longer
+      felt that God was in Pall Mall or St. James's Park, whither he resorted to
+      walk and muse. He felt now that God was somewhere about the horizon....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt too no longer that he thought straight into the mind of God. He
+      thought now of what he would presently say to God. He turned over and
+      rehearsed phrases. With that came a desire to try them first on some other
+      hearer. And from that to the attentive head of Lady Sunderbund, prettily
+      bent towards him, was no great leap. She would understand, if any one
+      could understand, the great change that had happened in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found her address in the telephone book. She could be quite alone to
+      him if he wouldn't mind &ldquo;just me.&rdquo; It was, he said, exactly what he
+      desired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when he got to her great airy flat overlooking Hyde Park, with its
+      Omega Workshop furniture and its arresting decoration, he was not so sure
+      whether this encounter was so exactly the thing he had desired as he had
+      supposed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The world had become opaque and real again as he walked up St. James's
+      Street and past the Ritz. He had a feeling that he was taking an afternoon
+      off from God. The adventurous modernity of the room in which he waited
+      intensified that. One whole white wall was devoted to a small picture by
+      Wyndham Lewis. It was like a picture of an earthquake in a city of aniline
+      pink and grey and keen green cardboard, and he wished it had never
+      existed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned his back upon it and stared out of the window over the trees and
+      greenery. The balcony was decorated with white and pink geraniums in pots
+      painted black and gold, and the railings of the balcony were black and
+      gold with crimson shape like squares wildly out of drawing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Sunderbund kept him waiting perhaps five minutes. Then she came
+      sailing in to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was dressed in a way and moved across the room in a way that was more
+      reminiscent of Botticelli's Spring than ever&mdash;only with a kind of
+      superadded stiffish polonaise of lace&mdash;and he did not want to be
+      reminded of Botticelli's Spring or wonder why she had taken to stiff lace
+      polonaises. He did not enquire whether he had met Lady Sunderbund to
+      better advantage at Mrs. Garstein Fellows' or whether his memory had
+      overrated her or whether anything had happened to his standard of taste,
+      but his feeling now was decidedly one of disappointment, and all the talk
+      and self-examination he had promised himself seemed to wither and hide
+      away within him. For a time he talked of her view, and then admired her
+      room and its arrangement, which he thought really were quite unbecomingly
+      flippant and undignified for a room. Then came the black tea-things on
+      their orange tray, and he searched in his mind for small talk to sustain
+      their interview.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he had already betrayed his disposition to &ldquo;go on with our talk&rdquo; in
+      his telephone enquiry, and Lady Sunderbund, perceiving his shyness, began
+      to make openings for him, at first just little hinting openings, and then
+      larger and larger ones, until at last one got him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm so glad,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;to see you again. I'm so glad to go on with our
+      talk. I've thought about it and thought about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She beamed at him happily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've thought ova ev'y wo'd you said,&rdquo; she went on, when she had finished
+      conveying her pretty bliss to him. &ldquo;I've been so helped by thinking the
+      k'eeds are symbols. And all you said. And I've felt time after time, you
+      couldn't stay whe' you we'. That what you we' saying to me, would have to
+      be said 'ight out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That brought him in. He could not very well evade that opening without
+      incivility. After all he had asked to see her, and it was a foolish thing
+      to let little decorative accidentals put him off his friendly purpose. A
+      woman may have flower-pots painted gold with black checkers and still be
+      deeply understanding. He determined to tell her what was in his mind. But
+      he found something barred him from telling that he had had an actual
+      vision of God. It was as if that had been a private and confidential
+      meeting. It wasn't, he felt, for him either to boast a privilege or tell
+      others of things that God had not chosen to show them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Since I saw you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I have thought a great deal&mdash;of the
+      subject of our conversation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been t'ying to think,&rdquo; she said in a confirmatory tone, as if she
+      had co-operated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My faith in God grows,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She glowed. Her lips fell apart. She flamed attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it grows less like the faith of the church, less and less. I was born
+      and trained in Anglicanism, and it is with a sort of astonishment I find
+      myself passing now out of every sort of Catholicism&mdash;seeing it from
+      the outside....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just as one might see Buddhism,&rdquo; she supplied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet feeling nearer, infinitely nearer to God,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she panted; &ldquo;yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought if one went out, one went out just to doubt and darkness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you don't?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have gone at one step to a new 'iligion!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared for a moment at the phrase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To religion,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is so wondyful,&rdquo; she said, with her hands straight down upon the couch
+      upon which she was sitting, and leaning forward at him, so as to seem
+      almost as much out of drawing as a modern picture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems,&rdquo; he reflected; &ldquo;&mdash;as if it were a natural thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She came back to earth very slowly. She turned to the tea-things with
+      hushed and solemn movements as though she administered a ceremony of
+      peculiar significance. The bishop too rose slowly out of the profundity of
+      his confession. &ldquo;No sugar please,&rdquo; he said, arresting the lump in mid air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only when they were embarked upon cups of tea and had a little
+      refreshed themselves, that she carried the talk further.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does it mean that you must leave the church?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seemed so at first,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But now I do not know. I do not know
+      what I ought to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She awaited his next thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is as if one had lived in a room all one's life and thought it the
+      world&mdash;and then suddenly walked out through a door and discovered the
+      sea and the mountains and stars. So it was with me and the Anglican
+      Church. It seems so extraordinary now&mdash;and it would have seemed the
+      most natural thing a year ago&mdash;to think that I ever believed that the
+      Anglican Compromise was the final truth of religion, that nothing more
+      until the end of the world could ever be known that Cosmo Gordon Lang did
+      not know, that there could be no conception of God and his quality that
+      Randall Davidson did not possess.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did,&rdquo; she responded with round blue eyes of wonder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At the utmost the Church of England is a tabernacle on a road.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A 'oad that goes whe'?&rdquo; she rhetorized.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said the bishop, and put down his cup.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, my dear Lady Sunderbund,&rdquo; he resumed, &ldquo;I am exactly in the same
+      position of that man at the door.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She quoted aptly and softly: &ldquo;The wo'ld was all befo' them whe' to
+      choose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was struck by the aptness of the words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel I have to come right out into the bare truth. What exactly then do
+      I become? Do I lose my priestly function because I discover how great God
+      is? But what am I to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He opened a new layer of his thoughts to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a saying,&rdquo; he remarked, &ldquo;once a priest, always a priest. I
+      cannot imagine myself as other than what I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But o'thodox no maw,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Orthodox&mdash;self-satisfied, no longer. A priest who seeks, an
+      exploring priest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In a Chu'ch of P'og'ess and B'othe'hood,&rdquo; she carried him on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At any rate, in a progressive and learning church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She flashed and glowed assent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been haunted,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;by those words spoken at Athens. 'Whom
+      therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.' That comes to me
+      with an effect of&mdash;guidance is an old-fashioned word&mdash;shall I
+      say suggestion? To stand by the altar bearing strange names and ancient
+      symbols, speaking plainly to all mankind of the one true God&mdash;!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not get much beyond this point at the time, though he remained
+      talking with Lady Sunderbund for nearly an hour longer. The rest was
+      merely a beating out of what had already been said. But insensibly she
+      renewed her original charm, and as he became accustomed to her he forgot a
+      certain artificiality in her manner and the extreme modernity of her
+      costume and furniture. She was a wonderful listener; nobody else could
+      have helped him to expression in quite the same way, and when he left her
+      he felt that now he was capable of stating his case in a coherent and
+      acceptable form to almost any intelligent hearer. He had a point of view
+      now that was no longer embarrassed by the immediate golden presence of
+      God; he was no longer dazzled nor ecstatic; his problem had diminished to
+      the scale of any other great human problem, to the scale of political
+      problems and problems of integrity and moral principle, problems about
+      which there is no such urgency as there is about a house on fire, for
+      example.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now the desire for expression was running strong. He wanted to state
+      his situation; if he did not state he would have to act; and as he walked
+      back to the club dinner he turned over possible interlocutors in his
+      thoughts. Lord Rampound sat with him at dinner, and he came near broaching
+      the subject with him. But Lord Rampound that evening had that morbid
+      running of bluish legal anecdotes which is so common an affliction with
+      lawyers, and theology sinks and dies in that turbid stream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as he lay in bed that night he thought of his old friend and helper
+      Bishop Likeman, and it was borne in upon him that he should consult him.
+      And this he did next day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since the days when the bishop had been only plain Mr. Scrope, the
+      youngest and most helpful of Likeman's historical band of curates, their
+      friendship had continued. Likeman had been a second father to him; in
+      particular his tact and helpfulness had shone during those days of doubt
+      and anxiety when dear old Queen Victoria, God's representative on earth,
+      had obstinately refused, at the eleventh hour, to make him a bishop. She
+      had those pigheaded fits, and she was touchy about the bishops. She had
+      liked Scrope on account of the excellence of his German pronunciation, but
+      she had been irritated by newspaper paragraphs&mdash;nobody could ever
+      find out who wrote them and nobody could ever find out who showed them to
+      the old lady&mdash;anticipating his elevation. She had gone very red in
+      the face and stiffened in the Guelphic manner whenever Scrope was
+      mentioned, and so a rich harvest of spiritual life had remained untilled
+      for some months. Likeman had brought her round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed arguable that Scrope owed some explanation to Likeman before he
+      came to any open breach with the Establishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found Likeman perceptibly older and more shrivelled on account of the
+      war, but still as sweet and lucid and subtle as ever. His voice sounded
+      more than ever like a kind old woman's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat buried in his cushions&mdash;for &ldquo;nowadays I must save every scrap
+      of vitality&rdquo;&mdash;and for a time contented himself with drawing out his
+      visitor's story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, one does not talk to Likeman of visions or intuitions. &ldquo;I am
+      disturbed, I find myself getting out of touch;&rdquo; that was the bishop's
+      tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Occasionally Likeman nodded slowly, as a physician might do at the recital
+      of familiar symptoms. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I have been through most of
+      this.... A little different in the inessentials.... How clear you are!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You leave our stupid old Trinities&mdash;as I left them long ago,&rdquo; said
+      old Likeman, with his lean hand feeling and clawing at the arm of his
+      chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man raised his hand and dropped it. &ldquo;You go away from it all&mdash;straight
+      as a line. I did. You take the wings of the morning and fly to the
+      uttermost parts of the earth. And there you find&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He held up a lean finger, and inclined it to tick off each point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fate&mdash;which is God the Father, the Power of the Heart, which is God
+      the Son, and that Light which comes in upon us from the inaccessible
+      Godhead, which is God the Holy Spirit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I know of no God the Holy Spirit, and Fate is not God at all. I saw
+      in my vision one sole God, uncrucified, militant&mdash;conquering and to
+      conquer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Old Likeman stared. &ldquo;You saw!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Bishop of Princhester had not meant to go so far. But he stuck to his
+      words. &ldquo;As if I saw with my eyes. A God of light and courage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have had visions, Scrope?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I seemed to see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you have just been dreaming dreams.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why should one not see?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See! The things of the spirit. These symbols as realities! These
+      metaphors as men walking!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You talk like an agnostic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are all agnostics. Our creeds are expressions of ourselves and our
+      attitude and relationship to the unknown. The triune God is just the form
+      of our need and disposition. I have always assumed that you took that for
+      granted. Who has ever really seen or heard or felt God? God is neither of
+      the senses nor of the mind; he is of the soul. You are realistic, you are
+      materialistic....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice expostulated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Bishop of Princhester reflected. The vision of God was far off among
+      his memories now, and difficult to recall. But he said at last: &ldquo;I believe
+      there is a God and that he is as real a person as you or I. And he is not
+      the theological God we set out before the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Personification,&rdquo; said Likeman. &ldquo;In the eighteenth century they used to
+      draw beautiful female figures as Science and Mathematics. Young men have
+      loved Science&mdash;and Freedom&mdash;as Pygmalion loved Galatea. Have it
+      so if you will. Have a visible person for your Deity. But let me keep up
+      my&mdash;spirituality.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your spirituality seems as thin as a mist. Do you really believe&mdash;anything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everything!&rdquo; said Likeman emphatically, sitting up with a transitory
+      vigour. &ldquo;Everything we two have ever professed together. I believe that
+      the creeds of my church do express all that can possibly be expressed in
+      the relationship of&mdash;That&rdquo;&mdash;he made a comprehensive gesture with
+      a twist of his hand upon its wrist&mdash;&ldquo;to the human soul. I believe
+      that they express it as well as the human mind can express it. Where they
+      seem to be contradictory or absurd, it is merely that the mystery is
+      paradoxical. I believe that the story of the Fall and of the Redemption is
+      a complete symbol, that to add to it or to subtract from it or to alter it
+      is to diminish its truth; if it seems incredible at this point or that,
+      then simply I admit my own mental defect. And I believe in our Church,
+      Scrope, as the embodied truth of religion, the divine instrument in human
+      affairs. I believe in the security of its tradition, in the complete and
+      entire soundness of its teaching, in its essential authority and
+      divinity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, and put his head a little on one side and smiled sweetly. &ldquo;And
+      now can you say I do not believe?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the historical Christ, the man Jesus?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A life may be a metaphor. Why not? Yes, I believe it all. All.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Bishop of Princhester was staggered by this complete acceptance. &ldquo;I
+      see you believe all you profess,&rdquo; he said, and remained for a moment or so
+      rallying his forces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your vision&mdash;if it was a vision&mdash;I put it to you, was just some
+      single aspect of divinity,&rdquo; said Likeman. &ldquo;We make a mistake in supposing
+      that Heresy has no truth in it. Most heresies are only a disproportionate
+      apprehension of some essential truth. Most heretics are men who have
+      suddenly caught a glimpse through the veil of some particular verity....
+      They are dazzled by that aspect. All the rest has vanished.... They are
+      obsessed. You are obsessed clearly by this discovery of the militancy of
+      God. God the Son&mdash;as Hero. And you want to go out to the simple
+      worship of that one aspect. You want to go out to a Dissenter's tent in
+      the wilderness, instead of staying in the Great Temple of the Ages.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Was that true?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some moments it sounded true.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Bishop of Princhester sat frowning and looking at that. Very far away
+      was the vision now of that golden Captain who bade him come. Then at a
+      thought the bishop smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Great Temple of the Ages,&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;But do you remember the
+      trouble we had when the little old Queen was so pigheaded?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! I remember, I remember,&rdquo; said Likeman, smiling with unshaken
+      confidence. &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For sixty years all we bishops in what you call the Great Temple of the
+      Ages, were appointed and bullied and kept in our places by that pink
+      irascible bit of dignity. I remember how at the time I didn't dare betray
+      my boiling indignation even to you&mdash;I scarcely dared admit it to
+      myself....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It doesn't matter at all,&rdquo; and old Likeman waved it aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; he confirmed, waving again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I spoke of the whole church of Christ on earth,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;These
+      things, these Victorias and Edwards and so on, are temporary accidents&mdash;just
+      as the severance of an Anglican from a Roman communion and a Greek
+      orthodox communion are temporary accidents. You will remark that wise men
+      in all ages have been able to surmount the difficulty of these things.
+      Why? Because they knew that in spite of all these splits and
+      irregularities and defacements&mdash;like the cracks and crannies and
+      lichens on a cathedral wall&mdash;the building held good, that it was
+      shelter and security. There is no other shelter and security. And so I
+      come to your problem. Suppose it is true that you have this incidental
+      vision of the militant aspect of God, and he isn't, as you see him now
+      that is,&mdash;he isn't like the Trinity, he isn't like the Creed, he
+      doesn't seem to be related to the Church, then comes the question, are you
+      going out for that? And whither do you go if you do go out? The Church
+      remains. We alter doctrines not by changing the words but by shifting the
+      accent. We can under-accentuate below the threshold of consciousness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But can we?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We do. Where's Hell now? Eighty years ago it warmed the whole Church. It
+      was&mdash;as some atheist or other put it the other day&mdash;the central
+      heating of the soul. But never mind that point now. Consider the essential
+      question, the question of breaking with the church. Ask yourself, whither
+      would you go? To become an oddity! A Dissenter. A Negative. Self
+      emasculated. The spirit that denies. You would just go out. You would just
+      cease to serve Religion. That would be all. You wouldn't do anything. The
+      Church would go on; everything else would go on. Only you would be lost in
+      the outer wilderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But then&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Old Likeman leant forward and pointed a bony finger. &ldquo;Stay in the Church
+      and modify it. Bring this new light of yours to the altar.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a little pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No man,&rdquo; the bishop thought aloud, &ldquo;putteth new wine into old bottles.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Old Likeman began to speak and had a fit of coughing. &ldquo;Some of these texts&mdash;whuff,
+      whuff&mdash;like a conjuror's hat&mdash;whuff&mdash;make 'em&mdash;fit
+      anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A man-servant appeared and handed a silver box of lozenges into which the
+      old bishop dipped with a trembling hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tricks of that sort,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;won't do, Scrope&mdash;among
+      professionals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And besides,&rdquo; he was inspired; &ldquo;true religion is old wine&mdash;as old as
+      the soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a bishop in the Church of Christ on Earth,&rdquo; he summed it up. &ldquo;And
+      you want to become a detached and wandering Ancient Mariner from your
+      shipwreck of faith with something to explain&mdash;that nobody wants to
+      hear. You are going out I suppose you have means?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man awaited the answer to his abrupt enquiry with a handful of
+      lozenges.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the Bishop of Princhester, &ldquo;practically&mdash;I haven't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear boy!&rdquo; it was as if they were once more rector and curate. &ldquo;My
+      dear brother! do you know what the value of an ex-bishop is in the
+      ordinary labour market?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never thought of that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Evidently. You have a wife and children?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Five daughters.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And your wife married you&mdash;I remember, she married you soon after
+      you got that living in St. John's Wood. I suppose she took it for granted
+      that you were fixed in an ecclesiastical career. That was implicit in the
+      transaction.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't looked very much at that side of the matter yet,&rdquo; said the
+      Bishop of Princhester.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It shouldn't be a decisive factor,&rdquo; said Bishop Likeman, &ldquo;not decisive.
+      But it will weigh. It should weigh....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man opened out fresh aspects of the case. His argument was for
+      delay, for deliberation. He went on to a wider set of considerations. A
+      man who has held the position of a bishop for some years is, he held, no
+      longer a free man in matters of opinion. He has become an official part of
+      a great edifice which supports the faith of multitudes of simple and
+      dependant believers. He has no right to indulge recklessly in intellectual
+      and moral integrities. He may understand, but how is the flock to
+      understand? He may get his own soul clear, but what will happen to them?
+      He will just break away their supports, astonish them, puzzle them,
+      distress them, deprive them of confidence, convince them of nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Intellectual egotism may be as grave a sin,&rdquo; said Bishop Likeman, &ldquo;as
+      physical selfishness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Assuming even that you are absolutely right,&rdquo; said Bishop Likeman,
+      &ldquo;aren't you still rather in the position of a man who insists upon Swedish
+      exercises and a strengthening dietary on a raft?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you have made out a case for delay,&rdquo; said his hearer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three months.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Bishop of Princhester conceded three months.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Including every sort of service. Because, after all, even supposing it is
+      damnable to repeat prayers and creeds you do not believe in, and
+      administer sacraments you think superstition, nobody can be damned but
+      yourself. On the other hand if you express doubts that are not yet
+      perfectly digested&mdash;you experiment with the souls of others....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop found much to ponder in his old friend's counsels. They were
+      discursive and many-fronted, and whenever he seemed to be penetrating or
+      defeating the particular considerations under examination the others in
+      the background had a way of appearing invincible. He had a strong
+      persuasion that Likeman was wrong&mdash;and unanswerable. And the true God
+      now was no more than the memory of a very vividly realized idea. It was
+      clear to the bishop that he was no longer a churchman or in the generally
+      accepted sense of the word a Christian, and that he was bound to come out
+      of the church. But all sense of urgency had gone. It was a matter
+      demanding deliberation and very great consideration for others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took no more of Dale's stuff because he felt bodily sound and slept
+      well. And he was now a little shy of this potent fluid. He went down to
+      Princhester the next day, for his compromise of an interval of three
+      months made it seem possible to face his episcopal routine again. It was
+      only when he was back in his own palace that the full weight of his
+      domestic responsibilities in the discussion of the course he had to take,
+      became apparent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella met him with affection and solicitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was tired and mentally fagged,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;A day or so in London had an
+      effect of change.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She agreed that he looked much better, and remained for a moment or so
+      scrutinizing him with the faint anxiety of one resolved to be completely
+      helpful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He regarded her with a renewed sense of her grace and dignity and
+      kindliness. She was wearing a grey dress of soft silky material, touched
+      with blue and covered with what seemed to him very rich and beautiful
+      lace; her hair flowed back very graciously from her broad brow, and about
+      her wrist and neck were delicate lines of gold. She seemed tremendously at
+      home and right just where she was, in that big hospitable room, cultured
+      but Anglican, without pretensions or novelties, with a glow of bound
+      books, with the grand piano that Miriam, his third daughter, was beginning
+      to play so well, with the tea equipage of shining silver and fine
+      porcelain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down contentedly in the low armchair beside her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It wasn't a setting that one would rashly destroy....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that evening at dinner this sense of his home as a complex of finely
+      adjusted things not to be rashly disturbed was still more in the mind of
+      the bishop. At dinner he had all his domesticities about him. It was the
+      family time, from eight until ten, at which latter hour he would usually
+      go back from the drawing-room to his study. He surveyed the table. Eleanor
+      was at home for a few days, looking a little thin and bright but very keen
+      and happy. She had taken a first in the first part of the Moral Science
+      Tripos, and she was working hard now for part two. Clementina was to go
+      back to Newnham with her next September. She aspired to history. Miriam's
+      bent was musical. She and Phoebe and Daphne and Clementina were under the
+      care of skilful Mademoiselle Lafarge, most tactful of Protestant
+      French-women, Protestant and yet not too Protestant, one of those rare
+      French Protestants in whom a touch of Bergson and the Pasteur Monod
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;scarce suspected, animates the whole.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      And also they had lessons, so high are our modern standards of education,
+      from Mr. Blent, a brilliant young mathematician in orders, who sat now
+      next to Lady Ella. Mr. Whippham, the chaplain, was at the bishop's right
+      hand, ready for any chance of making arrangements to clear off the small
+      arrears of duty the little holiday in London had accumulated. The bishop
+      surveyed all these bright young people between himself and the calm beauty
+      of his wife. He spoke first to one and then another upon the things that
+      interested them. It rejoiced his heart to be able to give them education
+      and opportunity, it pleased him to see them in clothes that he knew were
+      none the less expensive because of their complete simplicity. Miriam and
+      Mr. Blent wrangled pleasantly about Debussy, and old Dunk waited as though
+      in orders of some rare and special sort that qualified him for this
+      service.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these people, the bishop reflected, counted upon him that this would
+      go on....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Eleanor was answering some question of her mother's. They were so oddly
+      alike and so curiously different, and both in their several ways so fine.
+      Eleanor was dark like his own mother. Perhaps she did a little lack Lady
+      Ella's fine reserves; she could express more, she could feel more acutely,
+      she might easily be very unhappy or very happy....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these people counted on him. It was indeed acutely true, as Likeman
+      had said, that any sudden breach with his position would be a breach of
+      faith&mdash;so far as they were concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And just then his eye fell upon the epergne, a very old and beautiful
+      piece of silver, that graced the dinner-table. It had been given him,
+      together with an episcopal ring, by his curates and choristers at the
+      Church of the Holy Innocents, when he became bishop of Pinner. When they
+      gave it him, had any one of them dreamt that some day he might be moved to
+      strike an ungracious blow at the mother church that had reared them all?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was his custom to join the family in the drawing-room after dinner.
+      To-night he was a little delayed by Whippham, with some trivialities about
+      next month's confirmations in Pringle and Princhester. When he came in he
+      found Miriam playing, and playing very beautifully one of those later
+      sonatas of Beethoven, he could never remember whether it was Of. 109 or
+      Of. 111, but he knew that he liked it very much; it was solemn and sombre
+      with phases of indescribable sweetness&mdash;while Clementina, Daphne and
+      Mademoiselle Lafarge went on with their war knitting and Phoebe and Mr.
+      Blent bent their brows over chess. Eleanor was reading the evening paper.
+      Lady Ella sat on a high chair by the coffee things, and he stood in the
+      doorway surveying the peaceful scene for a moment or so, before he went
+      across the room and sat down on the couch close to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You look tired,&rdquo; she whispered softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Worries.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That Chasters case?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Things developing out of that. I must tell you later.&rdquo; It would be, he
+      felt, a good way of breaking the matter to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is the Chasters case coming on again, Daddy?&rdquo; asked Eleanor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a pity,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That he can't be left alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's Sir Reginald Phipps. The Church would be much more tolerant if it
+      wasn't for the House of Laymen. But they&mdash;they feel they must do
+      something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He seized the opportunity of the music ceasing to get away from the
+      subject. &ldquo;Miriam dear,&rdquo; he asked, raising his voice; &ldquo;is that 109 or 111?
+      I can never tell.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is always 111, Daddy,&rdquo; said Miriam. &ldquo;It's the other one is 109.&rdquo; And
+      then evidently feeling that she had been pert: &ldquo;Would you like me to play
+      you 109, Daddy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should love it, my dear.&rdquo; And he leant back and prepared to listen in
+      such a thorough way that Eleanor would have no chance of discussing the
+      Chasters' heresies. But this was interrupted by the consummation of the
+      coffee, and Mr. Blent, breaking a long silence with &ldquo;Mate in three, if I'm
+      not mistaken,&rdquo; leapt to his feet to be of service. Eleanor, with the rough
+      seriousness of youth, would not leave the Chasters case alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But need you take action against Mr. Chasters?&rdquo; she asked at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a very complicated subject, my dear,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His arguments?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The practical considerations.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what are practical considerations in such a case?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's a post-graduate subject, Norah,&rdquo; her father said with a smile and
+      a sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; began Eleanor, gathering fresh forces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Daddy is tired,&rdquo; Lady Ella intervened, patting him on the head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, terribly!&mdash;of that,&rdquo; he said, and so escaped Eleanor for the
+      evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he knew that before very long he would have to tell his wife of the
+      changes that hung over their lives; it would be shabby to let the
+      avalanche fall without giving the longest possible warning; and before
+      they parted that night he took her hands in his and said: &ldquo;There is much I
+      have to tell you, dear. Things change, the whole world changes. The church
+      must not live in a dream....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she whispered. &ldquo;I hope you will sleep to-night,&rdquo; and held up her
+      grave sweet face to be kissed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (6)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he did not sleep perfectly that night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not sleep indeed very badly, but he lay for some time thinking,
+      thinking not onward but as if he pressed his mind against very strong
+      barriers that had closed again. His vision of God which had filled the
+      heavens, had become now gem-like, a minute, hard, clear-cut conviction in
+      his mind that he had to disentangle himself from the enormous
+      complications of symbolism and statement and organization and
+      misunderstanding in the church and achieve again a simple and living
+      worship of a simple and living God. Likeman had puzzled and silenced him,
+      only upon reflection to convince him that amidst such intricacies of
+      explanation the spirit cannot live. Creeds may be symbolical, but symbols
+      must not prevaricate. A church that can symbolize everything and anything
+      means nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It followed from this that he ought to leave the church. But there came
+      the other side of this perplexing situation. His feelings as he lay in his
+      bed were exactly like those one has in a dream when one wishes to run or
+      leap or shout and one can achieve no movement, no sound. He could not
+      conceive how he could possibly leave the church.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife became as it were the representative of all that held him
+      helpless. She and he had never kept secret from one another any plan of
+      action, any motive, that affected the other. It was clear to him that any
+      movement towards the disavowal of doctrinal Christianity and the
+      renunciation of his see must be first discussed with her. He must tell her
+      before he told the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he could not imagine his telling her except as an incredibly
+      shattering act.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he left things from day to day, and went about his episcopal routines.
+      He preached and delivered addresses in such phrases as he knew people
+      expected, and wondered profoundly why it was that it should be impossible
+      for him to discuss theological points with Lady Ella. And one afternoon he
+      went for a walk with Eleanor along the banks of the Prin, and found
+      himself, in response to certain openings of hers, talking to her in almost
+      exactly the same terms as Likeman had used to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly the problem of this theological eclaircissement was
+      complicated in an unexpected fashion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had just been taking his Every Second Thursday Talk with Diocesan Men
+      Helpers. He had been trying to be plain and simple upon the needless
+      narrowness of enthusiastic laymen. He was still in the Bishop Andrews cap
+      and purple cassock he affected on these occasions; the Men Helpers loved
+      purple; and he was disentangling himself from two or three resolute bores&mdash;for
+      our loyal laymen can be at times quite superlative bores&mdash;when Miriam
+      came to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mummy says, 'Come to the drawing-room if you can.' There is a Lady
+      Sunderbund who seems particularly to want to see you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He hesitated for a moment, and then decided that this was a conversation
+      he ought to control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found Lady Sunderbund looking very tall and radiantly beautiful in a
+      sheathlike dress of bright crimson trimmed with snow-white fur and a white
+      fur toque. She held out a long white-gloved hand to him and cried in a
+      tone of comradeship and profound understanding: &ldquo;I've come, Bishop!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've come to see me?&rdquo; he said without any sincerity in his polite
+      pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've come to P'inchesta to stay!&rdquo; she cried with a bright triumphant
+      rising note.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She evidently considered Lady Ella a mere conversational stop-gap, to be
+      dropped now that the real business could be commenced. She turned her
+      pretty profile to that lady, and obliged the bishop with a compact summary
+      of all that had preceded his arrival. &ldquo;I have been telling Lady Ella,&rdquo; she
+      said, &ldquo;I've taken a house, fu'nitua and all! Hea. In P'inchesta! I've made
+      up my mind to sit unda you&mdash;as they say in Clapham. I've come 'ight
+      down he' fo' good. I've taken a little house&mdash;oh! a sweet little
+      house that will be all over 'oses next month. I'm living f'om 'oom to 'oom
+      and having the othas done up. It's in that little quiet st'eet behind you'
+      ga'den wall. And he' I am!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it the old doctor's house?&rdquo; asked Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was it an old docta?&rdquo; cried Lady Sunderbund. &ldquo;How delightful! And now I
+      shall be a patient!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She concentrated upon the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I've been thinking all the time of all the things you told me. Ova
+      and ova. It's all so wondyful and so&mdash;so like a G'ate Daw opening.
+      New light. As if it was all just beginning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She clasped her hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop felt that there were a great number of points to this
+      situation, and that it was extremely difficult to grasp them all at once.
+      But one that seemed of supreme importance to his whirling intelligence was
+      that Lady Ella should not know that he had gone to relieve his soul by
+      talking to Lady Sunderbund in London. It had never occurred to him at the
+      time that there was any shadow of disloyalty to Lady Ella in his going to
+      Lady Sunderbund, but now he realized that this was a thing that would
+      annoy Lady Ella extremely. The conversation had in the first place to be
+      kept away from that. And in the second place it had to be kept away from
+      the abrupt exploitation of the new theological developments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt that something of the general tension would be relieved if they
+      could all three be got to sit down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been talking for just upon two hours,&rdquo; he said to Lady Ella. &ldquo;It's
+      good to see the water boiling for tea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put a chair for Lady Sunderbund to the right of Lady Ella, got her into
+      it by infusing an ecclesiastical insistence into his manner, and then went
+      and sat upon the music-stool on his wife's left, so as to establish a
+      screen of tea-things and cakes and so forth against her more intimate
+      enthusiasm. Meanwhile he began to see his way clearer and to develop his
+      line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Lady Sunderbund,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I can assure you that I think you will
+      be no small addition to the church life of Princhester. But I warn you
+      this is a hard-working and exacting diocese. We shall take your money, all
+      we can get of it, we shall take your time, we shall work you hard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wo'k me hard!&rdquo; cried Lady Sunderbund with passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will, we will,&rdquo; said the bishop in a tone that ignored her passionate
+      note.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure Lady Sunderbund will be a great help to us,&rdquo; said Lady Ella.
+      &ldquo;We want brightening. There's a dinginess....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Sunderbund beamed an acknowledgment. &ldquo;I shall exact a 'eturn,&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;I don't mind wo'king, but I shall wo'k like the poo' students in
+      the Middle Ages did, to get my teaching. I've got my own soul to save as
+      well as help saving othas. Since oua last talk&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She found the bishop handing her bread and butter. For a time the bishop
+      fought a delaying action with the tea-things, while he sought eagerly and
+      vainly in his mind for some good practical topic in which he could
+      entangle and suppress Lady Sunderbund's enthusiasms. From this she broke
+      away by turning suddenly to Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Youa husband's views,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;we'e a 'eal 'evelation to me. It was
+      like not being blind&mdash;all at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella was always pleased to hear her husband praised. Her colour
+      brightened a little. &ldquo;They seem very ordinary views,&rdquo; she said modestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You share them?&rdquo; cried Lady Sunderbund.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But of course,&rdquo; said Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wondyful!&rdquo; cried Lady Sunderbund.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me, Lady Sunderbund,&rdquo; said the bishop, &ldquo;are you going to alter the
+      outer appearance of the old doctor's house?&rdquo; And found that at last he had
+      discovered the saving topic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha'dly at all,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I shall just have it pointed white and do the
+      doa&mdash;I'm not su' how I shall do the doa. Whetha I shall do the doa
+      gold or a vehy, vehy 'itch blue.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time she and Lady Ella, to whom these ideas were novel, discussed
+      the animation of grey and sombre towns by house painting. In such matter
+      Lady Sunderbund had a Russian mind. &ldquo;I can't bea' g'ey,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Not in
+      my su'oundings, not in my k'eed, nowhe'e.&rdquo; She turned to the bishop. &ldquo;If I
+      had my way I would paint you' cathed'al inside and out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They used to be painted,&rdquo; said the bishop. &ldquo;I don't know if you have seen
+      Ely. There the old painting has been largely restored....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From that to the end there was no real danger, and at last the bishop
+      found himself alone with his wife again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Remarkable person,&rdquo; he said tentatively. &ldquo;I never met any one whose
+      faults were more visible. I met her at Wimbush House.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced at his watch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did she mean,&rdquo; asked Lady Ella abruptly, &ldquo;by talking of your new
+      views? And about revelations?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She probably misunderstood something I said at the Garstein Fellows',&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;She has rather a leaping mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to the window, looked at his nails, and appeared to be suddenly
+      reminded of duties elsewhere....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was chiefly manifest to him that the difficulties in explaining the
+      changes of his outlook to Lady Ella had now increased enormously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (7)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A day or so after Lady Sunderbund's arrival in Princhester the bishop had
+      a letter from Likeman. The old man was manifestly in doubt about the
+      effect of their recent conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Scrope,&rdquo; it began. &ldquo;I find myself thinking continually about our
+      interview and the difficulties you laid bare so frankly to me. We touched
+      upon many things in that talk, and I find myself full of afterthoughts,
+      and not perfectly sure either quite of what I said or of what I failed to
+      say. I feel that in many ways I was not perhaps so clear and convincing as
+      the justice of my case should have made me, and you are one of my own
+      particular little company, you were one of the best workers in that band
+      of good workers, your life and your career are very much my concern. I
+      know you will forgive me if I still mingle something of the paternal with
+      my fraternal admonitions. I watched you closely. I have still my old
+      diaries of the St. Matthew's days, and I have been looking at them to
+      remind me of what you once were. It was my custom to note my early
+      impressions of all the men who worked with me, because I have a firm
+      belief in the soundness of first impressions and the considerable risk one
+      runs of having them obscured by the accidents and habituations of constant
+      intercourse. I found that quite early in your days at St. Matthew's I
+      wrote against your name 'enthusiastic, but a saving delicacy.' After all
+      our life-long friendship I would not write anything truer. I would say of
+      you to-day, 'This man might have been a revivalist, if he were not a
+      gentleman.' There is the enthusiast, there is the revivalist, in you. It
+      seems to me that the stresses and questions of this great crisis in the
+      world's history have brought it nearer to the surface than I had ever
+      expected it to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I quite understand and I sympathize with your impatience with the church
+      at the present time; we present a spectacle of pompous insignificance hard
+      to bear with. We are doing very little, and we are giving ourselves
+      preposterous airs. There seems to be an opinion abroad that in some
+      quasi-automatic way the country is going to collapse after the war into
+      the arms of the church and the High Tories; a possibility I don't accept
+      for a moment. Why should it? These forcible-feeble reactionaries are much
+      more likely to explode a revolution that will disestablish us. And I quite
+      understand your theological difficulties&mdash;quite. The creeds, if their
+      entire symbolism is for a moment forgotten, if they are taken as opaque
+      statements of fact, are inconsistent, incredible. So incredible that no
+      one believes them; not even the most devout. The utmost they do is to
+      avert their minds&mdash;reverentially. Credo quia impossibile. That is
+      offensive to a Western mind. I can quite understand the disposition to cry
+      out at such things, 'This is not the Church of God!'&mdash;to run out from
+      it&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have some dream, I suspect, of a dramatic dissidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, my dear Brother and erstwhile pupil, I ask you not to do this thing.
+      Wait, I implore you. Give me&mdash;and some others, a little time. I have
+      your promise for three months, but even after that, I ask you to wait. Let
+      the reform come from within the church. The church is something more than
+      either its creeds, its clergy, or its laymen. Look at your cathedral
+      rising out of and dominating Princhester. It stands not simply for
+      Athanasius; it stands but incidentally for Athanasius; it stands for all
+      religion. Within that fabric&mdash;let me be as frank here as in our
+      private conversation&mdash;doctrine has altered again and again. To-day
+      two distinct religions worship there side by side; one that fades and one
+      that grows brighter. There is the old quasi-materialistic belief of the
+      barbarians, the belief in such things, for example, as that Christ the
+      physical Son of God descended into hell and stayed there, seeing the
+      sights I suppose like any tourist and being treated with diplomatic
+      civilities for three terrestrial days; and on the other hand there is the
+      truly spiritual belief that you and I share, which is absolutely
+      intolerant of such grotesque ideas. My argument to you is that the new
+      faith, the clearer vision, gains ground; that the only thing that can
+      prevent or delay the church from being altogether possessed by what you
+      call and I admit is, the true God, is that such men as yourself, as the
+      light breaks upon you, should be hasty and leave the church. You see my
+      point of view, do you not? It is not one that has been assumed for our
+      discussion; it is one I came to long years ago, that I was already feeling
+      my way to in my St. Matthew's Lenton sermons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A word for your private ear. I am working. I cannot tell you fully
+      because I am not working alone. But there are movements afoot in which I
+      hope very shortly to be able to ask you to share. That much at least I may
+      say at this stage. Obscure but very powerful influences are at work for
+      the liberalizing of the church, for release from many narrow limitations,
+      for the establishment of a modus vivendi with the nonconformist and
+      dissentient bodies in Britain and America, and with the churches of the
+      East. But of that no more now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And in conclusion, my dear Scrope, let me insist again upon the eternal
+      persistence of the essential Religious Fact:&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (Greek Letters Here)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (Rev. i. 18. &ldquo;Fear not. I am the First and Last thing, the Living thing.&rdquo;)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And these promises which, even if we are not to take them as promises in
+      the exact sense in which, let us say, the payment of five sovereigns is
+      promised by a five-pound note, are yet assertions of practically
+      inevitable veracity:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (Greek Letters Here)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (Phil. i. 6. &ldquo;He who began... will perfect.&rdquo; Eph. v. 14. &ldquo;He will
+      illuminate.&rdquo;)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man had written his Greek tags in shakily resolute capitals. It
+      was his custom always to quote the Greek Testament in his letters, never
+      the English version. It is a practice not uncommon with the more scholarly
+      of our bishops. It is as if some eminent scientific man were to insist
+      upon writing H2O instead of &ldquo;water,&rdquo; and &ldquo;sodium chloride&rdquo; instead of
+      &ldquo;table salt&rdquo; in his private correspondence. Or upon hanging up a stuffed
+      crocodile in his hall to give the place tone. The Bishop of Princhester
+      construed these brief dicta without serious exertion, he found them very
+      congenial texts, but there were insuperable difficulties in the problem
+      why Likeman should suppose they had the slightest weight upon his side of
+      their discussion. The more he thought the less they seemed to be on
+      Likeman's side, until at last they began to take on a complexion entirely
+      opposed to the old man's insidious arguments, until indeed they began to
+      bear the extraordinary interpretation of a special message, unwittingly
+      delivered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (8)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop was still thinking over this communication when he was
+      interrupted by Lady Ella. She came with a letter in her hand to ask him
+      whether she might send five-and-twenty pounds to a poor cousin of his, a
+      teacher in a girls' school, who had been incapacitated from work by a
+      dislocation of the cartilage of her knee. If she could go to that
+      unorthodox but successful practitioner, Mr. Barker, the bone-setter, she
+      was convinced she could be restored to efficiency. But she had no ready
+      money. The bishop agreed without hesitation. His only doubt was the
+      certainty of the cure, but upon that point Lady Ella was convinced; there
+      had been a great experience in the Walshingham family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is pleasant to be able to do things like this,&rdquo; said Lady Ella,
+      standing over him when this matter was settled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; the bishop agreed; &ldquo;it is pleasant to be in a position to do things
+      like this....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE SEVENTH - THE SECOND VISION
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      A MONTH later found the bishop's original state of perplexity and insomnia
+      returned and intensified. He had done none of all the things that had
+      seemed so manifestly needing to be done after his vision in the Athenaeum.
+      All the relief and benefit of his experience in London had vanished out of
+      his life. He was afraid of Dr. Dale's drug; he knew certainly that it
+      would precipitate matters; and all his instincts in the state of moral
+      enfeeblement to which he had relapsed, were to temporize.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although he had said nothing further about his changed beliefs to Lady
+      Ella, yet he perceived clearly that a shadow had fallen between them. She
+      had a wife's extreme sensitiveness to fine shades of expression and
+      bearing, and manifestly she knew that something was different. Meanwhile
+      Lady Sunderbund had become a frequent worshipper in the cathedral, she was
+      a figure as conspicuous in sombre Princhester as a bird of paradise would
+      have been; common people stood outside her very very rich blue door on the
+      chance of seeing her; she never missed an opportunity of hearing the
+      bishop preach or speak, she wrote him several long and thoughtful letters
+      with which he did not bother Lady Ella, she communicated persistently, and
+      manifestly intended to become a very active worker in diocesan affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was inevitable that she and the bishop should meet and talk
+      occasionally in the cathedral precincts, and it was inevitable that he
+      should contrast the flexibility of her rapid and very responsive mind with
+      a certain defensiveness, a stoniness, in the intellectual bearing of Lady
+      Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If it had been Lady Sunderbund he had had to explain to, instead of Lady
+      Ella, he could have explained a dozen times a day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And since his mind was rehearsing explanations it was not unnatural they
+      should overflow into this eagerly receptive channel, and that the less he
+      told Lady Ella the fuller became his spiritual confidences to Lady
+      Sunderbund.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was clever in realizing that they were confidences and treating them
+      as such, more particularly when it chanced that she and Lady Ella and the
+      bishop found themselves in the same conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made great friends with Miriam, and initiated her by a whole
+      collection of pretty costume plates into the mysteries of the &ldquo;Ussian
+      Ballet&rdquo; and the works of Mousso'gski and &ldquo;Imsky Ko'zakof.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop liked a certain religiosity in the texture of Moussorgski's
+      music, but failed to see the &ldquo;significance &ldquo;&mdash;of many of the
+      costumes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was on a Sunday night&mdash;the fourth Sunday after Easter&mdash;that
+      the supreme crisis of the bishop's life began. He had had a feeling all
+      day of extreme dulness and stupidity; he felt his ministrations unreal,
+      his ceremonies absurd and undignified. In the night he became bleakly and
+      painfully awake. His mind occupied itself at first chiefly with the
+      tortuousness and weakness of his own character. Every day he perceived
+      that the difficulty of telling Lady Ella of the change in his faith became
+      more mountainous. And every day he procrastinated. If he had told her
+      naturally and simply on the evening of his return from London&mdash;before
+      anything material intervened&mdash;everything would have been different,
+      everything would have been simpler....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He groaned and rolled over in his bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There came upon him the acutest remorse and misery. For he saw that amidst
+      these petty immediacies he had lost touch with God. The last month became
+      incredible. He had seen God. He had touched God's hand. God had been given
+      to him, and he had neglected the gift. He was still lost amidst the
+      darkness and loneliness, the chaotic ends and mean shifts, of an Erastian
+      world. For a month now and more, after a vision of God so vivid and real
+      and reassuring that surely no saint nor prophet had ever had a better, he
+      had made no more than vague responsive movements; he had allowed himself
+      to be persuaded into an unreasonable and cowardly delay, and the fetters
+      of association and usage and minor interests were as unbroken as they had
+      been before ever the vision shone. Was it credible that there had ever
+      been such a vision in a life so entirely dictated by immediacy and
+      instinct as his? We are all creatures of the dark stream, we swim in needs
+      and bodily impulses and small vanities; if ever and again a bubble of
+      spiritual imaginativeness glows out of us, it breaks and leaves us where
+      we were.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Louse that I am!&rdquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He still believed in God, without a shadow of doubt; he believed in the
+      God that he had seen, the high courage, the golden intention, the light
+      that had for a moment touched him. But what had he to do with God, he, the
+      loiterer, the little thing?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was little, he was funny. His prevarications with his wife, for
+      example, were comic. There was no other word for him but &ldquo;funny.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rolled back again and lay staring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who will deliver me from the body of this death?&rdquo; What right has a little
+      bishop in a purple stock and doeskin breeches, who hangs back in his
+      palace from the very call of God, to a phrase so fine and tragic as &ldquo;the
+      body of this death?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was the most unreal thing in the universe. He was a base insect giving
+      himself airs. What advantage has a bishop over the Praying Mantis, that
+      cricket which apes the attitude of piety? Does he matter more&mdash;to
+      God?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the God of the Universe, who can tell? To the God of man,&mdash;yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat up in bed struck by his own answer, and full of an indescribable
+      hunger for God and an indescribable sense of his complete want of courage
+      to make the one simple appeal that would satisfy that hunger. He tried to
+      pray. &ldquo;O God!&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;forgive me! Take me!&rdquo; It seemed to him that he
+      was not really praying but only making believe to pray. It seemed to him
+      that he was not really existing but only seeming to exist. He seemed to
+      himself to be one with figures on a china plate, with figures painted on
+      walls, with the flimsy imagined lives of men in stories of forgotten
+      times. &ldquo;O God!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;O God,&rdquo; acting a gesture, mimicking appeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anaemic,&rdquo; he said, and was given an idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got out of bed, he took his keys from the night-table at the bed head
+      and went to his bureau.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood with Dale's tonic in his hand. He remained for some time holding
+      it, and feeling a curious indisposition to go on with the thing in his
+      mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned at last with an effort. He carried the little phial to his
+      bedside, and into the tumbler of his water-bottle he let the drops fall,
+      drop by drop, until he had counted twenty. Then holding it to the bulb of
+      his reading lamp he added the water and stood watching the slow pearly
+      eddies in the mixture mingle into an opalescent uniformity. He replaced
+      the water-bottle and stood with the glass in his hand. But he did not
+      drink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was afraid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He knew that he had only to drink and this world of confusion would grow
+      transparent, would roll back and reveal the great simplicities behind. And
+      he was afraid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was afraid of that greatness. He was afraid of the great imperatives
+      that he knew would at once take hold of his life. He wanted to muddle on
+      for just a little longer. He wanted to stay just where he was, in his
+      familiar prison-house, with the key of escape in his hand. Before he took
+      the last step into the very presence of truth, he would&mdash;think.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put down the glass and lay down upon his bed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He awoke in a mood of great depression out of a dream of wandering
+      interminably in an endless building of innumerable pillars, pillars so
+      vast and high that the ceiling was lost in darkness. By the scale of these
+      pillars he felt himself scarcely larger than an ant. He was always alone
+      in these wanderings, and always missing something that passed along
+      distant passages, something desirable, something in the nature of a
+      procession or of a ceremony, something of which he was in futile pursuit,
+      of which he heard faint echoes, something luminous of which he seemed at
+      times to see the last fading reflection, across vast halls and
+      wildernesses of shining pavement and through Cyclopaean archways. At last
+      there was neither sound nor gleam, but the utmost solitude, and a darkness
+      and silence and the uttermost profundity of sorrow....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was bright day. Dunk had just come into the room with his tea, and the
+      tumbler of Dr. Dale's tonic stood untouched upon the night-table. The
+      bishop sat up in bed. He had missed his opportunity. To-day was a busy
+      day, he knew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, as Dunk hesitated whether to remove or leave the tumbler.
+      &ldquo;Leave that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dunk found room for it upon the tea-tray, and vanished softly with the
+      bishop's evening clothes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop remained motionless facing the day. There stood the draught of
+      decision that he had lacked the decision even to touch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From his bed he could just read the larger items that figured upon the
+      engagement tablet which it was Whippham's business to fill over-night and
+      place upon his table. He had two confirmation services, first the big one
+      in the cathedral and then a second one in the evening at Pringle, various
+      committees and an interview with Chasters. He had not yet finished his
+      addresses for these confirmation services....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The task seemed mountainous&mdash;overwhelming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a gesture of desperation he seized the tumblerful of tonic and drank
+      it off at a gulp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some moments nothing seemed to happen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he began to feel stronger and less wretched, and then came a
+      throbbing and tingling of artery and nerve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a sense of adventure, a pleasant fear in the thing that he had
+      done. He got out of bed, leaving his cup of tea untasted, and began to
+      dress. He had the sensation of relief a prisoner may feel who suddenly
+      tries his cell door and finds it open upon sunshine, the outside world and
+      freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went on dressing although he was certain that in a few minutes the
+      world of delusion about him would dissolve, and that he would find himself
+      again in the great freedom of the place of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This time the transition came much sooner and much more rapidly. This time
+      the phases and quality of the experience were different. He felt once
+      again that luminous confusion between the world in which a human life is
+      imprisoned and a circumambient and interpenetrating world, but this phase
+      passed very rapidly; it did not spread out over nearly half an hour as it
+      had done before, and almost immediately he seemed to plunge away from
+      everything in this life altogether into that outer freedom he sought. And
+      this time there was not even the elemental scenery of the former vision.
+      He stood on nothing; there was nothing below and nothing above him. There
+      was no sense of falling, no terror, but a feeling as though he floated
+      released. There was no light, but as it were a clear darkness about him.
+      Then it was manifest to him that he was not alone, but that with him was
+      that same being that in his former vision had called himself the Angel of
+      God. He knew this without knowing why he knew this, and either he spoke
+      and was answered, or he thought and his thought answered him back. His
+      state of mind on this occasion was altogether different from the first
+      vision of God; before it had been spectacular, but now his perception was
+      altogether super-sensuous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (And nevertheless and all the time it seemed that very faintly he was
+      still in his room.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was he who was the first to speak. The great Angel whom he felt rather
+      than saw seemed to be waiting for him to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have come,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;because once more I desire to see God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you have seen God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw God. God was light, God was truth. And I went back to my life, and
+      God was hidden. God seemed to call me. He called. I heard him, I sought
+      him and I touched his hand. When I went back to my life I was presently
+      lost in perplexity. I could not tell why God had called me nor what I had
+      to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And why did you not come here before?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doubt and fear. Brother, will you not lay your hand on mine?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The figure in the darkness became distincter. But nothing touched the
+      bishop's seeking hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to see God and to understand him. I want reassurance. I want
+      conviction. I want to understand all that God asks me to do. The world is
+      full of conflict and confusion and the spirit of war. It is dark and
+      dreadful now with suffering and bloodshed. I want to serve God who could
+      save it, and I do not know how.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to the bishop that now he could distinguish dimly but surely the
+      form and features of the great Angel to whom he talked. For a little while
+      there was silence, and then the Angel spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was necessary first,&rdquo; said the Angel, &ldquo;that you should apprehend God
+      and desire him. That was the purport of your first vision. Now, since you
+      require it, I will tell you and show you certain things about him, things
+      that it seems you need to know, things that all men need to know. Know
+      then first that the time is at hand when God will come into the world and
+      rule it, and when men will know what is required of them. This time is
+      close at hand. In a little while God will be made manifest throughout the
+      earth. Men will know him and know that he is King. To you this truth is to
+      be shown&mdash;that you may tell it to others.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is no vision?&rdquo; said the bishop, &ldquo;no dream that will pass away?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I not here beside you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop was anxious to be very clear. Things that had been shapelessly
+      present in his mind now took form and found words for themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The God I saw in my vision&mdash;He is not yet manifest in the world?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He comes. He is in the world, but he is not yet manifested. He whom you
+      saw in your vision will speedily be manifest in the world. To you this
+      vision is given of the things that come. The world is already glowing with
+      God. Mankind is like a smouldering fire that will presently, in quite a
+      little time, burst out into flame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In your former vision I showed you God,&rdquo; said the Angel. &ldquo;This time I
+      will show you certain signs of the coming of God. And then you will
+      understand the place you hold in the world and the task that is required
+      of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (6)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as the Angel spoke he lifted up his hands with the palms upward, and
+      there appeared above them a little round cloud, that grew denser until it
+      had the likeness of a silver sphere. It was a mirror in the form of a
+      ball, but a mirror not shining uniformly; it was discoloured with greyish
+      patches that had a familiar shape. It circled slowly upon the Angel's
+      hands. It seemed no greater than the compass of a human skull, and yet it
+      was as great as the earth. Indeed it showed the whole earth. It was the
+      earth. The hands of the Angel vanished out of sight, dissolved and
+      vanished, and the spinning world hung free. All about the bishop the
+      velvet darkness broke into glittering points that shaped out the
+      constellations, and nearest to them, so near as to seem only a few million
+      miles away in the great emptiness into which everything had resolved
+      itself, shone the sun, a ball of red-tongued fires. The Angel was but a
+      voice now; the bishop and the Angel were somewhere aloof from and yet
+      accessible to the circling silver sphere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the time all that happened seemed to happen quite naturally, as things
+      happen in a dream. It was only later, when all this was a matter of
+      memory, that the bishop realized how strange and incomprehensible his
+      vision had been. The sphere was the earth with all its continents and
+      seas, its ships and cities, its country-sides and mountain ranges. It was
+      so small that he could see it all at once, and so great and full that he
+      could see everything in it. He could see great countries like little
+      patches upon it, and at the same time he could see the faces of the men
+      upon the highways, he could see the feelings in men's hearts and the
+      thoughts in their minds. But it did not seem in any way wonderful to the
+      bishop that so he should see those things, or that it was to him that
+      these things were shown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the whole world,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the vision of the world,&rdquo; the Angel answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very wonderful,&rdquo; said the bishop, and stood for a moment marvelling
+      at the compass of his vision. For here was India, here was Samarkand, in
+      the light of the late afternoon; and China and the swarming cities upon
+      her silvery rivers sinking through twilight to the night and throwing a
+      spray and tracery of lantern spots upon the dark; here was Russia under
+      the noontide, and so great a battle of artillery raging on the Dunajec as
+      no man had ever seen before; whole lines of trenches dissolved into clouds
+      of dust and heaps of blood-streaked earth; here close to the waiting
+      streets of Constantinople were the hills of Gallipoli, the grave of
+      British Imperialism, streaming to heaven with the dust and smoke of
+      bursting shells and rifle fire and the smoke and flame of burning
+      brushwood. In the sea of Marmora a big ship crowded with Turkish troops
+      was sinking; and, purple under the clear water, he could see the shape of
+      the British submarine which had torpedoed her and had submerged and was
+      going away. Berlin prepared its frugal meals, still far from famine. He
+      saw the war in Europe as if he saw it on a map, yet every human detail
+      showed. Over hundreds of miles of trenches east and west of Germany he
+      could see shells bursting and the men below dropping, and the
+      stretcher-bearers going back with the wounded. The roads to every front
+      were crowded with reserves and munitions. For a moment a little group of
+      men indifferent to all this struggle, who were landing amidst the
+      Antarctic wilderness, held his attention; and then his eyes went westward
+      to the dark rolling Atlantic across which, as the edge of the night was
+      drawn like a curtain, more and still more ships became visible beating
+      upon their courses eastward or westward under the overtaking day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wonder increased; the wonder of the single and infinitely
+      multitudinous adventure of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So God perhaps sees it,&rdquo; he whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (7)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look at this man,&rdquo; said the Angel, and the black shadow of a hand seemed
+      to point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a Chinaman sitting with two others in a little low room separated
+      by translucent paper windows from a noisy street of shrill-voiced people.
+      The three had been talking of the ultimatum that Japan had sent that day
+      to China, claiming a priority in many matters over European influences
+      they were by no means sure whether it was a wrong or a benefit that had
+      been done to their country. From that topic they had passed to the
+      discussion of the war, and then of wars and national aggressions and the
+      perpetual thrusting and quarrelling of mankind. The older man had said
+      that so life would always be; it was the will of Heaven. The little, very
+      yellow-faced, emaciated man had agreed with him. But now this younger man,
+      to whose thoughts the Angel had so particularly directed the bishop's
+      attention, was speaking. He did not agree with his companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;War is not the will of Heaven,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;it is the blindness of men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Man changes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;from day to day and from age to age. The science
+      of the West has taught us that. Man changes and war changes and all things
+      change. China has been the land of flowery peace, and she may yet give
+      peace to all the world. She has put aside that puppet Emperor at Peking,
+      she turns her face to the new learning of the West as a man lays aside his
+      heavy robes, in order that her task may be achieved.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The older man spoke, his manner was more than a little incredulous, and
+      yet not altogether contemptuous. &ldquo;You believe that someday there will be
+      no more war in the world, that a time will come when men will no longer
+      plot and plan against the welfare of men?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even that last,&rdquo; said the younger man. &ldquo;Did any of us dream twenty-five
+      years ago that here in China we should live to see a republic? The age of
+      the republics draws near, when men in every country of the world will look
+      straight up to the rule of Right and the empire of Heaven.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (&ldquo;And God will be King of the World,&rdquo; said the Angel. &ldquo;Is not that faith
+      exactly the faith that is coming to you?&rdquo;)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two other Chinamen questioned their companion, but without hostility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This war,&rdquo; said the Chinaman, &ldquo;will end in a great harvesting of kings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Japan&mdash;&rdquo; the older man began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop would have liked to hear more of that conversation, but the
+      dark hand of the Angel motioned him to another part of the world. &ldquo;Listen
+      to this,&rdquo; said the Angel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He pointed the bishop to where the armies of Britain and Turkey lay in the
+      heat of Mesopotamia. Along the sandy bank of a wide, slow-flowing river
+      rode two horsemen, an Englishman and a Turk. They were returning from the
+      Turkish lines, whither the Englishman had been with a flag of truce. When
+      Englishmen and Turks are thrown together they soon become friends, and in
+      this case matters had been facilitated by the Englishman's command of the
+      Turkish language. He was quite an exceptional Englishman. The Turk had
+      just been remarking cheerfully that it wouldn't please the Germans if they
+      were to discover how amiably he and his charge had got on. &ldquo;It's a pity we
+      ever ceased to be friends,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You Englishmen aren't like our Christians,&rdquo; he went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Englishmen wanted to know why.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't priests in robes. You don't chant and worship crosses and
+      pictures, and quarrel among yourselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We worship the same God as you do,&rdquo; said the Englishman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why do we fight?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what we want to know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do you call yourselves Christians? And take part against us? All who
+      worship the One God are brothers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They ought to be,&rdquo; said the Englishman, and thought. He was struck by
+      what seemed to him an amazingly novel idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it weren't for religions all men would serve God together,&rdquo; he said.
+      &ldquo;And then there would be no wars&mdash;only now and then perhaps just a
+      little honest fighting....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And see here,&rdquo; said the Angel. &ldquo;Here close behind this frightful battle,
+      where the German phalanx of guns pounds its way through the Russian hosts.
+      Here is a young German talking to two wounded Russian prisoners, who have
+      stopped to rest by the roadside. He is a German of East Prussia; he knows
+      and thinks a little Russian. And they too are saying, all three of them,
+      that the war is not God's will, but the confusion of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here,&rdquo; he said, and the shadow of his hand hovered over the burning-ghats
+      of Benares, where a Brahmin of the new persuasion watched the straight
+      spires of funereal smoke ascend into the glow of the late afternoon, while
+      he talked to an English painter, his friend, of the blind intolerance of
+      race and caste and custom in India.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Angel pointed to a group of people who had gathered upon a little
+      beach at the head of a Norwegian fiord. There were three lads, an old man
+      and two women, and they stood about the body of a drowned German sailor
+      which had been washed up that day. For a time they had talked in whispers,
+      but now suddenly the old man spoke aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the fourth that has come ashore,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Poor drowned souls!
+      Because men will not serve God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But folks go to church and pray enough,&rdquo; said one of the women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They do not serve God,&rdquo; said the old man. &ldquo;They just pray to him as one
+      nods to a beggar. They do not serve God who is their King. They set up
+      their false kings and emperors, and so all Europe is covered with dead,
+      and the seas wash up these dead to us. Why does the world suffer these
+      things? Why did we Norwegians, who are a free-spirited people, permit the
+      Germans and the Swedes and the English to set up a king over us? Because
+      we lack faith. Kings mean secret counsels, and secret counsels bring war.
+      Sooner or later war will come to us also if we give the soul of our nation
+      in trust to a king.... But things will not always be thus with men. God
+      will not suffer them for ever. A day comes, and it is no distant day, when
+      God himself will rule the earth, and when men will do, not what the king
+      wishes nor what is expedient nor what is customary, but what is manifestly
+      right.&rdquo;....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But men are saying that now in a thousand places,&rdquo; said the Angel. &ldquo;Here
+      is something that goes a little beyond that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His pointing hand went southward until they saw the Africanders riding
+      down to Windhuk. Two men, Boer farmers both, rode side by side and talked
+      of the German officer they brought prisoner with them. He had put
+      sheep-dip in the wells of drinking-water; his life was fairly forfeit, and
+      he was not to be killed. &ldquo;We want no more hate in South Africa,&rdquo; they
+      agreed. &ldquo;Dutch and English and German must live here now side by side. Men
+      cannot always be killing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And see his thoughts,&rdquo; said the Angel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The German's mind was one amazement. He had been sure of being shot, he
+      had meant to make a good end, fierce and scornful, a relentless fighter to
+      the last; and these men who might have shot him like a man were going to
+      spare him like a dog. His mind was a tumbled muddle of old and new ideas.
+      He had been brought up in an atmosphere of the foulest and fiercest
+      militarism; he had been trained to relentlessness, ruthlessness and so
+      forth; war was war and the bitterer the better, frightfulness was your way
+      to victory over every enemy. But these people had found a better way. Here
+      were Dutch and English side by side; sixteen years ago they had been at
+      war together and now they wore the same uniform and rode together, and
+      laughed at him for a queer fellow because he was for spitting at them and
+      defying them, and folding his arms and looking level at the executioners'
+      rifles. There were to be no executioners' rifles.... If it was so with
+      Dutch and English, why shouldn't it be so presently with French and
+      Germans? Why someday shouldn't French, German, Dutch and English, Russian
+      and Pole, ride together under this new star of mankind, the Southern
+      Cross, to catch whatever last mischief-maker was left to poison the wells
+      of goodwill?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mind resisted and struggled against these ideas. &ldquo;Austere,&rdquo; he
+      whispered. &ldquo;The ennobling tests of war.&rdquo; A trooner rode up alongside, and
+      offered him a drink of water
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just a mouthful,&rdquo; he said apologetically. &ldquo;We've had to go rather
+      short.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's another brain busy here with the same idea,&rdquo; the Angel
+      interrupted. And the bishop found himself looking into the bedroom of a
+      young German attache in Washington, sleepless in the small hours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ach!&rdquo; cried the young man, and sat up in bed and ran his hands through
+      his fair hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had been working late upon this detestable business of the Lusitania;
+      the news of her sinking had come to hand two days before, and all America
+      was aflame with it. It might mean war. His task had been to pour out
+      explanations and justifications to the press; to show that it was an act
+      of necessity, to pretend a conviction that the great ship was loaded with
+      munitions, to fight down the hostility and anger that blazed across a
+      continent. He had worked to his limit. He had taken cup after cup of
+      coffee, and had come to bed worked out not two hours ago. Now here he was
+      awake after a nightmare of drowning women and children, trying to comfort
+      his soul by recalling his own arguments. Never once since the war began
+      had he doubted the rightness of the German cause. It seemed only a proof
+      of his nervous exhaustion that he could doubt it now. Germany was the best
+      organized, most cultivated, scientific and liberal nation the earth had
+      ever seen, it was for the good of mankind that she should be the dominant
+      power in the world; his patriotism had had the passion of a mission. The
+      English were indolent, the French decadent, the Russians barbaric, the
+      Americans basely democratic; the rest of the world was the &ldquo;White man's
+      Burthen&rdquo;; the clear destiny of mankind was subservience to the good
+      Prussian eagle. Nevertheless&mdash;those wet draggled bodies that swirled
+      down in the eddies of the sinking Titan&mdash;Ach! He wished it could have
+      been otherwise. He nursed his knees and prayed that there need not be much
+      more of these things before the spirit of the enemy was broken and the
+      great Peace of Germany came upon the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And suddenly he stopped short in his prayer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly out of the nothingness and darkness about him came the conviction
+      that God did not listen to his prayers....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was there any other way?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the most awful doubt he had ever had, for it smote at the training
+      of all his life. &ldquo;Could it be possible that after all our old German God
+      is not the proper style and title of the true God? Is our old German God
+      perhaps only the last of a long succession of bloodstained tribal effigies&mdash;and
+      not God at all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a long time it seemed that the bishop watched the thoughts that
+      gathered in the young attache's mind. Until suddenly he broke into a
+      quotation, into that last cry of the dying Goethe, for &ldquo;Light. More
+      Light!&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave him at that,&rdquo; said the Angel. &ldquo;I want you to hear these two young
+      women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The hand came back to England and pointed to where Southend at the mouth
+      of the Thames was all agog with the excitement of an overnight Zeppelin
+      raid. People had got up hours before their usual time in order to look at
+      the wrecked houses before they went up to their work in town. Everybody
+      seemed abroad. Two nurses, not very well trained as nurses go nor very
+      well-educated women, were snatching a little sea air upon the front after
+      an eventful night. They were too excited still to sleep. They were talking
+      of the horror of the moment when they saw the nasty thing &ldquo;up there,&rdquo; and
+      felt helpless as it dropped its bombs. They had both hated it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There didn't ought to be such things,&rdquo; said one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They don't seem needed,&rdquo; said her companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men won't always go on like this&mdash;making wars and all such
+      wickedness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's 'ow to stop them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Science is going to stop them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Science?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, science. My young brother&mdash;oh, he's a clever one&mdash;he says
+      such things! He says that it's science that they won't always go on like
+      this. There's more sense coming into the world and more&mdash;my young
+      brother says so. Says it stands to reason; it's Evolution. It's science
+      that men are all brothers; you can prove it. It's science that there
+      oughtn't to be war. Science is ending war now by making it horrible like
+      this, and making it so that no one is safe. Showing it up. Only when
+      nobody is safe will everybody want to set up peace, he says. He says it's
+      proved there could easily be peace all over the world now if it wasn't for
+      flags and kings and capitalists and priests. They still manage to keep
+      safe and out of it. He says the world ought to be just one state. The
+      World State, he says it ought to be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (&ldquo;Under God,&rdquo; said the bishop, &ldquo;under God.&rdquo;)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He says science ought to be King of the whole world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Call it Science if you will,&rdquo; said the bishop. &ldquo;God is wisdom.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Out of the mouths of babes and elementary science students,&rdquo; said the
+      Angel. &ldquo;The very children in the board schools are turning against this
+      narrowness and nonsense and mischief of nations and creeds and kings. You
+      see it at a thousand points, at ten thousand points, look, the world is
+      all flashing and flickering; it is like a spinthariscope; it is aquiver
+      with the light that is coming to mankind. It is on the verge of blazing
+      even now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Into a light.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Into the one Kingdom of God. See here! See here! And here! This brave
+      little French priest in a helmet of steel who is daring to think for the
+      first time in his life; this gentle-mannered emir from Morocco looking at
+      the grave-diggers on the battlefield; this mother who has lost her son....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see they all turn in one direction, although none of them seem to
+      dream yet that they are all turning in the same direction. They turn,
+      every one, to the rule of righteousness, which is the rule of God. They
+      turn to that communism of effort in the world which alone permits men to
+      serve God in state and city and their economic lives.... They are all
+      coming to the verge of the same salvation, the salvation of one human
+      brotherhood under the rule of one Righteousness, one Divine will.... Is
+      that the salvation your church offers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (8)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now that we have seen how religion grows and spreads in men's hearts,
+      now that the fields are white with harvest, I want you to look also and
+      see what the teachers of religion are doing,&rdquo; said the Angel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled. His presence became more definite, and the earthly globe about
+      them and the sun and the stars grew less distinct and less immediately
+      there. The silence invited the bishop to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the light of this vision, I see my church plainly for the little thing
+      it is,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wanted to be perfectly clear with the Angel and himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This church of which I am a bishop is just a part of our poor human
+      struggle, small and pitiful as one thinks of it here in the light of the
+      advent of God's Kingdom, but very great, very great indeed, ancient and
+      high and venerable, in comparison with me. But mostly it is human. It is
+      most human. For my story is the church's story, and the church's story is
+      mine. Here I could almost believe myself the church itself. The world saw
+      a light, the nations that were sitting in darkness saw a great light. Even
+      as I saw God. And then the church began to forget and lose itself among
+      secondary things. As I have done.... It tried to express the truth and
+      lost itself in a maze of theology. It tried to bring order into the world
+      and sold its faith to Constantine. These men who had professed the
+      Invisible King of the World, shirked his service. It is a most terrible
+      disaster that Christianity has sold itself to emperors and kings. They
+      forged a saying of the Master's that we should render unto Ceasar the
+      things that are Ceasar's and unto God the things that are God's....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is this Ceasar to set himself up to share mankind with God? Nothing
+      that is Ceasar's can be any the less God's. But Constantine Caesar sat in
+      the midst of the council, his guards were all about it, and the poor
+      fanatics and trimmers and schemers disputed nervously with their eyes on
+      him, disputed about homoousian and homoiousian, and grimaced and pretended
+      to be very very fierce and exact to hide how much they were frightened and
+      how little they knew, and because they did not dare to lay violent hands
+      upon that usurper of the empire of the world....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And from that day forth the Christian churches have been damned and lost.
+      Kept churches. Lackey churches. Roman, Russian, Anglican; it matters not.
+      My church indeed was twice sold, for it doubled the sin of Nicaea and gave
+      itself over to Henry and Elizabeth while it shammed a dispute about the
+      sacraments. No one cared really about transubstantiation any more than the
+      earlier betrayers cared about consubstantiality; that dispute did but
+      serve to mask the betrayal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to the listening Angel. &ldquo;What can you show me of my church that
+      I do not know? Why! we Anglican bishops get our sees as footmen get a job.
+      For months Victoria, that old German Frau, delayed me&mdash;because of
+      some tittle-tattle.... The things we are! Snape, who afterwards became
+      Bishop of Burnham, used to waylay the Prince Consort when he was riding in
+      Hyde Park and give him, he boasts, 'a good loud cheer,' and then he would
+      run very fast across the park so as to catch him as he came round, and do
+      it again.... It is to that sort of thing we bearers of the light have
+      sunken....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have always despised that poor toady,&rdquo; the bishop went on. &ldquo;And yet
+      here am I, and God has called me and shown me the light of his
+      countenance, and for a month I have faltered. That is the mystery of the
+      human heart, that it can and does sin against the light. What right have
+      I, who have seen the light&mdash;and failed, what right have I&mdash;to
+      despise any other human being? I seem to have been held back by a sort of
+      paralysis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men are so small, so small still, that they cannot keep hold of the
+      vision of God. That is why I want to see God again.... But if it were not
+      for this strange drug that seems for a little while to lift my mind above
+      the confusion and personal entanglements of every day, I doubt if even now
+      I could be here. I am here, passionate to hold this moment and keep the
+      light. As this inspiration passes, I shall go back, I know, to my home and
+      my place and my limitations. The littleness of men! The forgetfulness of
+      men! I want to know what my chief duty is, to have it plain, in terms so
+      plain that I can never forget.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See in this world,&rdquo; he said, turning to the globe, &ldquo;while Chinese
+      merchants and Turkish troopers, school-board boys and Norwegian fishermen,
+      half-trained nurses and Boer farmers are full of the spirit of God, see
+      how the priests of the churches of Nicaea spend their time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And now it was the bishop whose dark hands ran over the great silver
+      globe, and it was the Angel who stood over him and listened, as a teacher
+      might stand over a child who is learning a lesson. The bishop's hand
+      rested for a second on a cardinal who was planning a political intrigue to
+      produce a reaction in France, then for a moment on a Pomeranian pastor who
+      was going out to his well-tilled fields with his Sunday sermon, full of
+      fierce hatred of England, still echoing in his head. Then he paused at a
+      Mollah preaching the Jehad, in doubt whether he too wasn't a German
+      pastor, and then at an Anglican clergyman still lying abed and thinking
+      out a great mission of Repentance and Hope that should restore the
+      authority of the established church&mdash;by incoherent missioning&mdash;without
+      any definite sin indicated for repentance nor any clear hope for anything
+      in particular arising out of such activities. The bishop's hand went
+      seeking to and fro, but nowhere could he find any religious teacher, any
+      religious body rousing itself to meet the new dawn of faith in the world.
+      Some few men indeed seemed thoughtful, but within the limitation of their
+      vows. Everywhere it was church and creed and nation and king and property
+      and partisanship, and nowhere was it the True God that the priests and
+      teachers were upholding. It was always the common unhampered man through
+      whom the light of God was breaking; it was always the creed and the
+      organization of the religious professionals that stood in the way to
+      God....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God is putting the priests aside,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;and reaching out to common
+      men. The churches do not serve God. They stand between man and God. They
+      are like great barricades on the way to God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop's hand brushed over Archbishop Pontifex, who was just coming
+      down to breakfast in his palace. This pompous old man was dressed in a
+      purple garment that set off his tall figure very finely, and he was
+      holding out his episcopal ring for his guests to kiss, that being the
+      customary morning greeting of Archbishop Pontifex. The thought of that
+      ring-kissing had made much hard work at lower levels &ldquo;worth while&rdquo; to
+      Archbishop Pontifex. And seventy miles away from him old Likeman
+      breakfasted in bed on Benger's food, and searched his Greek Testament for
+      tags to put to his letters. And here was the familiar palace at
+      Princhester, and in an armchair in his bed-room sat Bishop Scrope
+      insensible and motionless, in a trance in which he was dreaming of the
+      coming of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see my futility. I see my vanity. But what am I to do?&rdquo; he said,
+      turning to the darkness that now wrapped about the Angel again, fold upon
+      fold. &ldquo;The implications of yesterday bind me for the morrow. This is my
+      world. This is what I am and what I am in. How can I save myself? How can
+      I turn from these habits and customs and obligations to the service of the
+      one true God? When I see myself, then I understand how it is with the
+      others. All we priests and teachers are men caught in nets. I would serve
+      God. Easily said! But how am I to serve God? How am I to help and forward
+      His coming, to make myself part of His coming?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He perceived that he was returning into himself, and that the vision of
+      the sphere and of the starry spaces was fading into non-existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He struggled against this return. He felt that his demand was still
+      unanswered. His wife's face had suddenly come very close to him, and he
+      realized she intervened between him and that solution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was she doing here?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (9)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great Angel seemed still to be near at hand, limitless space was all
+      about him, and yet the bishop perceived that he was now sitting in the
+      arm-chair in his bedroom in the palace of Princhester. He was both there
+      and not there. It seemed now as if he had two distinct yet kindred selves,
+      and that the former watched the latter. The latter was now awakening to
+      the things about him; the former marked his gestures and listened with an
+      entire detachment to the words he was saying. These words he was saying to
+      Lady Ella: &ldquo;God is coming to rule the world, I tell you. We must leave the
+      church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Close to him sat Lady Ella, watching him with an expression in which
+      dismay and resolution mingled. Upon the other side of him, upon a little
+      occasional table, was a tray with breakfast things. He was no longer the
+      watcher now, but the watched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella bent towards him as he spoke. She seemed to struggle with and
+      dismiss his astonishing statement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Edward,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;you have been taking a drug.&rdquo; He looked round at his
+      night table to see the little phial. It had gone. Then he saw that Lady
+      Ella held it very firmly in her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dunk came to me in great distress. He said you were insensible and
+      breathing heavily. I came. I realized. I told him to say nothing to any
+      one, but to fetch me a tray with your breakfast. I have kept all the other
+      servants away and I have waited here by you.... Dunk I think is safe....
+      You have been muttering and moving your head from side to side....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop's mind was confused. He felt as though God must be standing
+      just outside the room. &ldquo;I have failed in my duty,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But I am very
+      near to God.&rdquo; He laid his hand on her arm. &ldquo;You know, Ella, He is very
+      close to us....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked perplexed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat up in his chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For some months now,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;there have been new forces at work in my
+      mind. I have been invaded by strange doubts and still stranger
+      realizations. This old church of ours is an empty mask. God is not
+      specially concerned in it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Edward!&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;what are you saying?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been hesitating to tell you. But I see now I must tell you
+      plainly. Our church is a cast hull. It is like the empty skin of a snake.
+      God has gone out of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose to her feet. She was so horrified that she staggered backward,
+      pushing her chair behind her. &ldquo;But you are mad,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was astonished at her distress. He stood up also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I can assure you I am not mad. I should have prepared
+      you, I know....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him wild-eyed. Then she glanced at the phial, gripped in her
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; she exclaimed, and going swiftly to the window emptied out the
+      contents of the little bottle. He realized what she was doing too late to
+      prevent her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't waste that!&rdquo; he cried, and stepping forward caught hold of her
+      wrist. The phial fell from her white fingers, and crashed upon the rough
+      paved garden path below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;my dear. You do not understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood face to face. &ldquo;It was a tonic,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I have been ill. I
+      need it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a drug,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;You have been uttering blasphemies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He dropped her arm and walked half-way across the room. Then he turned and
+      faced her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are not blasphemies,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But I ought not to have surprised
+      you and shocked you as I have done. I want to tell you of changes that
+      have happened to my mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now!&rdquo; she exclaimed, and then: &ldquo;I will not hear them now. Until you are
+      better. Until these fumes&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her manner changed. &ldquo;Oh, Edward!&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;why have you done this? Why
+      have you taken things secretly? I know you have been sleepless, but I have
+      been so ready to help you. I have been willing&mdash;you know I have been
+      willing&mdash;for any help. My life is all to be of use to you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there any reason,&rdquo; she pleaded, &ldquo;why you should have hidden things
+      from me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood remorseful and distressed. &ldquo;I should have talked to you,&rdquo; he said
+      lamely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Edward,&rdquo; she said, laying her hands on his shoulders, &ldquo;will you do one
+      thing for me? Will you try to eat a little breakfast? And stay here? I
+      will go down to Mr. Whippham and arrange whatever is urgent with him.
+      Perhaps if you rest&mdash;There is nothing really imperative until the
+      confirmation in the afternoon.... I do not understand all this. For some
+      time&mdash;I have felt it was going on. But of that we can talk. The thing
+      now is that people should not know, that nothing should be seen....
+      Suppose for instance that horrible White Blackbird were to hear of it....
+      I implore you. If you rest here&mdash;And if I were to send for that young
+      doctor who attended Miriam.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want a doctor,&rdquo; said the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you ought to have a doctor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I won't have a doctor,&rdquo; said the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was with a perplexed but powerless dissent that the externalized
+      perceptions of the bishop witnessed his agreement with the rest of Lady
+      Ella's proposals so soon as this point about the doctor was conceded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (10)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the rest of that day until his breakdown in the cathedral the sense of
+      being in two places at the same time haunted the bishop's mind. He stood
+      beside the Angel in the great space amidst the stars, and at the same time
+      he was back in his ordinary life, he was in his palace at Princhester,
+      first resting in his bedroom and talking to his wife and presently taking
+      up the routines of his duties again in his study downstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His chief task was to finish his two addresses for the confirmation
+      services of the day. He read over his notes, and threw them aside and
+      remained for a time thinking deeply. The Greek tags at the end of
+      Likeman's letter came into his thoughts; they assumed a quality of
+      peculiar relevance to this present occasion. He repeated the words:
+      &ldquo;Epitelesei. Epiphausei.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took his little Testament to verify them. After some slight trouble he
+      located the two texts. The first, from Philippians, ran in the old
+      version, &ldquo;He that hath begun a good work in you will perform it&rdquo;; the
+      second was expressed thus: &ldquo;Christ shall give thee light.&rdquo; He was
+      dissatisfied with these renderings and resorted to the revised version,
+      which gave &ldquo;perfect&rdquo; instead of &ldquo;perform,&rdquo; and &ldquo;shall shine upon you&rdquo; for
+      &ldquo;give thee light.&rdquo; He reflected profoundly for a time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly his addresses began to take shape in his mind, and these
+      little points lost any significance. He began to write rapidly, and as he
+      wrote he felt the Angel stood by his right hand and read and approved what
+      he was writing. There were moments when his mind seemed to be working
+      entirely beyond his control. He had a transitory questioning whether this
+      curious intellectual automatism was not perhaps what people meant by
+      &ldquo;inspiration.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (11)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop had always been sensitive to the secret fount of pathos that is
+      hidden in the spectacle of youth. Long years ago when he and Lady Ella had
+      been in Florence he had been moved to tears by the beauty of the
+      fresh-faced eager Tobit who runs beside the great angel in the picture of
+      Botticelli. And suddenly and almost as uncontrollably, that feeling
+      returned at the sight of the young congregation below him, of all these
+      scores of neophytes who were gathered to make a public acknowledgment of
+      God. The war has invested all youth now with the shadow of tragedy; before
+      it came many of us were a little envious of youth and a little too assured
+      of its certainty of happiness. All that has changed. Fear and a certain
+      tender solicitude mingle in our regard for every child; not a lad we pass
+      in the street but may presently be called to face such pain and stress and
+      danger as no ancient hero ever knew. The patronage, the insolent
+      condescension of age, has vanished out of the world. It is dreadful to
+      look upon the young.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood surveying the faces of the young people as the rector read the
+      Preface to the confirmation service. How simple they were, how innocent!
+      Some were a little flushed by the excitement of the occasion; some a
+      little pallid. But they were all such tender faces, so soft in outline, so
+      fresh and delicate in texture and colour. They had soft credulous mouths.
+      Some glanced sideways at one another; some listened with a forced
+      intentness. The expression of one good-looking boy, sitting in a corner
+      scat, struck the bishop as being curiously defiant. He stood very erect,
+      he blinked his eyes as though they smarted, his lips were compressed
+      bitterly. And then it seemed to the bishop that the Angel stood beside him
+      and gave him understanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is here,&rdquo; the bishop knew, &ldquo;because he could not avoid coming. He
+      tried to excuse himself. His mother wept. What could he do? But the
+      church's teaching nowadays fails even to grip the minds of boys.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The rector came to the end of his Preface: &ldquo;They will evermore endeavour
+      themselves faithfully to observe such things as they by their own
+      confession have assented unto.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like a smart solicitor pinning them down,&rdquo; said the bishop to himself,
+      and then roused himself, unrolled the little paper in his hand, leant
+      forward, and straightway began his first address.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nowadays it is possible to say very unorthodox things indeed in an
+      Anglican pulpit unchallenged. There remains no alert doctrinal criticism
+      in the church congregations. It was possible, therefore, for the bishop to
+      say all that follows without either hindrance or disturbance. The only
+      opposition, indeed, came from within, from a sense of dreamlike
+      incongruity between the place and the occasion and the things that he
+      found himself delivering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All ceremonies,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;grow old. All ceremonies are tainted even
+      from the first by things less worthy than their first intention, and you,
+      my dear sons and daughters, who have gathered to-day in this worn and
+      ancient building, beneath these monuments to ancient vanities and these
+      symbols of forgotten or abandoned theories about the mystery of God, will
+      do well to distinguish in your minds between what is essential and what is
+      superfluous and confusing in this dedication you make of yourselves to God
+      our Master and King. For that is the real thing you seek to do today, to
+      give yourselves to God. This is your spiritual coming of age, in which you
+      set aside your childish dependence upon teachers and upon taught phrases,
+      upon rote and direction, and stand up to look your Master in the face. You
+      profess a great brotherhood when you do that, a brotherhood that goes
+      round the earth, that numbers men of every race and nation and country,
+      that aims to bring God into all the affairs of this world and make him not
+      only the king of your individual lives but the king&mdash;in place of all
+      the upstarts, usurpers, accidents, and absurdities who bear crowns and
+      sceptres today&mdash;of an united mankind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, and in the pause he heard a little rustle as though the
+      congregation before him was sitting up in its places, a sound that always
+      nerves and reassures an experienced preacher.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This, my dear children, is the reality of this grave business to-day, as
+      indeed it is the real and practical end of all true religion. This is your
+      sacrament urn, your soldier's oath. You salute and give your fealty to the
+      coming Kingdom of God. And upon that I would have you fix your minds to
+      the exclusion of much that, I know only too well, has been narrow and evil
+      and sectarian in your preparation for this solemn rite. God is like a
+      precious jewel found among much rubble; you must cast the rubble from you.
+      The crowning triumph of the human mind is simplicity; the supreme
+      significance of God lies in his unity and universality. The God you salute
+      to-day is the God of the Jews and Gentiles alike, the God of Islam, the
+      God of the Brahmo Somaj, the unknown God of many a righteous unbeliever.
+      He is not the God of those felted theologies and inexplicable doctrines
+      with which your teachers may have confused your minds. I would have it
+      very clear in your minds that having drunken the draught you should not
+      reverence unduly the cracked old vessel that has brought it to your lips.
+      I should be falling short of my duty if I did not make that and everything
+      I mean by that altogether plain to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw the lad whose face of dull defiance he had marked before, sitting
+      now with a startled interest in his eyes. The bishop leant over the desk
+      before him, and continued in the persuasive tone of a man who speaks of
+      things too manifest for laboured argument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In all ages religion has come from God through broad-minded creative men,
+      and in all ages it has fallen very quickly into the hands of intense and
+      conservative men. These last&mdash;narrow, fearful, and suspicious&mdash;have
+      sought in every age to save the precious gift of religion by putting it
+      into a prison of formulae and asseverations. Bear that in mind when you
+      are pressed to definition. It is as if you made a box hermetically sealed
+      to save the treasure of a fresh breeze from the sea. But they have sought
+      out exact statements and tortuous explanations of the plain truth of God,
+      they have tried to take down God in writing, to commit him to documents,
+      to embalm his living faith as though it would otherwise corrupt. So they
+      have lost God and fallen into endless differences, disputes, violence, and
+      darkness about insignificant things. They have divided religion between
+      this creed and teacher and that. The corruption of the best is the worst,
+      said Aristotle; and the great religions of the world, and especially this
+      Christianity of ours, are the ones most darkened and divided and wasted by
+      the fussings and false exactitudes of the creed-monger and the sectary.
+      There is no lie so bad as a stale disfigured truth. There is no heresy so
+      damnable as a narrow orthodoxy. All religious associations carry this
+      danger of the over-statement that misstates and the over-emphasis that
+      divides and betrays. Beware of that danger. Do not imagine, because you
+      are gathered in this queerly beautiful old building today, because I
+      preside here in this odd raiment of an odder compromise, because you see
+      about you in coloured glass and carven stone the emblems of much vain
+      disputation, that thereby you cut yourselves off and come apart from the
+      great world of faith, Catholic, Islamic, Brahministic, Buddhistic, that
+      grows now to a common consciousness of the near Advent of God our King.
+      You enter that waiting world fraternity now, you do not leave it. This
+      place, this church of ours, should be to you not a seclusion and a
+      fastness but a door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could quote you a score of instances to establish that this simple
+      universalism was also the teaching of Christ. But now I will only remind
+      you that it was Mary who went to her lord simply, who was commended, and
+      not Martha who troubled about many things. Learn from the Mary of Faith
+      and not from these Marthas of the Creeds. Let us abandon the presumptions
+      of an ignorant past. The perfection of doctrine is not for finite men.
+      Give yourselves to God. Give yourselves to God. Not to churches and uses,
+      but to God. To God simply. He is the first word of religion and the last.
+      He is Alpha; he is Omega. Epitelesei; it is He who will finish the good
+      work begun.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop ended his address in a vivid silence. Then he began his
+      interrogation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you here, in the presence of God, and of this congregation, renew the
+      solemn promise and vow that was made in your name at your Baptism;
+      ratifying and confirming the same in your own persons, and acknowledging
+      yourselves&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped short. The next words were: &ldquo;bound to believe and do all those
+      things, which your Godfathers and Godmothers then undertook for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not stand those words. He hesitated, and then substituted:
+      &ldquo;acknowledge yourselves to be the true servants of the one God, who is the
+      Lord of Mankind?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment silence hung in the cathedral. Then one voice, a boy's voice,
+      led a ragged response. &ldquo;I do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the bishop: &ldquo;Our help is in the Name of the Lord.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The congregation answered doubtfully, with a glance at its prayer books:
+      &ldquo;Who hath made heaven and earth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop: &ldquo;Blessed be the name of the Lord.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The congregation said with returning confidence: &ldquo;Henceforth, world
+      without end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (12)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before his second address the bishop had to listen to Veni Creator
+      Spiritus, in its English form, and it seemed to him the worst of all
+      possible hymns. Its defects became monstrously exaggerated to his
+      hypersensitive mind. It impressed him in its Englished travesty as a
+      grotesque, as a veritable Charlie Chaplin among hymns, and in truth it
+      does stick out most awkward feet, it misses its accusatives, it catches
+      absurdly upon points of abstruse doctrine. The great Angel stood
+      motionless and ironical at the bishop's elbow while it was being sung.
+      &ldquo;Your church,&rdquo; he seemed to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must end this sort of thing,&rdquo; whispered the bishop. &ldquo;We must end this
+      sort of thing&mdash;absolutely.&rdquo; He glanced at the faces of the singers,
+      and it became beyond all other things urgent, that he should lift them
+      once for all above the sectarian dogmatism of that hymn to a simple vision
+      of God's light....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He roused himself to the touching business of the laying on of hands.
+      While he did so the prepared substance of his second address was running
+      through his mind. The following prayer and collects he read without
+      difficulty, and so came to his second address. His disposition at first
+      was explanatory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I spoke to you just now,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;I fell unintentionally into the
+      use of a Greek word, epitelesei. It was written to me in a letter from a
+      friend with another word that also I am now going to quote to you. This
+      letter touched very closely upon the things I want to say to you now, and
+      so these two words are very much in my mind. The former one was taken from
+      the Epistle to the Philippians; it signifies, 'He will complete the work
+      begun'; the one I have now in mind comes from the Epistle to the
+      Ephesians; it is Epiphausei&mdash;or, to be fuller, epiphausei soi ho
+      Christos, which signifies that He will shine upon us. And this is very
+      much in my thoughts now because I do believe that this world, which seemed
+      so very far from God a little while ago, draws near now to an unexampled
+      dawn. God is at hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is your privilege, it is your grave and terrible position, that you
+      have been born at the very end and collapse of a negligent age, of an age
+      of sham kingship, sham freedom, relaxation, evasion, greed, waste,
+      falsehood, and sinister preparation. Your lives open out in the midst of
+      the breakdown for which that age prepared. To you negligence is no longer
+      possible. There is cold and darkness, there is the heat of the furnace
+      before you; you will live amidst extremes such as our youth never knew;
+      whatever betide, you of your generation will have small chance of living
+      untempered lives. Our country is at war and half mankind is at war; death
+      and destruction trample through the world; men rot and die by the million,
+      food diminishes and fails, there is a wasting away of all the hoarded
+      resources, of all the accumulated well-being of mankind; and there is no
+      clear prospect yet of any end to this enormous and frightful conflict. Why
+      did it ever arise? What made it possible? It arose because men had
+      forgotten God. It was possible because they worshipped simulacra, were
+      loyal to phantoms of race and empire, permitted themselves to be ruled and
+      misled by idiot princes and usurper kings. Their minds were turned from
+      God, who alone can rule and unite mankind, and so they have passed from
+      the glare and follies of those former years into the darkness and anguish
+      of the present day. And in darkness and anguish they will remain until
+      they turn to that King who comes to rule them, until the sword and
+      indignation of God have overthrown their misleaders and oppressors, and
+      the Justice of God, the Kingdom of God set high over the republics of
+      mankind, has brought peace for ever to the world. It is to this militant
+      and imminent God, to this immortal Captain, this undying Law-giver, that
+      you devote yourselves to-day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For he is imminent now. He comes. I have seen in the east and in the
+      west, the hearts and the minds and the wills of men turning to him as
+      surely as when a needle is magnetized it turns towards the north. Even now
+      as I preach to you here, God stands over us all, ready to receive us....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And as he said these words, the long nave of the cathedral, the shadows of
+      its fretted roof, the brown choir with its golden screen, the rows of
+      seated figures, became like some picture cast upon a flimsy and
+      translucent curtain. Once more it seemed to the bishop that he saw God
+      plain. Once more the glorious effulgence poured about him, and the
+      beautiful and wonderful conquest of men's hearts and lives was manifest to
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted up his hands and cried to God, and with an emotion so profound,
+      an earnestness so commanding, that very many of those who were present
+      turned their faces to see the figure to which he looked and spoke. And
+      some of the children had a strange persuasion of a presence there, as of a
+      divine figure militant, armed, and serene....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh God our Leader and our Master and our Friend,&rdquo; the bishop prayed,
+      &ldquo;forgive our imperfection and our little motives, take us and make us one
+      with thy great purpose, use us and do not reject us, make us all here
+      servants of thy kingdom, weave our lives into thy struggle to conquer and
+      to bring peace and union to the world. We are small and feeble creatures,
+      we are feeble in speech, feebler still in action, nevertheless let but thy
+      light shine upon us and there is not one of us who cannot be lit by thy
+      fire, and who cannot lose himself in thy salvation. Take us into thy
+      purpose, O God. Let thy kingdom come into our hearts and into this world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice ceased, and he stood for a measurable time with his arms
+      extended and his face upturned....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The golden clouds that whirled and eddied so splendidly in his brain
+      thinned out, his sense of God's immediacy faded and passed, and he was
+      left aware of the cathedral pulpit in which he stood so strangely posed,
+      and of the astonished congregation below him. His arms sank to his side.
+      His eyes fell upon the book in front of him and he felt for and gripped
+      the two upper corners of it and, regardless of the common order and
+      practice, read out the Benediction, changing the words involuntarily as he
+      read:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Blessing of God who is the Father, the Son, the Spirit and the King
+      of all Mankind, be upon you and remain with you for ever. Amen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he looked again, as if to look once more upon that radiant vision of
+      God, but now he saw only the clear cool space of the cathedral vault and
+      the coloured glass and tracery of the great rose window. And then, as the
+      first notes of the organ came pealing above the departing stir of the
+      congregation, he turned about and descended slowly, like one who is still
+      half dreaming, from the pulpit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (13)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the vestry he found Canon Bliss. &ldquo;Help me to take off these garments,&rdquo;
+       the bishop said. &ldquo;I shall never wear them again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are ill,&rdquo; said the canon, scrutinizing his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not ill. But the word was taken out of my mouth. I perceive now that I
+      have been in a trance, a trance in which the truth is real. It is a
+      fearful thing to find oneself among realities. It is a dreadful thing when
+      God begins to haunt a priest.... I can never minister in the church
+      again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whippham thrust forward a chair for the bishop to sit down. The bishop
+      felt now extraordinarily fatigued. He sat down heavily, and rested his
+      wrists on the arms of the chair. &ldquo;Already,&rdquo; he resumed presently, &ldquo;I begin
+      to forget what it was I said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You became excited,&rdquo; said Bliss, &ldquo;and spoke very loudly and clearly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did I say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know what you said; I have forgotten. I never want to remember.
+      Things about the Second Advent. Dreadful things. You said God was close at
+      hand. Happily you spoke partly in Greek. I doubt if any of those children
+      understood. And you had a kind of lapse&mdash;an aphasia. You mutilated
+      the interrogation and you did not pronounce the benediction properly. You
+      changed words and you put in words. One sat frozen&mdash;waiting for what
+      would happen next.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must postpone the Pringle confirmation,&rdquo; said Whippham. &ldquo;I wonder to
+      whom I could telephone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella appeared, and came and knelt down by the bishop's chair. &ldquo;I
+      never ought to have let this happen,&rdquo; she said, taking his wrists in her
+      hands. &ldquo;You are in a fever, dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seemed entirely natural to say what I did,&rdquo; the bishop declared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella looked up at Bliss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A doctor has been sent for,&rdquo; said the canon to Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must speak to the doctor,&rdquo; said Lady Ella as if her husband could not
+      hear her. &ldquo;There is something that will make things clearer to the doctor.
+      I must speak to the doctor for a moment before he sees him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Came a gust of pretty sounds and a flash of bright colour that shamed the
+      rich vestments at hand. Over the shoulder of the rector and quite at the
+      back, appeared Lady Sunderbund resolutely invading the vestry. The rector
+      intercepted her, stood broad with extended arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must come in and speak to him. If it is only fo' a moment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop looked up and saw Lady Ella's expression. Lady Ella was sitting
+      up very stiffly, listening but not looking round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A vague horror and a passionate desire to prevent the entry of Lady
+      Sunderbund at any cost, seized upon the bishop. She would, he felt, be the
+      last overwhelming complication. He descended to a base subterfuge. He lay
+      back in his chair slowly as though he unfolded himself, he covered his
+      eyes with his hand and then groaned aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave me alone!&rdquo; he cried in a voice of agony. &ldquo;Leave me alone! I can see
+      no one.... I can&mdash;no more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a momentous silence, and then the tumult of Lady Sunderbund
+      receded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE EIGHTH - THE NEW WORLD
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      THAT night the bishop had a temperature of a hundred and a half. The
+      doctor pronounced him to be in a state of intense mental excitement,
+      aggravated by some drug. He was a doctor modern and clear-minded enough to
+      admit that he could not identify the drug. He overruled, every one
+      overruled, the bishop's declaration that he had done with the church, that
+      he could never mock God with his episcopal ministrations again, that he
+      must proceed at once with his resignation. &ldquo;Don't think of these things,&rdquo;
+       said the doctor. &ldquo;Banish them from your mind until your temperature is
+      down to ninety-eight. Then after a rest you may go into them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella insisted upon his keeping his room. It was with difficulty that
+      he got her to admit Whippham, and Whippham was exasperatingly in order.
+      &ldquo;You need not trouble about anything now, my lord,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Everything
+      will keep until you are ready to attend to it. It's well we're through
+      with Easter. Bishop Buncombe of Eastern Blowdesia was coming here anyhow.
+      And there is Canon Bliss. There's only two ordination candidates because
+      of the war. We'll get on swimmingly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop thought he would like to talk to those two ordination
+      candidates, but they prevailed upon him not to do so. He lay for the best
+      part of one night confiding remarkable things to two imaginary ordination
+      candidates.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He developed a marked liking for Eleanor's company. She was home again now
+      after a visit to some friends. It was decided that the best thing to do
+      with him would be to send him away in her charge. A journey abroad was
+      impossible. France would remind him too dreadfully of the war. His own
+      mind turned suddenly to the sweet air of Hunstanton. He had gone there at
+      times to read, in the old Cambridge days. &ldquo;It is a terribly ugly place,&rdquo;
+       he said, &ldquo;but it is wine in the veins.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella was doubtful about Zeppelins. Thrice they had been right over
+      Hunstanton already. They came in by the easy landmark of the Wash.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will interest him,&rdquo; said Eleanor, who knew her father better.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One warm and still and sunny afternoon the bishop found himself looking
+      out upon the waters of the Wash. He sat where the highest pebble layers of
+      the beach reached up to a little cliff of sandy earth perhaps a foot high,
+      and he looked upon sands and sea and sky and saw that they were beautiful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a little black-gaitered object in a scene of the most exquisite and
+      delicate colour. Right and left of him stretched the low grey salted
+      shore, pale banks of marly earth surmounted by green-grey wiry grass that
+      held and was half buried in fine blown sand. Above, the heavens made a
+      complete hemisphere of blue in which a series of remote cumulus clouds
+      floated and dissolved. Before him spread the long levels of the sands, and
+      far away at its utmost ebb was the sea. Eleanor had gone to explore the
+      black ribs of a wrecked fishing-boat that lay at the edge of a shallow
+      lagoon. She was a little pink-footed figure, very bright and apparently
+      transparent. She had reverted for a time to shameless childishness; she
+      had hidden her stockings among the reeds of the bank, and she was running
+      to and fro, from star-fish to razor shell and from cockle to weed. The
+      shingle was pale drab and purple close at hand, but to the westward,
+      towards Hunstanton, the sands became brown and purple, and were presently
+      broken up into endless skerries of low flat weed-covered boulders and
+      little intensely blue pools. The sea was a band of sapphire that became
+      silver to the west; it met the silver shining sands in one delicate
+      breathing edge of intensely white foam. Remote to the west, very small and
+      black and clear against the afternoon sky, was a cart, and about it was a
+      score or so of mussel-gatherers. A little nearer, on an apparently empty
+      stretch of shining wet sand, a multitude of gulls was mysteriously busy.
+      These two groups of activities and Eleanor's flitting translucent
+      movements did but set off and emphasize the immense and soothing
+      tranquillity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a long time the bishop sat passively receptive to this healing beauty.
+      Then a little flow of thought began and gathered in his mind. He had come
+      out to think over two letters that he had brought with him. He drew these
+      now rather reluctantly from his pocket, and after a long pause over the
+      envelopes began to read them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He reread Likeman's letter first.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Likeman could not forgive him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Scrope,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;your explanation explains nothing. This
+      sensational declaration of infidelity to our mother church, made under the
+      most damning and distressing circumstances in the presence of young and
+      tender minds entrusted to your ministrations, and in defiance of the
+      honourable engagements implied in the confirmation service, confirms my
+      worst apprehensions of the weaknesses of your character. I have always
+      felt the touch of theatricality in your temperament, the peculiar craving
+      to be pseudo-deeper, pseudo-simpler than us all, the need of personal
+      excitement. I know that you were never quite contented to believe in God
+      at second-hand. You wanted to be taken notice of&mdash;personally. Except
+      for some few hints to you, I have never breathed a word of these doubts to
+      any human being; I have always hoped that the ripening that comes with
+      years and experience would give you an increasing strength against the
+      dangers of emotionalism and against your strong, deep, quiet sense of your
+      exceptional personal importance....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop read thus far, and then sat reflecting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was it just?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had many weaknesses, but had he this egotism? No; that wasn't the
+      justice of the case. The old man, bitterly disappointed, was endeavouring
+      to wound. Scrope asked himself whether he was to blame for that
+      disappointment. That was a more difficult question....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He dismissed the charge at last, crumpled up the letter in his hand, and
+      after a moment's hesitation flung it away.... But he remained acutely
+      sorry, not so much for himself as for the revelation of Likeman this
+      letter made. He had had a great affection for Likeman and suddenly it was
+      turned into a wound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second letter was from Lady Sunderbund, and it was an altogether more
+      remarkable document. Lady Sunderbund wrote on a notepaper that was
+      evidently the result of a perverse research, but she wrote a letter far
+      more coherent than her speech, and without that curious falling away of
+      the r's that flavoured even her gravest observations with an unjust faint
+      aroma of absurdity. She wrote with a thin pen in a rounded boyish
+      handwriting. She italicized with slashes of the pen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He held this letter in both hands between his knees, and considered it now
+      with an expression that brought his eyebrows forward until they almost
+      met, and that tucked in the corners of his mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Bishop,&rdquo; it began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I keep thinking and thinking and thinking of that wonderful service, of
+      the wonderful, wonderful things you said, and the wonderful choice you
+      made of the moment to say them&mdash;when all those young lives were
+      coming to the great serious thing in life. It was most beautifully done.
+      At any rate, dear Bishop and Teacher, it was most beautifully begun. And
+      now we all stand to you like creditors because you have given us so much
+      that you owe us ever so much more. You have started us and you have to go
+      on with us. You have broken the shell of the old church, and here we are
+      running about with nowhere to go. You have to make the shelter of a new
+      church now for us, purged of errors, looking straight to God. The King of
+      Mankind!&mdash;what a wonderful, wonderful phrase that is. It says
+      everything. Tell us more of him and more. Count me first&mdash;not
+      foremost, but just the little one that runs in first&mdash;among your
+      disciples. They say you are resigning your position in the church. Of
+      course that must be true. You are coming out of it&mdash;what did you call
+      it?&mdash;coming out of the cracked old vessel from which you have poured
+      the living waters. I called on Lady Ella yesterday. She did not tell me
+      very much; I think she is a very reserved as well as a very dignified
+      woman, but she said that you intended to go to London. In London then I
+      suppose you will set up the first altar to the Divine King. I want to
+      help.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear Bishop and Teacher, I want to help tremendously&mdash;with all my
+      heart and all my soul. I want to be let do things for you.&rdquo; (The &ldquo;you&rdquo; was
+      erased by three or four rapid slashes, and &ldquo;our King&rdquo; substituted.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to be privileged to help build that First Church of the World
+      Unified under God. It is a dreadful thing to says but, you see, I am very
+      rich; this dreadful war has made me ever so much richer&mdash;steel and
+      shipping and things&mdash;it is my trustees have done it. I am ashamed to
+      be so rich. I want to give. I want to give and help this great beginning
+      of yours. I want you to let me help on the temporal side, to make it easy
+      for you to stand forth and deliver your message, amidst suitable
+      surroundings and without any horrid worries on account of the sacrifices
+      you have made. Please do not turn my offering aside. I have never wanted
+      anything so much in all my life as I want to make this gift. Unless I can
+      make it I feel that for me there is no salvation! I shall stick with my
+      loads and loads of stocks and shares and horrid possessions outside the
+      Needle's Eye. But if I could build a temple for God, and just live
+      somewhere near it so as to be the poor woman who sweeps out the chapels,
+      and die perhaps and be buried under its floor! Don't smile at me. I mean
+      every word of it. Years ago I thought of such a thing. After I had visited
+      the Certosa di Pavia&mdash;do you know it? So beautiful, and those two
+      still alabaster figures&mdash;recumbent. But until now I could never see
+      my way to any such service. Now I do. I am all afire to do it. Help me!
+      Tell me! Let me stand behind you and make your mission possible. I feel I
+      have come to the most wonderful phase in my life. I feel my call has
+      come....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have written this letter over three times, and torn each of them up. I
+      do so want to say all this, and it is so desperately hard to say. I am
+      full of fears that you despise me. I know there is a sort of high colour
+      about me. My passion for brightness. I am absurd. But inside of me is a
+      soul, a real, living, breathing soul. Crying out to you: 'Oh, let me help!
+      Let me help!' I will do anything, I will endure anything if only I can
+      keep hold of the vision splendid you gave me in the cathedral. I see it
+      now day and night, the dream of the place I can make for you&mdash;and you
+      preaching! My fingers itch to begin. The day before yesterday I said to
+      myself, 'I am quite unworthy, I am a worldly woman, a rich, smart,
+      decorated woman. He will never accept me as I am.' I took off all my
+      jewels, every one, I looked through all my clothes, and at last I decided
+      I would have made for me a very simple straight grey dress, just simple
+      and straight and grey. Perhaps you will think that too is absurd of me,
+      too self-conscious. I would not tell of it to you if I did not want you to
+      understand how alive I am to my utter impossibilities, how resolved I am
+      to do anything so that I may be able to serve. But never mind about silly
+      me; let me tell you how I see the new church.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you ought to have some place near the centre of London; not too
+      west, for you might easily become fashionable, not too east because you
+      might easily be swallowed up in merely philanthropic work, but somewhere
+      between the two. There must be vacant sites still to be got round about
+      Kingsway. And there we must set up your tabernacle, a very plain, very
+      simple, very beautifully proportioned building in which you can give your
+      message. I know a young man, just the very young man to do something of
+      the sort, something quite new, quite modern, and yet solemn and serious.
+      Lady Ella seemed to think you wanted to live somewhere in the north-west
+      of London&mdash;but she would tell me very little. I seem to see you not
+      there at all, not in anything between west-end and suburb, but yourself as
+      central as your mind, in a kind of clergy house that will be part of the
+      building. That is how it is in my dream anyhow. All that though can be
+      settled afterwards. My imagination and my desire is running away with me.
+      It is no time yet for premature plans. Not that I am not planning day and
+      night. This letter is simply to offer. I just want to offer. Here I am and
+      all my worldly goods. Take me, I pray you. And not only pray you. Take me,
+      I demand of you, in the name of God our king. I have a right to be used.
+      And you have no right to refuse me. You have to go on with your message,
+      and it is your duty to take me&mdash;just as you are obliged to step on
+      any steppingstone that lies on your way to do God service.... And so I am
+      waiting. I shall be waiting&mdash;on thorns. I know you will take your
+      time and think. But do not take too much time. Think of me waiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your servant, your most humble helper in God (your God),
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;AGATHA SUNDERBUND.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then scrawled along the margin of the last sheet:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If, when you know&mdash;a telegram. Even if you cannot say so much as
+      'Agreed,' still such a word as 'Favourable.' I just hang over the Void
+      until I hear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;AGATHA S.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A letter demanding enormous deliberation. She argued closely in spite of
+      her italics. It had never dawned upon the bishop before how light is the
+      servitude of the disciple in comparison with the servitude of the master.
+      In many ways this proposal repelled and troubled him, in many ways it
+      attracted him. And the argument of his clear obligation to accept her
+      co-operation gripped him; it was a good argument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And besides it worked in very conveniently with certain other difficulties
+      that perplexed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop became aware that Eleanor was returning to him across the
+      sands. She had made an end to her paddling, she had put on her shoes and
+      stockings and become once more the grave and responsible young woman who
+      had been taking care of him since his flight from Princhester. He replaced
+      the two letters in his pocket, and sat ready to smile as she drew near; he
+      admired her open brow, the toss of her hair, and the poise of her head
+      upon her neck. It was good to note that her hard reading at Cambridge
+      hadn't bent her shoulders in the least....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, old Dad!&rdquo; she said as she drew near. &ldquo;You've got back a colour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got back everything. It's time I returned to Princhester.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not in this weather. Not for a day or so.&rdquo; She flung herself at his feet.
+      &ldquo;Consider your overworked little daughter. Oh,how good this is!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the bishop in a grave tone that made her look up into his face.
+      &ldquo;I must go hack.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He met her clear gaze. &ldquo;What do you think of all this business, Eleanor?&rdquo;
+       he asked abruptly. &ldquo;Do you think I had a sort of fit in the cathedral?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He winced as he asked the question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Daddy,&rdquo; she said, after a little pause; &ldquo;the things you said and did that
+      afternoon were the noblest you ever did in your life. I wish I had been
+      there. It must have been splendid to be there. I've not told you before&mdash;I've
+      been dying to.... I'd promised not to say a word&mdash;not to remind you.
+      I promised the doctor. But now you ask me, now you are well again, I can
+      tell you. Kitty Kingdom has told me all about it, how it felt. It was like
+      light and order coming into a hopeless dark muddle. What you said was like
+      what we have all been trying to think&mdash;I mean all of us young people.
+      Suddenly it was all clear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped short. She was breathless with the excitement of her
+      confession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her father too remained silent for a little while. He was reminded of his
+      weakness; he was, he perceived, still a little hysterical. He felt that he
+      might weep at her youthful enthusiasm if he did not restrain himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm glad,&rdquo; he said, and patted her shoulder. &ldquo;I'm glad, Norah.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked away from him out across the lank brown sands and water pools
+      to the sea. &ldquo;It was what we have all been feeling our way towards, the
+      absolute simplification of religion, the absolute simplification of
+      politics and social duty; just God, just God the King.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But should I have said that&mdash;in the cathedral?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt no scruples. &ldquo;You had to,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But now think what it means,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I must leave the church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As a man strips off his coat for a fight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That doesn't dismay you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head, and smiled confidently to sea and sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm glad if you're with me,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Sometimes&mdash;I think&mdash;I'm
+      not a very self-reliant man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll have all the world with you,&rdquo; she was convinced, &ldquo;in a little
+      time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps rather a longer time than you think, Norah. In the meantime&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned to him once more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the meantime there are a great many things to consider. Young people,
+      they say, never think of the transport that is needed to win a battle. I
+      have it in my mind that I should leave the church. But I can't just walk
+      out into the marketplace and begin preaching there. I see the family
+      furniture being carried out of the palace and put into vans. It has to go
+      somewhere....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you will go to London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Possibly. In fact certainly. I have a plan. Or at least an
+      opportunity.... But that isn't what I have most in mind. These things are
+      not done without emotion and a considerable strain upon one's personal
+      relationships. I do not think this&mdash;I do not think your mother sees
+      things as we do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will,&rdquo; said young enthusiasm, &ldquo;when she understands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish she did. But I have been unlucky in the circumstances of my
+      explanations to her. And of course you understand all this means risks&mdash;poverty
+      perhaps&mdash;going without things&mdash;travel, opportunity, nice
+      possessions&mdash;for all of us. A loss of position too. All this sort of
+      thing,&rdquo; he stuck out a gaitered calf and smiled, &ldquo;will have to go. People,
+      some of them, may be disasagreeable to us....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After all, Daddy,&rdquo; she said, smiling, &ldquo;it isn't so bad as the cross and
+      the lions and burning pitch. And you have the Truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do believe&mdash;?&rdquo; He left his sentence unfinished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded, her face aglow. &ldquo;We know you have the Truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course in my own mind now it is very clear. I had a kind of
+      illumination....&rdquo; He would have tried to tell her of his vision, and he
+      was too shy. &ldquo;It came to me suddenly that the whole world was in confusion
+      because men followed after a thousand different immediate aims, when
+      really it was quite easy, if only one could be simple it was quite easy,
+      to show that nearly all men could only be fully satisfied and made happy
+      in themselves by one single aim, which was also the aim that would make
+      the whole world one great order, and that aim was to make God King of
+      one's heart and the whole world. I saw that all this world, except for a
+      few base monstrous spirits, was suffering hideous things because of this
+      war, and before the war it was full of folly, waste, social injustice and
+      suspicion for the same reason, because it had not realized the kingship of
+      God. And that is so simple; the essence of God is simplicity. The sin of
+      this war lies with men like myself, men who set up to tell people about
+      God, more than it lies with any other class&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kings?&rdquo; she interjected. &ldquo;Diplomatists? Finance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Those men could only work mischief in the world because the priests
+      and teachers let them. All things human lie at last at the door of the
+      priest and teacher. Who differentiate, who qualify and complicate, who
+      make mean unnecessary elaborations, and so divide mankind. If it were not
+      for the weakness and wickedness of the priests, every one would know and
+      understand God. Every one who was modest enough not to set up for
+      particular knowledge. Men disputed whether God is Finite or Infinite,
+      whether he has a triple or a single aspect. How should they know? All we
+      need to know is the face he turns to us. They impose their horrible creeds
+      and distinctions. None of those things matter. Call him Christ the God or
+      call him simply God, Allah, Heaven; it does not matter. He comes to us, we
+      know, like a Helper and Friend; that is all we want to know. You may
+      speculate further if you like, but it is not religion. They dispute
+      whether he can set aside nature. But that is superstition. He is either
+      master of nature and he knows that it is good, or he is part of nature and
+      must obey. That is an argument for hair-splitting metaphysicians. Either
+      answer means the same for us. It does not matter which way we come to
+      believe that he does not idly set the course of things aside. Obviously he
+      does not set the course of things aside. What he does do for certain is to
+      give us courage and save us from our selfishness and the bitter hell it
+      makes for us. And every one knows too what sort of things we want, and for
+      what end we want to escape from ourselves. We want to do right. And right,
+      if you think clearly, is just truth within and service without, the
+      service of God's kingdom, which is mankind, the service of human needs and
+      the increase of human power and experience. It is all perfectly plain, it
+      is all quite easy for any one to understand, who isn't misled and
+      chattered at and threatened and poisoned by evil priests and teachers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you are going to preach that, Daddy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I can. When I am free&mdash;you know I have still to resign and give
+      up&mdash;I shall make that my message.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so God comes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God comes as men perceive him in his simplicity.... Let men but see God
+      simply, and forthwith God and his kingdom possess the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked out to sea in silence for awhile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she turned to her father. &ldquo;And you think that His Kingdom will come&mdash;perhaps
+      in quite a little time&mdash;perhaps in our lifetimes? And that all these
+      ridiculous or wicked little kings and emperors, and these political
+      parties, and these policies and conspiracies, and this nationalist
+      nonsense and all the patriotism and rowdyism, all the private
+      profit-seeking and every baseness in life, all the things that it is so
+      horrible and disgusting to be young among and powerless among, you think
+      they will fade before him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop pulled his faith together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They will fade before him&mdash;but whether it will take a lifetime or a
+      hundred lifetimes or a thousand lifetimes, my Norah&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled and left his sentence unfinished, and she smiled back at him to
+      show she understood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then he confessed further, because he did not want to seem merely
+      sentimentally hopeful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I was in the cathedral, Norah&mdash;and just before that service, it
+      seemed to me&mdash;it was very real.... It seemed that perhaps the Kingdom
+      of God is nearer than we suppose, that it needs but the faith and courage
+      of a few, and it may be that we may even live to see the dawning of his
+      kingdom, even&mdash;who knows?&mdash;the sunrise. I am so full of faith
+      and hope that I fear to be hopeful with you. But whether it is near or far&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We work for it,&rdquo; said Eleanor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Eleanor thought, eyes downcast for a little while, and then looked up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is so wonderful to talk to you like this, Daddy. In the old days, I
+      didn't dream&mdash;Before I went to Newnham. I misjudged you. I thought
+      Never mind what I thought. It was silly. But now I am so proud of you. And
+      so happy to be back with you, Daddy, and find that your religion is after
+      all just the same religion that I have been wanting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE NINTH - THE THIRD VISION
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      ONE afternoon in October, four months and more after that previous
+      conversation, the card of Mr. Edward Scrope was brought up to Dr.
+      Brighton-Pomfrey. The name awakened no memories. The doctor descended to
+      discover a man so obviously in unaccustomed plain clothes that he had a
+      momentary disagreeable idea that he was facing a detective. Then he saw
+      that this secular disguise draped the familiar form of his old friend, the
+      former Bishop of Princhester. Scrope was pale and a little untidy; he had
+      already acquired something of the peculiar, slightly faded quality one
+      finds in a don who has gone to Hampstead and fallen amongst advanced
+      thinkers and got mixed up with the Fabian Society. His anxious eyes and
+      faintly propitiatory manner suggested an impending appeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey had the savoir-faire of a successful consultant; he
+      prided himself on being all things to all men; but just for an instant he
+      was at a loss what sort of thing he had to be here. Then he adopted the
+      genial, kindly, but by no means lavishly generous tone advisable in the
+      case of a man who has suffered considerable social deterioration without
+      being very seriously to blame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was a little round-faced man with defective eyesight
+      and an unsuitable nose for the glasses he wore, and he flaunted&mdash;God
+      knows why&mdash;enormous side-whiskers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, balancing the glasses skilfully by throwing back his
+      head, &ldquo;and how are you? And what can I do for you? There's no external
+      evidence of trouble. You're looking lean and a little pale, but thoroughly
+      fit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the late bishop, &ldquo;I'm fairly fit&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only&mdash;?&rdquo; said the doctor, smiling his teeth, with something of the
+      manner of an old bathing woman who tells a child to jump.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I'm run down and&mdash;worried.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'd better sit down,&rdquo; said the great doctor professionally, and looked
+      hard at him. Then he pulled at the arm of a chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ex-bishop sat down, and the doctor placed himself between his patient
+      and the light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This business of resigning my bishopric and so forth has involved very
+      considerable strains,&rdquo; Scrope began. &ldquo;That I think is the essence of the
+      trouble. One cuts so many associations.... I did not realize how much
+      feeling there would be.... Difficulties too of readjusting one's
+      position.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Zactly. Zactly. Zactly,&rdquo; said the doctor, snapping his face and making
+      his glasses vibrate. &ldquo;Run down. Want a tonic or a change?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. In fact&mdash;I want a particular tonic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey made his eyes and mouth round and interrogative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;While you were away last spring&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Had to go,&rdquo; said the doctor, &ldquo;unavoidable. Gas gangrene. Certain
+      enquiries. These young investigators all very well in their way. But we
+      older reputations&mdash;Experience. Maturity of judgment. Can't do without
+      us. Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I came here last spring and saw, an assistant I suppose he was, or
+      a supply,&mdash;do you call them supplies in your profession?&mdash;named,
+      I think&mdash;Let me see&mdash;D&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dale!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor as he uttered this word set his face to the unaccustomed
+      exercise of expressing malignity. His round blue eyes sought to blaze,
+      small cherubic muscles exerted themselves to pucker his brows. His colour
+      became a violent pink. &ldquo;Lunatic!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Dangerous Lunatic! He didn't
+      do anything&mdash;anything bad in your case, did he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was evidently highly charged with grievance in this matter. &ldquo;That man
+      was sent to me from Cambridge with the highest testimonials. The very
+      highest. I had to go at twenty-four hours' notice. Enquiry&mdash;gas
+      gangrene. There was nothing for it but to leave things in his hands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey disavowed responsibility with an open,
+      stumpy-fingered hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He did me no particular harm,&rdquo; said Scrope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are the first he spared,&rdquo; said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did he&mdash;? Was he unskilful?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unskilful is hardly the word.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were his methods peculiar?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little doctor sprang to his feet and began to pace about the room.
+      &ldquo;Peculiar!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It was abominable that they should send him to me.
+      Abominable!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned, with all the round knobs that constituted his face, aglow. His
+      side-whiskers waved apart like wings about to flap. He protruded his face
+      towards his seated patient. &ldquo;I am glad that he has been killed,&rdquo; he said.
+      &ldquo;Glad! There!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His glasses fell off&mdash;shocked beyond measure. He did not heed them.
+      They swung about in front of him as if they sought to escape while he
+      poured out his feelings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fool!&rdquo; he spluttered with demonstrative gestures. &ldquo;Dangerous fool! His
+      one idea&mdash;to upset everybody. Drugs, Sir! The most terrible drugs! I
+      come back. Find ladies. High social position. Morphine-maniacs. Others.
+      Reckless use of the most dangerous expedients.... Cocaine not in it.
+      Stimulants&mdash;violent stimulants. In the highest quarters. Terrible.
+      Exalted persons. Royalty! Anxious to be given war work and become
+      anonymous.... Horrible! He's been a terrible influence. One idea&mdash;to
+      disturb soul and body. Minds unhinged. Personal relations deranged.
+      Shattered the practice of years. The harm he has done! The harm!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked as though he was trying to burst&mdash;as a final expression of
+      wrath. He failed. His hands felt trembling to recover his pince-nez. Then
+      from his tail pocket he produced a large silk handkerchief and wiped the
+      glasses. Replaced them. Wriggled his head in his collar, running his
+      fingers round his neck. Patted his tie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excuse this outbreak!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But Dr. Dale has inflicted injuries!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope got up, walked slowly to the window, clasping his hands behind his
+      back, and turned. His manner still retained much of his episcopal dignity.
+      &ldquo;I am sorry. But still you can no doubt tell from your books what it was
+      he gave me. It was a tonic that had a very great effect on me. And I need
+      it badly now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was quietly malignant. &ldquo;He kept no diary at all,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;No diary at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If he did,&rdquo; said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey, holding up a flat hand and wagging
+      it from side to side, &ldquo;I wouldn't follow his treatment.&rdquo; He intensified
+      with the hand going faster. &ldquo;I wouldn't follow his treatment. Not under
+      any circumstances.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naturally,&rdquo; said Scrope, &ldquo;if the results are what you say. But in my case
+      it wasn't a treatment. I was sleepless, confused in my mind, wretched and
+      demoralized; I came here, and he just produced the stuff&mdash;It clears
+      the head, it clears the mind. One seems to get away from the cloud of
+      things, to get through to essentials and fundamentals. It straightened me
+      out.... You must know such a stuff. Just now, confronted with all sorts of
+      problems arising out of my resignation, I want that tonic effect again. I
+      must have it. I have matters to decide&mdash;and I can't decide. I find
+      myself uncertain, changeable from hour to hour. I don't ask you to take up
+      anything of this man Dale's. This is a new occasion. But I want that
+      drug.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the beginning of this speech Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's hands had fallen to
+      his hips. As Scrope went on the doctor's pose had stiffened. His head had
+      gone a little on one side; he had begun to play with his glasses. At the
+      end he gave vent to one or two short coughs, and then pointed his words
+      with his glasses held out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;tell me.&rdquo; (Cough.) &ldquo;Had this drug that cleared your
+      head&mdash;anything to do with your resignation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he put on his glasses disconcertingly, and threw his head back to
+      watch the reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It did help to clear up the situation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey in a tone that defined his own
+      position with remorseless clearness. &ldquo;Exactly.&rdquo; And he held up a flat,
+      arresting hand. .
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Sir,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;How can you expect me to help you to a drug so
+      disastrous?&mdash;even if I could tell you what it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it was not disastrous to me,&rdquo; said Scrope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your extraordinary resignation&mdash;your still more extraordinary way of
+      proclaiming it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think those were disasters.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But my dear Sir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't want to discuss theology with me, I know. So let me tell you
+      simply that from my point of view the illumination that came to me&mdash;this
+      drug of Dr. Dale's helping&mdash;has been the great release of my life. It
+      crystallized my mind. It swept aside the confusing commonplace things
+      about me. Just for a time I saw truth clearly.... I want to do so again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a crisis in my affairs&mdash;never mind what. But I cannot see
+      my way clear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was meditating now with his eyes on his carpet and
+      the corners of his mouth tucked in. He was swinging his glasses
+      pendulum-wise. &ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; he said, looking sideways at Scrope, &ldquo;what were
+      the effects of this drug? It may have been anything. How did it give you
+      this&mdash;this vision of the truth&mdash;that led to your resignation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope felt a sudden shyness. But he wanted Dale's drug again so badly
+      that he obliged himself to describe his previous experiences to the best
+      of his ability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was,&rdquo; he said in a matter-of-fact tone, &ldquo;a golden, transparent liquid.
+      Very golden, like a warm-tinted Chablis. When water was added it became
+      streaked and opalescent, with a kind of living quiver in it. I held it up
+      to the light.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes? And when you took it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I felt suddenly clearer. My mind&mdash;I had a kind of exaltation and
+      assurance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your mind,&rdquo; Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey assisted, &ldquo;began to go twenty-nine to
+      the dozen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It felt stronger and clearer,&rdquo; said Scrope, sticking to his quest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And did things look as usual?&rdquo; asked the doctor, protruding his knobby
+      little face like a clenched fist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Scrope and regarded him. How much was it possible to tell a man
+      of this type?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They differed?&rdquo; said the doctor, relaxing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.... Well, to be plain.... I had an immediate sense of God. I saw the
+      world&mdash;as if it were a transparent curtain, and then God became&mdash;evident....
+      Is it possible for that to determine the drug?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God became&mdash;evident,&rdquo; the doctor said with some distaste, and shook
+      his head slowly. Then in a sudden sharp cross-examining tone: &ldquo;You mean
+      you had a vision? Actually saw 'um?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was in the form of a vision.&rdquo; Scrope was now mentally very
+      uncomfortable indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor's lips repeated these words noiselessly, with an effect of
+      contempt. &ldquo;He must have given you something&mdash;It's a little like
+      morphia. But golden&mdash;opalescent? And it was this vision made you
+      astonish us all with your resignation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was part of a larger process,&rdquo; said Scrope patiently. &ldquo;I had been
+      drifting into a complete repudiation of the Anglican positions long before
+      that. All that this drug did was to make clear what was already in my
+      mind. And give it value. Act as a developer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor suddenly gave way to a botryoidal hilarity. &ldquo;To think that one
+      should be consulted about visions of God&mdash;in Mount Street!&rdquo; he said.
+      &ldquo;And you know, you know you half want to believe that vision was real. You
+      know you do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So far Scrope had been resisting his realization of failure. Now he gave
+      way to an exasperation that made him reckless of Brighton-Pomfrey's
+      opinion. &ldquo;I do think,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that that drug did in some way make God
+      real to me. I think I saw God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey shook his head in a way that made Scrope want to hit
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I saw God,&rdquo; he repeated more firmly. &ldquo;I had a sudden realization
+      of how great he was and how great life was, and how timid and mean and
+      sordid were all our genteel, professional lives. I was seized upon, for a
+      time I was altogether possessed by a passion to serve him fitly and
+      recklessly, to make an end to compromises with comfort and self-love and
+      secondary things. And I want to hold to that. I want to get back to that.
+      I am given to lassitudes. I relax. I am by temperament an easy-going man.
+      I want to buck myself up, I want to get on with my larger purposes, and I
+      find myself tired, muddled, entangled.... The drug was a good thing. For
+      me it was a good thing. I want its help again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know no more than you do what it was.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are there no other drugs that you do know, that have a kindred effect? If
+      for example I tried morphia in some form?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd get visions. They wouldn't be divine visions. If you took small
+      quantities very discreetly you might get a temporary quickening. But the
+      swift result of all repeated drug-taking is, I can assure you, moral decay&mdash;rapid
+      moral decay. To touch drugs habitually is to become hopelessly unpunctual,
+      untruthful, callously selfish and insincere. I am talking mere textbook,
+      mere everyday common-places, to you when I tell you that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had an idea. I had a hope....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've a stiff enough fight before you,&rdquo; said the doctor, &ldquo;without such a
+      handicap as that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You won't help me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor walked up and down his hearthrug, and then delivered himself
+      with an extended hand and waggling fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wouldn't if I could. For your good I wouldn't. And even if I would I
+      couldn't, for I don't know the drug. One of his infernal brews, no doubt.
+      Something&mdash;accidental. It's lost&mdash;for good&mdash;for your good,
+      anyhow....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope halted outside the stucco portals of the doctor's house. He
+      hesitated whether he should turn to the east or the west.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That door closes,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;There's no getting back that way.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood for a time on the kerb. He turned at last towards Park Lane and
+      Hyde Park. He walked along thoughtfully, inattentively steering a course
+      for his new home in Pembury Road, Notting Hill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the outset of this new phase in Scrope's life that had followed the
+      crisis of the confirmation service, everything had seemed very clear
+      before him. He believed firmly that he had been shown God, that he had
+      himself stood in the presence of God, and that there had been a plain call
+      to him to proclaim God to the world. He had realized God, and it was the
+      task of every one who had realized God to help all mankind to the same
+      realization. The proposal of Lady Sunderbund had fallen in with that idea.
+      He had been steeling himself to a prospect of struggle and dire poverty,
+      but her prompt loyalty had come as an immense relief to his anxiety for
+      his wife and family. When he had talked to Eleanor upon the beach at
+      Hunstanton it had seemed to him that his course was manifest, perhaps a
+      little severe but by no means impossible. They had sat together in the
+      sunshine, exalted by a sense of fine adventure and confident of success,
+      they had looked out upon the future, upon the great near future in which
+      the idea of God was to inspire and reconstruct the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only very slowly that this pristine clearness became clouded and
+      confused. It had not been so easy as Eleanor had supposed to win over the
+      sympathy of Lady Ella with his resignation. Indeed it had not been won
+      over. She had become a stern and chilling companion, mute now upon the
+      issue of his resignation, but manifestly resentful. He was secretly
+      disappointed and disconcerted by her tone. And the same hesitation of the
+      mind, instinctive rather than reasoned, that had prevented a frank
+      explanation of his earlier doubts to her, now restrained him from telling
+      her naturally and at once of the part that Lady Sunderbund was to play in
+      his future ministry. In his own mind he felt assured about that part, but
+      in order to excuse his delay in being frank with his wife, he told himself
+      that he was not as yet definitely committed to Lady Sunderbund's project.
+      And in accordance with that idea he set up housekeeping in London upon a
+      scale that implied a very complete cessation of income. &ldquo;As yet,&rdquo; he told
+      Lady Ella, &ldquo;we do not know where we stand. For a time we must not so much
+      house ourselves as camp. We must take some quite small and modest house in
+      some less expensive district. If possible I would like to take it for a
+      year, until we know better how things are with us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He reviewed a choice of London districts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella said her bitterest thing. &ldquo;Does it matter where we hide our
+      heads?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That wrung him to: &ldquo;We are not hiding our heads.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She repented at once. &ldquo;I am sorry, Ted,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It slipped from
+      me.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He called it camping, but the house they had found in Pembury Road,
+      Notting Hill, was more darkened and less airy than any camp. Neither he
+      nor his wife had ever had any experience of middle-class house-hunting or
+      middle-class housekeeping before, and they spent three of the most
+      desolating days of their lives in looking for this cheap and modest
+      shelter for their household possessions. Hitherto life had moved them from
+      one established and comfortable home to another; their worst affliction
+      had been the modern decorations of the Palace at Princhester, and it was
+      altogether a revelation to them to visit house after house, ill-lit,
+      ill-planned, with dingy paint and peeling wallpaper, kitchens for the most
+      part underground, and either without bathrooms or with built-out bathrooms
+      that were manifestly grudging afterthoughts, such as harbour the
+      respectable middle classes of London. The house agents perceived
+      intimations of helplessness in their manner, adopted a &ldquo;rushing&rdquo; method
+      with them strange to people who had hitherto lived in a glowing halo of
+      episcopal dignity. &ldquo;Take it or leave it,&rdquo; was the note of those gentlemen;
+      &ldquo;there are always people ready for houses.&rdquo; The line that property in land
+      and houses takes in England, the ex-bishop realized, is always to hold up
+      and look scornful. The position of the land-owning, house-owning class in
+      a crowded country like England is ultra-regal. It is under no obligation
+      to be of use, and people are obliged to get down to the land somewhere.
+      They cannot conduct business and rear families in the air. England's
+      necessity is the landlord's opportunity....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope began to generalize about this, and develop a new and sincerer
+      streak of socialism in his ideas. &ldquo;The church has been very remiss,&rdquo; he
+      said, as he and Lady Ella stared at the basement &ldquo;breakfast room&rdquo; of their
+      twenty-seventh dismal possibility. &ldquo;It should have insisted far more than
+      it has done upon the landlord's responsibility. No one should tolerate the
+      offer of such a house as this&mdash;at such a rent&mdash;to decent people.
+      It is unrighteous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the house agent's he asked in a cold, intelligent ruling-class voice,
+      the name of the offending landlord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all the property of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners that side of
+      the railway,&rdquo; said the agent, picking his teeth with a pin. &ldquo;Lazy lot.
+      Dreadfully hard to get 'em to do anything. Own some of the worst
+      properties in London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella saw things differently again. &ldquo;If you had stayed in the church,&rdquo;
+       she said afterwards, &ldquo;you might have helped to alter such things as that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the time he had no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; he said presently as they went back in the tube to their modest
+      Bloomsbury hotel, &ldquo;if I had stayed in the church I should never have
+      realized things like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it does no justice to Lady Ella to record these two unavoidable
+      expressions of regret without telling also of the rallying courage with
+      which she presently took over the task of resettling herself and her
+      stricken family. Her husband's change of opinion had fallen upon her out
+      of a clear sky, without any premonition, in one tremendous day. In one day
+      there had come clamouring upon her, with an effect of revelation after
+      revelation, the ideas of drugs, of heresy and blasphemy, of an alien
+      feminine influence, of the entire moral and material breakdown of the man
+      who had been the centre of her life. Never was the whole world of a woman
+      so swiftly and comprehensively smashed. All the previous troubles of her
+      life seemed infinitesimal in comparison with any single item in this
+      dismaying debacle. She tried to consolidate it in the idea that he was
+      ill, &ldquo;disordered.&rdquo; She assured herself that he would return from
+      Hunstanton restored to health and orthodoxy, with all his threatenings of
+      a resignation recalled; the man she had loved and trusted to succeed in
+      the world and to do right always according to her ideas. It was only with
+      extreme reluctance that she faced the fact that with the fumes of the drug
+      dispelled and all signs of nervous exhaustion gone, he still pressed
+      quietly but resolutely toward a severance from the church. She tried to
+      argue with him and she found she could not argue. The church was a crystal
+      sphere in which her life was wholly contained, her mind could not go
+      outside it even to consider a dissentient proposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While he was at Hunstanton, every day she had prayed for an hour, some
+      days she had prayed for several hours, in the cathedral, kneeling upon a
+      harsh hassock that hurt her knees. Even in her prayers she could not argue
+      nor vary. She prayed over and over again many hundreds of times: &ldquo;Bring
+      him back, dear Lord. Bring him back again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the past he had always been a very kind and friendly mate to her, but
+      sometimes he had been irritable about small things, especially during his
+      seasons of insomnia; now he came back changed, a much graver man, rather
+      older in his manner, carefully attentive to her, kinder and more watchful,
+      at times astonishingly apologetic, but rigidly set upon his purpose of
+      leaving the church. &ldquo;I know you do not think with me in this,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I
+      have to pray you to be patient with me. I have struggled with my
+      conscience.... For a time it means hardship, I know. Poverty. But if you
+      will trust me I think I shall be able to pull through. There are ways of
+      doing my work. Perhaps we shall not have to undergo this cramping in this
+      house for very long....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not the poverty I fear,&rdquo; said Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she did face the worldly situation, if a little sadly, at any rate
+      with the courage of practical energy. It was she who stood in one ungainly
+      house after another and schemed how to make discomforts tolerable, while
+      Scrope raged unhelpfully at landlordism and the responsibility of the
+      church for economic disorder. It was she who at last took decisions into
+      her hands when he was too jaded to do anything but generalize weakly, and
+      settled upon the house in Pembury Road which became their London home. She
+      got him to visit Hunstanton again for half a week while she and Miriam,
+      who was the practical genius of the family, moved in and made the new home
+      presentable. At the best it was barely presentable. There were many plain
+      hardships. The girls had to share one of the chief bedrooms in common
+      instead of their jolly little individual dens at Princhester.... One
+      little room was all that could be squeezed out as a study for &ldquo;father&rdquo;; it
+      was not really a separate room, it was merely cut off by closed folding
+      doors from the dining-room, folding doors that slowly transmitted the
+      dinner flavours to a sensitive worker, and its window looked out upon a
+      blackened and uneventful yard and the skylights of a populous,
+      conversational, and high-spirited millinery establishment that had been
+      built over the corresponding garden of the house in Restharrow Street.
+      Lady Ella had this room lined with open shelves, and Clementina (in the
+      absence of Eleanor at Newuham) arranged the pick of her father's books. It
+      is to be noted as a fact of psychological interest that this cramped,
+      ill-lit little room distressed Lady Ella more than any other of the
+      discomforts of their new quarters. The bishop's writing-desk filled a
+      whole side of it. Parsimony ruled her mind, but she could not resist the
+      impulse to get him at least a seemly reading-lamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came back from Hunstanton full of ideas for work in London. He was, he
+      thought, going to &ldquo;write something&rdquo; about his views. He was very grateful
+      and much surprised at what she had done to that forbidding house, and full
+      of hints and intimations that it would not be long before they moved to
+      something roomier. She was disposed to seek some sort of salaried
+      employment for Clementina and Miriam at least, but he would not hear of
+      that. &ldquo;They must go on and get educated,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;if I have to give up
+      smoking to do it. Perhaps I may manage even without that.&rdquo; Eleanor, it
+      seemed, had a good prospect of a scholarship at the London School of
+      Economics that would practically keep her. There would be no Cambridge for
+      Clementina, but London University might still be possible with a little
+      pinching, and the move to London had really improved the prospects of a
+      good musical training for Miriam. Phoebe and Daphne, Lady Ella believed,
+      might get in on special terms at the Notting Hill High School.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope found it difficult to guess at what was going on in the heads of
+      his younger daughters. None displayed such sympathy as Eleanor had
+      confessed. He had a feeling that his wife had schooled them to say nothing
+      about the change in their fortunes to him. But they quarrelled a good
+      deal, he could hear, about the use of the one bathroom&mdash;there was
+      never enough hot water after the second bath. And Miriam did not seem to
+      enjoy playing the new upright piano in the drawing-room as much as she had
+      done the Princhester grand it replaced. Though she was always willing to
+      play that thing he liked; he knew now that it was the Adagio of Of. 111;
+      whenever he asked for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      London servants, Lady Ella found, were now much more difficult to get than
+      they had been in the Holy Innocents' days in St. John's Wood. And more
+      difficult to manage when they were got. The households of the more
+      prosperous clergy are much sought after by domestics of a serious and
+      excellent type; an unfrocked clergyman's household is by no means so
+      attractive. The first comers were young women of unfortunate dispositions;
+      the first cook was reluctant and insolent, she went before her month was
+      up; the second careless; she made burnt potatoes and cindered chops,
+      underboiled and overboiled eggs; a &ldquo;dropped&rdquo; look about everything, harsh
+      coffee and bitter tea seemed to be a natural aspect of the state of being
+      no longer a bishop. He would often after a struggle with his nerves in the
+      bedroom come humming cheerfully to breakfast, to find that Phoebe, who was
+      a delicate eater, had pushed her plate away scarcely touched, while Lady
+      Ella sat at the end of the table in a state of dangerous calm, framing
+      comments for delivering downstairs that would be sure to sting and yet
+      leave no opening for repartee, and trying at the same time to believe that
+      a third cook, if the chances were risked again, would certainly be &ldquo;all
+      right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The drawing-room was papered with a morose wallpaper that the landlord, in
+      view of the fact that Scrope in his optimism would only take the house on
+      a yearly agreement, had refused to replace; it was a design of very dark
+      green leaves and grey gothic arches; and the apartment was lit by a
+      chandelier, which spilt a pool of light in the centre of the room and
+      splashed useless weak patches elsewhere. Lady Ella had to interfere to
+      prevent the monopolization of this centre by Phoebe and Daphne for their
+      home work. This light trouble was difficult to arrange; the plain truth
+      was that there was not enough illumination to go round. In the Princhester
+      drawing-room there had been a number of obliging little electric pushes.
+      The size of the dining-room, now that the study was cut off from it,
+      forbade hospitality. As it was, with only the family at home, the
+      housemaid made it a grievance that she could scarcely squeeze by on the
+      sideboard side to wait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The house vibrated to the trains in the adjacent underground railway.
+      There was a lady next door but one who was very pluckily training a
+      contralto voice that most people would have gladly thrown away. At the end
+      of Restharrow Street was a garage, and a yard where chauffeurs were
+      accustomed to &ldquo;tune up&rdquo; their engines. All these facts were persistently
+      audible to any one sitting down in the little back study to think out this
+      project of &ldquo;writing something,&rdquo; about a change in the government of the
+      whole world. Petty inconveniences no doubt all these inconveniences were,
+      but they distressed a rather oversensitive mind which was also acutely
+      aware that even upon this scale living would cost certainly two hundred
+      and fifty pounds if not more in excess of the little private income
+      available.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These domestic details, irrelevant as they may seem in a spiritual
+      history, need to be given because they added an intimate keenness to
+      Scrope's readiness for this private chapel enterprise that he was
+      discussing with Lady Sunderbund. Along that line and along that line
+      alone, he saw the way of escape from the great sea of London dinginess
+      that threatened to submerge his family. And it was also, he felt, the line
+      of his duty; it was his &ldquo;call.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At least that was how he felt at first. And then matters began to grow
+      complicated again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Things had gone far between himself and Lady Sunderbund since that letter
+      he had read upon the beach at Old Hunstanton. The blinds of the house with
+      the very very blue door in Princhester had been drawn from the day when
+      the first vanload of the renegade bishop's private possessions had
+      departed from the palace. The lady had returned to the brightly decorated
+      flat overlooking Hyde Park. He had seen her repeatedly since then, and
+      always with a fairly clear understanding that she was to provide the
+      chapel and pulpit in which he was to proclaim to London the gospel of the
+      Simplicity and Universality of God. He was to be the prophet of a
+      reconsidered faith, calling the whole world from creeds and sects, from
+      egotisms and vain loyalties, from prejudices of race and custom, to the
+      worship and service of the Divine King of all mankind. That in fact had
+      been the ruling resolve in his mind, the resolve determining his relations
+      not only with Lady Sunderbund but with Lady Ella and his family, his
+      friends, enemies and associates. He had set out upon this course unchecked
+      by any doubt, and overriding the manifest disapproval of his wife and his
+      younger daughters. Lady Sunderbund's enthusiasm had been enormous and
+      sustaining....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost imperceptibly that resolve had weakened. Imperceptibly at first.
+      Then the decline had been perceived as one sometimes perceives a thing in
+      the background out of the corner of one's eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all his early anticipations of the chapel enterprise, he had imagined
+      himself in the likeness of a small but eloquent figure standing in a large
+      exposed place and calling this lost misled world back to God. Lady
+      Sunderbund, he assumed, was to provide the large exposed place (which was
+      dimly paved with pews) and guarantee that little matter which was to
+      relieve him of sordid anxieties for his family, the stipend. He had agreed
+      in an inattentive way that this was to be eight hundred a year, with a
+      certain proportion of the subscriptions. &ldquo;At first, I shall be the chief
+      subscriber,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Before the rush comes.&rdquo; He had been so content to
+      take all this for granted and think no more about it&mdash;more
+      particularly to think no more about it&mdash;that for a time he entirely
+      disregarded the intense decorative activities into which Lady Sunderbund
+      incontinently plunged. Had he been inclined to remark them he certainly
+      might have done so, even though a considerable proportion was being
+      thoughtfully veiled for a time from his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For example, there was the young architect with the wonderful tie whom he
+      met once or twice at lunch in the Hyde Park flat. This young man pulled
+      the conversation again and again, Lady Sunderbund aiding and abetting, in
+      the direction of the &ldquo;ideal church.&rdquo; It was his ambition, he said,
+      someday, to build an ideal church, &ldquo;divorced from tradition.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope had been drawn at last into a dissertation. He said that hitherto
+      all temples and places of worship had been conditioned by orientation due
+      to the seasonal aspects of religion, they pointed to the west or&mdash;as
+      in the case of the Egyptian temples&mdash;to some particular star, and by
+      sacramentalism, which centred everything on a highly lit sacrificial
+      altar. It was almost impossible to think of a church built upon other
+      lines than that. The architect would be so free that&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Absolutely free,&rdquo; interrupted the young architect. &ldquo;He might, for
+      example, build a temple like a star.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or like some wondyful casket,&rdquo; said Lady Sunderbund....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And also there was a musician with fuzzy hair and an impulsive way of
+      taking the salted almonds, who wanted to know about religious music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope hazarded the idea that a chanting people was a religious people. He
+      said, moreover, that there was a fine religiosity about Moussorgski, but
+      that the most beautiful single piece of music in the world was Beethoven's
+      sonata, Opus 111,&mdash;he was thinking, he said, more particularly of the
+      Adagio at the end, molto semplice e cantabile. It had a real quality of
+      divinity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The musician betrayed impatience at the name of Beethoven, and thought,
+      with his mouth appreciatively full of salted almonds, that nowadays we had
+      got a little beyond that anyhow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall be superhuman before we get beyond either Purcell or Beethoven,&rdquo;
+       said Scrope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor did he attach sufficient importance to Lady Sunderbund's disposition
+      to invite Positivists, members of the Brotherhood Church, leaders among
+      the Christian Scientists, old followers of the Rev. Charles Voysey,
+      Swedenborgians, Moslem converts, Indian Theosophists, psychic phenomena
+      and so forth, to meet him. Nevertheless it began to drift into his mind
+      that he was by no means so completely in control of the new departure as
+      he had supposed at first. Both he and Lady Sunderbund professed
+      universalism; but while his was the universalism of one who would simplify
+      to the bare fundamentals of a common faith, hers was the universalism of
+      the collector. Religion to him was something that illuminated the soul, to
+      her it was something that illuminated prayer-books. For a considerable
+      time they followed their divergent inclinations without any realization of
+      their divergence. None the less a vague doubt and dissatisfaction with the
+      prospect before him arose to cloud his confidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first there was little or no doubt of his own faith. He was still
+      altogether convinced that he had to confess and proclaim God in his life.
+      He was as sure that God was the necessary king and saviour of mankind and
+      of a man's life, as he was of the truth of the Binomial Theorem. But what
+      began first to fade was the idea that he had been specially called to
+      proclaim the True God to all the world. He would have the most amiable
+      conference with Lady Sunderbund, and then as he walked back to Notting
+      Hill he would suddenly find stuck into his mind like a challenge, Heaven
+      knows how: &ldquo;Another prophet?&rdquo; Even if he succeeded in this mission
+      enterprise, he found himself asking, what would he be but just a little
+      West-end Mahomet? He would have founded another sect, and we have to make
+      an end to all sects. How is there to be an end to sects, if there are
+      still to be chapels&mdash;richly decorated chapels&mdash;and
+      congregations, and salaried specialists in God?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was a very disconcerting idea. It was particularly active at night.
+      He did his best to consider it with a cool detachment, regardless of the
+      facts that his private income was just under three hundred pounds a year,
+      and that his experiments in cultured journalism made it extremely
+      improbable that the most sedulous literary work would do more than double
+      this scanty sum. Yet for all that these nasty, ugly, sordid facts were
+      entirely disregarded, they did somehow persist in coming in and squatting
+      down, shapeless in a black corner of his mind&mdash;from which their eyes
+      shone out, so to speak&mdash;whenever his doubt whether he ought to set up
+      as a prophet at all was under consideration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (6)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then very suddenly on this October afternoon the situation had come to a
+      crisis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had gone to Lady Sunderbund's flat to see the plans and drawings for
+      the new church in which he was to give his message to the world. They had
+      brought home to him the complete realization of Lady Sunderbund's
+      impossibility. He had attempted upon the spur of the moment an explanation
+      of just how much they differed, and he had precipitated a storm of
+      extravagantly perplexing emotions....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She kept him waiting for perhaps ten minutes before she brought the plans
+      to him. He waited in the little room with the Wyndham Lewis picture that
+      opened upon the balcony painted with crazy squares of livid pink. On a
+      golden table by the window a number of recently bought books were lying,
+      and he went and stood over these, taking them up one after another. The
+      first was &ldquo;The Countess of Huntingdon and Her Circle,&rdquo; that bearder of
+      lightminded archbishops, that formidable harbourer of Wesleyan chaplains.
+      For some minutes he studied the grim portrait of this inspired lady
+      standing with one foot ostentatiously on her coronet and then turned to
+      the next volume. This was a life of Saint Teresa, that energetic organizer
+      of Spanish nunneries. The third dealt with Madame Guyon. It was difficult
+      not to feel that Lady Sunderbund was reading for a part.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was wearing a long simple dress of spangled white with a very high
+      waist; she had a bracelet of green jade, a waistband of green silk, and
+      her hair was held by a wreath of artificial laurel, very stiff and green.
+      Her arms were full of big rolls of cartridge paper and tracing paper. &ldquo;I'm
+      so pleased,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It's 'eady at last and I can show you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She banged the whole armful down upon a vivid little table of inlaid black
+      and white wood. He rescued one or two rolls and a sheet of tracing paper
+      from the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's the Temple,&rdquo; she panted in a significant whisper. &ldquo;It's the Temple
+      of the One T'ue God!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She scrabbled among the papers, and held up the elevation of a strange
+      square building to his startled eyes. &ldquo;Iszi't it just pe'fect?&rdquo; she
+      demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took the drawing from her. It represented a building, manifestly an
+      enormous building, consisting largely of two great, deeply fluted towers
+      flanking a vast archway approached by a long flight of steps. Between the
+      towers appeared a dome. It was as if the Mosque of Saint Sophia had
+      produced this offspring in a mesalliance with the cathedral of Wells. Its
+      enormity was made manifest by the minuteness of the large automobiles that
+      were driving away in the foreground after &ldquo;setting down.&rdquo; &ldquo;Here is the
+      plan,&rdquo; she said, thrusting another sheet upon him before he could fully
+      take in the quality of the design. &ldquo;The g'eat Hall is to be pe'fectly
+      'ound, no aisle, no altar, and in lettas of sapphiah, 'God is ev'ywhe'.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She added with a note of solemnity, &ldquo;It will hold th'ee thousand people
+      sitting down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;!&rdquo; said Scrope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The'e's a sort of g'andeur,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It's young Venable's wo'k. It's
+      his fl'st g'ate oppo'tunity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;is this to go on that little site in Aldwych?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He says the' isn't 'oom the'!&rdquo; she explained. &ldquo;He wants to put it out at
+      Golda's G'een.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;if it is to be this little simple chapel we proposed, then
+      wasn't our idea to be central?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if the' isn't 'oem!&rdquo; she said&mdash;conclusively. &ldquo;And isn't this&mdash;isn't
+      it rather a costly undertaking, rather more costly&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That doesn't matta. I'm making heaps and heaps of money. Half my p'ope'ty
+      is in shipping and a lot of the 'eat in munitions. I'm 'icher than eva.
+      Isn't the' a sort of g'andeur?&rdquo; she pressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put the elevation down. He took the plan from her hands and seemed to
+      study it. But he was really staring blankly at the whole situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lady Sunderbund,&rdquo; he said at last, with an effort, &ldquo;I am afraid all this
+      won't do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't do!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. It isn't in the spirit of my intention. It isn't in a great building
+      of this sort&mdash;so&mdash;so ornate and imposing, that the simple gospel
+      of God's Universal Kingdom can be preached.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But oughtn't so gate a message to have as g'ate a pulpit?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then as if she would seize him before he could go on to further
+      repudiations, she sought hastily among the drawings again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But look,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It has ev'ything! It's not only a p'eaching place;
+      it's a headquarters for ev'ything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With the rapid movements of an excited child she began to thrust the
+      remarkable features and merits of the great project upon him. The
+      preaching dome was only the heart of it. There were to be a library,
+      &ldquo;'efecto'ies,&rdquo; consultation rooms, classrooms, a publication department, a
+      big underground printing establishment. &ldquo;Nowadays,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;ev'y gate
+      movement must p'int.&rdquo; There was to be music, she said, &ldquo;a gate invisible
+      o'gan,&rdquo; hidden amidst the architectural details, and pouring out its
+      sounds into the dome, and then she glanced in passing at possible
+      &ldquo;p'ocessions&rdquo; round the preaching dome. This preaching dome was not a mere
+      shut-in drum for spiritual reverberations, around it ran great open
+      corridors, and in these corridors there were to be &ldquo;chapels.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what for?&rdquo; he asked, stemming the torrent. &ldquo;What need is there for
+      chapels? There are to be no altars, no masses, no sacraments?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;but they are to be chapels for special int'ests; a chapel
+      for science, a chapel for healing, a chapel for gov'ment. Places for
+      peoples to sit and think about those things&mdash;with paintings and
+      symbols.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see your intention,&rdquo; he admitted. &ldquo;I see your intention.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The' is to be a gate da'k blue 'ound chapel for sta's and atoms and the
+      myst'ry of matta.&rdquo; Her voice grew solemn. &ldquo;All still and deep and high.
+      Like a k'ystal in a da'k place. You will go down steps to it. Th'ough a
+      da'k 'ounded a'ch ma'ked with mathematical symbols and balances and
+      scientific app'atus.... And the ve'y next to it, the ve'y next, is to be a
+      little b'ight chapel for bi'ds and flowas!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;it is all very fine and expressive. It is, I see, a
+      symbolical building, a great artistic possibility. But is it the place for
+      me? What I have to say is something very simple, that God is the king of
+      the whole world, king of the ha'penny newspaper and the omnibus and the
+      vulgar everyday things, and that they have to worship him and serve him as
+      their leader in every moment of their lives. This isn't that. This is the
+      old religions over again. This is taking God apart. This is putting him
+      into a fresh casket instead of the old one. And.... I don't like it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't like it,&rdquo; she cried, and stood apart from him with her chin in the
+      air, a tall astonishment and dismay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't do the work I want to do with this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;Isn't it you' idea?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. It is not in the least my idea. I want to tell the whole world of the
+      one God that can alone unite it and save it&mdash;and you make this
+      extravagant toy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt as if he had struck her directly he uttered that last word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Toy!&rdquo; she echoed, taking it in, &ldquo;you call it a Toy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A note in her voice reminded him that there were two people who might feel
+      strongly in this affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Lady Sunderbund,&rdquo; he said with a sudden change of manner, &ldquo;I must
+      needs follow the light of my own mind. I have had a vision of God, I have
+      seen him as a great leader towering over the little lives of men,
+      demanding the little lives of men, prepared to take them and guide them to
+      the salvation of mankind and the conquest of pain and death. I have seen
+      him as the God of the human affair, a God of politics, a God of such muddy
+      and bloody wars as this war, a God of economics, a God of railway
+      junctions and clinics and factories and evening schools, a God in fact of
+      men. This God&mdash;this God here, that you want to worship, is a God of
+      artists and poets&mdash;of elegant poets, a God of bric-a-brac, a God of
+      choice allusions. Oh, it has its grandeur! I don't want you to think that
+      what you are doing may not be altogether fine and right for you to do. But
+      it is not what I have to do.... I cannot&mdash;indeed I cannot&mdash;go on
+      with this project&mdash;upon these lines.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, flushed and breathless. Lady Sunderbund had heard him to the
+      end. Her bright face was brightly flushed, and there were tears in her
+      eyes. It was like her that they should seem tears of the largest, most
+      expensive sort, tears of the first water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; she cried, and her red delicate mouth went awry with dismay and
+      disappointment, and her expression was the half incredulous expression of
+      a child suddenly and cruelly disappointed: &ldquo;You won't go on with all
+      this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;My dear Lady Sunderbund&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! don't Lady Sunderbund me!&rdquo; she cried with a novel rudeness. &ldquo;Don't
+      you see I've done it all for you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He winced and felt boorish. He had never liked and disapproved of Lady
+      Sunderbund so much as he did at that moment. And he had no words for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I stop it all at once like this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And still he had no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She pursued her advantage. &ldquo;What am I to do?&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned upon him passionately. &ldquo;Look what you've done!&rdquo; She marked her
+      points with finger upheld, and gave odd suggestions in her face of an
+      angry coster girl. &ldquo;Eva' since I met you, I've wo'shipped you. I've been
+      'eady to follow you anywhe'&mdash;to do anything. Eva' since that night
+      when you sat so calm and dignified, and they baited you and wo'id you.
+      When they we' all vain and cleva, and you&mdash;you thought only of God
+      and 'iligion and didn't mind fo' you'self.... Up to then&mdash;I'd been
+      living&mdash;oh! the emptiest life...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The tears ran. &ldquo;Pe'haps I shall live it again....&rdquo; She dashed her grief
+      away with a hand beringed with stones as big as beetles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said to myself, this man knows something I don't know. He's got the
+      seeds of ete'nal life su'ely. I made up my mind then and the' I'd follow
+      you and back you and do all I could fo' you. I've lived fo' you. Eve'
+      since. Lived fo' you. And now when all my little plans are 'ipe, you&mdash;!
+      Oh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made a quaint little gesture with pink fists upraised, and then stood
+      with her hand held up, staring at the plans and drawings that were
+      littered over the inlaid table. &ldquo;I've planned and planned. I said, I will
+      build him a temple. I will be his temple se'vant.... Just a me'
+      se'vant....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She could not go on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it is just these temples that have confused mankind,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not my temple,&rdquo; she said presently, now openly weeping over the gay
+      rejected drawings. &ldquo;You could have explained....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; she said petulantly, and thrust them away from her so that they went
+      sliding one after the other on to the floor. For some long-drawn moments
+      there was no sound in the room but the slowly accelerated slide and flop
+      of one sheet of cartridge paper after another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We could have been so happy,&rdquo; she wailed, &ldquo;se'ving oua God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then this disconcerting lady did a still more disconcerting thing. She
+      staggered a step towards Scrape, seized the lapels of his coat, bowed her
+      head upon his shoulder, put her black hair against his cheek, and began
+      sobbing and weeping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear lady!&rdquo; he expostulated, trying weakly to disengage her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me k'y,&rdquo; she insisted, gripping more resolutely, and following his
+      backward pace. &ldquo;You must let me k'y. You must let me k'y.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His resistance ceased. One hand supported her, the other patted her
+      shining hair. &ldquo;My dear child!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;My dear child! I had no idea.
+      That you would take it like this....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (7)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was but the opening of an enormous interview. Presently he had
+      contrived in a helpful and sympathetic manner to seat the unhappy lady on
+      a sofa, and when after some cramped discourse she stood up before him,
+      wiping her eyes with a wet wonder of lace, to deliver herself the better,
+      a newborn appreciation of the tactics of the situation made him walk to
+      the other side of the table under colour of picking up a drawing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the retrospect he tried to disentangle the threads of a discussion that
+      went to and fro and contradicted itself and began again far back among
+      things that had seemed forgotten and disposed of. Lady Sunderbund's mind
+      was extravagantly untrained, a wild-grown mental thicket. At times she
+      reproached him as if he were a heartless God; at times she talked as if he
+      were a recalcitrant servant. Her mingling of utter devotion and the
+      completest disregard for his thoughts and wishes dazzled and distressed
+      his mind. It was clear that for half a year her clear, bold, absurd will
+      had been crystallized upon the idea of giving him exactly what she wanted
+      him to want. The crystal sphere of those ambitions lay now shattered
+      between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was trying to reconstruct it before his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was, she declared, prepared to alter her plans in any way that would
+      meet his wishes. She had not understood. &ldquo;If it is a Toy,&rdquo; she cried,
+      &ldquo;show me how to make it not a Toy! Make it 'eal!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He said it was the bare idea of a temple that made it impossible. And
+      there was this drawing here; what did it mean? He held it out to her. It
+      represented a figure, distressingly like himself, robed as a priest in
+      vestments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She snatched the offending drawing from him and tore it to shreds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you don't want a Temple, have a meeting-house. You wanted a
+      meeting-house anyhow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just any old meeting-house,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Not that special one. A place
+      without choirs and clergy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you won't have music,&rdquo; she responded, &ldquo;don't have music. If God
+      doesn't want music it can go. I can't think God does not app'ove of music,
+      but&mdash;that is for you to settle. If you don't like the' being
+      o'naments, we'll make it all plain. Some g'ate g'ey Dome&mdash;all g'ey
+      and black. If it isn't to be beautiful, it can be ugly. Yes, ugly. It can
+      be as ugly&rdquo;&mdash;she sobbed&mdash;&ldquo;as the City Temple. We will get some
+      otha a'chitect&mdash;some City a'chitect. Some man who has built B'anch
+      Banks or 'ailway stations. That's if you think it pleases God.... B'eak
+      young Venable's hea't.... Only why should you not let me make a place fo'
+      you' message? Why shouldn't it be me? You must have a place. You've got
+      'to p'each somewhe'.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As a man, not as a priest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then p'each as a man. You must still wea' something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just ordinary clothes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O'dina'y clothes a' clothes in the fashion,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You would have to
+      go to you' taila for a new p'eaching coat with b'aid put on dif'ently, or
+      two buttons instead of th'ee....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One needn't be fashionable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ev'ybody is fash'nable. How can you help it? Some people wea' old
+      fashions; that's all.... A cassock's an old fashion. There's nothing so
+      plain as a cassock.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Except that it's a clerical fashion. I want to be just as I am now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you think that&mdash;that owoble suit is o'dina'y clothes!&rdquo; she said,
+      and stared at him and gave way to tears of real tenderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A cassock,&rdquo; she cried with passion. &ldquo;Just a pe'fectly plain cassock. Fo'
+      deecency!... Oh, if you won't&mdash;not even that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (8)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he walked now after his unsuccessful quest of Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey
+      towards the Serpentine he acted that stormy interview with Lady Sunderbund
+      over again. At the end, as a condition indeed of his departure, he had
+      left things open. He had assented to certain promises. He was to make her
+      understand better what it was he needed. He was not to let anything that
+      had happened affect that &ldquo;spi'tual f'enship.&rdquo; She was to abandon all her
+      plans, she was to begin again &ldquo;at the ve'y beginning.&rdquo; But he knew that
+      indeed there should be no more beginning again with her. He knew that
+      quite beyond these questions of the organization of a purified religion,
+      it was time their association ended. She had wept upon him; she had
+      clasped both his hands at parting and prayed to be forgiven. She was
+      drawing him closer to her by their very dissension. She had infected him
+      with the softness of remorse; from being a bright and spirited person, she
+      had converted herself into a warm and touching person. Her fine, bright
+      black hair against his cheek and the clasp of her hand on his shoulder was
+      now inextricably in the business. The perplexing, the astonishing thing in
+      his situation was that there was still a reluctance to make a conclusive
+      breach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was not the first of men who have tried to find in vain how and when a
+      relationship becomes an entanglement. He ought to break off now, and the
+      riddle was just why he should feel this compunction in breaking off now.
+      He had disappointed her, and he ought not to have disappointed her; that
+      was the essential feeling. He had never realized before as he realized now
+      this peculiar quality of his own mind and the gulf into which it was
+      leading him. It came as an illuminating discovery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a social animal. He had an instinctive disposition to act according
+      to the expectations of the people about him, whether they were reasonable
+      or congenial expectations or whether they were not. That, he saw for the
+      first time, had been the ruling motive of his life; it was the clue to
+      him. Man is not a reasonable creature; he is a socially responsive
+      creature trying to be reasonable in spite of that fact. From the days in
+      the rectory nursery when Scrope had tried to be a good boy on the whole
+      and just a little naughty sometimes until they stopped smiling, through
+      all his life of school, university, curacy, vicarage and episcopacy up to
+      this present moment, he perceived now that he had acted upon no authentic
+      and independent impulse. His impulse had always been to fall in with
+      people and satisfy them. And all the painful conflicts of those last few
+      years had been due to a growing realization of jarring criticisms, of
+      antagonized forces that required from him incompatible things. From which
+      he had now taken refuge&mdash;or at any rate sought refuge&mdash;in God.
+      It was paradoxical, but manifestly in God he not only sank his
+      individuality but discovered it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was wonderful how much he had thought and still thought of the feelings
+      and desires of Lady Sunderbund, and how little he thought of God. Her he
+      had been assiduously propitiating, managing, accepting, for three months
+      now. Why? Partly because she demanded it, and there was a quality in her
+      demand that had touched some hidden spring&mdash;of vanity perhaps it was&mdash;in
+      him, that made him respond. But partly also it was because after the
+      evacuation of the palace at Princhester he had felt more and more, felt
+      but never dared to look squarely in the face, the catastrophic change in
+      the worldly circumstances of his family. Only this chapel adventure seemed
+      likely to restore those fallen and bedraggled fortunes. He had not
+      anticipated a tithe of the dire quality of that change. They were not
+      simply uncomfortable in the Notting Hill home. They were miserable. He
+      fancied they looked to him with something between reproach and urgency.
+      Why had he brought them here? What next did he propose to do? He wished at
+      times they would say it out instead of merely looking it. Phoebe's failing
+      appetite chilled his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That concern for his family, he believed, had been his chief motive in
+      clinging to Lady Sunderbund's projects long after he had realized how
+      little they would forward the true service of God. No doubt there had been
+      moments of flattery, moments of something, something rather in the nature
+      of an excited affection; some touch of the magnificent in her, some touch
+      of the infantile,&mdash;both appealed magnetically to his imagination; but
+      the real effective cause was his habitual solicitude for his wife and
+      children and his consequent desire to prosper materially. As his first
+      dream of being something between Mohammed and Peter the Hermit in a new
+      proclamation of God to the world lost colour and life in his mind, he
+      realized more and more clearly that there was no way of living in a state
+      of material prosperity and at the same time in a state of active service
+      to God. The Church of the One True God (by favour of Lady Sunderbund) was
+      a gaily-coloured lure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet he wanted to go on with it. All his imagination and intelligence
+      was busy now with the possibility of in some way subjugating Lady
+      Sunderbund, and modifying her and qualifying her to an endurable
+      proposition. Why?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There could be but one answer, he thought. Brought to the test of action,
+      he did not really believe in God! He did not believe in God as he believed
+      in his family. He did not believe in the reality of either his first or
+      his second vision; they had been dreams, autogenous revelations,
+      exaltations of his own imaginations. These beliefs were upon different
+      grades of reality. Put to the test, his faith in God gave way; a sword of
+      plaster against a reality of steel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet he did believe in God. He was as persuaded that there was a God as
+      he was that there was another side to the moon. His intellectual
+      conviction was complete. Only, beside the living, breathing&mdash;occasionally
+      coughing&mdash;reality of Phoebe, God was something as unsubstantial as
+      the Binomial Theorem....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very like the Binomial Theorem as one thought over that comparison.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time he had reached the banks of the Serpentine and was
+      approaching the grey stone bridge that crosses just where Hyde Park ends
+      and Kensington Gardens begins. Following upon his doubts of his religious
+      faith had come another still more extraordinary question: &ldquo;Although there
+      is a God, does he indeed matter more in our ordinary lives than that same
+      demonstrable Binomial Theorem? Isn't one's duty to Phoebe plain and
+      clear?&rdquo; Old Likeman's argument came back to him with novel and enhanced
+      powers. Wasn't he after all selfishly putting his own salvation in front
+      of his plain duty to those about him? What did it matter if he told lies,
+      taught a false faith, perjured and damned himself, if after all those
+      others were thereby saved and comforted?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that is just where the whole of this state of mind is false and
+      wrong,&rdquo; he told himself. &ldquo;God is something more than a priggish devotion,
+      an intellectual formula. He has a hold and a claim&mdash;he should have a
+      hold and a claim&mdash;exceeding all the claims of Phoebe, Miriam, Daphne,
+      Clementina&mdash;all of them.... But he hasn't'!...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was to that he had got after he had left Lady Sunderbund, and to that
+      he now returned. It was the thinness and unreality of his thought of God
+      that had driven him post-haste to Brighton-Pomfrey in search for that drug
+      that had touched his soul to belief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was God so insignificant in comparison with his family that after all with
+      a good conscience he might preach him every Sunday in Lady Sunderbund's
+      church, wearing Lady Sunderbund's vestments?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before him he saw an empty seat. The question was so immense and
+      conclusive, it was so clearly a choice for all the rest of his life
+      between God and the dear things of this world, that he felt he could not
+      decide it upon his legs. He sat down, threw an arm along the back of the
+      seat and drummed with his fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the answer was &ldquo;yes&rdquo; then it was decidedly a pity that he had not
+      stayed in the church. It was ridiculous to strain at the cathedral gnat
+      and then swallow Lady Sunderbund's decorative Pantechnicon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the first time, Scrope definitely regretted his apostasy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A trivial matter, as it may seem to the reader, intensified that regret.
+      Three weeks ago Borrowdale, the bishop of Howeaster, had died, and Scrope
+      would have been the next in rotation to succeed him on the bench of
+      bishops. He had always looked forward to the House of Lords, intending to
+      take rather a new line, to speak more, and to speak more plainly and fully
+      upon social questions than had hitherto been the practice of his brethren.
+      Well, that had gone....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (9)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Regrets were plain now. The question before his mind was growing clear;
+      whether he was to persist in this self-imposed martyrdom of himself and
+      his family or whether he was to go back upon his outbreak of visionary
+      fanaticism and close with this last opportunity that Lady Sunderbund
+      offered of saving at least the substance of the comfort and social status
+      of his wife and daughters. In which case it was clear to him he would have
+      to go to great lengths and exercise very considerable subtlety&mdash;and
+      magnetism&mdash;in the management of Lady Sunderbund....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found himself composing a peculiar speech to her, very frank and
+      revealing, and one that he felt would dominate her thoughts.... She
+      attracted him oddly.... At least this afternoon she had attracted him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And repelled him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A wholesome gust of moral impatience stirred him. He smacked the back of
+      the seat hard, as though he smacked himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No. He did not like it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A torn sunset of purple and crimson streamed raggedly up above and through
+      the half stripped trecs of Kensington Gardens, and he found himself
+      wishing that Heaven would give us fewer sublimities in sky and mountain
+      and more in our hearts. Against the background of darkling trees and
+      stormily flaming sky a girl was approaching him. There was little to be
+      seen of her but her outline. Something in her movement caught his eye and
+      carried his memory back to a sundown at Hunstanton. Then as she came
+      nearer he saw that it was Eleanor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was odd to see her here. He had thought she was at Newnham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But anyhow it was very pleasant to see her. And there was something in
+      Eleanor that promised an answer to his necessity. The girl had a kind of
+      instinctive wisdom. She would understand the quality of his situation
+      better perhaps than any one. He would put the essentials of that situation
+      as fully and plainly as he could to her. Perhaps she, with that clear
+      young idealism of hers, would give him just the lift and the light of
+      which he stood in need. She would comprehend both sides of it, the points
+      about Phoebe as well as the points about God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When first he saw her she seemed to be hurrying, but now she had fallen to
+      a loitering pace. She looked once or twice behind her and then ahead,
+      almost as though she expected some one and was not sure whether this
+      person would approach from east or west. She did not observe her father
+      until she was close upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she was so astonished that for a moment she stood motionless,
+      regarding him. She made an odd movement, almost as if she would have
+      walked on, that she checked in its inception. Then she came up to him and
+      stood before him. &ldquo;It's Dad,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know you were in London, Norah,&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came up suddenly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you been home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I wasn't going home. At least&mdash;not until afterwards.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she looked away from him, east and then west, and then met his eye
+      again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't you sit down, Norah?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know whether I can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She consulted the view again and seemed to come to a decision. &ldquo;At least,
+      I will for a minute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down. For a moment neither of them spoke....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you doing here, little Norah?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She gathered her wits. Then she spoke rather volubly. &ldquo;I know it looks
+      bad, Daddy. I came up to meet a boy I know, who is going to France
+      to-morrow. I had to make excuses&mdash;up there. I hardly remember what
+      excuses I made.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A boy you know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do we know him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time Scrope forgot the Church of the One True God altogether. &ldquo;Who
+      is this boy?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a perceptible effort Eleanor assumed a tone of commonsense
+      conventionality. &ldquo;He's a boy I met first when we were skating last year.
+      His sister has the study next to mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father looked at daughter, and she met his eyes. &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all happened so quickly, Daddy,&rdquo; she said, answering all that was
+      implicit in that &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; She went on, &ldquo;I would have told you about him if
+      he had seemed to matter. But it was just a friendship. It didn't seem to
+      matter in any serious way. Of course we'd been good friends&mdash;and
+      talked about all sorts of things. And then suddenly you see,&rdquo;&mdash;her
+      tone was offhand and matter-of-fact&mdash;&ldquo;he has to go to France.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stared at her father with the expression of a hostess who talks about
+      the weather. And then the tears gathered and ran down her cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned her face to the Serpentine and clenched her fist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But she was now fairly weeping. &ldquo;I didn't know he cared. I didn't know I
+      cared.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His next question took a little time in coming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it's love, little Norah?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was comfortably crying now, the defensive altogether abandoned. &ldquo;It's
+      love, Daddy.... Oh! love!.... He's going tomorrow.&rdquo; For a minute or so
+      neither spoke. Scrope's mind was entirely made up in the matter. He
+      approved altogether of his daughter. But the traditions of parentage, his
+      habit of restrained decision, made him act a judicial part. &ldquo;I'd like just
+      to see this boy,&rdquo; he said, and added: &ldquo;If it isn't rather interfering....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear Daddy!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Dear Daddy!&rdquo; and touched his hand. &ldquo;He'll be
+      coming here....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you could tell me a few things about him,&rdquo; said Scrope. &ldquo;Is he an
+      undergraduate?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; began Eleanor and paused to marshal her facts. &ldquo;He graduated
+      this year. Then he's been in training at Cambridge. Properly he'd have a
+      fellowship. He took the Natural Science tripos, zoology chiefly. He's good
+      at philosophy, but of course our Cambridge philosophy is so silly&mdash;McTaggart
+      blowing bubbles.... His father's a doctor, Sir Hedley Riverton.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As she spoke her eyes had been roving up the path and down. &ldquo;He's coming,&rdquo;
+       she interrupted. She hesitated. &ldquo;Would you mind if I went and spoke to him
+      first, Daddy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course go to him. Go and warn him I'm here,&rdquo; said Scrope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Eleanor got up, and was immediately greeted with joyful gestures by an
+      approaching figure in khaki. The two young people quickened their paces as
+      they drew nearer one another. There was a rapid greeting; they stood close
+      together and spoke eagerly. Scrope could tell by their movements when he
+      became the subject of their talk. He saw the young man start and look over
+      Eleanor's shoulder, and he assumed an attitude of philosophical
+      contemplation of the water, so as to give the young man the liberty of his
+      profile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not look up until they were quite close to him, and when he did he
+      saw a pleasant, slightly freckled fair face a little agitated, and very
+      honest blue eyes. &ldquo;I hope you don't think, Sir, that it's bad form of me
+      to ask Eleanor to come up and see me as I've done. I telegraphed to her on
+      an impulse, and it's been very kind of her to come up to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down,&rdquo; said Scrope, &ldquo;sit down. You're Mr. Riverton?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Sir,&rdquo; said the young man. He had the frequent &ldquo;Sir&rdquo; of the
+      subaltern. Scrope was in the centre of the seat, and the young officer sat
+      down on one side of him while Eleanor took up a watching position on her
+      father's other hand. &ldquo;You see, Sir, we've hardly known each other&mdash;I
+      mean we've been associated over a philosophical society and all that sort
+      of thing, but in a more familiar way, I mean....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He hung for a moment, just a little short of breath. Scrope helped him
+      with a grave but sympathetic movement of the head. &ldquo;It's a little
+      difficult to explain,&rdquo; the young man apologized.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We hadn't understood, I think, either of us very much. We'd just been
+      friendly&mdash;and liked each other. And so it went on even when I was
+      training. And then when I found I had to go out&mdash;I'm going out a
+      little earlier than I expected&mdash;I thought suddenly I wouldn't ever go
+      to Cambridge again at all perhaps&mdash;and there was something in one of
+      her letters.... I thought of it a lot, Sir, I thought it all over, and I
+      thought it wasn't right for me to do anything and I didn't do anything
+      until this morning. And then I sort of had to telegraph. I know it was
+      frightful cheek and bad form and all that, Sir. It is. It would be worse
+      if she wasn't different&mdash;I mean, Sir, if she was just an ordinary
+      girl.... But I had a sort of feeling&mdash;just wanting to see her. I
+      don't suppose you've ever felt anything, Sir, as I felt I wanted to see
+      her&mdash;and just hear her speak to me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced across Scrope at Eleanor. It was as if he justified himself to
+      them both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope glanced furtively at his daughter who was leaning forward with
+      tender eyes on her lover, and his heart went out to her. But his manner
+      remained judicial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this is very sudden,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or you would have heard all about it, Sir,&rdquo; said young Riverton. &ldquo;It's
+      just the hurry that has made this seem furtive. All that there is between
+      us, Sir, is just the two telegrams we've sent, hers and mine. I hope you
+      won't mind our having a little time together. We won't do anything very
+      committal. It's as much friendship as anything. I go by the evening train
+      to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mm,&rdquo; said Serope with his eye on Eleanor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In these uncertain times,&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why shouldn't I take a risk too, Daddy?&rdquo; said Eleanor sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know there's that side of it,&rdquo; said the young man. &ldquo;I oughtn't to have
+      telegraphed,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't I take a risk?&rdquo; exclaimed Eleanor. &ldquo;I'm not a doll. I don't want to
+      live in wadding until all the world is safe for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope looked at the glowing face of the young man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is this taking care of her?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you hadn't telegraphed&mdash;!&rdquo; she cried with a threat in her voice,
+      and left it at that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps I feel about her&mdash;rather as if she was as strong as I am&mdash;in
+      those ways. Perhaps I shouldn't. I could hardly endure myself, Sir&mdash;cut
+      off from her. And a sort of blank. Nothing said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You want to work out your own salvation,&rdquo; said Scrope to his daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one else can,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;I'm&mdash;I'm grown up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even if it hurts?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To live is to be hurt somehow,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;This&mdash;This&mdash;&rdquo; She
+      flashed her love. She intimated by a gesture that it is better to be
+      stabbed with a clean knife than to be suffocated or poisoned or to
+      decay....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope turned his eyes to the young man again. He liked him. He liked the
+      modelling of his mouth and chin and the line of his brows. He liked him
+      altogether. He pronounced his verdict slowly. &ldquo;I suppose, after all,&rdquo; he
+      said, &ldquo;that this is better than the tender solicitude of a safe and
+      prosperous middleaged man. Eleanor, my dear, I've been thinking to-day
+      that a father who stands between his children and hardship, by doing
+      wrong, may really be doing them a wrong. You are a dear girl to me. I
+      won't stand between you two. Find your own salvation.&rdquo; He got up. &ldquo;I go
+      west,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;presently. You, I think, go east.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can assure you, Sir,&rdquo; the young man began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope held his hand out. &ldquo;Take your life in your own way,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to Eleanor. &ldquo;Talk as you will,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She clasped his hand with emotion. Then she turned to the waiting young
+      man, who saluted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll come back to supper?&rdquo; Scrope said, without thinking out the
+      implications of that invitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She assented as carelessly. The fact that she and her lover were to go,
+      with their meeting legalized and blessed, excluded all other
+      considerations. The two young people turned to each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope stood for a moment or so and then sat down again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time he could think only of Eleanor.... He watched the two young
+      people as they went eastward. As they walked their shoulders and elbows
+      bumped amicably together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (10)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently he sought to resume the interrupted thread of his thoughts. He
+      knew that he had been dealing with some very tremendous and urgent problem
+      when Eleanor had appeared. Then he remembered that Eleanor at the time of
+      her approach had seemed to be a solution rather than an interruption.
+      Well, she had her own life. She was making her own life. Instead of
+      solving his problems she was solving her own. God bless those dear grave
+      children! They were nearer the elemental things than he was. That eastward
+      path led to Victoria&mdash;and thence to a very probable death. The lad
+      was in the infantry and going straight into the trenches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Love, death, God; this war was bringing the whole world back to elemental
+      things, to heroic things. The years of comedy and comfort were at an end
+      in Europe; the age of steel and want was here. And he had been thinking&mdash;What
+      had he been thinking?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He mused, and the scheme of his perplexities reshaped itself in his mind.
+      But at that time he did not realize that a powerful new light was falling
+      upon it now, cast by the tragic illumination of these young lovers whose
+      love began with a parting. He did not see how reality had come to all
+      things through that one intense reality. He reverted to the question as he
+      had put it to himself, before first he recognized Eleanor. Did he believe
+      in God? Should he go on with this Sunderbund adventure in which he no
+      longer believed? Should he play for safety and comfort, trusting to God's
+      toleration? Or go back to his family and warn them of the years of
+      struggle and poverty his renunciation cast upon them?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Somehow Lady Sunderbund's chapel was very remote and flimsy now, and the
+      hardships of poverty seemed less black than the hardship of a youthful
+      death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Did he believe in God? Again he put that fundamental question to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat very still in the sunset peace, with his eyes upon the steel mirror
+      of the waters. The question seemed to fill the whole scene, to wait, even
+      as the water and sky and the windless trees were waiting....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then by imperceptible degrees there grew in Scrope's mind the
+      persuasion that he was in the presence of the living God. This time there
+      was no vision of angels nor stars, no snapping of bow-strings, no
+      throbbing of the heart nor change of scene, no magic and melodramatic
+      drawing back of the curtain from the mysteries; the water and the bridge,
+      the ragged black trees, and a distant boat that broke the silvery calm
+      with an arrow of black ripples, all these things were still before him.
+      But God was there too. God was everywhere about him. This persuasion was
+      over him and about him; a dome of protection, a power in his nerves, a
+      peace in his heart. It was an exalting beauty; it was a perfected
+      conviction.... This indeed was the coming of God, the real coming of God.
+      For the first time Scrope was absolutely sure that for the rest of his
+      life he would possess God. Everything that had so perplexed him seemed to
+      be clear now, and his troubles lay at the foot of this last complete
+      realization like a litter of dust and leaves in the foreground of a
+      sunlit, snowy mountain range.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a little incredible that he could ever have doubted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (11)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a phase of extreme intellectual clairvoyance. A multitude of things
+      that hitherto had been higgledy-piggledy, contradictory and incongruous in
+      his mind became lucid, serene, full and assured. He seemed to see all
+      things plainly as one sees things plainly through perfectly clear still
+      water in the shadows of a summer noon. His doubts about God, his periods
+      of complete forgetfulness and disregard of God, this conflict of his
+      instincts and the habits and affections of his daily life with the service
+      of God, ceased to be perplexing incompatibilities and were manifest as
+      necessary, understandable aspects of the business of living.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was no longer a riddle that little immediate things should seem of more
+      importance than great and final things. For man is a creature thrusting
+      his way up from the beast to divinity, from the blindness of individuality
+      to the knowledge of a common end. We stand deep in the engagements of our
+      individual lives looking up to God, and only realizing in our moments of
+      exaltation that through God we can escape from and rule and alter the
+      whole world-wide scheme of individual lives. Only in phases of
+      illumination do we realize the creative powers that lie ready to man's
+      hand. Personal affections, immediate obligations, ambitions, self-seeking,
+      these are among the natural and essential things of our individual lives,
+      as intimate almost as our primordial lusts and needs; God, the true God,
+      is a later revelation, a newer, less natural thing in us; a knowledge
+      still remote, uncertain, and confused with superstition; an apprehension
+      as yet entangled with barbaric traditions of fear and with ceremonial
+      surgeries, blood sacrifices, and the maddest barbarities of thought. We
+      are only beginning to realize that God is here; so far as our minds go he
+      is still not here continually; we perceive him and then again we are blind
+      to him. God is the last thing added to the completeness of human life. To
+      most His presence is imperceptible throughout their lives; they know as
+      little of him as a savage knows of the electric waves that beat through us
+      for ever from the sun. All this appeared now so clear and necessary to
+      Scrope that he was astonished he had ever found the quality of
+      contradiction in these manifest facts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this unprecedented lucidity that had now come to him, Scrope saw as a
+      clear and simple necessity that there can be no such thing as a continuous
+      living presence of God in our lives. That is an unreasonable desire. There
+      is no permanent exaltation of belief. It is contrary to the nature of
+      life. One cannot keep actively believing in and realizing God round all
+      the twenty-four hours any more than one can keep awake through the whole
+      cycle of night and day, day after day. If it were possible so to apprehend
+      God without cessation, life would dissolve in religious ecstasy. But
+      nothing human has ever had the power to hold the curtain of sense
+      continually aside and retain the light of God always. We must get along by
+      remembering our moments of assurance. Even Jesus himself, leader of all
+      those who have hailed the coming kingdom of God, had cried upon the cross,
+      &ldquo;My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?&rdquo; The business of life on
+      earth, life itself, is a thing curtained off, as it were, from such
+      immediate convictions. That is in the constitution of life. Our ordinary
+      state of belief, even when we are free from doubt, is necessarily far
+      removed from the intuitive certainty of sight and hearing. It is a
+      persuasion, it falls far short of perception....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We don't know directly,&rdquo; Scrope said to himself with a checking gesture
+      of the hand, &ldquo;we don't see. We can't. We hold on to the remembered
+      glimpse, we go over our reasons.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it was clear too just because God is thus manifest like the momentary
+      drawing of a curtain, sometimes to this man for a time and sometimes to
+      that, but never continuously to any, and because the perception of him
+      depends upon the ability and quality of the perceiver, because to the
+      intellectual man God is necessarily a formula, to the active man a will
+      and a commandment, and to the emotional man love, there can be no creed
+      defining him for all men, and no ritual and special forms of service to
+      justify a priesthood. &ldquo;God is God,&rdquo; he whispered to himself, and the
+      phrase seemed to him the discovery of a sufficient creed. God is his own
+      definition; there is no other definition of God. Scrope had troubled
+      himself with endless arguments whether God was a person, whether he was
+      concerned with personal troubles, whether he loved, whether he was finite.
+      It were as reasonable to argue whether God was a frog or a rock or a tree.
+      He had imagined God as a figure of youth and courage, had perceived him as
+      an effulgence of leadership, a captain like the sun. The vision of his
+      drug-quickened mind had but symbolized what was otherwise inexpressible.
+      Of that he was now sure. He had not seen the invisible but only its sign
+      and visible likeness. He knew now that all such presentations were true
+      and that all such presentations were false. Just as much and just as
+      little was God the darkness and the brightness of the ripples under the
+      bows of the distant boat, the black beauty of the leaves and twigs of
+      those trees now acid-clear against the flushed and deepening sky. These
+      riddles of the profundities were beyond the compass of common living. They
+      were beyond the needs of common living. He was but a little earth
+      parasite, sitting idle in the darkling day, trying to understand his
+      infinitesimal functions on a minor planet. Within the compass of
+      terrestrial living God showed himself in its own terms. The life of man on
+      earth was a struggle for unity of spirit and for unity with his kind, and
+      the aspect of God that alone mattered to man was a unifying kingship
+      without and within. So long as men were men, so would they see God. Only
+      when they reached the crest could they begin to look beyond. So we knew
+      God, so God was to us; since we struggled, he led our struggle, since we
+      were finite and mortal he defined an aim, his personality was the answer
+      to our personality; but God, except in so far as he was to us, remained
+      inaccessible, inexplicable, wonderful, shining through beauty, shining
+      beyond research, greater than time or space, above good and evil and pain
+      and pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (12)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Serope's mind was saturated as it had never been before by his sense of
+      the immediate presence of God. He floated in that realization. He was not
+      so much thinking now as conversing starkly with the divine interlocutor,
+      who penetrated all things and saw into and illuminated every recess of his
+      mind. He spread out his ideas to the test of this presence; he brought out
+      his hazards and interpretations that this light might judge them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There came back to his mind the substance of his two former visions; they
+      assumed now a reciprocal quality, they explained one another and the
+      riddle before him. The first had shown him the personal human aspect of
+      God, he had seen God as the unifying captain calling for his personal
+      service, the second had set the stage for that service in the spectacle of
+      mankind's adventure. He had been shown a great multitude of human spirits
+      reaching up at countless points towards the conception of the racial unity
+      under a divine leadership, he had seen mankind on the verge of awakening
+      to the kingdom of God. &ldquo;That solves no mystery,&rdquo; he whispered, gripping
+      the seat and frowning at the water; &ldquo;mysteries remain mysteries; but that
+      is the reality of religion. And now, now, what is my place? What have I to
+      do? That is the question I have been asking always; the question that this
+      moment now will answer; what have I to do?...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      God was coming into the life of all mankind in the likeness of a captain
+      and a king; all the governments of men, all the leagues of men, their
+      debts and claims and possessions, must give way to the world republic
+      under God the king. For five troubled years he had been staring religion
+      in the face, and now he saw that it must mean this&mdash;or be no more
+      than fetishism, Obi, Orphic mysteries or ceremonies of Demeter, a legacy
+      of mental dirtiness, a residue of self-mutilation and superstitious
+      sacrifices from the cunning, fear-haunted, ape-dog phase of human
+      development. But it did mean this. And every one who apprehended as much
+      was called by that very apprehension to the service of God's kingdom. To
+      live and serve God's kingdom on earth, to help to bring it about, to
+      propagate the idea of it, to establish the method of it, to incorporate
+      all that one made and all that one did into its growing reality, was the
+      only possible life that could be lived, once that God was known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat with his hands gripping his knees, as if he were holding on to his
+      idea. &ldquo;And now for my part,&rdquo; he whispered, brows knit, &ldquo;now for my part.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ever since he had given his confirmation addresses he had been clear that
+      his task, or at least a considerable portion of his task, was to tell of
+      this faith in God and of this conception of service in his kingdom as the
+      form and rule of human life and human society. But up to now he had been
+      floundering hopelessly in his search for a method and means of telling.
+      That, he saw, still needed to be thought out. For example, one cannot run
+      through the world crying, &ldquo;The Kingdom of God is at hand.&rdquo; Men's minds
+      were still so filled with old theological ideas that for the most part
+      they would understand by that only a fantasy of some great coming of
+      angels and fiery chariots and judgments, and hardly a soul but would doubt
+      one's sanity and turn scornfully away. But one must proclaim God not to
+      confuse but to convince men's minds. It was that and the habit of his
+      priestly calling that had disposed him towards a pulpit. There he could
+      reason and explain. The decorative genius of Lady Sunderbund had turned
+      that intention into a vast iridescent absurdity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This sense he had of thinking openly in the sight of God, enabled him to
+      see the adventure of Lady Sunderbund without illusion and without shame.
+      He saw himself at once honest and disingenuous, divided between two aims.
+      He had no doubt now of the path he had to pursue. A stronger man of
+      permanently clear aims might possibly turn Lady Sunderbund into a useful
+      opportunity, oblige her to provide the rostrum he needed; but for himself,
+      he knew he had neither the needed strength nor clearness; she would
+      smother him in decoration, overcome him by her picturesque persistence. It
+      might be ridiculous to run away from her, but it was necessary. And he was
+      equally clear now that for him there must be no idea of any pulpit, of any
+      sustained mission. He was a man of intellectual moods; only at times, he
+      realized, had he the inspiration of truth; upon such uncertain snatches
+      and glimpses he must live; to make his life a ministry would be to face
+      phases when he would simply be &ldquo;carrying on,&rdquo; with his mind blank and his
+      faith asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His thought spread out from this perennial decision to more general things
+      again. Had God any need of organized priests at all? Wasn't that just what
+      had been the matter with religion for the last three thousand years?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His vision and his sense of access to God had given a new courage to his
+      mind; in these moods of enlightenment he could see the world as a
+      comprehensible ball, he could see history as an understandable drama. He
+      had always been on the verge of realizing before, he realized now, the two
+      entirely different and antagonistic strands that interweave in the twisted
+      rope of contemporary religion; the old strand of the priest, the
+      fetishistic element of the blood sacrifice and the obscene rite, the
+      element of ritual and tradition, of the cult, the caste, the consecrated
+      tribe; and interwoven with this so closely as to be scarcely separable in
+      any existing religion was the new strand, the religion of the prophets,
+      the unidolatrous universal worship of the one true God. Priest religion is
+      the antithesis to prophet religion. He saw that the founders of all the
+      great existing religions of the world had been like himself&mdash;only
+      that he was a weak and commonplace man with no creative force, and they
+      had been great men of enormous initiative&mdash;men reaching out, and
+      never with a complete definition, from the old kind of religion to the
+      new. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus, whom the priests killed when Pilate would
+      have spared him, Mohammed, Buddha, had this much in common that they had
+      sought to lead men from temple worship, idol worship, from rites and
+      ceremonies and the rule of priests, from anniversaryism and
+      sacramentalism, into a direct and simple relation to the simplicity of
+      God. Religious progress had always been liberation and simplification. But
+      none of these efforts had got altogether clear. The organizing temper in
+      men, the disposition to dogmatic theorizing, the distrust of the
+      discretion of the young by the wisdom of age, the fear of indiscipline
+      which is so just in warfare and so foolish in education, the tremendous
+      power of the propitiatory tradition, had always caught and crippled every
+      new gospel before it had run a score of years. Jesus for example gave man
+      neither a theology nor a church organization; His sacrament was an
+      innocent feast of memorial; but the fearful, limited, imitative men he
+      left to carry on his work speedily restored all these three abominations
+      of the antiquated religion, theology, priest, and sacrifice. Jesus indeed,
+      caught into identification with the ancient victim of the harvest
+      sacrifice and turned from a plain teacher into a horrible blood bath and a
+      mock cannibal meal, was surely the supreme feat of the ironies of
+      chance....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is curious how I drift back to Jesus,&rdquo; said Scrope. &ldquo;I have never seen
+      how much truth and good there was in his teaching until I broke away from
+      Christianity and began to see him plain. If I go on as I am going, I shall
+      end a Nazarene....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought on. He had a feeling of temerity, but then it seemed as if God
+      within him bade him be of good courage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Already in a glow of inspiration he had said practically as much as he was
+      now thinking in his confirmation address, but now he realized completely
+      what it was he had then said. There could be no priests, no specialized
+      ministers of the one true God, because every man to the utmost measure of
+      his capacity was bound to be God's priest and minister. Many things one
+      may leave to specialists: surgery, detailed administration, chemistry, for
+      example; but it is for every man to think his own philosophy and think out
+      his own religion. One man may tell another, but no man may take charge of
+      another. A man may avail himself of electrician or gardener or what not,
+      but he must stand directly before God; he may suffer neither priest nor
+      king. These other things are incidental, but God, the kingdom of God, is
+      what he is for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good,&rdquo; he said, checking his reasoning. &ldquo;So I must bear witness to God&mdash;but
+      neither as priest nor pastor. I must write and talk about him as I can. No
+      reason why I should not live by such writing and talking if it does not
+      hamper my message to do so. But there must be no high place, no ordered
+      congregation. I begin to see my way....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The evening was growing dark and chill about him now, the sky was barred
+      with deep bluish purple bands drawn across a chilly brightness that had
+      already forgotten the sun, the trees were black and dim, but his
+      understanding of his place and duty was growing very definite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And this duty to bear witness to God's kingdom and serve it is so plain
+      that I must not deflect my witness even by a little, though to do so means
+      comfort and security for my wife and children. God comes first....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They must not come between God and me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there is more in it than that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had come round at last through the long clearing-up of his mind, to his
+      fundamental problem again. He sat darkly reluctant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must not play priest or providence to them,&rdquo; he admitted at last. &ldquo;I
+      must not even stand between God and them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw now what he had been doing; it had been the flaw in his faith that
+      he would not trust his family to God. And he saw too that this distrust
+      has been the flaw in the faith of all religious systems hitherto....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (13)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this strange voyage of the spirit which was now drawing to its end, in
+      which Scrope had travelled from the confused, unanalyzed formulas and
+      assumptions and implications of his rectory upbringing to his present
+      stark and simple realization of God, he had at times made some remarkable
+      self-identifications. He was naturally much given to analogy; every train
+      of thought in his mind set up induced parallel currents. He had likened
+      himself to the Anglican church, to the whole Christian body, as, for
+      example, in his imagined second conversation with the angel of God. But
+      now he found himself associating himself with a still more far-reaching
+      section of mankind. This excess of solicitude was traceable perhaps in
+      nearly every one in all the past of mankind who had ever had the vision of
+      God. An excessive solicitude to shield those others from one's own trials
+      and hardships, to preserve the exact quality of the revelation, for
+      example, had been the fruitful cause of crippling errors, spiritual
+      tyrannies, dogmatisms, dissensions, and futilities. &ldquo;Suffer little
+      children to come unto me&rdquo;; the text came into his head with an effect of
+      contribution. The parent in us all flares out at the thought of the
+      younger and weaker minds; we hide difficulties, seek to spare them from
+      the fires that temper the spirit, the sharp edge of the truth that shapes
+      the soul. Christian is always trying to have a carriage sent back from the
+      Celestial City for his family. Why, we ask, should they flounder
+      dangerously in the morasses that we escaped, or wander in the forest in
+      which we lost ourselves? Catch these souls young, therefore, save them
+      before they know they exist, kidnap them to heaven; vaccinate them with a
+      catechism they may never understand, lull them into comfort and routine.
+      Instinct plays us false here as it plays the savage mother false when she
+      snatches her fevered child from the doctor's hands. The last act of faith
+      is to trust those we love to God....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hitherto he had seen the great nets of theological overstatement and dogma
+      that kept mankind from God as if they were the work of purely evil things
+      in man, of pride, of self-assertion, of a desire to possess and dominate
+      the minds and souls of others. It was only now that he saw how large a
+      share in the obstruction of God's Kingdom had been played by the love of
+      the elder and the parent, by the carefulness, the fussy care, of good men
+      and women. He had wandered in wildernesses of unbelief, in dangerous
+      places of doubt and questioning, but he had left his wife and children
+      safe and secure in the self-satisfaction of orthodoxy. To none of them
+      except to Eleanor had he ever talked with any freedom of his new
+      apprehensions of religious reality. And that had been at Eleanor's
+      initiative. There was, he saw now, something of insolence and something of
+      treachery in this concealment. His ruling disposition throughout the
+      crisis had been to force comfort and worldly well-being upon all those
+      dependants even at the price of his own spiritual integrity. In no way had
+      he consulted them upon the bargain.... While we have pottered, each for
+      the little good of his own family, each for the lessons and clothes and
+      leisure of his own children, assenting to this injustice, conforming to
+      that dishonest custom, being myopically benevolent and fundamentally
+      treacherous, our accumulated folly has achieved this catastrophe. It is
+      not so much human wickedness as human weakness that has permitted the
+      youth of the world to go through this hell of blood and mud and fire. The
+      way to the kingdom of God is the only way to the true safety, the true
+      wellbeing of the children of men....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It wasn't fair to them. But now he saw how unfair it was to them in a
+      light that has only shone plainly upon European life since the great
+      interlude of the armed peace came to an end in August, 1914. Until that
+      time it had been the fashion to ignore death and evade poverty and
+      necessity for the young. We can shield our young no longer, death has
+      broken through our precautions and tender evasions&mdash;and his eyes went
+      eastward into the twilight that had swallowed up his daughter and her
+      lover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tumbled darkling sky, monstrous masses of frowning blue, with icy gaps
+      of cold light, was like the great confusions of the war. All our youth has
+      had to go into that terrible and destructive chaos&mdash;because of the
+      kings and churches and nationalities sturdier-souled men would have set
+      aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everything was sharp and clear in his mind now. Eleanor after all had
+      brought him his solution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat quite still for a little while, and then stood up and turned
+      northward towards Notting Hill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The keepers were closing Kensington Gardens, and he would have to skirt
+      the Park to Victoria Gate and go home by the Bayswater Road....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (14)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he walked he rearranged in his mind this long-overdue apology for his
+      faith that he was presently to make to his family. There was no one to
+      interrupt him and nothing to embarrass him, and so he was able to set out
+      everything very clearly and convincingly. There was perhaps a disposition
+      to digress into rather voluminous subordinate explanations, on such
+      themes, for instance, as sacramentalism, whereon he found himself
+      summarizing Frazer's Golden Bough, which the Chasters' controversy had
+      first obliged him to read, and upon the irrelevance of the question of
+      immortality to the process of salvation. But the reality of his
+      eclaircissement was very different from anything he prepared in these
+      anticipations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tea had been finished and put away, and the family was disposed about the
+      dining-room engaged in various evening occupations; Phoebe sat at the
+      table working at some mathematical problem, Clementina was reading with
+      her chin on her fist and a frown on her brow; Lady Ella, Miriam and Daphne
+      were busy making soft washing cloths for the wounded; Lady Ella had
+      brought home the demand for them from the Red Cross centre in Burlington
+      House. The family was all downstairs in the dining-room because the
+      evening was chilly, and there were no fires upstairs yet in the
+      drawing-room. He came into the room and exchanged greetings with Lady
+      Ella. Then he stood for a time surveying his children. Phoebe, he noted,
+      was a little flushed; she put passion into her work; on the whole she was
+      more like Eleanor than any other of them. Miriam knitted with a steady
+      skill. Clementina's face too expressed a tussle. He took up one of the
+      rough-knit washing-cloths upon the side-table, and asked how many could be
+      made in an hour. Then he asked some idle obvious question about the fire
+      upstairs. Clementina made an involuntary movement; he was disturbing her.
+      He hovered for a moment longer. He wanted to catch his wife's eye and
+      speak to her first. She looked up, but before he could convey his wish for
+      a private conference with her, she smiled at him and then bent over her
+      work again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went into the back study and lit his gas fire. Hitherto he had always
+      made a considerable explosion when he did so, but this time by taking
+      thought and lighting his match before he turned on the gas he did it with
+      only a gentle thud. Then he lit his reading-lamp and pulled down the blind&mdash;pausing
+      for a time to look at the lit dressmaker's opposite. Then he sat down
+      thoughtfully before the fire. Presently Ella would come in and he would
+      talk to her. He waited a long time, thinking only weakly and
+      inconsecutively, and then he became restless. Should he call her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he wanted their talk to begin in a natural-seeming way. He did not
+      want the portentousness of &ldquo;wanting to speak&rdquo; to her and calling her out
+      to him. He got up at last and went back into the other room. Clementina
+      had gone upstairs, and the book she had been reading was lying closed on
+      the sideboard. He saw it was one of Chasters' books, he took it up, it was
+      &ldquo;The Core of Truth in Christianity,&rdquo; and he felt an irrational shock at
+      the idea of Clementina reading it. In spite of his own immense changes of
+      opinion he had still to revise his conception of the polemical Chasters as
+      an evil influence in religion. He fidgeted past his wife to the mantel in
+      search of an imaginary mislaid pencil. Clementina came down with some
+      bandage linen she was cutting out. He hung over his wife in a way that he
+      felt must convey his desire for a conversation. Then he picked up
+      Chasters' book again. &ldquo;Does any one want this?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not if I may have it again,&rdquo; consented Clementina.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took it back with him and began to read again those familiar
+      controversial pages. He read for the best part of an hour with his knees
+      drying until they smoked over the gas. What curious stuff it was! How it
+      wrangled! Was Chasters a religious man? Why did he write these books? Had
+      he really a passion for truth or only a Swift-like hatred of
+      weakly-thinking people? None of this stuff in his books was really wrong,
+      provided it was religious-spirited. Much of it had been indeed
+      destructively illuminating to its reader. It let daylight through all
+      sorts of walls. Indeed, the more one read the more vividly true its
+      acid-bit lines became.... And yet, and yet, there was something hateful in
+      the man's tone. Scrope held the book and thought. He had seen Chasters
+      once or twice. Chasters had the sort of face, the sort of voice, the sort
+      of bearing that made one think of his possibly saying upon occasion,
+      rudely and rejoicing, &ldquo;More fool you!&rdquo; Nevertheless Scrope perceived now
+      with an effort of discovery that it was from Chasters that he had taken
+      all the leading ideas of the new faith that was in him. Here was the stuff
+      of it. He had forgotten how much of it was here. During those months of
+      worried study while the threat of a Chasters prosecution hung over him his
+      mind had assimilated almost unknowingly every assimilable element of the
+      Chasters doctrine; he had either assimilated and transmuted it by the
+      alchemy of his own temperament, or he had reacted obviously and filled in
+      Chasters' gaps and pauses. Chasters could beat a road to the Holy of
+      Holies, and shy at entering it. But in spite of all the man's roughness,
+      in spite of a curious flavour of baseness and malice about him, the spirit
+      of truth had spoken through him. God has a use for harsh ministers. In one
+      man God lights the heart, in another the reason becomes a consuming fire.
+      God takes his own where he finds it. He does not limit himself to nice
+      people. In these matters of evidence and argument, in his contempt for
+      amiable, demoralizing compromise, Chasters served God as Scrope could
+      never hope to serve him. Scrope's new faith had perhaps been altogether
+      impossible if the Chasters controversy had not ploughed his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time Scrope dwelt upon this remarkable realization. Then as he
+      turned over the pages his eyes rested on a passage of uncivil and
+      ungenerous sarcasm. Against old Likeman of all people!...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What did a girl like Clementina make of all this? How had she got the
+      book? From Eleanor? The stuff had not hurt Eleanor. Eleanor had been able
+      to take the good that Chasters taught, and reject the evil of his
+      spirit....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of Eleanor, gallantly working out her own salvation. The world
+      was moving fast to a phase of great freedom&mdash;for the young and the
+      bold.... He liked that boy....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His thoughts came back with a start to his wife. The evening was slipping
+      by and he had momentous things to say to her. He went and just opened the
+      door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ella!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you want me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Presently.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She put a liberal interpretation upon that &ldquo;presently,&rdquo; so that after what
+      seemed to him a long interval he had to call again, &ldquo;Ella!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just a minute,&rdquo; she answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (15)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella was still, so to speak, a little in the other room when she came
+      to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shut that door, please,&rdquo; he said, and felt the request had just that
+      flavour of portentousness he wished to avoid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to talk to you&mdash;about some things. I've done something
+      rather serious to-day. I've made an important decision.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her face became anxious. &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; he said, leaning upon the mantelshelf and looking down at the
+      gas flames, &ldquo;I've never thought that we should all have to live in this
+      crowded house for long.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All!&rdquo; she interrupted in a voice that made him look up sharply. &ldquo;You're
+      not going away, Ted?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no. But I hoped we should all be going away in a little time. It
+      isn't so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never quite understood why you hoped that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was plain enough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I should have found something to do that would have enabled us
+      to live in better style. I'd had a plan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What plan?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's fallen through.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what plan was it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I should be able to set up a sort of broad church chapel. I had
+      a promise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice was rich with indignation. &ldquo;And she has betrayed you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I have betrayed her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella's face showed them still at cross purposes. He looked down again
+      and frowned. &ldquo;I can't do that chapel business,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I've had to let
+      her down. I've got to let you all down. There's no help for it. It isn't
+      the way. I can't have anything to do with Lady Sunderbund and her chapel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; Lady Ella was still perplexed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's too great a sacrifice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of us?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, of myself. I can't get into her pulpit and do as she wants and keep
+      my conscience. It's been a horrible riddle for me. It means plunging into
+      all this poverty for good. But I can't work with her, Ella. She's
+      impossible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean&mdash;you're going to break with Lady Sunderbund?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, Teddy!&rdquo;&mdash;she was a woman groping for flight amidst intolerable
+      perplexities&mdash;&ldquo;why did you ever leave the church?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I have ceased to believe&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But had it nothing to do with Lady Sunderbund?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared at her in astonishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it means breaking with that woman,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean,&rdquo; he said, beginning for the first time to comprehend her, &ldquo;that
+      you don't mind the poverty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poverty!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;I cared for nothing but the disgrace.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Disgrace?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, never mind, Ted! If it isn't true, if I've been dreaming....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Instead of a woman stunned by a life sentence of poverty, he saw his wife
+      rejoicing as if she had heard good news.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their minds were held for a minute by the sound of some one knocking at
+      the house door; one of the girls opened the door, there was a brief hubbub
+      in the passage and then they heard a cry of &ldquo;Eleanor!&rdquo; through the folding
+      doors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's Eleanor,&rdquo; he said, realizing he had told his wife nothing of the
+      encounter in Hyde Park.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They heard Eleanor's clear voice: &ldquo;Where's Mummy? Or Daddy?&rdquo; and then:
+      &ldquo;Can't stay now, dears. Where's Mummy or Daddy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought to have told you,&rdquo; said Scrope quickly. &ldquo;I met Eleanor in the
+      Park. By accident. She's come up unexpectedly. To meet a boy going to the
+      front. Quite a nice boy. Son of Riverton the doctor. The parting had made
+      them understand one another. It's all right, Ella. It's a little
+      irregular, but I'd stake my life on the boy. She's very lucky.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Eleanor appeared through the folding doors. She came to business at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I promised you I'd come back to supper here, Daddy,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;But I
+      don't want to have supper here. I want to stay out late.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She saw her mother look perplexed. &ldquo;Hasn't Daddy told you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But where is young Riverton?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's outside.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Eleanor became aware of a broad chink in the folding doors that was making
+      the dining-room an auditorium for their dialogue. She shut them deftly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have told Mummy,&rdquo; Scrope explained. &ldquo;Bring him in to supper. We ought
+      to see him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Eleanor hesitated. She indicated her sisters beyond the folding doors.
+      &ldquo;They'll all be watching us, Mummy,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;We'd be uncomfortable. And
+      besides&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you can't go out and dine with him alone!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Mummy! It's our only chance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Customs are changing,&rdquo; said Scrope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But can they?&rdquo; asked Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see why not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mother was still doubtful, but she was in no mood to cross her husband
+      that night. &ldquo;It's an exceptional occasion,&rdquo; said Scrope, and Eleanor knew
+      her point was won. She became radiant. &ldquo;I can be late?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope handed her his latch-key without a word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You dear kind things,&rdquo; she said, and went to the door. Then turned and
+      came back and kissed her father. Then she kissed her mother. &ldquo;It is so
+      kind of you,&rdquo; she said, and was gone. They listened to her passage through
+      a storm of questions in the dining-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three months ago that would have shocked me,&rdquo; said Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't seen the boy,&rdquo; said Scrope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the appearances!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren't we rather breaking with appearances?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he goes to-morrow&mdash;perhaps to get killed,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;A lad like
+      a schoolboy. A young thing. Because of the political foolery that we
+      priests and teachers have suffered in the place of the Kingdom of God,
+      because we have allowed the religion of Europe to become a lie; because no
+      man spoke the word of God. You see&mdash;when I see that&mdash;see those
+      two, those children of one-and-twenty, wrenched by tragedy, beginning with
+      a parting.... It's like a knife slashing at all our appearances and
+      discretions.... Think of our lovemaking....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The front door banged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had some idea of resuming their talk. But his was a scattered mind now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a quarter to eight,&rdquo; he said as if in explanation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must see to the supper,&rdquo; said Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (16)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an air of tension at supper as though the whole family felt that
+      momentous words impended. But Phoebe had emerged victorious from her
+      mathematical struggle, and she seemed to eat with better appetite than she
+      had shown for some time. It was a cold meat supper; Lady Ella had found it
+      impossible to keep up the regular practice of a cooked dinner in the
+      evening, and now it was only on Thursdays that the Scropes, to preserve
+      their social tradition, dressed and dined; the rest of the week they
+      supped. Lady Ella never talked very much at supper; this evening was no
+      exception. Clementina talked of London University and Bedford College; she
+      had been making enquiries; Daphne described some of the mistresses at her
+      new school. The feeling that something was expected had got upon Scrope's
+      nerves. He talked a little in a flat and obvious way, and lapsed into
+      thoughtful silences. While supper was being cleared away he went back into
+      his study.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thence he returned to the dining-room hearthrug as his family resumed
+      their various occupations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to speak in a casual conversational tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to tell you all,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;of something that has happened
+      to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He waited. Phoebe had begun to figure at a fresh sheet of computations.
+      Miriam bent her head closer over her work, as though she winced at what
+      was coming. Daphne and Clementina looked at one another. Their eyes said
+      &ldquo;Eleanor!&rdquo; But he was too full of his own intention to read that glance.
+      Only his wife regarded him attentively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It concerns you all,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at Phoebe. He saw Lady Ella's hand go out and touch the girl's
+      hand gently to make her desist. Phoebe obeyed, with a little sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to tell you that to-day I refused an income that would certainly
+      have exceeded fifteen hundred pounds a year.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Clementina looked up now. This was not what she expected. Her expression
+      conveyed protesting enquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want you all to understand why I did that and why we are in the
+      position we are in, and what lies before us. I want you to know what has
+      been going on in my mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked down at the hearthrug, and tried to throw off a memory of his
+      Princhester classes for young women, that oppressed him. His manner he
+      forced to a more familiar note. He stuck his hands into his trouser
+      pockets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know, my dears, I had to give up the church. I just simply didn't
+      believe any more in orthodox Church teaching. And I feel I've never
+      explained that properly to you. Not at all clearly. I want to explain that
+      now. It's a queer thing, I know, for me to say to you, but I want you to
+      understand that I am a religious man. I believe that God matters more than
+      wealth or comfort or position or the respect of men, that he also matters
+      more than your comfort and prosperity. God knows I have cared for your
+      comfort and prosperity. I don't want you to think that in all these
+      changes we have been through lately, I haven't been aware of all the
+      discomfort into which you have come&mdash;the relative discomfort.
+      Compared with Princhester this is dark and crowded and poverty-stricken. I
+      have never felt crowded before, but in this house I know you are horribly
+      crowded. It is a house that seems almost contrived for small discomforts.
+      This narrow passage outside; the incessant going up and down stairs. And
+      there are other things. There is the blankness of our London Sundays. What
+      is the good of pretending? They are desolating. There's the impossibility
+      too of getting good servants to come into our dug-out kitchen. I'm not
+      blind to all these sordid consequences. But all the same, God has to be
+      served first. I had to come to this. I felt I could not serve God any
+      longer as a bishop in the established church, because I did not believe
+      that the established church was serving God. I struggled against that
+      conviction&mdash;and I struggled against it largely for your sakes. But I
+      had to obey my conviction.... I haven't talked to you about these things
+      as much as I should have done, but partly at least that is due to the fact
+      that my own mind has been changing and reconsidering, going forward and
+      going back, and in that fluid state it didn't seem fair to tell you things
+      that I might presently find mistaken. But now I begin to feel that I have
+      really thought out things, and that they are definite enough to tell
+      you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused and resumed. &ldquo;A number of things have helped to change the
+      opinions in which I grew up and in which you have grown up. There were
+      worries at Princhester; I didn't let you know much about them, but there
+      were. There was something harsh and cruel in that atmosphere. I saw for
+      the first time&mdash;it's a lesson I'm still only learning&mdash;how harsh
+      and greedy rich people and employing people are to poor people and working
+      people, and how ineffective our church was to make things better. That
+      struck me. There were religious disputes in the diocese too, and they
+      shook me. I thought my faith was built on a rock, and I found it was built
+      on sand. It was slipping and sliding long before the war. But the war
+      brought it down. Before the war such a lot of things in England and Europe
+      seemed like a comedy or a farce, a bad joke that one tolerated. One tried
+      half consciously, half avoiding the knowledge of what one was doing, to
+      keep one's own little circle and life civilized. The war shook all those
+      ideas of isolation, all that sort of evasion, down. The world is the
+      rightful kingdom of God; we had left its affairs to kings and emperors and
+      suchlike impostors, to priests and profit-seekers and greedy men. We were
+      genteel condoners. The war has ended that. It thrusts into all our lives.
+      It brings death so close&mdash;A fortnight ago twenty-seven people were
+      killed and injured within a mile of this by Zeppelin bombs.... Every one
+      loses some one.... Because through all that time men like myself were
+      going through our priestly mummeries, abasing ourselves to kings and
+      politicians, when we ought to have been crying out: 'No! No! There is no
+      righteousness in the world, there is no right government, except it be the
+      kingdom of God.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused and looked at them. They were all listening to him now. But he
+      was still haunted by a dread of preaching in his own family. He dropped to
+      the conversational note again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see what I had in mind. I saw I must come out of this, and preach the
+      kingdom of God. That was my idea. I don't want to force it upon you, but I
+      want you to understand why I acted as I did. But let me come to the
+      particular thing that has happened to-day. I did not think when I made my
+      final decision to leave the church that it meant such poverty as this we
+      are living in&mdash;permanently. That is what I want to make clear to you.
+      I thought there would be a temporary dip into dinginess, but that was all.
+      There was a plan; at the time it seemed a right and reasonable plan; for
+      setting up a chapel in London, a very plain and simple undenominational
+      chapel, for the simple preaching of the world kingdom of God. There was
+      some one who seemed prepared to meet all the immediate demands for such a
+      chapel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was it Lady Sunderbund?&rdquo; asked Clementina.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope was pulled up abruptly. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It seemed at first a quite
+      hopeful project.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'd have hated that,&rdquo; said Clementina, with a glance as if for assent,
+      at her mother. &ldquo;We should all have hated that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anyhow it has fallen through.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We don't mind that,&rdquo; said Clementina, and Daphne echoed her words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see that there is any necessity to import this note of&mdash;hostility
+      to Lady Sunderbund into this matter.&rdquo; He addressed himself rather more
+      definitely to Lady Ella. &ldquo;She's a woman of a very extraordinary character,
+      highly emotional, energetic, generous to an extraordinary extent....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Daphne made a little noise like a comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A faint acerbity in her father's voice responded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anyhow you make a mistake if you think that the personality of Lady
+      Sunderbund has very much to do with this thing now. Her quality may have
+      brought out certain aspects of the situation rather more sharply than they
+      might have been brought out under other circumstances, but if this chapel
+      enterprise had been suggested by quite a different sort of person, by a
+      man, or by a committee, in the end I think I should have come to the same
+      conclusion. Leave Lady Sunderbund out. Any chapel was impossible. It is
+      just this specialization that has been the trouble with religion. It is
+      just this tendency to make it the business of a special sort of man, in a
+      special sort of building, on a special day&mdash;Every man, every
+      building, every day belongs equally to God. That is my conviction. I think
+      that the only possible existing sort of religions meeting is something
+      after the fashion of the Quaker meeting. In that there is no professional
+      religious man at all; not a trace of the sacrifices to the ancient
+      gods.... And no room for a professional religions man....&rdquo; He felt his
+      argument did a little escape him. He snatched, &ldquo;That is what I want to
+      make clear to you. God is not a speciality; he is a universal interest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped. Both Daphne and Clementina seemed disposed to say something
+      and did not say anything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miriam was the first to speak. &ldquo;Daddy,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I know I'm stupid. But
+      are we still Christians?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want you to think for yourselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I mean,&rdquo; said Miriam, &ldquo;are we&mdash;something like Quakers&mdash;a
+      sort of very broad Christians?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are what you choose to be. If you want to keep in the church, then
+      you must keep in the church. If you feel that the Christian doctrine is
+      alive, then it is alive so far as you are concerned.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the creeds?&rdquo; asked Clementina.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook his head. &ldquo;So far as Christianity is defined by its creeds, I am
+      not a Christian. If we are going to call any sort of religious feeling
+      that has a respect for Jesus, Christianity, then no doubt I am a
+      Christian. But so was Mohammed at that rate. Let me tell you what I
+      believe. I believe in God, I believe in the immediate presence of God in
+      every human life, I believe that our lives have to serve the Kingdom of
+      God....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That practically is what Mr. Chasters calls 'The Core of Truth in
+      Christianity.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been reading him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eleanor lent me the book. But Mr. Chasters keeps his living.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not Chasters,&rdquo; said Scrope stiffly, and then relenting: &ldquo;What he
+      does may be right for him. But I could not do as he does.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella had said no word for some time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would be ashamed,&rdquo; she said quietly, &ldquo;if you had not done as you have
+      done. I don't mind&mdash;The girls don't mind&mdash;all this.... Not when
+      we understand&mdash;as we do now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the limit of her eloquence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not now that we understand, Daddy,&rdquo; said Clementina, and a faint flavour
+      of Lady Sunderbund seemed to pass and vanish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a queer little pause. He stood rather distressed and perplexed,
+      because the talk had not gone quite as he had intended it to go. It had
+      deteriorated towards personal issues. Phoebe broke the awkwardness by
+      jumping up and coming to her father. &ldquo;Dear Daddy,&rdquo; she said, and kissed
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We didn't understand properly,&rdquo; said Clementina, in the tone of one who
+      explains away much&mdash;that had never been spoken....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Daddy,&rdquo; said Miriam with an inspiration, &ldquo;may I play something to you
+      presently?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the fire!&rdquo; interjected Lady Ella, disposing of that idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want you to know, all of you, the faith I have,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Daphne had remained seated at the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are we never to go to church again?&rdquo; she asked, as if at a loss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (17)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope went back into his little study. He felt shy and awkward with his
+      daughters now. He felt it would be difficult to get back to usualness with
+      them. To-night it would be impossible. To-morrow he must come down to
+      breakfast as though their talk had never occurred.... In his rehearsal of
+      this deliverance during his walk home he had spoken much more plainly of
+      his sense of the coming of God to rule the world and end the long age of
+      the warring nations and competing traders, and he had intended to speak
+      with equal plainness of the passionate subordination of the individual
+      life to this great common purpose of God and man, an aspect he had
+      scarcely mentioned at all. But in that little room, in the presence of
+      those dear familiar people, those great horizons of life had vanished. The
+      room with its folding doors had fixed the scale. The wallpaper had
+      smothered the Kingdom of God; he had been, he felt, domestic; it had been
+      an after-supper talk. He had been put out, too, by the mention of Lady
+      Sunderbund and the case of Chasters....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his study he consoled himself for this diminution of his intention. It
+      had taken him five years, he reflected, to get to his present real sense
+      of God's presence and to his personal subordination to God's purpose. It
+      had been a little absurd, he perceived, to expect these girls to leap at
+      once to a complete understanding of the halting hints, the allusive
+      indications of the thoughts that now possessed his soul. He tried like
+      some maiden speaker to recall exactly what it was he had said and what it
+      was he had forgotten to say.... This was merely a beginning, merely a
+      beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the girls had gone to bed, Lady Ella came to him and she was glowing
+      and tender; she was in love again as she had not been since the shadow had
+      first fallen between them. &ldquo;I was so glad you spoke to them,&rdquo; she said.
+      &ldquo;They had been puzzled. But they are dear loyal girls.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to tell her rather more plainly what he felt about the whole
+      question of religion in their lives, but eloquence had departed from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, Ella, life cannot get out of tragedy&mdash;and sordid tragedy&mdash;until
+      we bring about the Kingdom of God. It's no unreality that has made me come
+      out of the church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, dear. No,&rdquo; she said soothingly and reassuringly. &ldquo;With all these mere
+      boys going to the most dreadful deaths in the trenches, with death,
+      hardship and separation running amok in the world&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One has to do something,&rdquo; she agreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know, dear,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that all this year of doubt and change has been
+      a dreadful year for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was stupid of me,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;but I have been so unhappy. It's over
+      now&mdash;but I was wretched. And there was nothing I could say.... I
+      prayed.... It isn't the poverty I feared ever, but the disgrace. Now&mdash;I'm
+      happy. I'm happy again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how far do you come with me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you are still a churchwoman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I don't mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I thought always that was what hurt you most, my breach with the
+      church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Things are so different now,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her heart dissolved within her into tender possessiveness. There came
+      flooding into her mind the old phrases of an ancient story: &ldquo;Whither thou
+      goest I will go... thy people shall be my people and thy God my God....
+      The Lord do so to me and more also if aught but death part thee and me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Just those words would Lady Ella have said to her husband now, but she was
+      capable of no such rhetoric.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whither thou goest,&rdquo; she whispered almost inaudibly, and she could get no
+      further. &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (18)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At two o'clock the next morning Scrope was still up. He was sitting over
+      the snoring gas fire in his study. He did not want to go to bed. His mind
+      was too excited, he knew, for any hope of sleep. In the last twelve hours,
+      since he had gone out across the park to his momentous talk with Lady
+      Sunderbund, it seemed to him that his life had passed through its cardinal
+      crisis and come to its crown and decision. The spiritual voyage that had
+      begun five years ago amidst a stormy succession of theological nightmares
+      had reached harbour at last. He was established now in the sure conviction
+      of God's reality, and of his advent to unify the lives of men and to save
+      mankind. Some unobserved process in his mind had perfected that
+      conviction, behind the cloudy veil of his vacillations and moods. Surely
+      that work was finished now, and the day's experience had drawn the veil
+      and discovered God established for ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He contrasted this simple and overruling knowledge of God as the supreme
+      fact in a practical world with that vague and ineffective subject for
+      sentiment who had been the &ldquo;God&rdquo; of his Anglican days. Some theologian
+      once spoke of God as &ldquo;the friend behind phenomena&rdquo;; that Anglican deity
+      had been rather a vague flummery behind court and society, wealth,
+      &ldquo;respectability,&rdquo; and the comfortable life. And even while he had lived in
+      lipservice to that complaisant compromise, this true God had been here,
+      this God he now certainly professed, waiting for his allegiance, waiting
+      to take up the kingship of this distraught and bloodstained earth. The
+      finding of God is but the stripping of bandages from the eyes. Seek and ye
+      shall find....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He whispered four words very softly: &ldquo;The Kingdom of God!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was quite sure he had that now, quite sure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Kingdom of God!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That now was the form into which all his life must fall. He recalled his
+      vision of the silver sphere and of ten thousand diverse minds about the
+      world all making their ways to the same one conclusion. Here at last was a
+      king and emperor for mankind for whom one need have neither contempt nor
+      resentment; here was an aim for which man might forge the steel and wield
+      the scalpel, write and paint and till and teach. Upon this conception he
+      must model all his life. Upon this basis he must found friendships and
+      co-operations. All the great religions, Christianity, Islam, in the days
+      of their power and honesty, had proclaimed the advent of this kingdom of
+      God. It had been their common inspiration. A religion surrenders when it
+      abandons the promise of its Millennium. He had recovered that ancient and
+      immortal hope. All men must achieve it, and with their achievement the
+      rule of God begins. He muttered his faith. It made it more definite to put
+      it into words and utter it. &ldquo;It comes. It surely comes. To-morrow I begin.
+      I will do no work that goes not Godward. Always now it shall be the truth
+      as near as I can put it. Always now it shall be the service of the
+      commonweal as well as I can do it. I will live for the ending of all false
+      kingship and priestcraft, for the eternal growth of the spirit of man....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was, he knew clearly, only one common soldier in a great army that was
+      finding its way to enlistment round and about the earth. He was not alone.
+      While the kings of this world fought for dominion these others gathered
+      and found themselves and one another, these others of the faith that grows
+      plain, these men who have resolved to end the bloodstained chronicles of
+      the Dynasts and the miseries of a world that trades in life, for ever.
+      They were many men, speaking divers tongues. He was but one who obeyed the
+      worldwide impulse. He could smile at the artless vanity that had blinded
+      him to the import of his earlier visions, that had made him imagine
+      himself a sole discoverer, a new Prophet, that had brought him so near to
+      founding a new sect. Every soldier in the new host was a recruiting
+      sergeant according to his opportunity.... And none was leader. Only God
+      was leader....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The achievement of the Kingdom of God;&rdquo; this was his calling. Henceforth
+      this was his business in life....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time he indulged in vague dreams of that kingdom of God on earth of
+      which he would be one of the makers; it was a dream of a shadowy splendour
+      of cities, of great scientific achievements, of a universal beauty, of
+      beautiful people living in the light of God, of a splendid adventure,
+      thrusting out at last among the stars. But neither his natural bent nor
+      his mental training inclined him to mechanical or administrative
+      explicitness. Much more was his dream a vision of men inwardly ennobled
+      and united in spirit. He saw history growing reasonable and life visibly
+      noble as mankind realized the divine aim. All the outward peace and order,
+      the joy of physical existence finely conceived, the mounting power and
+      widening aim were but the expression and verification of the growth of God
+      within. Then we would bear children for finer ends than the blood and mud
+      of battlefields. Life would tower up like a great flame. By faith we
+      reached forward to that. The vision grew more splendid as it grew more
+      metaphorical. And the price one paid for that; one gave sham dignities,
+      false honour, a Levitical righteousness, immediate peace, one bartered
+      kings and churches for God.... He looked at the mean, poverty-struck room,
+      he marked the dinginess and tawdriness of its detail and all the sordid
+      evidences of ungracious bargaining and grudging service in its
+      appointments. For all his life now he would have to live in such rooms. He
+      who had been one of the lucky ones.... Well, men were living in dug-outs
+      and dying gaily in muddy trenches, they had given limbs and lives, eyes
+      and the joy of movement, prosperity and pride, for a smaller cause and a
+      feebler assurance than this that he had found....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (19)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently his thoughts were brought back to his family by the sounds of
+      Eleanor's return. He heard her key in the outer door; he heard her move
+      about in the hall and then slip lightly up to bed. He did not go out to
+      speak to her, and she did not note the light under his door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would talk to her later when this discovery of her own emotions no
+      longer dominated her mind. He recalled her departing figure and how she
+      had walked, touching and looking up to her young mate, and he a little
+      leaning to her....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God bless them and save them,&rdquo; he said....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of her sisters. They had said but little to his clumsy
+      explanations. He thought of the years and experience that they must needs
+      pass through before they could think the fulness of his present thoughts,
+      and so he tempered his disappointment. They were a gallant group, he felt.
+      He had to thank Ella and good fortune that so they were. There was
+      Clementina with her odd quick combatant sharpness, a harder being than
+      Eleanor, but nevertheless a fine-spirited and even more independent. There
+      was Miriam, indefatigably kind. Phoebe too had a real passion of the
+      intellect and Daphne an innate disposition to service. But it was strange
+      how they had taken his proclamation of a conclusive breach with the church
+      as though it was a command they must, at least outwardly, obey. He had
+      expected them to be more deeply shocked; he had thought he would have to
+      argue against objections and convert them to his views. Their acquiescence
+      was strange. They were content he should think all this great issue out
+      and give his results to them. And his wife, well as he knew her, had
+      surprised him. He thought of her words: &ldquo;Whither thou goest&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was dissatisfied with this unconditional agreement. Why could not his
+      wife meet God as he had met God? Why must Miriam put the fantastic
+      question&mdash;as though it was not for her to decide: &ldquo;Are we still
+      Christians?&rdquo; And pursuing this thought, why couldn't Lady Sunderbund set
+      up in religion for herself without going about the world seeking for a
+      priest and prophet. Were women Undines who must get their souls from
+      mortal men? And who was it tempted men to set themselves up as priests? It
+      was the wife, the disciple, the lover, who was the last, the most fatal
+      pitfall on the way to God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to pray, still sitting as he prayed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh God!&rdquo; he prayed. &ldquo;Thou who has shown thyself to me, let me never
+      forget thee again. Save me from forgetfulness. And show thyself to those I
+      love; show thyself to all mankind. Use me, O God, use me; but keep my soul
+      alive. Save me from the presumption of the trusted servant; save me from
+      the vanity of authority....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And let thy light shine upon all those who are so dear to me.... Save
+      them from me. Take their dear loyalty....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused. A flushed, childishly miserable face that stared indignantly
+      through glittering tears, rose before his eyes. He forgot that he had been
+      addressing God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I help you, you silly thing?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I would give my own soul
+      to know that God had given his peace to you. I could not do as you wished.
+      And I have hurt you!... You hurt yourself.... But all the time you would
+      have hampered me and tempted me&mdash;and wasted yourself. It was
+      impossible.... And yet you are so fine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was struck by another aspect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ella was happy&mdash;partly because Lady Sunderbund was hurt and left
+      desolated....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Both of them are still living upon nothings. Living for nothings. A
+      phantom way of living....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared blankly at the humming blue gas jets amidst the incandescent
+      asbestos for a space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make them understand,&rdquo; he pleaded, as though he spoke confidentially of
+      some desirable and reasonable thing to a friend who sat beside him. &ldquo;You
+      see it is so hard for them until they understand. It is easy enough when
+      one understands. Easy&mdash;&rdquo; He reflected for some moments&mdash;&ldquo;It is
+      as if they could not exist&mdash;except in relationship to other definite
+      people. I want them to exist&mdash;as now I exist&mdash;in relationship to
+      God. Knowing God....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But now he was talking to himself again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So far as one can know God,&rdquo; he said presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a while he remained frowning at the fire. Then he bent forward, turned
+      out the gas, arose with the air of a man who relinquishes a difficult
+      task. &ldquo;One is limited,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;All one's ideas must fall within one's
+      limitations. Faith is a sort of tour de force. A feat of the imagination.
+      For such things as we are. Naturally&mdash;naturally.... One perceives it
+      clearly only in rare moments.... That alters nothing....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h4>
+      Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:
+    </h4>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
+     KIPPS
+     MR. POLLY
+     THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
+     THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
+     ANN VERONICA
+     TONO BUNGAY
+     MARRIAGE
+     BEALBY
+     THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
+     THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
+     THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+     MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
+
+     The following fantastic and imaginative romances:
+     THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
+     THE TIME MACHINE
+     THE WONDERFUL VISIT
+     THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
+     THE SEA LADY
+     THE SLEEPER AWAKES
+     THE FOOD OF THE GODS
+     THE WAR IN THE AIR
+     THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
+     IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
+     THE WORLD SET FREE
+
+     And numerous Short Stories now collected in
+     One Volume under the title of
+     THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
+
+     A Series of books upon Social, Religious and
+     Political questions:
+     ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
+     MANKIND IN THE MAKING
+     FIRST AND LAST THINGS (RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY)
+     NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
+     A MODERN UTOPIA
+     THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
+     AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
+     WHAT IS COMING?
+     WAR AND THE FUTURE
+     GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
+
+     And two little books about children's play, called:
+     FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+  <div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1269 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+
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+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #1269 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1269)
diff --git a/old/1269-0.txt b/old/1269-0.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Soul of a Bishop, by H. G. Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Soul of a Bishop
+
+Author: H. G. Wells
+
+Release Date: February 18, 2006 [EBook #1269]
+Last Updated: March 2, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOUL OF A BISHOP ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
+
+By H. G. Wells
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+     CHAPTER THE FIRST   -  THE DREAM
+     CHAPTER THE SECOND  -  THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY
+     CHAPTER THE THIRD   -  INSOMNIA
+     CHAPTER THE FOURTH  -  THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND
+     CHAPTER THE FIFTH   -  THE FIRST VISION
+     CHAPTER THE SIXTH   -  EXEGETICAL
+     CHAPTER THE SEVENTH -  THE SECOND VISION
+     CHAPTER THE EIGHTH  -  THE NEW WORLD
+     CHAPTER THE NINTH   -  THE THIRD VISION
+
+
+“Man's true Environment is God”
+
+J. H. OLDHAM in “The Christian Gospel” (Tract of the N. M. R. and H.)
+
+
+
+
+THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST - THE DREAM
+
+(1)
+
+
+IT was a scene of bitter disputation. A hawk-nosed young man with a
+pointing finger was prominent. His face worked violently, his lips moved
+very rapidly, but what he said was inaudible.
+
+Behind him the little rufous man with the big eyes twitched at his robe
+and offered suggestions.
+
+And behind these two clustered a great multitude of heated, excited,
+swarthy faces....
+
+The emperor sat on his golden throne in the midst of the gathering,
+commanding silence by gestures, speaking inaudibly to them in a tongue
+the majority did not use, and then prevailing. They ceased their
+interruptions, and the old man, Arius, took up the debate. For a time
+all those impassioned faces were intent upon him; they listened as
+though they sought occasion, and suddenly as if by a preconcerted
+arrangement they were all thrusting their fingers into their ears and
+knitting their brows in assumed horror; some were crying aloud and
+making as if to fly. Some indeed tucked up their garments and fled. They
+spread out into a pattern. They were like the little monks who run from
+St. Jerome's lion in the picture by Carpaccio. Then one zealot rushed
+forward and smote the old man heavily upon the mouth....
+
+The hall seemed to grow vaster and vaster, the disputing, infuriated
+figures multiplied to an innumerable assembly, they drove about like
+snowflakes in a gale, they whirled in argumentative couples, they spun
+in eddies of contradiction, they made extraordinary patterns, and then
+amidst the cloudy darkness of the unfathomable dome above them there
+appeared and increased a radiant triangle in which shone an eye. The eye
+and the triangle filled the heavens, sent out flickering rays, glowed
+to a blinding incandescence, seemed to be speaking words of thunder
+that were nevertheless inaudible. It was as if that thunder filled the
+heavens, it was as if it were nothing but the beating artery in the
+sleeper's ear. The attention strained to hear and comprehend, and on the
+very verge of comprehension snapped like a fiddle-string.
+
+“Nicoea!”
+
+The word remained like a little ash after a flare.
+
+The sleeper had awakened and lay very still, oppressed by a sense of
+intellectual effort that had survived the dream in which it had arisen.
+Was it so that things had happened? The slumber-shadowed mind, moving
+obscurely, could not determine whether it was so or not. Had they indeed
+behaved in this manner when the great mystery was established? Who
+said they stopped their ears with their fingers and fled, shouting with
+horror? Shouting? Was it Eusebius or Athanasius? Or Sozomen.... Some
+letter or apology by Athanasius?... And surely it was impossible that
+the Trinity could have appeared visibly as a triangle and an eye. Above
+such an assembly.
+
+That was mere dreaming, of course. Was it dreaming after Raphael? After
+Raphael? The drowsy mind wandered into a side issue. Was the picture
+that had suggested this dream the one in the Vatican where all the
+Fathers of the Church are shown disputing together? But there surely God
+and the Son themselves were painted with a symbol--some symbol--also?
+But was that disputation about the Trinity at all? Wasn't it rather
+about a chalice and a dove? Of course it was a chalice and a dove! Then
+where did one see the triangle and the eye? And men disputing? Some such
+picture there was....
+
+What a lot of disputing there had been! What endless disputing! Which
+had gone on. Until last night. When this very disagreeable young man
+with the hawk nose and the pointing finger had tackled one when one was
+sorely fagged, and disputed; disputed. Rebuked and disputed. “Answer me
+this,” he had said.... And still one's poor brains disputed and would
+not rest.... About the Trinity....
+
+The brain upon the pillow was now wearily awake. It was at once
+hopelessly awake and active and hopelessly unprogressive. It was like
+some floating stick that had got caught in an eddy in a river, going
+round and round and round. And round. Eternally--eternally--eternally
+begotten.
+
+“But what possible meaning do you attach then to such a phrase as
+eternally begotten?”
+
+The brain upon the pillow stared hopelessly at this question, without an
+answer, without an escape. The three repetitions spun round and round,
+became a swiftly revolving triangle, like some electric sign that
+had got beyond control, in the midst of which stared an unwinking and
+resentful eye.
+
+(2)
+
+
+Every one knows that expedient of the sleepless, the counting of sheep.
+
+You lie quite still, you breathe regularly, you imagine sheep jumping
+over a gate, one after another, you count them quietly and slowly until
+you count yourself off through a fading string of phantom numbers to
+number Nod....
+
+But sheep, alas! suggest an episcopal crook.
+
+And presently a black sheep had got into the succession and was
+struggling violently with the crook about its leg, a hawk-nosed black
+sheep full of reproof, with disordered hair and a pointing finger. A
+young man with a most disagreeable voice.
+
+At which the other sheep took heart and, deserting the numbered
+succession, came and sat about the fire in a big drawing-room and argued
+also. In particular there was Lady Sunderbund, a pretty fragile tall
+woman in the corner, richly jewelled, who sat with her pretty eyes
+watching and her lips compressed. What had she thought of it? She had
+said very little.
+
+It is an unusual thing for a mixed gathering of this sort to argue about
+the Trinity. Simply because a tired bishop had fallen into their party.
+It was not fair to him to pretend that the atmosphere was a liberal and
+inquiring one, when the young man who had sat still and dormant by the
+table was in reality a keen and bitter Irish Roman Catholic. Then the
+question, a question-begging question, was put quite suddenly, without
+preparation or prelude, by surprise. “Why, Bishop, was the Spermaticos
+Logos identified with the Second and not the Third Person of the
+Trinity?”
+
+It was indiscreet, it was silly, to turn upon the speaker and affect an
+air of disengagement and modernity and to say: “Ah, that indeed is the
+unfortunate aspect of the whole affair.”
+
+Whereupon the fierce young man had exploded with: “To that, is it, that
+you Anglicans have come?”
+
+The whole gathering had given itself up to the disputation, Lady
+Sunderbund, an actress, a dancer--though she, it is true, did not say
+very much--a novelist, a mechanical expert of some sort, a railway peer,
+geniuses, hairy and Celtic, people of no clearly definable position,
+but all quite unequal to the task of maintaining that air of reverent
+vagueness, that tenderness of touch, which is by all Anglican standards
+imperative in so deep, so mysterious, and, nowadays, in mixed society at
+least, so infrequent a discussion.
+
+It was like animals breaking down a fence about some sacred spot. Within
+a couple of minutes the affair had become highly improper. They had
+raised their voices, they had spoken with the utmost familiarity of
+almost unspeakable things. There had been even attempts at epigram.
+Athanasian epigrams. Bent the novelist had doubted if originally there
+had been a Third Person in the Trinity at all. He suggested a reaction
+from a too-Manichaean dualism at some date after the time of St. John's
+Gospel. He maintained obstinately that that Gospel was dualistic.
+
+The unpleasant quality of the talk was far more manifest in the
+retrospect than it had been at the time. It had seemed then bold
+and strange, but not impossible; now in the cold darkness it seemed
+sacrilegious. And the bishop's share, which was indeed only the weak
+yielding of a tired man to an atmosphere he had misjudged, became a
+disgraceful display of levity and bad faith. They had baited him.
+Some one had said that nowadays every one was an Arian, knowingly or
+unknowingly. They had not concealed their conviction that the bishop did
+not really believe in the Creeds he uttered.
+
+And that unfortunate first admission stuck terribly in his throat.
+
+Oh! Why had he made it?
+
+(3)
+
+
+Sleep had gone.
+
+The awakened sleeper groaned, sat up in the darkness, and felt gropingly
+in this unaccustomed bed and bedroom first for the edge of the bed and
+then for the electric light that was possibly on the little bedside
+table.
+
+The searching hand touched something. A water-bottle. The hand resumed
+its exploration. Here was something metallic and smooth, a stem. Either
+above or below there must be a switch....
+
+The switch was found, grasped, and turned.
+
+The darkness fled.
+
+In a mirror the sleeper saw the reflection of his face and a corner
+of the bed in which he lay. The lamp had a tilted shade that threw
+a slanting bar of shadow across the field of reflection, lighting a
+right-angled triangle very brightly and leaving the rest obscure. The
+bed was a very great one, a bed for the Anakim. It had a canopy with
+yellow silk curtains, surmounted by a gilded crown of carved wood.
+Between the curtains was a man's face, clean-shaven, pale, with
+disordered brown hair and weary, pale-blue eyes. He was clad in purple
+pyjamas, and the hand that now ran its fingers through the brown hair
+was long and lean and shapely.
+
+Beside the bed was a convenient little table bearing the light, a
+water-bottle and glass, a bunch of keys, a congested pocket-book, a
+gold-banded fountain pen, and a gold watch that indicated a quarter past
+three. On the lower edge of the picture in the mirror appeared the back
+of a gilt chair, over which a garment of peculiar construction had been
+carelessly thrown. It was in the form of that sleeveless cassock of
+purple, opening at the side, whose lower flap is called a bishop's
+apron; the corner of the frogged coat showed behind the chair-back, and
+the sash lay crumpled on the floor. Black doeskin breeches, still warmly
+lined with their pants, lay where they had been thrust off at the corner
+of the bed, partly covering black hose and silver-buckled shoes.
+
+For a moment the tired gaze of the man in the bed rested upon these
+evidences of his episcopal dignity. Then he turned from them to the
+watch at the bedside.
+
+He groaned helplessly.
+
+(4)
+
+
+These country doctors were no good. There wasn't a physician in the
+diocese. He must go to London.
+
+He looked into the weary eyes of his reflection and said, as one makes a
+reassuring promise, “London.”
+
+He was being worried. He was being intolerably worried, and he was ill
+and unable to sustain his positions. This doubt, this sudden discovery
+of controversial unsoundness, was only one aspect of his general
+neurasthenia. It had been creeping into his mind since the “Light Unden
+the Altar” controversy. Now suddenly it had leapt upon him from his own
+unwary lips.
+
+The immediate trouble arose from his loyalty. He had followed the King's
+example; he had become a total abstainer and, in addition, on his own
+account he had ceased to smoke. And his digestion, which Princhester
+had first made sensitive, was deranged. He was suffering chemically,
+suffering one of those nameless sequences of maladjustments that still
+defy our ordinary medical science. It was afflicting him with a general
+malaise, it was affecting his energy, his temper, all the balance and
+comfort of his nerves. All day he was weary; all night he was wakeful.
+He was estranged from his body. He was distressed by a sense of
+detachment from the things about him, by a curious intimation of
+unreality in everything he experienced. And with that went this levity
+of conscience, a heaviness of soul and a levity of conscience, that
+could make him talk as though the Creeds did not matter--as though
+nothing mattered....
+
+If only he could smoke!
+
+He was persuaded that a couple of Egyptian cigarettes, or three at the
+outside, a day, would do wonders in restoring his nervous calm. That,
+and just a weak whisky and soda at lunch and dinner. Suppose now--!
+
+His conscience, his sense of honour, deserted him. Latterly he had had
+several of these conscience-blanks; it was only when they were over that
+he realized that they had occurred.
+
+One might smoke up the chimney, he reflected. But he had no cigarettes!
+Perhaps if he were to slip downstairs....
+
+Why had he given up smoking?
+
+He groaned aloud. He and his reflection eyed one another in mutual
+despair.
+
+There came before his memory the image of a boy's face, a swarthy little
+boy, grinning, grinning with a horrible knowingness and pointing
+his finger--an accusing finger. It had been the most exasperating,
+humiliating, and shameful incident in the bishop's career. It was
+the afternoon for his fortnightly address to the Shop-girls' Church
+Association, and he had been seized with a panic fear, entirely
+irrational and unjustifiable, that he would not be able to deliver the
+address. The fear had arisen after lunch, had gripped his mind, and then
+as now had come the thought, “If only I could smoke!” And he had smoked.
+It seemed better to break a vow than fail the Association. He had fallen
+to the temptation with a completeness that now filled him with shame and
+horror. He had stalked Dunk, his valet-butler, out of the dining-room,
+had affected to need a book from the book-case beyond the sideboard,
+had gone insincerely to the sideboard humming “From Greenland's icy
+mountains,” and then, glancing over his shoulder, had stolen one of
+his own cigarettes, one of the fatter sort. With this and his bedroom
+matches he had gone off to the bottom of the garden among the laurels,
+looked everywhere except above the wall to be sure that he was alone,
+and at last lit up, only as he raised his eyes in gratitude for the
+first blissful inhalation to discover that dreadful little boy peeping
+at him from the crotch in the yew-tree in the next garden. As though God
+had sent him to be a witness!
+
+Their eyes had met. The bishop recalled with an agonized distinctness
+every moment, every error, of that shameful encounter. He had been too
+surprised to conceal the state of affairs from the pitiless scrutiny of
+those youthful eyes. He had instantly made as if to put the cigarette
+behind his back, and then as frankly dropped it....
+
+His soul would not be more naked at the resurrection. The little boy
+had stared, realized the state of affairs slowly but surely, pointed his
+finger....
+
+Never had two human beings understood each other more completely.
+
+A dirty little boy! Capable no doubt of a thousand kindred
+scoundrelisms.
+
+It seemed ages before the conscience-stricken bishop could tear himself
+from the spot and walk back, with such a pretence of dignity as he could
+muster, to the house.
+
+And instead of the discourse he had prepared for the Shop-girls' Church
+Association, he had preached on temptation and falling, and how he knew
+they had all fallen, and how he understood and could sympathize with the
+bitterness of a secret shame, a moving but unsuitable discourse that
+had already been subjected to misconstruction and severe reproof in the
+local press of Princhester.
+
+But the haunting thing in the bishop's memory was the face and gesture
+of the little boy. That grubby little finger stabbed him to the heart.
+
+“Oh, God!” he groaned. “The meanness of it! How did I bring myself--?”
+
+He turned out the light convulsively, and rolled over in the bed, making
+a sort of cocoon of himself. He bored his head into the pillow and
+groaned, and then struggled impatiently to throw the bed-clothes off
+himself. Then he sat up and talked aloud.
+
+“I must go to Brighton-Pomfrey,” he said. “And get a medical
+dispensation. If I do not smoke--”
+
+He paused for a long time.
+
+Then his voice sounded again in the darkness, speaking quietly, speaking
+with a note almost of satisfaction.
+
+“I shall go mad. I must smoke or I shall go mad.”
+
+For a long time he sat up in the great bed with his arms about his
+knees.
+
+(5)
+
+
+Fearful things came to him; things at once dreadfully blasphemous and
+entirely weak-minded.
+
+The triangle and the eye became almost visible upon the black background
+of night. They were very angry. They were spinning round and round
+faster and faster. Because he was a bishop and because really he did not
+believe fully and completely in the Trinity. At one and the same time
+he did not believe in the Trinity and was terrified by the anger of the
+Trinity at his unbelief.... He was afraid. He was aghast.... And oh! he
+was weary....
+
+He rubbed his eyes.
+
+“If I could have a cup of tea!” he said.
+
+Then he perceived with surprise that he had not thought of praying. What
+should he say? To what could he pray?
+
+He tried not to think of that whizzing Triangle, that seemed now to be
+nailed like a Catherine wheel to the very centre of his forehead,
+and yet at the same time to be at the apex of the universe. Against
+that--for protection against that--he was praying. It was by a great
+effort that at last he pronounced the words:
+
+“Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord ....”
+
+Presently he had turned up his light, and was prowling about the room.
+The clear inky dinginess that comes before the raw dawn of a spring
+morning, found his white face at the window, looking out upon the great
+terrace and the park.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND - THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY
+
+(1)
+
+
+IT was only in the last few years that the bishop had experienced
+these nervous and mental crises. He was a belated doubter. Whatever
+questionings had marked his intellectual adolescence had either been
+very slight or had been too adequately answered to leave any serious
+scars upon his convictions.
+
+And even now he felt that he was afflicted physically rather than
+mentally, that some protective padding of nerve-sheath or brain-case had
+worn thin and weak, and left him a prey to strange disturbances, rather
+than that any new process of thought was eating into his mind. These
+doubts in his mind were still not really doubts; they were rather alien
+and, for the first time, uncontrolled movements of his intelligence.
+He had had a sheltered upbringing; he was the well-connected son of
+a comfortable rectory, the only son and sole survivor of a family
+of three; he had been carefully instructed and he had been a willing
+learner; it had been easy and natural to take many things for granted.
+It had been very easy and pleasant for him to take the world as he found
+it and God as he found Him. Indeed for all his years up to manhood
+he had been able to take life exactly as in his infancy he took his
+carefully warmed and prepared bottle--unquestioningly and beneficially.
+
+And indeed that has been the way with most bishops since bishops began.
+
+It is a busy continuous process that turns boys into bishops, and it
+will stand few jars or discords. The student of ecclesiastical biography
+will find that an early vocation has in every age been almost universal
+among them; few are there among these lives that do not display the
+incipient bishop from the tenderest years. Bishop How of Wakefield
+composed hymns before he was eleven, and Archbishop Benson when scarcely
+older possessed a little oratory in which he conducted services and--a
+pleasant touch of the more secular boy--which he protected from a too
+inquisitive sister by means of a booby trap. It is rare that those
+marked for episcopal dignities go so far into the outer world
+as Archbishop Lang of York, who began as a barrister. This early
+predestination has always been the common episcopal experience.
+Archbishop Benson's early attempts at religious services remind one both
+of St. Thomas a Becket, the “boy bishop,” and those early ceremonies of
+St. Athanasius which were observed and inquired upon by the good bishop
+Alexander. (For though still a tender infant, St. Athanasius with
+perfect correctness and validity was baptizing a number of his innocent
+playmates, and the bishop who “had paused to contemplate the sports of
+the child remained to confirm the zeal of the missionary.”) And as with
+the bishop of the past, so with the bishop of the future; the Rev. H. J.
+Campbell, in his story of his soul's pilgrimage, has given us a pleasant
+picture of himself as a child stealing out into the woods to build
+himself a little altar.
+
+Such minds as these, settled as it were from the outset, are either
+incapable of real scepticism or become sceptical only after catastrophic
+changes. They understand the sceptical mind with difficulty, and their
+beliefs are regarded by the sceptical mind with incredulity. They have
+determined their forms of belief before their years of discretion, and
+once those forms are determined they are not very easily changed. Within
+the shell it has adopted the intelligence may be active and lively
+enough, may indeed be extraordinarily active and lively, but only within
+the shell.
+
+There is an entire difference in the mental quality of those who are
+converts to a faith and those who are brought up in it. The former know
+it from outside as well as from within. They know not only that it is,
+but also that it is not. The latter have a confidence in their creed
+that is one with their apprehension of sky or air or gravitation. It
+is a primary mental structure, and they not only do not doubt but they
+doubt the good faith of those who do. They think that the Atheist and
+Agnostic really believe but are impelled by a mysterious obstinacy to
+deny. So it had been with the Bishop of Princhester; not of cunning
+or design but in simple good faith he had accepted all the inherited
+assurances of his native rectory, and held by Church, Crown, Empire,
+decorum, respectability, solvency--and compulsory Greek at the Little
+Go--as his father had done before him. If in his undergraduate days he
+had said a thing or two in the modern vein, affected the socialism
+of William Morris and learnt some Swinburne by heart, it was out of a
+conscious wildness. He did not wish to be a prig. He had taken a far
+more genuine interest in the artistry of ritual.
+
+Through all the time of his incumbency of the church of the Holy
+Innocents, St. John's Wood, and of his career as the bishop suffragan
+of Pinner, he had never faltered from his profound confidence in those
+standards of his home. He had been kind, popular, and endlessly active.
+His undergraduate socialism had expanded simply and sincerely into a
+theory of administrative philanthropy. He knew the Webbs. He was
+as successful with working-class audiences as with fashionable
+congregations. His home life with Lady Ella (she was the daughter of
+the fifth Earl of Birkenholme) and his five little girls was simple,
+beautiful, and happy as few homes are in these days of confusion. Until
+he became Bishop of Princhester--he followed Hood, the first bishop,
+as the reign of his Majesty King Edward the Peacemaker drew to its
+close--no anticipation of his coming distress fell across his path.
+
+(2)
+
+
+He came to Princhester an innocent and trustful man. The home life
+at the old rectory of Otteringham was still his standard of truth and
+reality. London had not disillusioned him. It was a strange waste of
+people, it made him feel like a missionary in infidel parts, but it was
+a kindly waste. It was neither antagonistic nor malicious. He had always
+felt there that if he searched his Londoner to the bottom, he would
+find the completest recognition of the old rectory and all its data and
+implications.
+
+But Princhester was different.
+
+Princhester made one think that recently there had been a second and
+much more serious Fall.
+
+Princhester was industrial and unashamed. It was a countryside savagely
+invaded by forges and mine shafts and gaunt black things. It was scarred
+and impeded and discoloured. Even before that invasion, when the heather
+was not in flower it must have been a black country. Its people were
+dour uncandid individuals, who slanted their heads and knitted their
+brows to look at you. Occasionally one saw woods brown and blistered by
+the gases from chemical works. Here and there remained old rectories,
+closely reminiscent of the dear old home at Otteringham, jostled and
+elbowed and overshadowed by horrible iron cylinders belching smoke and
+flame. The fine old abbey church of Princhester, which was the cathedral
+of the new diocese, looked when first he saw it like a lady Abbess who
+had taken to drink and slept in a coal truck. She minced apologetically
+upon the market-place; the parvenu Town Hall patronized and protected
+her as if she were a poor relation....
+
+The old aristocracy of the countryside was unpicturesquely decayed. The
+branch of the Walshinghams, Lady Ella's cousins, who lived near Pringle,
+was poor, proud and ignoble. And extremely unpopular. The rich people
+of the country were self-made and inclined to nonconformity, the
+working-people were not strictly speaking a “poor,” they were highly
+paid, badly housed, and deeply resentful. They went in vast droves to
+football matches, and did not care a rap if it rained. The prevailing
+wind was sarcastic. To come here from London was to come from
+atmospheric blue-greys to ashen-greys, from smoke and soft smut to grime
+and black grimness.
+
+The bishop had been charmed by the historical associations of
+Princhester when first the see was put before his mind. His realization
+of his diocese was a profound shock.
+
+Only one hint had he had of what was coming. He had met during
+his season of congratulations Lord Gatling dining unusually at the
+Athenaeum. Lord Gatling and he did not talk frequently, but on this
+occasion the great racing peer came over to him. “You will feel like a
+cherub in a stokehole,” Lord Gatling had said....
+
+“They used to heave lumps of slag at old Hood's gaiters,” said Lord
+Gatling.
+
+“In London a bishop's a lord and a lark and nobody minds him,” said Lord
+Gatling, “but Princhester is different. It isn't used to bishops....
+Well,--I hope you'll get to like 'em.”
+
+(3)
+
+
+Trouble began with a fearful row about the position of the bishop's
+palace. Hood had always evaded this question, and a number of
+strong-willed self-made men of wealth and influence, full of local
+patriotism and that competitive spirit which has made England what it
+is, already intensely irritated by Hood's prevarications, were resolved
+to pin his successor to an immediate decision. Of this the new bishop
+was unaware. Mindful of a bishop's constant need to travel, he was
+disposed to seek a home within easy reach of Pringle Junction, from
+which nearly every point in the diocese could be simply and easily
+reached. This fell in with Lady Ella's liking for the rare rural
+quiet of the Kibe valley and the neighbourhood of her cousins the
+Walshinghams. Unhappily it did not fall in with the inflexible
+resolution of each and every one of the six leading towns of the see to
+put up, own, obtrude, boast, and swagger about the biggest and showiest
+thing in episcopal palaces in all industrial England, and the new
+bishop had already taken a short lease and gone some way towards the
+acquisition of Ganford House, two miles from Pringle, before he realized
+the strength and fury of these local ambitions.
+
+At first the magnates and influences seemed to be fighting only among
+themselves, and he was so ill-advised as to broach the Ganford House
+project as a compromise that would glorify no one unfairly, and leave
+the erection of an episcopal palace for some future date when he perhaps
+would have the good fortune to have passed to “where beyond these
+voices there is peace,” forgetting altogether among other oversights
+the importance of architects and builders in local affairs. His
+proposal seemed for a time to concentrate the rich passions of the whole
+countryside upon himself and his wife.
+
+Because they did not leave Lady Ella alone. The Walshinghams were
+already unpopular in their county on account of a poverty and shyness
+that made them seem “stuck up” to successful captains of industry
+only too ready with the hand of friendship, the iron grip indeed
+of friendship, consciously hospitable and eager for admission and
+endorsements. And Princhester in particular was under the sway of that
+enterprising weekly, The White Blackbird, which was illustrated by,
+which indeed monopolized the gifts of, that brilliant young caricaturist
+“The Snicker.”
+
+It had seemed natural for Lady Ella to acquiesce in the proposals of the
+leading Princhester photographer. She had always helped where she could
+in her husband's public work, and she had been popular upon her own
+merits in Wealdstone. The portrait was abominable enough in itself; it
+dwelt on her chin, doubled her age, and denied her gentleness, but it
+was a mere starting-point for the subtle extravagance of The Snicker's
+poisonous gift.... The thing came upon the bishop suddenly from the
+book-stall at Pringle Junction.
+
+He kept it carefully from Lady Ella.... It was only later that he found
+that a copy of The White Blackbird had been sent to her, and that she
+was keeping the horror from him. It was in her vein that she should
+reproach herself for being a vulnerable side to him.
+
+Even when the bishop capitulated in favour of Princhester, that decision
+only opened a fresh trouble for him. Princhester wanted the palace to be
+a palace; it wanted to combine all the best points of Lambeth and
+Fulham with the marble splendours of a good modern bank. The bishop's
+architectural tastes, on the other hand, were rationalistic. He was all
+for building a useful palace in undertones, with a green slate roof
+and long horizontal lines. What he wanted more than anything else was
+a quite remote wing with a lot of bright little bedrooms and a
+sitting-room and so on, complete in itself, examination hall and
+everything, with a long intricate connecting passage and several doors,
+to prevent the ordination candidates straying all over the place and
+getting into the talk and the tea. But the diocese wanted a proud
+archway--and turrets, and did not care a rap if the ordination
+candidates slept about on the carpets in the bishop's bedroom.
+Ordination candidates were quite outside the sphere of its imagination.
+
+And he disappointed Princhester with his equipage. Princhester had
+a feeling that it deserved more for coming over to the church from
+nonconformity as it was doing. It wanted a bishop in a mitre and a gilt
+coach. It wanted a pastoral crook. It wanted something to go with its
+mace and its mayor. And (obsessed by The Snicker) it wanted less of Lady
+Ella. The cruelty and unreason of these attacks upon his wife distressed
+the bishop beyond measure, and baffled him hopelessly. He could not see
+any means of checking them nor of defending or justifying her against
+them.
+
+The palace was awaiting its tenant, but the controversies and
+bitternesses were still swinging and swaying and developing when King
+George was being crowned. Close upon that event came a wave of social
+discontent, the great railway strike, a curious sense of social and
+political instability, and the first beginnings of the bishop's ill
+health.
+
+(4)
+
+
+There came a day of exceptional fatigue and significance.
+
+The industrial trouble was a very real distress to the bishop. He had
+a firm belief that it is a function of the church to act as mediator
+between employer and employed. It was a common saying of his that the
+aim of socialism--the right sort of socialism--was to Christianize
+employment. Regardless of suspicion on either hand, regardless of
+very distinct hints that he should “mind his own business,” he exerted
+himself in a search for methods of reconciliation. He sought out every
+one who seemed likely to be influential on either side, and did his
+utmost to discover the conditions of a settlement. As far as possible
+and with the help of a not very efficient chaplain he tried to combine
+such interviews with his more normal visiting.
+
+At times, and this was particularly the case on this day, he seemed to
+be discovering nothing but the incurable perversity and militancy of
+human nature. It was a day under an east wind, when a steely-blue sky
+full of colourless light filled a stiff-necked world with whitish high
+lights and inky shadows. These bright harsh days of barometric high
+pressure in England rouse and thwart every expectation of the happiness
+of spring. And as the bishop drove through the afternoon in a hired
+fly along a rutted road of slag between fields that were bitterly wired
+against the Sunday trespasser, he fell into a despondent meditation upon
+the political and social outlook.
+
+His thoughts were of a sort not uncommon in those days. The world was
+strangely restless. Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had
+been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some
+compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people's ideas,
+and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow. Not that Queen
+Victoria had really been a paper-weight or any weight at all, but
+it happened that she died as an epoch closed, an epoch of tremendous
+stabilities. Her son, already elderly, had followed as the selvedge
+follows the piece, he had passed and left the new age stripped bare.
+In nearly every department of economic and social life now there was
+upheaval, and it was an upheaval very different in character from the
+radicalism and liberalism of the Victorian days. There were not only
+doubt and denial, but now there were also impatience and unreason.
+People argued less and acted quicker. There was a pride in rebellion for
+its own sake, an indiscipline and disposition to sporadic violence that
+made it extremely hard to negotiate any reconciliations or compromises.
+Behind every extremist it seemed stood a further extremist prepared to
+go one better....
+
+The bishop had spent most of the morning with one of the big employers,
+a tall dark man, lean and nervous, and obviously tired and worried
+by the struggle. He did not conceal his opinion that the church was
+meddling with matters quite outside its sphere. Never had it been
+conveyed to the bishop before how remote a rich and established
+Englishman could consider the church from reality.
+
+“You've got no hold on them,” he said. “It isn't your sphere.”
+
+And again: “They'll listen to you--if you speak well. But they don't
+believe you know anything about it, and they don't trust your good
+intentions. They won't mind a bit what you say unless you drop something
+they can use against us.”
+
+The bishop tried a few phrases. He thought there might be something in
+co-operation, in profit-sharing, in some more permanent relationship
+between the business and the employee.
+
+“There isn't,” said the employer compactly. “It's just the malice of
+being inferior against the man in control. It's just the spirit of
+insubordination and boredom with duty. This trouble's as old as the
+Devil.”
+
+“But that is exactly the business of the church,” said the bishop
+brightly, “to reconcile men to their duty.”
+
+“By chanting the Athanasian creed at 'em, I suppose,” said the big
+employer, betraying the sneer he had been hiding hitherto.
+
+“This thing is a fight,” said the big employer, carrying on before the
+bishop could reply. “Religion had better get out of the streets until
+this thing is over. The men won't listen to reason. They don't mean
+to. They're bit by Syndicalism. They're setting out, I tell you, to be
+unreasonable and impossible. It isn't an argument; it's a fight. They
+don't want to make friends with the employer. They want to make an end
+to the employer. Whatever we give them they'll take and press us for
+more. Directly we make terms with the leaders the men go behind
+it.... It's a raid on the whole system. They don't mean to work the
+system--anyhow. I'm the capitalist, and the capitalist has to go. I'm to
+be bundled out of my works, and some--some “--he seemed to be rejecting
+unsuitable words--“confounded politician put in. Much good it would do
+them. But before that happens I'm going to fight. You would.”
+
+The bishop walked to the window and stood staring at the brilliant
+spring bulbs in the big employer's garden, and at a long vista of
+newly-mown lawn under great shapely trees just budding into green.
+
+“I can't admit,” he said, “that these troubles lie outside the sphere of
+the church.”
+
+The employer came and stood beside him. He felt he was being a little
+hard on the bishop, but he could not see any way of making things
+easier.
+
+“One doesn't want Sacred Things,” he tried, “in a scrap like this.
+
+“We've got to mend things or end things,” continued the big employer.
+“Nothing goes on for ever. Things can't last as they are going on
+now....”
+
+Then he went on abruptly to something that for a time he had been
+keeping back.
+
+“Of course just at present the church may do a confounded lot of harm.
+Some of you clerical gentlemen are rather too fond of talking socialism
+and even preaching socialism. Don't think I want to be overcritical.
+I admit there's no end of things to be said for a proper sort of
+socialism, Ruskin, and all that. We're all Socialists nowadays.
+Ideals--excellent. But--it gets misunderstood. It gives the men a sense
+of moral support. It makes them fancy that they are It. Encourages them
+to forget duties and set up preposterous claims. Class war and all that
+sort of thing. You gentlemen of the clergy don't quite realize that
+socialism may begin with Ruskin and end with Karl Marx. And that from
+the Class War to the Commune is just one step.”
+
+(5)
+
+
+From this conversation the bishop had made his way to the vicarage of
+Mogham Banks. The vicar of Mogham Banks was a sacerdotal socialist of
+the most advanced type, with the reputation of being closely in touch
+with the labour extremists. He was a man addicted to banners, prohibited
+ornaments, special services at unusual hours, and processions in the
+streets. His taste in chasubles was loud, he gardened in a cassock
+and, it was said, he slept in his biretta; he certainly slept in a hair
+shirt, and he littered his church with flowers, candles, side altars,
+confessional boxes, requests for prayers for the departed, and the like.
+There had already been two Kensitite demonstrations at his services, and
+altogether he was a source of considerable anxiety to the bishop. The
+bishop did his best not to know too exactly what was going on at Mogham
+Banks. Sooner or later he felt he would be forced to do something--and
+the longer he could put that off the better. But the Rev. Morrice Deans
+had promised to get together three or four prominent labour leaders for
+tea and a frank talk, and the opportunity was one not to be missed.
+So the bishop, after a hasty and not too digestible lunch in the
+refreshment room at Pringle, was now in a fly that smelt of straw
+and suggested infectious hospital patients, on his way through the
+industry-scarred countryside to this second conversation.
+
+The countryside had never seemed so scarred to him as it did that day.
+
+It was probably the bright hard spring sunshine that emphasized
+the contrast between that dear England of hedges and homes and the
+south-west wind in which his imagination lived, and the crude presences
+of a mechanical age. Never before had the cuttings and heapings, the
+smashing down of trees, the obtrusion of corrugated iron and tar, the
+belchings of smoke and the haste, seemed so harsh and disregardful
+of all the bishop's world. Across the fields a line of gaunt iron
+standards, abominably designed, carried an electric cable to some
+unknown end. The curve of the hill made them seem a little out of the
+straight, as if they hurried and bent forward furtively.
+
+“Where are they going?” asked the bishop, leaning forward to look out of
+the window of the fly, and then: “Where is it all going?”
+
+And presently the road was under repair, and was being done at a great
+pace with a huge steam-roller, mechanically smashed granite, and kettles
+of stinking stuff, asphalt or something of that sort, that looked
+and smelt like Milton's hell. Beyond, a gaunt hoarding advertised
+extensively the Princhester Music Hall, a mean beastly place that
+corrupted boys and girls; and also it clamoured of tyres and potted
+meats....
+
+The afternoon's conference gave him no reassuring answer to his
+question, “Where is it all going?”
+
+The afternoon's conference did no more than intensify the new and
+strange sense of alienation from the world that the morning's talk had
+evoked.
+
+The three labour extremists that Morrice Deans had assembled obviously
+liked the bishop and found him picturesque, and were not above a certain
+snobbish gratification at the purple-trimmed company they were in, but
+it was clear that they regarded his intervention in the great dispute
+as if it were a feeble waving from the bank across the waters of a great
+river.
+
+“There's an incurable misunderstanding between the modern employer and
+the modern employed,” the chief labour spokesman said, speaking in a
+broad accent that completely hid from him and the bishop and every one
+the fact that he was by far the best-read man of the party. “Disraeli
+called them the Two Nations, but that was long ago. Now it's a case
+of two species. Machinery has made them into different species. The
+employer lives away from his work-people, marries a wife foreign, out of
+a county family or suchlike, trains his children from their very birth
+in a different manner. Why, the growth curve is different for the two
+species. They haven't even a common speech between them. One looks east
+and the other looks west. How can you expect them to agree? Of course
+they won't agree. We've got to fight it out. They say we're their
+slaves for ever. Have you ever read Lady Bell's 'At the Works'? A
+well-intentioned woman, but she gives the whole thing away. We say,
+No! It's our sort and not your sort. We'll do without you. We'll get a
+little more education and then we'll do without you. We're pressing for
+all we can get, and when we've got that we'll take breath and press
+for more. We're the Morlocks. Coming up. It isn't our fault that we've
+differentiated.”
+
+“But you haven't understood the drift of Christianity,” said the bishop.
+“It's just to assert that men are One community and not two.”
+
+“There's not much of that in the Creeds,” said a second labour leader
+who was a rationalist. “There's not much of that in the services of the
+church.”
+
+The vicar spoke before his bishop, and indeed he had plenty of time
+to speak before his bishop. “Because you will not set yourselves to
+understand the symbolism of her ritual,” he said.
+
+“If the church chooses to speak in riddles,” said the rationalist.
+
+“Symbols,” said Morrice Deans, “need not be riddles,” and for a time the
+talk eddied about this minor issue and the chief labour spokesman and
+the bishop looked at one another. The vicar instanced and explained
+certain apparently insignificant observances, his antagonist was
+contemptuously polite to these explanations. “That's all very pratty,”
+ he said....
+
+The bishop wished that fine points of ceremonial might have been left
+out of the discussion.
+
+Something much bigger than that was laying hold of his intelligence, the
+realization of a world extravagantly out of hand. The sky, the wind,
+the telegraph poles, had been jabbing in the harsh lesson of these men's
+voices, that the church, as people say, “wasn't in it.” And that at
+the same time the church held the one remedy for all this ugliness and
+contention in its teaching of the universal fatherhood of God and the
+universal brotherhood of men. Only for some reason he hadn't the phrases
+and he hadn't the voice to assert this over their wrangling and their
+stiff resolution. He wanted to think the whole business out thoroughly,
+for the moment he had nothing to say, and there was the labour leader
+opposite waiting smilingly to hear what he had to say so soon as the
+bout between the vicar and the rationalist was over.
+
+(6)
+
+
+That morning in the long galleries of the bishop's imagination a fresh
+painting had been added. It was a big wall painting rather in the manner
+of Puvis de Chavannes. And the central figure had been the bishop of
+Princhester himself. He had been standing upon the steps of the
+great door of the cathedral that looks upon the marketplace where the
+tram-lines meet, and he had been dressed very magnificently and rather
+after the older use. He had been wearing a tunicle and dalmatic under a
+chasuble, a pectoral cross, purple gloves, sandals and buskins, a mitre
+and his presentation ring. In his hand he had borne his pastoral staff.
+And the clustering pillars and arches of the great doorway were painted
+with a loving flat particularity that omitted nothing but the sooty
+tinge of the later discolourations.
+
+On his right hand had stood a group of employers very richly dressed
+in the fashion of the fifteenth century, and on the left a rather more
+numerous group of less decorative artisans. With them their wives and
+children had been shown, all greatly impressed by the canonicals. Every
+one had been extremely respectful.
+
+He had been reconciling the people and blessing them and calling them
+his “sheep” and his “little children.”
+
+But all this was so different.
+
+Neither party resembled sheep or little children in the least degree. .
+
+The labour leader became impatient with the ritualistic controversy; he
+set his tea-cup aside out of danger and leant across the corner of the
+table to the bishop and spoke in a sawing undertone. “You see,” he said,
+“the church does not talk our language. I doubt if it understands our
+language. I doubt if we understand clearly where we are ourselves. These
+things have to be fought out and hammered out. It's a big dusty dirty
+noisy job. It may be a bloody job before it's through. You can't
+suddenly call a halt in the middle of the scrap and have a sort of
+millennium just because you want it....
+
+“Of course if the church had a plan,” he said, “if it had a proposal to
+make, if it had anything more than a few pious palliatives to suggest,
+that might be different. But has it?”
+
+The bishop had a bankrupt feeling. On the spur of the moment he could
+say no more than: “It offers its mediation.”
+
+(7)
+
+
+Full as he was with the preoccupation of these things and so a little
+slow and inattentive in his movements, the bishop had his usual luck
+at Pringle Junction and just missed the 7.27 for Princhester. He might
+perhaps have got it by running through the subway and pushing past
+people, but bishops must not run through subways and push past people.
+His mind swore at the mischance, even if his lips refrained.
+
+He was hungry and, tired; he would not get to the palace now until long
+after nine; dinner would be over and Lady Ella would naturally suppose
+he had dined early with the Rev. Morrice Deans. Very probably there
+would be nothing ready for him at all.
+
+He tried to think he was exercising self-control, but indeed all his
+sub-conscious self was busy in a manner that would not have disgraced
+Tertullian with the eternal welfare of those city fathers whose
+obstinacy had fixed the palace at Princhester. He walked up and down the
+platform, gripping his hands very tightly behind him, and maintaining
+a serene upcast countenance by a steadfast effort. It seemed a small
+matter to him that the placards of the local evening papers should
+proclaim “Lloyd George's Reconciliation Meeting at Wombash Broken up
+by Suffragettes.” For a year now he had observed a strict rule against
+buying the products of the local press, and he saw no reason for varying
+this protective regulation.
+
+His mind was full of angry helplessness.
+
+Was he to blame, was the church to blame, for its powerlessness in these
+social disputes? Could an abler man with a readier eloquence have done
+more?
+
+He envied the cleverness of Cardinal Manning. Manning would have got
+right into the front of this affair. He would have accumulated credit
+for his church and himself....
+
+But would he have done much?...
+
+The bishop wandered along the platform to its end, and stood
+contemplating the convergent ways that gather together beyond the
+station and plunge into the hillside and the wilderness of sidings and
+trucks, signal-boxes, huts, coal-pits, electric standards, goods sheds,
+turntables, and engine-houses, that ends in a bluish bricked-up cliff
+against the hill. A train rushed with a roar and clatter into the
+throat of the great tunnel and was immediately silenced; its rear lights
+twinkled and vanished, and then out of that huge black throat came wisps
+of white steam and curled slowly upward like lazy snakes until they
+caught the slanting sunshine. For the first time the day betrayed
+a softness and touched this scene of black energy to gold. All late
+afternoons are beautiful, whatever the day has been--if only there is a
+gleam of sun. And now a kind of mechanical greatness took the place of
+mere black disorder in the bishop's perception of his see. It was harsh,
+it was vast and strong, it was no lamb he had to rule but a dragon.
+Would it ever be given to him to overcome his dragon, to lead it home,
+and bless it?
+
+He stood at the very end of the platform, with his gaitered legs wide
+apart and his hands folded behind him, staring beyond all visible
+things.
+
+Should he do something very bold and striking? Should he invite both men
+and masters to the cathedral, and preach tremendous sermons to them upon
+these living issues?
+
+Short sermons, of course.
+
+But stating the church's attitude with a new and convincing vigour.
+
+He had a vision of the great aisle strangely full and alive and astir.
+The organ notes still echoed in the fretted vaulting, as the preacher
+made his way from the chancel to the pulpit. The congregation was tense
+with expectation, and for some reason his mind dwelt for a long time
+upon the figure of the preacher ascending the steps of the pulpit.
+Outside the day was dark and stormy, so that the stained-glass windows
+looked absolutely dead. For a little while the preacher prayed. Then in
+the attentive silence the tenor of the preacher would begin, a thin jet
+of sound, a ray of light in the darkness, speaking to all these men as
+they had never been spoken to before....
+
+Surely so one might call a halt to all these harsh conflicts. So one
+might lay hands afresh upon these stubborn minds, one might win them
+round to look at Christ the Master and Servant....
+
+That, he thought, would be a good phrase: “Christ the Master and
+Servant.”....
+
+“Members of one Body,” that should be his text.... At last it was
+finished. The big congregation, which had kept so still, sighed and
+stirred. The task of reconciliation was as good as done. “And now to God
+the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost....”
+
+Outside the day had become suddenly bright, the threatening storm had
+drifted away, and great shafts of coloured light from the pictured
+windows were smiting like arrows amidst his hearers....
+
+This idea of a great sermon upon capital and labour did so powerfully
+grip the bishop's imagination that he came near to losing the 8.27 train
+also.
+
+He discovered it when it was already in the station. He had to walk down
+the platform very quickly. He did not run, but his gaiters, he felt,
+twinkled more than a bishop's should.
+
+(8)
+
+
+Directly he met his wife he realized that he had to hear something
+important and unpleasant.
+
+She stood waiting for him in the inner hall, looking very grave and
+still. The light fell upon her pale face and her dark hair and her long
+white silken dress, making her seem more delicate and unworldly than
+usual and making the bishop feel grimy and sordid.
+
+“I must have a wash,” he said, though before he had thought of nothing
+but food. “I have had nothing to eat since tea-time--and that was mostly
+talk.”
+
+Lady Ella considered. “There are cold things.... You shall have a tray
+in the study. Not in the dining-room. Eleanor is there. I want to tell
+you something. But go upstairs first and wash your poor tired face.”
+
+“Nothing serious, I hope?” he asked, struck by an unusual quality in her
+voice.
+
+“I will tell you,” she evaded, and after a moment of mutual scrutiny he
+went past her upstairs.
+
+Since they had come to Princhester Lady Ella had changed very markedly.
+She seemed to her husband to have gained in dignity; she was stiller
+and more restrained; a certain faint arrogance, a touch of the “ruling
+class” manner had dwindled almost to the vanishing point. There had been
+a time when she had inclined to an authoritative hauteur, when she had
+seemed likely to develop into one of those aggressive and interfering
+old ladies who play so overwhelming a part in British public affairs.
+She had been known to initiate adverse judgments, to exercise the snub,
+to cut and humiliate. Princhester had done much to purge her of such
+tendencies. Princhester had made her think abundantly, and had put a new
+and subtler quality into her beauty. It had taken away the least little
+disposition to rustle as she moved, and it had softened her voice.
+
+Now, when presently she stood in the study, she showed a new
+circumspection in her treatment of her husband. She surveyed the tray
+before him.
+
+“You ought not to drink that Burgundy,” she said. “I can see you
+are dog-tired. It was uncorked yesterday, and anyhow it is not very
+digestible. This cold meat is bad enough. You ought to have one of those
+quarter bottles of champagne you got for my last convalescence. There's
+more than a dozen left over.”
+
+The bishop felt that this was a pretty return of his own kindly thoughts
+“after many days,” and soon Dunk, his valet-butler, was pouring out the
+precious and refreshing glassful....
+
+“And now, dear?” said the bishop, feeling already much better.
+
+Lady Ella had come round to the marble fireplace. The mantel-piece was
+a handsome work by a Princhester artist in the Gill style--with
+contemplative ascetics as supporters.
+
+“I am worried about Eleanor,” said Lady Ella.
+
+“She is in the dining-room now,” she said, “having some dinner. She came
+in about a quarter past eight, half way through dinner.”
+
+“Where had she been?” asked the bishop.
+
+“Her dress was torn--in two places. Her wrist had been twisted and a
+little sprained.”
+
+“My dear!”
+
+“Her face--Grubby! And she had been crying.”
+
+“But, my dear, what had happened to her? You don't mean--?”
+
+Husband and wife stared at one another aghast. Neither of them said the
+horrid word that flamed between them.
+
+“Merciful heaven!” said the bishop, and assumed an attitude of despair.
+
+“I didn't know she knew any of them. But it seems it is the second
+Walshingham girl--Phoebe. It's impossible to trace a girl's thoughts and
+friends. She persuaded her to go.”
+
+“But did she understand?”
+
+“That's the serious thing,” said Lady Ella.
+
+She seemed to consider whether he could bear the blow.
+
+“She understands all sorts of things. She argues.... I am quite unable
+to argue with her.”
+
+“About this vote business?”
+
+“About all sorts of things. Things I didn't imagine she had heard of.
+I knew she had been reading books. But I never imagined that she could
+have understood....”
+
+The bishop laid down his knife and fork.
+
+“One may read in books, one may even talk of things, without fully
+understanding,” he said.
+
+Lady Ella tried to entertain this comforting thought. “It isn't like
+that,” she said at last. “She talks like a grown-up person. This--this
+escapade is just an accident. But things have gone further than that.
+She seems to think--that she is not being educated properly here, that
+she ought to go to a College. As if we were keeping things from her....”
+
+The bishop reconsidered his plate.
+
+“But what things?” he said.
+
+“She says we get all round her,” said Lady Ella, and left the
+implications of that phrase to unfold.
+
+(9)
+
+
+For a time the bishop said very little.
+
+Lady Ella had found it necessary to make her first announcement standing
+behind him upon the hearthrug, but now she sat upon the arm of the great
+armchair as close to him as possible, and spoke in a more familiar tone.
+
+The thing, she said, had come to her as a complete surprise. Everything
+had seemed so safe. Eleanor had been thoughtful, it was true, but it had
+never occurred to her mother that she had really been thinking--about
+such things as she had been thinking about. She had ranged in the
+library, and displayed a disposition to read the weekly papers and the
+monthly reviews. But never a sign of discontent.
+
+“But I don't understand,” said the bishop. “Why is she discontented?
+What is there that she wants different?”
+
+“Exactly,” said Lady Ella.
+
+“She has got this idea that life here is secluded in some way,” she
+expanded. “She used words like 'secluded' and 'artificial' and--what was
+it?--'cloistered.' And she said--”
+
+Lady Ella paused with an effect of exact retrospection.
+
+“'Out there,' she said, 'things are alive. Real things are happening.'
+It is almost as if she did not fully believe--”
+
+Lady Ella paused again.
+
+The bishop sat with his arm over the back of his chair, and his face
+downcast.
+
+“The ferment of youth,” he said at last. “The ferment of youth. Who has
+given her these ideas?”
+
+Lady Ella did not know. She could have thought a school like St. Aubyns
+would have been safe, but nowadays nothing was safe. It was clear the
+girls who went there talked as girls a generation ago did not talk.
+Their people at home encouraged them to talk and profess opinions about
+everything. It seemed that Phoebe Walshingham and Lady Kitty Kingdom
+were the leaders in these premature mental excursions. Phoebe aired
+religious doubts.
+
+“But little Phoebe!” said the bishop.
+
+“Kitty,” said Lady Ella, “has written a novel.”
+
+“Already!”
+
+“With elopements in it--and all sorts of things. She's had it typed.
+You'd think Mary Crosshampton would know better than to let her daughter
+go flourishing the family imagination about in that way.”
+
+“Eleanor told you?”
+
+“By way of showing that they think of--things in general.”
+
+The bishop reflected. “She wants to go to College.”
+
+“They want to go in a set.”
+
+“I wonder if college can be much worse than school.... She's eighteen--?
+But I will talk to her....”
+
+(10)
+
+
+All our children are changelings. They are perpetually fresh strangers.
+Every day they vanish and a new person masquerades as yesterday's child
+until some unexpected development betrays the cheat.
+
+The bishop had still to learn this perennial newness of the young. He
+learnt it in half an hour at the end of a fatiguing day.
+
+He went into the dining-room. He went in as carelessly as possible and
+smoking a cigarette. He had an honourable dread of being portentous in
+his family; almost ostentatiously he laid the bishop aside. Eleanor had
+finished her meal, and was sitting in the arm-chair by the fire with one
+hand holding her sprained wrist.
+
+“Well,” he said, and strolled to the hearthrug. He had had an odd idea
+that he would find her still dirty, torn, and tearful, as her mother had
+described her, a little girl in a scrape. But she had changed into
+her best white evening frock and put up her hair, and became in the
+firelight more of a lady, a very young lady but still a lady, than she
+had ever been to him before. She was dark like her mother, but not of
+the same willowy type; she had more of her father's sturdy build, and
+she had developed her shoulders at hockey and tennis. The firelight
+brought out the gracious reposeful lines of a body that ripened in
+adolescence. And though there was a vibration of resolution in her voice
+she spoke like one who is under her own control.
+
+“Mother has told you that I have disgraced myself,” she began.
+
+“No,” said the bishop, weighing it. “No. But you seem to have been
+indiscreet, little Norah.”
+
+“I got excited,” she said. “They began turning out the other
+women--roughly. I was indignant.”
+
+“You didn't go to interrupt?” he asked.
+
+She considered. “No,” she said. “But I went.”
+
+He liked her disposition to get it right. “On that side,” he assisted.
+
+“It isn't the same thing as really meaning, Daddy,” she said.
+
+“And then things happened?”
+
+“Yes,” she said to the fire.
+
+A pause followed. If they had been in a law-court, her barrister would
+have said, “That is my case, my lord.” The bishop prepared to open the
+next stage in the proceedings.
+
+“I think, Norah, you shouldn't have been there at all,” he said.
+
+“Mother says that.”
+
+“A man in my position is apt to be judged by his family. You commit
+more than yourself when you commit an indiscretion. Apart from that, it
+wasn't the place for a girl to be at. You are not a child now. We give
+you freedom--more freedom than most girls get--because we think you
+will use it wisely. You knew--enough to know that there was likely to be
+trouble.”
+
+The girl looked into the fire and spoke very carefully. “I don't think
+that I oughtn't to know the things that are going on.”
+
+The bishop studied her face for an instant. It struck him that they
+had reached something very fundamental as between parent and child. His
+modernity showed itself in the temperance of his reply.
+
+“Don't you think, my dear, that on the whole your mother and I, who have
+lived longer and know more, are more likely to know when it is best that
+you should begin to know--this or that?”
+
+The girl knitted her brows and seemed to be reading her answer out of
+the depths of the coals. She was on the verge of speaking, altered her
+mind and tried a different beginning.
+
+“I think that every one must do their thinking--his
+thinking--for--oneself,” she said awkwardly.
+
+“You mean you can't trust--?”
+
+“It isn't trusting. But one knows best for oneself when one is hungry.”
+
+“And you find yourself hungry?”
+
+“I want to find out for myself what all this trouble about votes and
+things means.”
+
+“And we starve you--intellectually?”
+
+“You know I don't think that. But you are busy....”
+
+“Aren't you being perhaps a little impatient, Eleanor? After all--you
+are barely eighteen.... We have given you all sorts of liberties.”
+
+Her silence admitted it. “But still,” she said after a long pause,
+“there are other girls, younger than I am, in these things. They talk
+about--oh, all sorts of things. Freely....”
+
+“You've been awfully good to me,” she said irrelevantly. “And of course
+this meeting was all pure accident.”
+
+Father and daughter remained silent for awhile, seeking a better grip.
+
+“What exactly do you want, Eleanor?” he asked.
+
+She looked up at him. “Generally?” she asked.
+
+“Your mother has the impression that you are discontented.”
+
+“Discontented is a horrid word.”
+
+“Well--unsatisfied.”
+
+She remained still for a time. She felt the moment had come to make her
+demand.
+
+“I would like to go to Newnham or Somerville--and work. I feel--so
+horribly ignorant. Of all sorts of things. If I were a son I should
+go--”
+
+“Ye--es,” said the bishop and reflected.
+
+He had gone rather far in the direction of the Woman Suffrage people;
+he had advocated equality of standard in all sorts of matters, and the
+memory of these utterances hampered him.
+
+“You could read here,” he tried.
+
+“If I were a son, you wouldn't say that.”
+
+His reply was vague. “But in this home,” he said, “we have a certain
+atmosphere.”
+
+He left her to imply her differences in sensibility and response from
+the hardier male.
+
+Her hesitation marked the full gravity of her reply. “It's just that,”
+ she said. “One feels--” She considered it further. “As if we were living
+in a kind of magic world--not really real. Out there--” she glanced
+over her shoulder at the drawn blind that hid the night. “One meets with
+different sorts of minds and different--atmospheres. All this is very
+beautiful. I've had the most wonderful home. But there's a sort of
+feeling as though it couldn't really go on, as though all these strikes
+and doubts and questionings--”
+
+She stopped short at questionings, for the thing was said.
+
+The bishop took her meaning gallantly and honestly.
+
+“The church of Christ, little Norah, is built upon a rock.”
+
+She made no answer. She moved her head very slightly so that he could
+not see her face, and remained sitting rather stiffly and awkwardly with
+her eyes upon the fire.
+
+Her silence was the third and greatest blow the bishop received that
+day....
+
+It seemed very long indeed before either of them spoke. At last he said:
+“We must talk about these things again, Norah, when we are less tired
+and have more time.... You have been reading books.... When Caxton set
+up his printing-press he thrust a new power between church and disciple
+and father and child.... And I am tired. We must talk it over a little
+later.”
+
+The girl stood up. She took her father's hands. “Dear, dear Daddy,”
+ she said, “I am so sorry to be a bother. I am so sorry I went to that
+meeting.... You look tired out.”
+
+“We must talk--properly,” said the bishop, patting one hand, then
+discovering from her wincing face that it was the sprained one. “Your
+poor wrist,” he said.
+
+“It's so hard to talk, but I want to talk to you, Daddy. It isn't that I
+have hidden things....”
+
+She kissed him, and the bishop had the odd fancy that she kissed him as
+though she was sorry for him....
+
+It occurred to him that really there could be no time like the present
+for discussing these “questionings” of hers, and then his fatigue and
+shyness had the better of him again.
+
+(11)
+
+
+The papers got hold of Eleanor's share in the suffragette disturbance.
+The White Blackbird said things about her.
+
+It did not attack her. It did worse. It admired her ...impudently.
+
+It spoke of her once as “Norah,” and once as “the Scrope Flapper.”
+
+Its headline proclaimed: “Plucky Flappers Hold Up L. G.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD - INSOMNIA
+
+(1)
+
+
+THE night after his conversation with Eleanor was the first night of the
+bishop's insomnia. It was the definite beginning of a new phase in his
+life.
+
+Doctors explain to us that the immediate cause of insomnia is always
+some poisoned or depleted state of the body, and no doubt the
+fatigues and hasty meals of the day had left the bishop in a state of
+unprecedented chemical disorder, with his nerves irritated by strange
+compounds and unsoothed by familiar lubricants. But chemical disorders
+follow mental disturbances, and the core and essence of his trouble was
+an intellectual distress. For the first time in his life he was
+really in doubt, about himself, about his way of living, about all his
+persuasions. It was a general doubt. It was not a specific suspicion
+upon this point or that. It was a feeling of detachment and unreality at
+once extraordinarily vague and extraordinarily oppressive. It was as
+if he discovered himself flimsy and transparent in a world of minatory
+solidity and opacity. It was as if he found himself made not of flesh
+and blood but of tissue paper.
+
+But this intellectual insecurity extended into his physical sensations.
+It affected his feeling in his skin, as if it were not absolutely his
+own skin.
+
+And as he lay there, a weak phantom mentally and bodily, an endless
+succession and recurrence of anxieties for which he could find no
+reassurance besieged him.
+
+Chief of this was his distress for Eleanor.
+
+She was the central figure in this new sense of illusion in familiar and
+trusted things. It was not only that the world of his existence which
+had seemed to be the whole universe had become diaphanous and betrayed
+vast and uncontrollable realities beyond it, but his daughter had as it
+were suddenly opened a door in this glassy sphere of insecurity that had
+been his abiding refuge, a door upon the stormy rebel outer world, and
+she stood there, young, ignorant, confident, adventurous, ready to step
+out.
+
+“Could it be possible that she did not believe?”
+
+He saw her very vividly as he had seen her in the dining-room, slender
+and upright, half child, half woman, so fragile and so fearless. And the
+door she opened thus carelessly gave upon a stormy background like one
+of the stormy backgrounds that were popular behind portrait Dianas in
+eighteenth century paintings. Did she believe that all he had taught
+her, all the life he led was--what was her phrase?--a kind of magic
+world, not really real?
+
+He groaned and turned over and repeated the words: “A kind of magic
+world--not really real!”
+
+The wind blew through the door she opened, and scattered everything in
+the room. And still she held the door open.
+
+He was astonished at himself. He started up in swift indignation. Had
+he not taught the child? Had he not brought her up in an atmosphere
+of faith? What right had she to turn upon him in this matter? It
+was--indeed it was--a sort of insolence, a lack of reverence....
+
+It was strange he had not perceived this at the time.
+
+But indeed at the first mention of “questionings” he ought to have
+thundered. He saw that quite clearly now. He ought to have cried out and
+said, “On your knees, my Norah, and ask pardon of God!”
+
+Because after all faith is an emotional thing....
+
+He began to think very rapidly and copiously of things he ought to have
+said to Eleanor. And now the eloquence of reverie was upon him. In a
+little time he was also addressing the tea-party at Morrice Deans'. Upon
+them too he ought to have thundered. And he knew now also all that he
+should have said to the recalcitrant employer. Thunder also. Thunder is
+surely the privilege of the higher clergy--under Jove.
+
+But why hadn't he thundered?
+
+He gesticulated in the darkness, thrust out a clutching hand.
+
+There are situations that must be gripped--gripped firmly. And without
+delay. In the middle ages there had been grip enough in a purple glove.
+
+(2)
+
+
+From these belated seizures of the day's lost opportunities the bishop
+passed to such a pessimistic estimate of the church as had never entered
+his mind before.
+
+It was as if he had fallen suddenly out of a spiritual balloon into
+a world of bleak realism. He found himself asking unprecedented and
+devastating questions, questions that implied the most fundamental
+shiftings of opinion. Why was the church such a failure? Why had it
+no grip upon either masters or men amidst this vigorous life of modern
+industrialism, and why had it no grip upon the questioning young? It was
+a tolerated thing, he felt, just as sometimes he had felt that the
+Crown was a tolerated thing. He too was a tolerated thing; a curious
+survival....
+
+This was not as things should be. He struggled to recover a proper
+attitude. But he remained enormously dissatisfied....
+
+The church was no Levite to pass by on the other side away from the
+struggles and wrongs of the social conflict. It had no right when the
+children asked for the bread of life to offer them Gothic stone....
+
+He began to make interminable weak plans for fulfilling his duty to his
+diocese and his daughter.
+
+What could he do to revivify his clergy? He wished he had more personal
+magnetism, he wished he had a darker and a larger presence. He wished he
+had not been saddled with Whippham's rather futile son as his chaplain.
+He wished he had a dean instead of being his own dean. With an
+unsympathetic rector. He wished he had it in him to make some resounding
+appeal. He might of course preach a series of thumping addresses and
+sermons, rather on the lines of “Fors Clavigera,” to masters and men,
+in the Cathedral. Only it was so difficult to get either masters or men
+into the Cathedral.
+
+Well, if the people will not come to the bishop the bishop must go out
+to the people. Should he go outside the Cathedral--to the place where
+the trains met?
+
+Interweaving with such thoughts the problem of Eleanor rose again into
+his consciousness.
+
+Weren't there books she ought to read? Weren't there books she ought to
+be made to read? And books--and friends--that ought to be imperatively
+forbidden? Imperatively!
+
+But how to define the forbidden?
+
+He began to compose an address on Modern Literature (so-called).
+
+It became acrimonious.
+
+Before dawn the birds began to sing.
+
+His mind had seemed to be a little tranquillized, there had been a
+distinct feeling of subsidence sleepwards, when first one and then
+another little creature roused itself and the bishop to greet the
+gathering daylight.
+
+It became a little clamour, a misty sea of sound in which individuality
+appeared and disappeared. For a time a distant cuckoo was very
+perceptible, like a landmark looming up over a fog, like the cuckoo in
+the Pastoral Symphony.
+
+The bishop tried not to heed these sounds, but they were by their very
+nature insistent sounds. He lay disregarding them acutely.
+
+Presently he pulled the coverlet over his ears.
+
+A little later he sat up in bed.
+
+Again in a slight detail he marked his strange and novel detachment from
+the world of his upbringing. His hallucination of disillusionment had
+spread from himself and his church and his faith to the whole animate
+creation. He knew that these were the voices of “our feathered
+songsters,” that this was “a joyous chorus” greeting the day. He knew
+that a wakeful bishop ought to bless these happy creatures, and join
+with them by reciting Ken's morning hymn. He made an effort that was
+more than half habit, to repeat and he repeated with a scowling face and
+the voice of a schoolmaster:
+
+
+“Awake my soul, and with the sun
+Thy daily stage of duty run....”
+
+
+He got no further. He stopped short, sat still, thinking what utterly
+detestable things singing birds were. A. blackbird had gripped his
+attention. Never had he heard such vain repetitions. He struggled
+against the dark mood of criticism. “He prayeth best who loveth best--”
+
+No, he did not love the birds. It was useless to pretend. Whatever one
+may say about other birds a cuckoo is a low detestable cad of a bird.
+
+Then the bishop began to be particularly tormented by a bird that made a
+short, insistent, wheezing sound at regular intervals of perhaps twenty
+seconds. If a bird could have whooping-cough, that, he thought, was the
+sort of whoop it would have. But even if it had whooping-cough he could
+not pity it. He hung in its intervals waiting for the return of the
+wheeze.
+
+And then that blackbird reasserted itself. It had a rich boastful note;
+it seemed proud of its noisy reiteration of simple self-assertion. For
+some obscure reason the phrase “oleographic sounds” drifted into the
+bishop's thoughts. This bird produced the peculiar and irrational
+impression that it had recently made a considerable sum of money by
+shrewd industrialism. It was, he thought grimly, a genuine Princhester
+blackbird.
+
+This wickedly uncharitable reference to his diocese ran all unchallenged
+through the bishop's mind. And others no less wicked followed it.
+
+Once during his summer holidays in Florence he and Lady Ella had
+subscribed to an association for the protection of song-birds. He
+recalled this now with a mild wonder. It seemed to him that perhaps
+after all it was as well to let fruit-growers and Italians deal with
+singing-birds in their own way. Perhaps after all they had a wisdom....
+
+He passed his hands over his face. The world after all is not made
+entirely for singing-birds; there is such a thing as proportion.
+Singing-birds may become a luxury, an indulgence, an excess.
+
+Did the birds eat the fruit in Paradise?
+
+Perhaps there they worked for some collective musical effect, had some
+sort of conductor in the place of this--hullabaloo....
+
+He decided to walk about the room for a time and then remake his bed....
+
+The sunrise found the bishop with his head and shoulders out of the
+window trying to see that blackbird. He just wanted to look at it. He
+was persuaded it was a quite exceptional blackbird.
+
+Again came that oppressive sense of the futility of the contemporary
+church, but this time it came in the most grotesque form. For hanging
+half out of the casement he was suddenly reminded of St. Francis of
+Assisi, and how at his rebuke the wheeling swallow stilled their cries.
+
+But it was all so different then.
+
+(3)
+
+
+It was only after he had passed four similar nights, with intervening
+days of lassitude and afternoon siestas, that the bishop realized that
+he was in the grip of insomnia.
+
+He did not go at once to a doctor, but he told his trouble to every one
+he met and received much tentative advice. He had meant to have his
+talk with Eleanor on the morning next after their conversation in the
+dining-room, but his bodily and spiritual anaemia prevented him.
+
+The fifth night was the beginning of the Whitsuntide Ember week, and
+he wore a red cassock and had a distracting and rather interesting day
+welcoming his ordination candidates. They had a good effect upon him; we
+spiritualize ourselves when we seek to spiritualize others, and he went
+to bed in a happier frame of mind than he had done since the day of the
+shock. He woke in the night, but he woke much more himself than he had
+been since the trouble began. He repeated that verse of Ken's:
+
+“When in the night I sleepless lie, My soul with heavenly thoughts
+supply; Let no ill dreams disturb my rest, No powers of darkness me
+molest.”
+
+
+Almost immediately after these there floated into his mind, as if it
+were a message, the dear familiar words:
+
+“He giveth his Beloved sleep.”
+
+
+These words irradiated and soothed him quite miraculously, the clouds of
+doubt seemed to dissolve and vanish and leave him safe and calm under a
+clear sky; he knew those words were a promise, and very speedily he fell
+asleep and slept until he was called.
+
+But the next day was a troubled one. Whippham had muddled his timetable
+and crowded his afternoon; the strike of the transport workers had
+begun, and the ugly noises they made at the tramway depot, where they
+were booing some one, penetrated into the palace. He had to snatch a
+meal between services, and the sense of hurry invaded his afternoon
+lectures to the candidates. He hated hurry in Ember week. His ideal was
+one of quiet serenity, of grave things said slowly, of still, kneeling
+figures, of a sort of dark cool spiritual germination. But what sort of
+dark cool spiritual germination is possible with an ass like Whippham
+about?
+
+In the fresh courage of the morning the bishop had arranged for that
+talk with Eleanor he had already deferred too long, and this had proved
+less satisfactory than he had intended it to be.
+
+The bishop's experience with the ordination candidates was following
+the usual course. Before they came there was something bordering upon
+distaste for the coming invasion; then always there was an effect of
+surprise at the youth and faith of the neophytes and a real response of
+the spirit to the occasion. Throughout the first twenty-four hours
+they were all simply neophytes, without individuality to break up their
+uniformity of self-devotion. Then afterwards they began to develop
+little personal traits, and scarcely ever were these pleasing traits.
+Always one or two of them would begin haunting the bishop, giving way
+to an appetite for special words, special recognitions. He knew the
+expression of that craving on their faces. He knew the way-laying
+movements in room and passage that presently began.
+
+This time in particular there was a freckled underbred young man who
+handed in what was evidently a carefully prepared memorandum upon what
+he called “my positions.” Apparently he had a muddle of doubts about
+the early fathers and the dates of the earlier authentic copies of the
+gospels, things of no conceivable significance.
+
+The bishop glanced through this bale of papers--it had of course no
+index and no synopsis, and some of the pages were not numbered--handed
+it over to Whippham, and when he proved, as usual, a broken reed, the
+bishop had the brilliant idea of referring the young man to Canon Bliss
+(of Pringle), “who has a special knowledge quite beyond my own in this
+field.”
+
+But he knew from the young man's eye even as he said this that it was
+not going to put him off for more than a day or so.
+
+The immediate result of glancing over these papers was, however, to
+enhance in the bishop's mind a growing disposition to minimize the
+importance of all dated and explicit evidences and arguments for
+orthodox beliefs, and to resort to vague symbolic and liberal
+interpretations, and it was in this state that he came to his talk with
+Eleanor.
+
+He did not give her much time to develop her objections. He met her
+half way and stated them for her, and overwhelmed her with sympathy
+and understanding. She had been “too literal.” “Too literal” was his
+keynote. He was a little astonished at the liberality of his own views.
+He had been getting along now for some years without looking into his
+own opinions too closely and he was by no means prepared to discover
+how far he had come to meet his daughter's scepticisms. But he did meet
+them. He met them so thoroughly that he almost conveyed that hers was a
+needlessly conservative and oldfashioned attitude.
+
+Occasionally he felt he was being a little evasive, but she did not
+seem to notice it. As she took his drift, her relief and happiness were
+manifest. And he had never noticed before how clear and pretty her eyes
+were; they were the most honest eyes he had ever seen. She looked at him
+very steadily as he explained, and lit up at his points. She brightened
+wonderfully as she realized that after all they were not apart, they had
+not differed; simply they had misunderstood....
+
+And before he knew where he was, and in a mere parenthetical declaration
+of liberality, he surprised himself by conceding her demand for Newnham
+even before she had repeated it. It helped his case wonderfully.
+
+“Call in every exterior witness you can. The church will welcome
+them.... No, I want you to go, my dear....”
+
+But his mind was stirred again to its depths by this discussion. And
+in particular he was surprised and a little puzzled by this Newnham
+concession and the necessity of making his new attitude clear to Lady
+Ella....
+
+It was with a sense of fatality that he found himself awake again that
+night, like some one lying drowned and still and yet perfectly conscious
+at the bottom of deep cold water.
+
+He repeated, “He giveth his Beloved sleep,” but all the conviction had
+gone out of the words.
+
+(4)
+
+
+Neither the bishop's insomnia nor his incertitudes about himself and his
+faith developed in a simple and orderly manner. There were periods of
+sustained suffering and periods of recovery; it was not for a year or
+so that he regarded these troubles as more than acute incidental
+interruptions of his general tranquillity or realized that he was
+passing into a new phase of life and into a new quality of thought.
+He told every one of the insomnia and no one of his doubts; these he
+betrayed only by an increasing tendency towards vagueness, symbolism,
+poetry and toleration. Eleanor seemed satisfied with his exposition; she
+did not press for further enlightenment. She continued all her outward
+conformities except that after a time she ceased to communicate; and in
+September she went away to Newnham. Her doubts had not visibly affected
+Clementina or her other sisters, and the bishop made no further attempts
+to explore the spiritual life of his family below the surface of its
+formal acquiescence.
+
+As a matter of fact his own spiritual wrestlings were almost exclusively
+nocturnal. During his spells of insomnia he led a curiously double
+existence. In the daytime he was largely the self he had always been,
+able, assured, ecclesiastical, except that he was a little jaded and
+irritable or sleepy instead of being quick and bright; he believed in
+God and the church and the Royal Family and himself securely; in
+the wakeful night time he experienced a different and novel self, a
+bare-minded self, bleakly fearless at its best, shamelessly weak at its
+worst, critical, sceptical, joyless, anxious. The anxiety was quite the
+worst element of all. Something sat by his pillow asking grey questions:
+“What are you doing? Where are you going? Is it really well with the
+children? Is it really well with the church? Is it really well with the
+country? Are you indeed doing anything at all? Are you anything more
+than an actor wearing a costume in an archaic play? The people turn
+their backs on you.”
+
+He would twist over on his pillow. He would whisper hymns and prayers
+that had the quality of charms.
+
+“He giveth his Beloved sleep”; that answered many times, and many times
+it failed.
+
+The labour troubles of 1912 eased off as the year wore on, and the
+bitterness of the local press over the palace abated very considerably.
+Indeed there was something like a watery gleam of popularity when he
+brought down his consistent friend, the dear old Princess Christiana of
+Hoch and Unter, black bonnet, deafness, and all, to open a new wing of
+the children's hospital. The Princhester conservative paper took the
+occasion to inform the diocese that he was a fluent German scholar and
+consequently a persona grata with the royal aunts, and that the Princess
+Christiana was merely just one of a number of royalties now practically
+at the beck and call of Princhester. It was not true, but it was very
+effective locally, and seemed to justify a little the hauteur of which
+Lady Ella was so unjustly suspected. Yet it involved a possibility of
+disappointments in the future.
+
+He went to Brighton-Pomfrey too upon the score of his general health,
+and Brighton-Pomfrey revised his general regimen, discouraged indiscreet
+fasting, and suggested a complete abstinence from red wine except white
+port, if indeed that can be called a red wine, and a moderate use of
+Egyptian cigarettes.
+
+But 1913 was a strenuous year. The labour troubles revived, the
+suffragette movement increased greatly in violence and aggressiveness,
+and there sprang up no less than three ecclesiastical scandals in
+the diocese. First, the Kensitites set themselves firmly to make
+presentations and prosecutions against Morrice Deans, who was reserving
+the sacrament, wearing, they said, “Babylonish garments,” going beyond
+all reason in the matter of infant confession, and generally brightening
+up Mogham Banks; next, a popular preacher in Wombash, published a book
+under the exasperating title, “The Light Under the Altar,” in which
+he showed himself as something between an Arian and a Pantheist, and
+treated the dogma of the Trinity with as little respect as one would
+show to an intrusive cat; while thirdly, an obscure but overworked
+missioner of a tin mission church in the new working-class district at
+Pringle, being discovered in some sort of polygamous relationship, had
+seen fit to publish in pamphlet form a scandalous admission and defence,
+a pamphlet entitled “Marriage True and False,” taking the public
+needlessly into his completest confidence and quoting the affairs of
+Abraham and Hosea, reviving many points that are better forgotten about
+Luther, and appealing also to such uncanonical authorities as
+Milton, Plato, and John Humphrey Noyes. This abnormal concurrence of
+indiscipline was extremely unlucky for the bishop. It plunged him into
+strenuous controversy upon three fronts, so to speak, and involved
+a great number of personal encounters far too vivid for his mental
+serenity.
+
+The Pringle polygamist was the most moving as Morrice Deans was the most
+exacting and troublesome and the Wombash Pantheist the most insidiously
+destructive figure in these three toilsome disputes. The Pringle man's
+soul had apparently missed the normal distribution of fig-leaves; he
+was an illiterate, open-eyed, hard-voiced, freckled, rational-minded
+creature, with large expository hands, who had come by a side way into
+the church because he was an indefatigable worker, and he insisted upon
+telling the bishop with an irrepressible candour and completeness just
+exactly what was the matter with his intimate life. The bishop very
+earnestly did not want these details, and did his utmost to avoid the
+controversial questions that the honest man pressed respectfully but
+obstinately upon him.
+
+“Even St. Paul, my lord, admitted that it is better to marry than burn,”
+ said the Pringle misdemeanant, “and here was I, my lord, married and
+still burning!” and, “I think you would find, my lord, considering
+all Charlotte's peculiarities, that the situation was really much more
+trying than the absolute celibacy St. Paul had in view.”...
+
+The bishop listened to these arguments as little as possible, and did
+not answer them at all. But afterwards the offender came and wept and
+said he was ruined and heartbroken and unfairly treated because
+he wasn't a gentleman, and that was distressing. It was so exactly
+true--and so inevitable. He had been deprived, rather on account of
+his voice and apologetics than of his offence, and public opinion was
+solidly with the sentence. He made a gallant effort to found what
+he called a Labour Church in Pringle, and after some financial
+misunderstandings departed with his unambiguous menage to join the
+advanced movement on the Clyde.
+
+The Morrice Deans enquiry however demanded an amount of erudition that
+greatly fatigued the bishop. He had a very fair general knowledge of
+vestments, but he had never really cared for anything but the poetry of
+ornaments, and he had to work strenuously to master the legal side
+of the question. Whippham, his chaplain, was worse than useless as a
+helper. The bishop wanted to end the matter as quickly, quietly, and
+favourably to Morrice Deans as possible; he thought Morrice Deans a
+thoroughly good man in his parish, and he believed that the substitution
+of a low churchman would mean a very complete collapse of church
+influence in Mogham Banks, where people were now thoroughly accustomed
+to a highly ornate service. But Morrice Deans was intractable and his
+pursuers indefatigable, and on several occasions the bishop sat far into
+the night devising compromises and equivocations that should make the
+Kensitites think that Morrice Deans wasn't wearing vestments when he
+was, and that should make Morrice Deans think he was wearing vestments
+when he wasn't. And it was Whippham who first suggested green tea as
+a substitute for coffee, which gave the bishop indigestion, as his
+stimulant for these nocturnal bouts.
+
+Now green tea is the most lucid of poisons.
+
+And while all this extra activity about Morrice Deans, these vigils and
+crammings and writings down, were using all and more energy than the
+bishop could well spare, he was also doing his quiet utmost to keep “The
+Light under the Altar” ease from coming to a head.
+
+This man he hated.
+
+And he dreaded him as well as hated him. Chasters, the author of “The
+Light under the Altar,” was a man who not only reasoned closely
+but indelicately. There was a demonstrating, jeering, air about his
+preaching and writing, and everything he said and did was saturated by
+the spirit of challenge. He did not so much imitate as exaggerate the
+style of Matthew Arnold. And whatever was done publicly against him
+would have to be done very publicly because his book had got him a
+London reputation.
+
+From the bishop's point of view Chasters was one of nature's ignoblemen.
+He seemed to have subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles and passed all
+the tests and taken all the pledges that stand on the way to ordination,
+chiefly for the pleasure of attacking them more successfully from the
+rear; he had been given the living of Wombash by a cousin, and filled it
+very largely because it was not only more piquant but more remunerative
+and respectable to be a rationalist lecturer in a surplice. And in a
+hard kind of ultra-Protestant way his social and parochial work was not
+badly done. But his sermons were terrible. “He takes a text,” said one
+informant, “and he goes on firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly, like
+somebody tearing the petals from a flower. 'Finally,' he says, and
+throws the bare stalk into the dustbin.”
+
+The bishop avoided “The Light under the Altar” for nearly a year. It
+was only when a second book was announced with the winning title of “The
+Core of Truth in Christianity” that he perceived he must take action.
+He sat up late one night with a marked copy, a very indignantly marked
+copy, of the former work that an elderly colonel, a Wombash parishioner,
+an orthodox Layman of the most virulent type, had sent him. He perceived
+that he had to deal with a dialectician of exceptional ability, who had
+concentrated a quite considerable weight of scholarship upon the task of
+explaining away every scrap of spiritual significance in the Eucharist.
+From Chasters the bishop was driven by reference to the works of Legge
+and Frazer, and for the first time he began to measure the dimensions
+and power of the modern criticism of church doctrine and observance.
+Green tea should have lit his way to refutation; instead it lit up the
+whole inquiry with a light of melancholy confirmation. Neither by night
+nor by day could the bishop find a proper method of opening a counter
+attack upon Chasters, who was indisputably an intellectually abler man
+and a very ruthless beast indeed to assail, and meanwhile the demand
+that action should be taken increased.
+
+The literature of church history and the controversies arising out of
+doctrinal development became the employment of the bishop's leisure and
+a commanding preoccupation. He would have liked to discuss with some one
+else the network of perplexities in which he was entangling himself, and
+more particularly with Canon Bliss, but his own positions were becoming
+so insecure that he feared to betray them by argument. He had grown up
+with a kind of intellectual modesty. Some things he had never yet talked
+about; it made his mind blench to think of talking about them. And his
+great aching gaps of wakefulness began now, thanks to the green tea, to
+be interspersed with theological dreams and visions of an extravagant
+vividness. He would see Frazer's sacrificial kings butchered
+picturesquely and terribly amidst strange and grotesque rituals; he
+would survey long and elaborate processions and ceremonials in which
+the most remarkable symbols were borne high in the sight of all men; he
+would cower before a gigantic and threatening Heaven. These
+green-tea dreams and visions were not so much phases of sleep as an
+intensification and vivid furnishing forth of insomnia. It added
+greatly to his disturbance that--exceeding the instructions of
+Brighton-Pomfrey--he had now experimented ignorantly and planlessly
+with one or two narcotics and sleeping mixtures that friends and
+acquaintances had mentioned in his hearing. For the first time in his
+life he became secretive from his wife. He knew he ought not to take
+these things, he knew they were physically and morally evil, but
+a tormenting craving drove him to them. Subtly and insensibly his
+character was being undermined by the growing nervous trouble.
+
+He astonished himself by the cunning and the hypocritical dignity he
+could display in procuring these drugs. He arranged to have a tea-making
+set in his bedroom, and secretly substituted green tea, for which he
+developed a powerful craving, in the place of the delicate China tea
+Lady Ella procured him.
+
+(5)
+
+
+These doctrinal and physical anxieties and distresses were at their
+worst in the spring and early summer of 1914. That was a time of great
+mental and moral disturbance. There was premonition in the air of those
+days. It was like the uneasiness sensitive people experience before a
+thunderstorm. The moral atmosphere was sullen and close. The whole
+world seemed irritable and mischievous. The suffragettes became
+extraordinarily malignant; the democratic movement went rotten with
+sabotage and with a cant of being “rebels”; the reactionary Tories and a
+crew of noisy old peeresses set themselves to create incurable confusion
+again in the healing wounds of Ireland, and feuds and frantic folly
+broke out at every point of the social and political edifice. And then
+a bomb burst at Sarajevo that silenced all this tumult. The unstable
+polity of Europe heeled over like a ship that founders.
+
+Through the swiftest, tensest week in history Europe capsized into war.
+
+(6)
+
+
+The first effect of the war upon the mind of the bishop, as upon
+most imaginative minds, was to steady and exalt it. Trivialities and
+exasperations seemed swept out of existence. Men lifted up their eyes
+from disputes that had seemed incurable and wrangling that promised to
+be interminable, and discovered a plain and tragic issue that involved
+every one in a common call for devotion. For a great number of men and
+women who had been born and bred in security, the August and September
+of 1914 were the supremely heroic period of their lives. Myriads
+of souls were born again to ideas of service and sacrifice in those
+tremendous days.
+
+Black and evil thing as the war was, it was at any rate a great thing;
+it did this much for countless minds that for the first time they
+realized the epic quality of history and their own relationship to the
+destinies of the race. The flimsy roof under which we had been living
+our lives of comedy fell and shattered the floor under our feet; we saw
+the stars above and the abyss below. We perceived that life was insecure
+and adventurous, part of one vast adventure in space and time....
+
+Presently the smoke and dust of battle hid the great distances again,
+but they could not altogether destroy the memories of this revelation.
+
+For the first two months the bishop's attention was so detached from
+his immediate surroundings and employments, so absorbed by great events,
+that his history if it were told in detail would differ scarcely at all
+from the histories of most comparatively unemployed minds during those
+first dramatic days, the days when the Germans made their great rush
+upon Paris and it seemed that France was down, France and the whole
+fabric of liberal civilization. He emerged from these stunning
+apprehensions after the Battle of the Marne, to find himself busy upon a
+score of dispersed and disconnected war jobs, and trying to get all the
+new appearances and forces and urgencies of the war into relations with
+himself. One thing became very vivid indeed, that he wasn't being used
+in any real and effective way in the war. There was a mighty going
+to and fro upon Red Cross work and various war committees, a vast
+preparation for wounded men and for the succour of dislocated
+families; a preparation, that proved to be needless, for catastrophic
+unemployment. The war problem and the puzzle of German psychology ousted
+for a time all other intellectual interests; like every one else the
+bishop swam deep in Nietzsche, Bernhardi, Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
+and the like; he preached several sermons upon German materialism
+and the astonishing decay of the German character. He also read every
+newspaper he could lay his hands on--like any secular man. He signed
+an address to the Russian Orthodox church, beginning “Brethren,” and
+he revised his impressions of the Filioque controversy. The idea of a
+reunion of the two great state churches of Russia and England had always
+attracted him. But hitherto it had been a thing quite out of scale,
+visionary, utopian. Now in this strange time of altered perspectives it
+seemed the most practicable of suggestions. The mayor and corporation
+and a detachment of the special reserve in uniform came to a great
+intercession service, and in the palace there were two conferences of
+local influential people, people of the most various types, people
+who had never met tolerantly before, expressing now opinions of
+unprecedented breadth and liberality.
+
+All this sort of thing was fresh and exciting at first, and then it
+began to fall into a routine and became habitual, and as it became
+habitual he found that old sense of detachment and futility was creeping
+back again. One day he realized that indeed the whole flood and tumult
+of the war would be going on almost exactly as it was going on now if
+there had been neither cathedral nor bishop in Princhester. It came to
+him that if archbishops were rolled into patriarchs and patriarchs into
+archbishops, it would matter scarcely more in the world process that was
+afoot than if two men shook hands while their house was afire. At times
+all of us have inappropriate thoughts. The unfortunate thought that
+struck the bishop as a bullet might strike a man in an exposed trench,
+as he was hurrying through the cloisters to a special service and
+address upon that doubly glorious day in our English history, the day of
+St. Crispin, was of Diogenes rolling his tub.
+
+It was a poisonous thought.
+
+It arose perhaps out of an article in a weekly paper at which he had
+glanced after lunch, an article written by one of those sceptical
+spirits who find all too abundant expression in our periodical
+literature. The writer boldly charged the “Christian churches” with
+absolute ineffectiveness. This war, he declared, was above all other
+wars a war of ideas, of material organization against rational freedom,
+of violence against law; it was a war more copiously discussed than any
+war had ever been before, the air was thick with apologetics. And what
+was the voice of the church amidst these elemental issues? Bishops and
+divines who were patriots one heard discordantly enough, but where were
+the bishops and divines who spoke for the Prince of Peace? Where was the
+blessing of the church, where was the veto of the church? When it
+came to that one discovered only a broad preoccupied back busied in
+supplementing the Army Medical Corps with Red Cross activities, good
+work in its way--except that the canonicals seemed superfluous. Who
+indeed looked to the church for any voice at all? And so to Diogenes.
+
+The bishop's mind went hunting for an answer to that indictment. And
+came back and came back to the image of Diogenes.
+
+It was with that image dangling like a barbed arrow from his mind that
+the bishop went into the pulpit to preach upon St. Crispin's day, and
+looked down upon a thin and scattered congregation in which the elderly,
+the childless, and the unoccupied predominated.
+
+That night insomnia resumed its sway.
+
+Of course the church ought to be controlling this great storm, the
+greatest storm of war that had ever stirred mankind. It ought to be
+standing fearlessly between the combatants like a figure in a wall
+painting, with the cross of Christ uplifted and the restored memory of
+Christendom softening the eyes of the armed nations. “Put down those
+weapons and listen to me,” so the church should speak in irresistible
+tones, in a voice of silver trumpets.
+
+Instead it kept a long way from the fighting, tucked up its vestments,
+and was rolling its local tubs quite briskly.
+
+(7)
+
+
+And then came the aggravation of all these distresses by an abrupt
+abandonment of smoking and alcohol. Alcoholic relaxation, a necessary
+mitigation of the unreality of peacetime politics, becomes a grave
+danger in war, and it was with an understandable desire to forward the
+interests of his realm that the King decided to set his statesmen an
+example--which unhappily was not very widely followed--by abstaining
+from alcohol during the continuance of the struggle. It did however
+swing over the Bishop of Princhester to an immediate and complete
+abandonment of both drink and tobacco. At that time he was finding
+comfort for his nerves in Manila cheroots, and a particularly big and
+heavy type of Egyptian cigarette with a considerable amount of opium,
+and his disorganized system seized upon this sudden change as a
+grievance, and set all his jangling being crying aloud for one
+cigarette--just one cigarette.
+
+The cheroots, it seemed, he could better spare, but a cigarette became
+his symbol for his lost steadiness and ease.
+
+It brought him low.
+
+The reader has already been told the lamentable incident of the stolen
+cigarette and the small boy, and how the bishop, tormented by that
+shameful memory, cried aloud in the night.
+
+The bishop rolled his tub, and is there any tub-rolling in the world
+more busy and exacting than a bishop's? He rolled in it spite of
+ill-health and insomnia, and all the while he was tormented by the
+enormous background of the world war, by his ineffective realization
+of vast national needs, by his passionate desire, for himself and his
+church, not to be ineffective.
+
+The distressful alternation between nights of lucid doubt and days of
+dull acquiescence was resumed with an intensification of its contrasts.
+The brief phase of hope that followed the turn of the fighting upon the
+Maine, the hope that after all the war would end swiftly, dramatically,
+and justly, and everything be as it had been before--but pleasanter,
+gave place to a phase that bordered upon despair. The fall of Antwerp
+and the doubts and uncertainties of the Flanders situation weighed
+terribly upon the bishop. He was haunted for a time by nightmares of
+Zeppelins presently raining fire upon London. These visions became
+Apocalyptic. The Zeppelins came to England with the new year, and with
+the close of the year came the struggle for Ypres that was so near
+to being a collapse of the allied defensive. The events of the early
+spring, the bloody failure of British generalship at Neuve Chapelle,
+the naval disaster in the Dardanelles, the sinking of the Falaba,
+the Russian defeat in the Masurian Lakes, all deepened the bishop's
+impression of the immensity of the nation's difficulties and of his
+own unhelpfulness. He was ashamed that the church should hold back its
+curates from enlistment while the French priests were wearing their
+uniforms in the trenches; the expedition of the Bishop of London to
+hold open-air services at the front seemed merely to accentuate the
+tub-rolling. It was rolling the tub just where it was most in the way.
+
+What was wrong? What was wanting?
+
+The Westminster Gazette, The Spectator, and several other of the most
+trusted organs of public opinion were intermittently discussing the same
+question. Their discussions implied at once the extreme need that
+was felt for religion by all sorts of representative people, and the
+universal conviction that the church was in some way muddling and
+masking her revelation. “What is wrong with the Churches?” was,
+for example, the general heading of The Westminster Gazette's
+correspondence.
+
+One day the bishop skimmed a brief incisive utterance by Sir Harry
+Johnston that pierced to the marrow of his own shrinking convictions.
+Sir Harry is one of those people who seem to write as well as speak in
+a quick tenor. “Instead of propounding plainly and without the acereted
+mythology of Asia Minor, Greece and Rome, the pure Gospel of Christ....
+they present it overloaded with unbelievable myths (such as, among
+a thousand others, that Massacre of the Innocents which never took
+place).... bore their listeners by a Tibetan repetition of creeds that
+have ceased to be credible.... Mutually contradictory propositions....
+Prayers and litanies composed in Byzantine and mediaeval times....
+the want of actuality, the curious silliness which has, ever since the
+destruction of Jerusalem, hung about the exposition of Christianity....
+But if the Bishops continue to fuss about the trappings of religion....
+the maintenance of codes compiled by people who lived sixteen hundred
+or two thousand five hundred years ago.... the increasingly educated
+and practical-minded working classes will not come to church, weekday or
+Sunday.”
+
+The bishop held the paper in his hand, and with a mind that he felt to
+be terribly open, asked himself how true that sharp indictment might be,
+and, granting its general truth, what was the duty of the church, that
+is to say of the bishops, for as Cyprian says, ecelesia est in episcopo.
+We say the creeds; how far may we unsay them?
+
+So far he had taken no open action against Chasters. Suppose now he
+were to side with Chasters and let the whole diocese, the church of
+Princhester, drift as far as it chose under his inaction towards an
+extreme modernism, risking a conflict with, and if necessary fighting,
+the archbishop.... It was but for a moment that his mind swung to this
+possibility and then recoiled. The Laymen, that band of bigots, would
+fight. He could not contemplate litigation and wrangling about the
+teaching of the church. Besides, what were the “trappings of religion”
+ and what the essentials? What after all was “the pure gospel of Christ”
+ of which this writer wrote so glibly? He put the paper down and took a
+New Testament from his desk and opened it haphazard. He felt a curious
+wish that he could read it for the first time. It was over-familiar.
+Everything latterly in his theology and beliefs had become
+over-familiar. It had all become mechanical and dead and unmeaning to
+his tired mind....
+
+Whippham came with a reminder of more tub-rolling, and the bishop's
+speculations were broken off.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH - THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND
+
+(1)
+
+
+THAT night when he cried aloud at the memory of his furtive cigarette,
+the bishop was staying with a rich man named Garstein Fellows. These
+Garstein Fellows people were steel people with a financial side to them;
+young Garstein Fellows had his fingers in various chemical businesses,
+and the real life of the firm was in various minor partners called
+Hartstein and Blumenhart and so forth, who had acquired a considerable
+amount of ungentlemanly science and energy in Germany and German
+Switzerland. But the Fellows element was good old Princhester stuff.
+There had been a Fellows firm in Princhester in 1819. They were not
+people the bishop liked and it was not a house the bishop liked staying
+at, but it had become part of his policy to visit and keep in touch with
+as many of the local plutocracy as he could, to give and take with them,
+in order to make the presence of the church a reality to them. It had
+been not least among the negligences and evasions of the sainted but
+indolent Hood that he had invariably refused overnight hospitality
+whenever it was possible for him to get back to his home. The morning
+was his working time. His books and hymns had profited at the cost of
+missing many a generous after-dinner subscription, and at the expense
+of social unity. From the outset Scrope had set himself to alter this.
+A certain lack of enthusiasm on Lady Ella's part had merely provoked
+him to greater effort on his own. His ideal of what was needed with the
+people was something rather jolly and familiar, something like a very
+good and successful French or Irish priest, something that came
+easily and readily into their homes and laid a friendly hand on their
+shoulders. The less he liked these rich people naturally the more
+familiar his resolution to be successfully intimate made him. He put
+down the names and brief characteristics of their sons and daughters in
+a little note-book and consulted it before every visit so as to get
+his most casual enquiries right. And he invited himself to the Garstein
+Fellows house on this occasion by telegram.
+
+
+“A special mission and some business in Wombash may I have a scrap of
+supper and a bed?”
+
+
+Now Mrs. Garstein Fellows was a thoroughly London woman; she was one of
+the banking Grunenbaums, the fair tall sort, and she had a very decided
+tendency to smartness. She had a little party in the house, a sort of
+long week-end party, that made her hesitate for a minute or so before
+she framed a reply to the bishop's request.
+
+
+It was the intention of Mrs. Garstein Fellows to succeed very
+conspicuously in the British world, and the British world she felt was
+a complicated one; it is really not one world but several, and if you
+would surely succeed you must keep your peace with all the systems and
+be a source of satisfaction to all of them. So at least Mrs. Garstein
+Fellows saw it, and her method was to classify her acquaintances
+according to their systems, to keep them in their proper bundles, and
+to give every one the treatment he or she was accustomed to receive. And
+since all things British are now changing and passing away, it may not
+be uninteresting to record the classification Mrs. Garstein Fellows
+adopted. First she set apart as most precious and desirable, and
+requiring the most careful treatment, the “court dowdies “--for so it
+was that the dignity and quiet good taste that radiated from Buckingham
+Palace impressed her restless, shallow mind--the sort of people who
+prefer pair horse carriages to automobiles, have quiet friendships in
+the highest quarters, quietly do not know any one else, busy themselves
+with charities, dress richly rather than impressively, and have either
+little water-colour accomplishments or none at all, and no other
+relations with “art.” At the skirts of this crowning British world Mrs.
+Garstein Fellows tugged industriously and expensively. She did not keep
+a carriage and pair and an old family coachman because that, she felt,
+would be considered pushing and presumptuous; she had the sense to stick
+to her common unpretending 80 h.p. Daimler; but she wore a special sort
+of blackish hat-bonnet for such occasions as brought her near the centre
+of honour, which she got from a little good shop known only to very few
+outside the inner ring, which hat-bonnet she was always careful to
+sit on for a few minutes before wearing. And it was to this first and
+highest and best section of her social scheme that she considered that
+bishops properly belonged. But some bishops, and in particular such
+a comparatively bright bishop as the Bishop of Princhester, she also
+thought of as being just as comfortably accommodated in her second
+system, the “serious liberal lot,” which was more fatiguing and less
+boring, which talked of books and things, visited the Bells, went to all
+first-nights when Granville Barker was the producer, and knew and valued
+people in the grey and earnest plains between the Cecils and the Sidney
+Webbs. And thirdly there were the smart intellectual lot, again not very
+well marked off, and on the whole practicable to bishops, of whom fewer
+particulars are needed because theirs is a perennial species, and then
+finally there was that fourth world which was paradoxically at once very
+brilliant and a little shady, which had its Night Club side, and seemed
+to set no limit to its eccentricities. It seemed at times to be aiming
+to shock and yet it had its standards, but here it was that the dancers
+and actresses and forgiven divorcees came in--and the bishops as a rule,
+a rule hitherto always respected, didn't. This was the ultimate world of
+Mrs. Garstein Fellows; she had no use for merely sporting people and
+the merely correct smart and the duller county families, sets that led
+nowhere, and it was from her fourth system of the Glittering Doubtfuls
+that this party which made her hesitate over the bishop's telegram, was
+derived.
+
+She ran over their names as she sat considering her reply.
+
+What was there for a bishop to object to? There was that admirable
+American widow, Lady Sunderbund. She was enormously rich, she was
+enthusiastic. She was really on probation for higher levels; it was her
+decolletage delayed her. If only she kept off theosophy and the Keltic
+renascence and her disposition to profess wild intellectual passions,
+there would be no harm in her. Provided she didn't come down to dinner
+in anything too fantastically scanty--but a word in season was possible.
+No! there was no harm in Lady Sunderbund. Then there were Ridgeway Kelso
+and this dark excitable Catholic friend of his, Paidraig O'Gorman. Mrs.
+Garstein Fellows saw no harm in them. Then one had to consider Lord
+Gatling and Lizzie Barusetter. But nothing showed, nothing was likely to
+show even if there was anything. And besides, wasn't there a Church and
+Stage Guild?
+
+Except for those people there seemed little reason for alarm. Mrs.
+Garstein Fellows did not know that Professor Hoppart, who so amusingly
+combined a professorship of political economy with the writing of
+music-hall lyrics, was a keen amateur theologian, nor that Bent, the
+sentimental novelist, had a similar passion. She did not know that her
+own eldest son, a dark, romantic-looking youngster from Eton, had also
+come to the theological stage of development. She did however weigh
+the possibilities of too liberal opinions on what are called social
+questions on the part of Miss Sharsper, the novelist, and decided that
+if that lady was watched nothing so terrible could be said even in an
+undertone; and as for the Mariposa, the dancer, she had nothing but
+Spanish and bad French, she looked all right, and it wasn't very likely
+she would go out of her way to startle an Anglican bishop. Simply she
+needn't dance. Besides which even if a man does get a glimpse of a
+little something--it isn't as if it was a woman.
+
+But of course if the party mustn't annoy the bishop, the bishop must
+do his duty by the party. There must be the usual purple and the silver
+buckles.
+
+She wired back:
+
+
+“A little party but it won't put you out send your man with your
+change.”
+
+(2)
+
+
+In making that promise Mrs. Garstein Fellows reckoned without the
+morbid sensibility of the bishop's disorganized nervous system and the
+unsuspected theological stirrings beneath the apparent worldliness of
+Hoppart and Bent.
+
+The trouble began in the drawing-room after dinner. Out of deference to
+the bishop's abstinence the men did not remain to smoke, but came in to
+find the Mariposa and Lady Sunderbund smoking cigarettes, which these
+ladies continued to do a little defiantly. They had hoped to finish them
+before the bishop came up. The night was chilly, and a cheerful wood
+fire cracking and banging on the fireplace emphasized the ordinary
+heating. Mrs. Garstein Fellows, who had not expected so prompt an
+appearance of the men, had arranged her chairs in a semicircle for a
+little womanly gossip, and before she could intervene she found her
+party, with the exception of Lord Gatling, who had drifted just a little
+too noticeably with Miss Barnsetter into a window, sitting round with
+a conscious air, that was perhaps just a trifle too apparent, of being
+“good.”
+
+And Mr. Bent plunged boldly into general conversation.
+
+“Are you reading anything now, Mrs. Garstein Fellows?” he asked. “I'm an
+interested party.”
+
+She was standing at the side of the fireplace. She bit her lip and
+looked at the cornice and meditated with a girlish expression. “Yes,”
+ she said. “I am reading again. I didn't think I should but I am.”
+
+“For a time,” said Hoppart, “I read nothing but the papers. I bought
+from a dozen to twenty a day.”
+
+“That is wearing off,” said the bishop.
+
+“The first thing I began to read again,” said Mrs. Garstein Fellows,
+“--I'm not saying it for your sake, Bishop--was the Bible.”
+
+“I went to the Bible,” said Bent as if he was surprised.
+
+“I've heard that before,” said Ridgeway Kelso, in that slightly
+explosive manner of his. “All sorts of people who don't usually read the
+Bible--”
+
+“But Mr. Kelso!” protested their hostess with raised eyebrows.
+
+“I was thinking of Bent. But anyhow there's been a great wave of
+seriousness, a sudden turning to religion and religious things. I don't
+know if it comes your way, Bishop....”
+
+“I've had no rows of penitents yet.”
+
+“We may be coming,” said Hoppart.
+
+He turned sideways to face the bishop. “I think we should be coming
+if--if it wasn't for old entangled difficulties. I don't know if you
+will mind my saying it to you, but....”
+
+The bishop returned his frank glance. “I'd like to know above all
+things,” he said. “If Mrs. Garstein Fellow will permit us. It's my
+business to know.”
+
+“We all want to know,” said Lady Sunderbund, speaking from the low chair
+on the other side of the fireplace. There was a vibration in her voice
+and a sudden gleam of enthusiasm in her face. “Why shouldn't people talk
+se'iously sometimes?”
+
+“Well, take my own case,” said Hoppart. “In the last few weeks, I've
+been reading not only in the Bible but in the Fathers. I've read most of
+Athanasius, most of Eusebius, and--I'll confess it--Gibbon. I find all
+my old wonder come back. Why are we pinned to--to the amount of creed we
+are pinned to? Why for instance must you insist on the Trinity?”
+
+“Yes,” said the Eton boy explosively, and flushed darkly to find he had
+spoken.
+
+“Here is a time when men ask for God,” said Hoppart. “And you give them
+three!” cried Bent rather cheaply. “I confess I find the way encumbered
+by these Alexandrian elaborations,” Hoppart completed.
+
+“Need it be?” whispered Lady Sunderbund very softly.
+
+“Well,” said the bishop, and leant back in his armchair and knitted his
+brow at the fire. “I do not think,” he said, “that men coming to God
+think very much of the nature of God. Nevertheless,” he spoke slowly
+and patted the arm of his chair, “nevertheless the church insists that
+certain vitally important truths have to be conveyed, certain mortal
+errors are best guarded against, by these symbols.”
+
+“You admit they are symbols.”
+
+“So the church has always called them.”
+
+Hoppart showed by a little movement and grimace that he thought the
+bishop quibbled.
+
+“In every sense of the word,” the bishop hastened to explain, “the
+creeds are symbolical. It is clear they seek to express ineffable things
+by at least an extended use of familiar words. I suppose we are all
+agreed nowadays that when we speak of the Father and of the Son we mean
+something only in a very remote and exalted way parallel with--with
+biological fatherhood and sonship.”
+
+Lady Sunderbund nodded eagerly. “Yes,” she said, “oh, yes,” and held up
+an expectant face for more.
+
+“Our utmost words, our most elaborately phrased creeds, can at the best
+be no better than the shadow of something unseen thrown upon the screen
+of experience.”
+
+He raised his rather weary eyes to Hoppart as if he would know what else
+needed explanation. He was gratified by Lady Sunderbund's approval, but
+he affected not to see or hear it. But it was Bent who spoke.
+
+He spoke in the most casual way. He made the thing seem the most
+incidental of observations.
+
+“What puzzles me,” he said, “is why the early Christians identified the
+Spermaticos Logos of the Stoics with the second and not with the third
+person of the Trinity.”
+
+To which the bishop, rising artlessly to the bait, replied, “Ah! that
+indeed is the unfortunate aspect of the whole affair.”
+
+And then the Irish Catholic came down on him....
+
+(3)
+
+
+How the bishop awakened in the night after this dispute has been
+told already in the opening section of this story. To that night of
+discomfort we now return after this comprehensive digression. He
+awoke from nightmares of eyes and triangles to bottomless remorse and
+perplexity. For the first time he fully measured the vast distances
+he had travelled from the beliefs and attitudes of his early training,
+since his coming to Princhester. Travelled--or rather slipped and fallen
+down the long slopes of doubt.
+
+That clear inky dimness that comes before dawn found his white face at
+the window looking out upon the great terrace and the park.
+
+(4)
+
+
+After a bout of mental distress and sleeplessness the bishop would
+sometimes wake in the morning not so much exhausted as in a state of
+thin mental and bodily activity. This was more particularly so if the
+night had produced anything in the nature of a purpose. So it was
+on this occasion. The day was clear before him; at least it could be
+cleared by sending three telegrams; his man could go back to Princhester
+and so leave him perfectly free to go to Brighton-Pomfrey in London and
+secure that friendly dispensation to smoke again which seemed the only
+alternative to a serious mental breakdown. He would take his bag, stay
+the night in London, smoke, sleep well, and return the next morning.
+Dunk, his valet-butler, found him already bathed and ready for a cup of
+tea and a Bradshaw at half-past seven. He went on dressing although the
+good train for London did not start until 10.45.
+
+Mrs. Garstein Fellows was by nature and principle a late riser; the
+breakfast-room showed small promise yet of the repast, though the table
+was set and bright with silver and fresh flowers, and a wood fire popped
+and spurted to greet and encourage the March sunshine. But standing in
+the doorway that led to the promise and daffodils and crocuses of Mrs.
+Garstein Fellows' garden stood Lady Sunderbund, almost with an effect
+of waiting, and she greeted the bishop very cheerfully, doubted the
+immediate appearance of any one else, and led him in the most natural
+manner into the new but already very pleasant shrubbery.
+
+In some indefinable special way the bishop had been aware of Lady
+Sunderbund's presence since first he had met her, but it was only now
+that he could observe her with any particularity. She was tall like his
+own Lady Ella but not calm and quiet; she was electric, her eyes, her
+smiles, her complexion had as it were an established brightness that
+exceeded the common lustre of things. This morning she was dressed in
+grey that was nevertheless not grey but had an effect of colour, and
+there was a thread of black along the lines of her body and a gleam of
+gold. She carried her head back with less dignity than pride; there was
+a little frozen movement in her dark hair as if it flamed up out of her
+head. There were silver ornaments in her hair. She spoke with a pretty
+little weakness of the r's that had probably been acquired abroad. And
+she lost no time in telling him, she was eager to tell him, that she had
+been waylaying him. “I did so want to talk to you some maw,” she said.
+“I was shy last night and they we' all so noisy and eaga'. I p'ayed that
+you might come down early.
+
+“It's an oppo'tunity I've longed for,” she said.
+
+She did her very pretty best to convey what it was had been troubling
+her. 'iligion bad been worrying her for years. Life was--oh--just
+ornaments and games and so wea'isome, so wea'isome, unless it was
+'iligious. And she couldn't get it 'iligious.
+
+The bishop nodded his head gravely.
+
+“You unde'stand?” she pressed.
+
+“I understand too well--the attempt to get hold--and keep hold.”
+
+“I knew you would!” she cried.
+
+She went on with an impulsive rapidity. O'thodoxy had always 'ipelled
+her,--always. She had felt herself confronted by the most insurmountable
+difficulties, and yet whenever she had gone away from Christianity--she
+had gone away from Christianity, to the Theosophists and the Christian
+Scientists--she had felt she was only “st'aying fu'tha.” And then
+suddenly when he was speaking last night, she had felt he knew. It was
+so wonderful to hear the “k'eed was only a symbol.”
+
+“Symbol is the proper name for it,” said the bishop. “It wasn't for
+centuries it was called the Creed.”
+
+Yes, and so what it really meant was something quite different from what
+it did mean.
+
+The bishop felt that this sentence also was only a symbol, and nodded
+encouragingly--but gravely, warily.
+
+And there she was, and the point was there were thousands and thousands
+and thousands of educated people like her who were dying to get through
+these old-fashioned symbols to the true faith that lay behind them. That
+they knew lay behind them. She didn't know if he had read “The Light
+under the Altar”?
+
+“He's vicar of Wombash--in my diocese,” said the bishop with restraint.
+
+“It's wonde'ful stuff,” said Lady Sunderbund. “It's spi'tually cold,
+but it's intellectually wonde'ful. But we want that with spi'tuality. We
+want it so badly. If some one--”
+
+She became daring. She bit her under lip and flashed her spirit at him.
+
+“If you--” she said and paused.
+
+“Could think aloud,” said the bishop.
+
+“Yes,” she said, nodding rapidly, and became breathless to hear.
+
+It would certainly be an astonishing end to the Chasters difficulty if
+the bishop went over to the heretic, the bishop reflected.
+
+“My dear lady, I won't disguise,” he began; “in fact I don't see how
+I could, that for some years I have been growing more and more
+discontented with some of our most fundamental formulae. But it's been
+very largely a shapeless discontent--hitherto. I don't think I've said a
+word to a single soul. No, not a word. You are the first person to
+whom I've ever made the admission that even my feelings are at times
+unorthodox.”
+
+She lit up marvellously at his words. “Go on,” she whispered.
+
+But she did not need to tell him to go on. Now that he had once broached
+the casket of his reserves he was only too glad of a listener. He talked
+as if they were intimate and loving friends, and so it seemed to both
+of them they were. It was a wonderful release from a long and painful
+solitude.
+
+To certain types it is never quite clear what has happened to them until
+they tell it. So that now the bishop, punctuated very prettily by
+Lady Sunderbund, began to measure for the first time the extent of his
+departure from the old innate convictions of Otteringham Rectory. He
+said that it was strange to find doubt coming so late in life, but
+perhaps it was only in recent years that his faith had been put to any
+really severe tests. It had been sheltered and unchallenged.
+
+“This fearful wa',” Lady Sunderbund interjected.
+
+But Princhester had been a critical and trying change, and “The Light
+under the Altar” case had ploughed him deeply. It was curious that
+his doubts always seemed to have a double strand; there was a moral
+objection based on the church's practical futility and an intellectual
+strand subordinated to this which traced that futility largely to its
+unconvincing formulae.
+
+“And yet you know,” said the bishop, “I find I can't go with Chasters.
+He beats at the church; he treats her as though she were wrong. I feel
+like a son, growing up, who finds his mother isn't quite so clear-spoken
+nor quite so energetic as she seemed to be once. She's right, I feel
+sure. I've never doubted her fundamental goodness.”
+
+“Yes,” said Lady Sunderbund, very eagerly, “yes.”
+
+“And yet there's this futility.... You know, my dear lady, I don't
+know what to do. One feels on the one hand, that here is a cloud of
+witnesses, great men, sainted men, subtle men, figures permanently
+historical, before whom one can do nothing but bow down in the utmost
+humility, here is a great instrument and organization--what would the
+world be without the witness of the church?--and on the other hand here
+are our masses out of hand and hostile, our industrial leaders equally
+hostile; there is a failure to grip, and that failure to grip is so
+clearly traceable to the fact that our ideas are not modern ideas, that
+when we come to profess our faith we find nothing in our mouths but
+antiquated Alexandrian subtleties and phrases and ideas that may have
+been quite alive, quite significant, quite adequate in Asia Minor or
+Egypt, among men essentially orientals, fifteen hundred years ago, but
+which now--”
+
+He expressed just what they came to now by a gesture.
+
+She echoed his gesture.
+
+“Probably I'm not alone among my brethren,” he went on, and then: “But
+what is one to do?”
+
+With her hands she acted her sense of his difficulty.
+
+“One may be precipitate,” he said. “There's a kind of loyalty and
+discipline that requires one to keep the ranks until one's course of
+action is perfectly clear. One owes so much to so many. One has to
+consider how one may affect--oh! people one has never seen.”
+
+He was lugging things now into speech that so far had been scarcely
+above the threshold of his conscious thought. He went on to discuss the
+entire position of the disbelieving cleric. He discovered a fine point.
+
+“If there was something else, an alternative, another religion, another
+Church, to which one could go, the whole case would be different. But to
+go from the church to nothingness isn't to go from falsehood to truth.
+It's to go from truth, rather badly expressed, rather conservatively
+hidden by its protections, truth in an antiquated costume, to the
+blackest lie--in the world.”
+
+She took that point very brightly.
+
+“One must hold fast to 'iligion,” she said, and looked earnestly at him
+and gripped fiercely, pink thumbs out, with her beautiful hands held up.
+
+That was it, exactly. He too was gripping. But while on the outside the
+Midianites of denial were prowling for these clinging souls, within
+the camp they were assailed by a meticulous orthodoxy that was only too
+eager to cast them forth. The bishop dwelt for a time upon the curious
+fierceness orthodoxy would sometimes display. Nowadays atheism can be
+civil, can be generous; it is orthodoxy that trails a scurrilous fringe.
+
+“Who was that young man with a strong Irish accent--who contradicted me
+so suddenly?” he asked.
+
+“The dark young man?”
+
+“The noisy young man.”
+
+“That was Mist' Pat'ick O'Go'man. He is a Kelt and all that. Spells
+Pat'ick with eva so many letters. You know. They say he spends ouas and
+ouas lea'ning E'se. He wo'ies about it. They all t'y to lea'n E'se, and
+it wo'ies them and makes them hate England moa and moa.”
+
+“He is orthodox. He--is what I call orthodox to the ridiculous extent.”
+
+“'idiculous.”
+
+A deep-toned gong proclaimed breakfast over a square mile or so of
+territory, and Lady Sunderbund turned about mechanically towards the
+house. But they continued their discussion.
+
+She started indeed a new topic. “Shall we eva, do 'ou think, have a new
+'iligion--t'ua and betta?”
+
+That was a revolutionary idea to him.
+
+He was still fending it off from him when a gap in the shrubs brought
+them within sight of the house and of Mrs. Garstein Fellows on the
+portico waving a handkerchief and crying “Break-fast.”
+
+“I wish we could talk for houas,” said Lady Sunderbund.
+
+“I've been glad of this talk,” said the bishop. “Very glad.”
+
+She lifted her soft abundant skirts and trotted briskly across the still
+dewy lawn towards the house door. The bishop followed gravely and slowly
+with his hands behind his back and an unusually peaceful expression upon
+his face. He was thinking how rare and precious a thing it is to find
+intelligent friendship in women. More particularly when they were
+dazzlingly charming and pretty. It was strange, but this was really his
+first woman friend. If, as he hoped, she became his friend.
+
+Lady Sunderbund entered the breakfast room in a gusty abundance like
+Botticelli's Primavera, and kissed Mrs. Garstein Fellows good-morning.
+She exhaled a glowing happiness. “He is wondyful,” she panted. “He is
+most wondyful.”
+
+“Mr. Hidgeway Kelso?”
+
+“No, the dee' bishop! I love him. Are those the little sausages I like?
+May I take th'ee? I've been up houas.”
+
+The dee' bishop appeared in the sunlit doorway.
+
+(5)
+
+
+The bishop felt more contentment in the London train than he had felt
+for many weeks. He had taken two decisive and relieving steps. One was
+that he had stated his case to another human being, and that a very
+charming and sympathetic human being, he was no longer a prey to a
+current of secret and concealed thoughts running counter to all the
+appearances of his outward life; and the other was that he was now
+within an hour or so of Brighton-Pomfrey and a cigarette. He would lunch
+on the train, get to London about two, take a taxi at once to the wise
+old doctor, catch him over his coffee in a charitable and understanding
+mood, and perhaps be smoking a cigarette publicly and honourably and
+altogether satisfyingly before three.
+
+So far as Brighton-Pomfrey's door this program was fulfilled without
+a hitch. The day was fine and he had his taxi opened, and noted with a
+patriotic satisfaction as he rattled through the streets, the glare of
+the recruiting posters on every vacant piece of wall and the increasing
+number of men in khaki in the streets. But at the door he had a
+disappointment. Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was away at the front--of all
+places; he had gone for some weeks; would the bishop like to see Dr.
+Dale?
+
+The bishop hesitated. He had never set eyes on this Dr. Dale.
+
+Indeed, he had never heard of Dr. Dale.
+
+Seeing his old friend Brighton-Pomfrey and being gently and tactfully
+told to do exactly what he was longing to do was one thing; facing some
+strange doctor and going slowly and elaborately through the whole
+story of his illness, his vow and his breakdown, and perhaps having his
+reaction time tested and all sorts of stripping and soundings done, was
+quite another. He was within an ace of turning away.
+
+If he had turned away his whole subsequent life would have been
+different. It was the very slightest thing in the world tipped the
+beam. It was the thought that, after all, whatever inconvenience and
+unpleasantness there might be in this interview, there was at the end of
+it a very reasonable prospect of a restored and legitimate cigarette.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIFTH - THE FIRST VISION
+
+(1)
+
+
+Dr. DALE exceeded the bishop's worst apprehensions. He was a lean, lank,
+dark young man with long black hair and irregular, rather prolonged
+features; his chin was right over to the left; he looked constantly at
+the bishop's face with a distinctly sceptical grey eye; he could not
+have looked harder if he had been a photographer or a portrait painter.
+And his voice was harsh, and the bishop was particularly sensitive to
+voices.
+
+He began by understanding far too much of the bishop's illness, and he
+insisted on various familiarities with the bishop's heart and tongue and
+eye and knee that ruffled the bishop's soul.
+
+“Brighton-Pomfrey talked of neurasthenia?” he asked. “That was his
+diagnosis,” said the bishop. “Neurasthenia,” said the young man as
+though he despised the word.
+
+The bishop went on buttoning up his coat.
+
+“You don't of course want to break your vows about drinking and
+smoking,” said the young man with the very faintest suggestion of
+derision in his voice.
+
+“Not if it can possibly be avoided,” the bishop asserted. “Without a
+loss, that is, of practical efficiency,” he added. “For I have much to
+do.”
+
+“I think that it is possible to keep your vow,” said the young man,
+and the bishop could have sworn at him. “I think we can manage that all
+right.”
+
+(2)
+
+
+The bishop sat at the table resting his arm upon it and awaiting the
+next development of this unsatisfactory interview. He was on the verge
+of asking as unpleasantly as possible when Brighton-Pomfrey would
+return.
+
+The young man stood upon Brighton-Pomfrey's hearth-rug and was evidently
+contemplating dissertations.
+
+“Of course,” he said, as though he discussed a problem with himself,
+“you must have some sort of comfort. You must get out of this state, one
+way or another.”
+
+The bishop nodded assent. He had faint hopes of this young man's ideas
+of comfort.
+
+Dr. Dale reflected. Then he went off away from the question of comfort
+altogether. “You see, the trouble in such a case as this is peculiarly
+difficult to trace to its sources because it comes just upon the
+border-line of bodily and mental things. You may take a drug or alter
+your regimen and it disturbs your thoughts, you may take an idea and
+it disturbs your health. It is easy enough to say, as some do, that all
+ideas have a physical substratum; it is almost as easy to say with the
+Christian Scientist that all bodily states are amenable to our ideas.
+The truth doesn't, I think, follow the border between those opposite
+opinions very exactly on either side. I can't, for instance, tell you to
+go home and pray against these uncertainties and despairs, because it
+is just these uncertainties and despairs that rob you of the power of
+efficient prayer.”
+
+He did not seem to expect anything from the bishop.
+
+“I don't see that because a case brings one suddenly right up against
+the frontier of metaphysics, why a doctor should necessarily pull
+up short at that, why one shouldn't go on into either metaphysics or
+psychology if such an extension is necessary for the understanding of
+the case. At any rate if you'll permit it in this consultation....”
+
+“Go on,” said the bishop, holding on to that promise of comfort. “The
+best thing is to thrash out the case in your own way. And then come to
+what is practical.”
+
+“What is really the matter here--the matter with you that is--is a
+disorganization of your tests of reality. It's one of a group of states
+hitherto confused. Neurasthenia, that comprehensive phrase--well, it is
+one of the neurasthenias. Here, I confess, I begin to talk of work I am
+doing, work still to be published, finished first and then published....
+But I go off from the idea that every living being lives in a state
+not differing essentially from a state of hallucination concerning the
+things about it. Truth, essential truth, is hidden. Always. Of course
+there must be a measure of truth in our working illusions, a working
+measure of truth, or the creature would smash itself up and end itself,
+but beyond that discretion of the fire and the pitfall lies a wide
+margin of error about which we may be deceived for years. So long as it
+doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. I don't know if I make myself clear.”
+
+“I follow you,” said the bishop a little wearily, “I follow you.
+Phenomena and noumena and so on and so on. Kant and so forth.
+Pragmatism. Yes.”
+
+With a sigh.
+
+“And all that,” completed Dr. Dale in a voice that suggested mockery.
+“But you see we grow into a way of life, we settle down among habits and
+conventions, we say 'This is all right' and 'That is always so.' We
+get more and more settled into our life as a whole and more and more
+confident. Unless something happens to shake us out of our sphere of
+illusion. That may be some violent contradictory fact, some accident,
+or it may be some subtle change in one's health and nerves that makes
+us feel doubtful. Or a change of habits. Or, as I believe, some subtle
+quickening of the critical faculty. Then suddenly comes the feeling as
+though we were lost in a strange world, as though we had never really
+seen the world before.”
+
+He paused.
+
+The bishop was reluctantly interested. “That does describe something--of
+the mental side,” he admitted. “I never believe in concealing my own
+thoughts from an intelligent patient,” said Dr. Dale, with a quiet
+offensiveness. “That sort of thing belongs to the dark ages of the
+'pothecary's art. I will tell you exactly my guesses and suppositions
+about you. At the base of it all is a slight and subtle kidney trouble,
+due I suggest to your going to Princhester and drinking the local
+water--”
+
+“But it's excellent water. They boast of it.”
+
+“By all the established tests. As a matter of fact many of our best
+drinking waters have all sorts of unspecified qualities. Burton water,
+for example, is radioactive by Beetham's standards up to the ninth
+degree. But that is by the way. My theory about your case is that this
+produced a change in your blood, that quickened your sensibilities and
+your critical faculties just at a time when a good many bothers--I don't
+of course know what they were, but I can, so to speak, see the marks all
+over you--came into your life.”
+
+The bishop nodded.
+
+“You were uprooted. You moved from house to house, and failed to get
+that curled up safe feeling one has in a real home in any of them.”
+
+“If you saw the fireplaces and the general decoration of the new
+palace!” admitted the bishop. “I had practically no control.”
+
+“That confirms me,” said Dr. Dale. “Insomnia followed, and increased the
+feeling of physical strangeness by increasing the bodily disturbance. I
+suspect an intellectual disturbance.”
+
+He paused.
+
+“There was,” said the bishop.
+
+“You were no longer at home anywhere. You were no longer at home in your
+diocese, in your palace, in your body, in your convictions. And then
+came the war. Quite apart from everything else the mind of the whole
+world is suffering profoundly from the shock of this war--much more
+than is generally admitted. One thing you did that you probably did not
+observe yourself doing, you drank rather more at your meals, you smoked
+a lot more. That was your natural and proper response to the shock.”
+
+“Ah!” said the bishop, and brightened up.
+
+“It was remarked by Tolstoy, I think, that few intellectual men would
+really tolerate the world as it is if it were not for smoking and
+drinking. Even novelists have their moments of lucidity. Certainly these
+things soothe the restlessness in men's minds, deaden their sceptical
+sensibilities. And just at the time when you were getting most
+dislodged--you gave them up.”
+
+“And the sooner I go back to them the better,” said the bishop brightly.
+“I quite see that.”
+
+“I wouldn't say that,” said Dr. Dale....
+
+(3)
+
+
+“That,” said Dr. Dale, “is just where my treatment of this case differs
+from the treatment of “--he spoke the name reluctantly as if he disliked
+the mere sound of it--“Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.”
+
+“Hitherto, of course,” said the bishop, “I've been in his hands.”
+
+“He,” said Dr. Dale, “would certainly set about trying to restore your
+old sphere of illusion, your old familiar sensations and ideas and
+confidences. He would in fact turn you back. He would restore all your
+habits. He would order you a rest. He would send you off to some holiday
+resort, fresh in fact but familiar in character, the High lands, North
+Italy, or Switzerland for example. He would forbid you newspapers and
+order you to botanize and prescribe tranquillizing reading; Trollope's
+novels, the Life of Gladstone, the works of Mr. A. C. Benson, memoirs
+and so on. You'd go somewhere where there was a good Anglican chaplain,
+and you'd take some of the services yourself. And we'd wash out the
+effects of the Princhester water with Contrexeville, and afterwards
+put you on Salutaris or Perrier. I don't know whether I shouldn't have
+inclined to some such treatment before the war began. Only--”
+
+He paused.
+
+“You think--?”
+
+Dr. Dale's face betrayed a sudden sombre passion. “It won't do now,” he
+said in a voice of quiet intensity. “It won't do now.”
+
+He remained darkly silent for so long that at last the bishop spoke.
+“Then what,” he asked, “do you suggest?
+
+“Suppose we don't try to go back,” said Dr. Dale. “Suppose we go on and
+go through.”
+
+“Where?”
+
+“To reality.
+
+“I know it's doubtful, I know it's dangerous,” he went on, “but I am
+convinced that now we can no longer keep men's minds and souls in these
+feathered nests, these spheres of illusion. Behind these veils there is
+either God or the Darkness.... Why should we not go on?”
+
+The bishop was profoundly perplexed. He heard himself speaking. “It
+would be unworthy of my cloth,” he was saying.
+
+Dr. Dale completed the sentence: “to go back.”
+
+“Let me explain a little more,” he said, “what I mean by 'going on.' I
+think that this loosening of the ties of association that bind a man to
+his everyday life and his everyday self is in nine cases out of ten a
+loosening of the ties that bind him to everyday sanity. One common form
+of this detachment is the form you have in those cases of people who
+are found wandering unaware of their names, unaware of their places
+of residence, lost altogether from themselves. They have not only lost
+their sense of identity with themselves, but all the circumstances of
+their lives have faded out of their minds like an idle story in a book
+that has been read and put aside. I have looked into hundreds of such
+cases. I don't think that loss of identity is a necessary thing; it's
+just another side of the general weakening of the grip upon reality, a
+kind of anaemia of the brain so that interest fades and fails. There
+is no reason why you should forget a story because you do not believe
+it--if your brain is strong enough to hold it. But if your brain is
+tired and weak, then so soon as you lose faith in your records, your
+mind is glad to let them go. When you see these lost identity people
+that is always your first impression, a tired brain that has let go.”
+
+The bishop felt extremely like letting go.
+
+“But how does this apply to my case?”
+
+“I come to that,” said Dr. Dale, holding up a long large hand. “What
+if we treat this case of yours in a new way? What if we give you not
+narcotics but stimulants and tonics? What if we so touch the blood that
+we increase your sense of physical detachment while at the same time
+feeding up your senses to a new and more vivid apprehension of things
+about you?” He looked at his patient's hesitation and added: “You'd lose
+all that craving feeling, that you fancy at present is just the need
+of a smoke. The world might grow a trifle--transparent, but you'd keep
+real. Instead of drugging oneself back to the old contentment--”
+
+“You'd drug me on to the new,” said the bishop.
+
+“But just one word more!” said Dr. Dale. “Hear why I would do this! It
+was easy and successful to rest and drug people back to their old states
+of mind when the world wasn't changing, wasn't spinning round in the
+wildest tornado of change that it has ever been in. But now--Where can
+I send you for a rest? Where can I send you to get you out of sight and
+hearing of the Catastrophe? Of course old Brighton-Pomfrey would go on
+sending people away for rest and a nice little soothing change if the
+Day of Judgment was coming in the sky and the earth was opening and the
+sea was giving up its dead. He'd send 'em to the seaside. Such things as
+that wouldn't shake his faith in the Channel crossing. My idea is that
+it's not only right for you to go through with this, but that it's the
+only thing to do. If you go right on and right through with these doubts
+and intimations--”
+
+He paused.
+
+“You may die like a madman,” he said, “but you won't die like a tame
+rabbit.”
+
+(4)
+
+
+The bishop sat reflecting. What fascinated and attracted him was the
+ending of all the cravings and uneasinesses and restlessness that had
+distressed his life for over four years; what deterred him was the
+personality of this gaunt young man with his long grey face, his excited
+manner, his shock of black hair. He wanted that tonic--with grave
+misgivings. “If you think this tonic is the wiser course,” he began.
+“I'd give it you if you were my father,” said Dr. Dale. “I've got
+everything for it,” he added.
+
+“You mean you can make it up--without a prescription.”
+
+“I can't give you a prescription. The essence of it--It's a distillate I
+have been trying. It isn't in the Pharmacopeia.”
+
+Again the bishop had a twinge of misgiving.
+
+But in the end he succumbed. He didn't want to take the stuff, but also
+he did not want to go without his promised comfort.
+
+Presently Dale had given him a little phial--and was holding up to the
+window a small medicine glass into which he was pouring very carefully
+twenty drops of the precious fluid. “Take it only,” he said, “when you
+feel you must.”
+
+“It is the most golden of liquids,” said the bishop, peering at it.
+
+“When you want more I will make you more. Later of course, it will be
+possible to write a prescription. Now add the water--so.
+
+“It becomes opalescent. How beautifully the light plays in it!
+
+“Take it.”
+
+The bishop dismissed his last discretion and drank.
+
+“Well?” said Dr. Dale.
+
+“I am still here,” said the bishop, smiling, and feeling a joyous
+tingling throughout his body. “It stirs me.”
+
+(5)
+
+
+The bishop stood on the pavement outside Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's house.
+The massive door had closed behind him.
+
+It had been an act of courage, of rashness if you will, to take this
+draught. He was acutely introspective, ready for anything, for the most
+disagreeable or the most bizarre sensations. He was asking himself, Were
+his feet steady? Was his head swimming?
+
+His doubts glowed into assurance.
+
+Suddenly he perceived that he was sure of God.
+
+Not perhaps of the God of Nicaea, but what did these poor little
+quibblings and definitions of the theologians matter? He had been
+worrying about these definitions and quibblings for four long restless
+years. Now they were just failures to express--what surely every one
+knew--and no one would ever express exactly. Because here was God, and
+the kingdom of God was manifestly at hand. The visible world hung before
+him as a mist might hang before the rising sun. He stood proudly and
+masterfully facing a universe that had heretofore bullied him into doubt
+and apologetics, a universe that had hitherto been opaque and was now
+betrayed translucent.
+
+That was the first effect of the new tonic, complete reassurance,
+complete courage. He turned to walk towards Mount Street and Berkeley
+Square as a sultan might turn to walk among his slaves.
+
+But the tonic was only beginning.
+
+Before he had gone a dozen steps he was aware that he seemed more solid
+and larger than the people about him. They had all a curious miniature
+effect, as though he was looking at them through the wrong end of an
+opera glass. The houses on either side of the street and the traffic
+shared this quality in an equal measure. It was as if he was looking at
+the world through apertures in a miniature cinematograph peep-show. This
+surprised him and a little dashed his first glow of satisfaction.
+
+He passed a man in khaki who, he fancied, looked at him with an odd
+expression. He observed the next passers-by narrowly and suspiciously, a
+couple of smartish young men, a lady with a poodle, a grocer's boy with
+a basket, but none seemed to observe anything remarkable about him. Then
+he caught the eye of a taxi-driver and became doubtful again.
+
+He had a feeling that this tonic was still coming in like a tide. It
+seemed to be filling him and distending him, in spite of the fact that
+he was already full. After four years of flaccidity it was pleasant to
+be distended again, but already he felt more filled than he had ever
+been before. At present nothing was showing, but all his body seemed
+braced and uplifted. He must be careful not to become inflated in his
+bearing.
+
+And yet it was difficult not to betray a little inflation. He was so
+filled with assurance that things were right with him and that God was
+there with him. After all it was not mere fancy; he was looking through
+the peepholes of his eyes at the world of illusion and appearance. The
+world that was so intent upon its immediate business, so regardless of
+eternal things, that had so dominated him but a little while ago, was
+after all a thing more mortal than himself.
+
+Another man in khaki passed him.
+
+For the first time he saw the war as something measurable, as something
+with a beginning and an end, as something less than the immortal spirit
+in man. He had been too much oppressed by it. He perceived all these
+people in the street were too much oppressed by it. He wanted to tell
+them as much, tell them that all was well with them, bid them be of good
+cheer. He wanted to bless them. He found his arm floating up towards
+gestures of benediction. Self-control became increasingly difficult.
+
+All the way down Berkeley Square the bishop was in full-bodied struggle
+with himself. He was trying to control himself, trying to keep within
+bounds. He felt that he was stepping too high, that his feet were not
+properly reaching the ground, that he was walking upon cushions of air.
+
+The feeling of largeness increased, and the feeling of transparency in
+things about him. He avoided collision with passers-by--excessively. And
+he felt his attention was being drawn more and more to something that
+was going on beyond the veil of visible things. He was in Piccadilly
+now, but at the same time Piccadilly was very small and he was walking
+in the presence of God.
+
+He had a feeling that God was there though he could not see him. And at
+the same time he was in this transitory world, with people going to and
+fro, men with umbrellas tucked dangerously under their arms, men in a
+hurry, policemen, young women rattling Red Cross collecting boxes, smart
+people, loafers. They distracted one from God.
+
+He set out to cross the road just opposite Prince's, and jumping
+needlessly to give way to an omnibus had the narrowest escape from a
+taxicab.
+
+He paused on the pavement edge to recover himself. The shock of his near
+escape had, as people say, pulled him together.
+
+What was he to do? Manifestly this opalescent draught was overpowering
+him. He ought never to have taken it. He ought to have listened to the
+voice of his misgivings. It was clear that he was not in a fit state to
+walk about the streets. He was--what had been Dr. Dale's term?--losing
+his sense of reality. What was he to do? He was alarmed but not
+dismayed. His thoughts were as full-bodied as the rest of his being,
+they came throbbing and bumping into his mind. What was he to do?
+
+Brighton-Pomfrey ought never to have left his practice in the hands of
+this wild-eyed experimenter.
+
+Strange that after a lifetime of discretion and men's respect one should
+be standing on the Piccadilly pavement--intoxicated!
+
+It came into his head that he was not so very far from the Athenaeum,
+and surely there if anywhere a bishop may recover his sense of
+being--ordinary.
+
+And behind everything, behind the tall buildings and the swarming people
+there was still the sense of a wide illuminated space, of a light of
+wonder and a Presence. But he must not give way to that again! He had
+already given way altogether too much. He repeated to himself in a
+whisper, “I am in Piccadilly.”
+
+If he kept tight hold upon himself he felt he might get to the Athenaeum
+before--before anything more happened.
+
+He murmured directions to himself. “Keep along the pavement. Turn to
+the right at the Circus. Now down the hill. Easily down the hill. Don't
+float! Junior Army and Navy Stores. And the bookseller.”
+
+And presently he had a doubt of his name and began to repeat it.
+
+“Edward Princhester. Edward Scrope, Lord Bishop of Princhester.”
+
+And all the while voices within him were asserting, “You are in the
+kingdom of Heaven. You are in the presence of God. Place and time are a
+texture of illusion and dreamland. Even now, you are with God.”
+
+(6)
+
+
+The porter of the Athenaeum saw him come in, looking well--flushed
+indeed--but queer in expression; his blue eyes were wide open and
+unusually vague and blue.
+
+He wandered across towards the dining-room, hesitated, went to look at
+the news, seemed in doubt whether he would not go into the smoking-room,
+and then went very slowly upstairs, past the golden angel up to the
+great drawing-room.
+
+In the drawing-room he found only Sir James Mounce, the man who knew
+the novels of Sir Walter Scott by heart and had the minutest and most
+unsparing knowledge of every detail in the life of that supreme giant of
+English literature. He had even, it was said, acquired a Scotch burr in
+the enthusiasm of his hero-worship. It was usually sufficient only to
+turn an ear towards him for him to talk for an hour or so. He was now
+studying Bradshaw.
+
+The bishop snatched at him desperately. He felt that if he went away
+there would be no hold left upon the ordinary things of life.
+
+“Sir James,” he said, “I was wondering the other day when was the exact
+date of the earliest public ascription of Waverley to Scott.”
+
+“Eh!” said Sir James, “but I'd like to talk that over with ye. Indeed
+I would. It would be depending very largely on what ye called 'public.'
+But--”
+
+He explained something about an engagement in Birmingham that night, a
+train to catch. Reluctantly but relentlessly he abandoned the proffered
+ear. But he promised that the next time they met in the club he would go
+into the matter “exhausteevely.”
+
+The door closed upon him. The bishop was alone. He was flooded with
+the light of the world that is beyond this world. The things about him
+became very small and indistinct.
+
+He would take himself into a quiet corner in the library of this doll's
+house, and sit his little body down in one of the miniature armchairs.
+Then if he was going to faint or if the trancelike feeling was to become
+altogether a trance--well, a bishop asleep in an armchair in the library
+of the Athenaeum is nothing to startle any one.
+
+He thought of that convenient hidden room, the North Library, in which
+is the bust of Croker. There often one can be quite alone.... It was
+empty, and he went across to the window that looks out upon Pall Mall
+and sat down in the little uncomfortable easy chair by the desk with its
+back to the Benvenuto Cellini.
+
+And as he sat down, something snapped--like the snapping of a lute
+string--in his brain.
+
+(7)
+
+
+With a sigh of deep relief the bishop realized that this world had
+vanished.
+
+He was in a golden light.
+
+He perceived it as a place, but it was a place without buildings or
+trees or any very definite features. There was a cloudy suggestion of
+distant hills, and beneath his feet were little gem-like flowers, and
+a feeling of divinity and infinite friendliness pervaded his being. His
+impressions grew more definite. His feet seemed to be bare. He was no
+longer a bishop nor clad as a bishop. That had gone with the rest of the
+world. He was seated on a slab of starry rock.
+
+This he knew quite clearly was the place of God.
+
+He was unable to disentangle thoughts from words. He seemed to be
+speaking in his mind.
+
+“I have been very foolish and confused and perplexed. I have been like a
+creature caught among thorns.”
+
+“You served the purpose of God among those thorns.” It seemed to him at
+first that the answer also was among his thoughts.
+
+“I seemed so silly and so little. My wits were clay.”
+
+“Clay full of desires.”
+
+“Such desires!”
+
+“Blind desires. That will presently come to the light.”
+
+“Shall we come to the light?”
+
+“But here it is, and you see it!”
+
+(8)
+
+
+It became clearer in the mind of the bishop that a figure sat beside
+him, a figure of great strength and beauty, with a smiling face and
+kindly eyes. A strange thought and a strange courage came to the bishop.
+
+“Tell me,” he whispered, “are you God?”
+
+“I am the Angel of God.”
+
+The bishop thought over that for some moments.
+
+“I want,” he said, “to know about God.
+
+“I want,” he said, with a deepening passion of the soul, “to know about
+God. Slowly through four long years I have been awakening to the need
+of God. Body and soul I am sick for the want of God and the knowledge of
+God. I did not know what was the matter with me, why my life had become
+so disordered and confused that my very appetites and habits are all
+astray. But I am perishing for God as a waterless man upon a raft
+perishes for drink, and there is nothing but madness if I touch the seas
+about me. Not only in my thoughts but in my under thoughts and in my
+nerves and bones and arteries I have need of God. You see I grew up in
+the delusion that I knew God, I did not know that I was unprovisioned
+and unprovided against the tests and strains and hardships of life. I
+thought that I was secure and safe. I was told that we men--who were
+apes not a quarter of a million years ago, who still have hair upon
+our arms and ape's teeth in our jaws--had come to the full and perfect
+knowledge of God. It was all put into a creed. Not a word of it was to
+be altered, not a sentence was to be doubted any more. They made me a
+teacher of this creed. They seemed to explain it to me. And when I came
+to look into it, when my need came and I turned to my creed, it was old
+and shrivelled up, it was the patched-up speculations of vanished Greeks
+and Egyptians, it was a mummy of ancient disputes, old and dry, that
+fell to dust as I unwrapped it. And I was dressed up in the dress of old
+dead times and put before an altar of forgotten sacrifices, and I went
+through ceremonies as old as the first seedtime; and suddenly I knew
+clearly that God was not there, God was not in my Creed, not in my
+cathedral, not in my ceremonies, nowhere in my life. And at the same
+time I knew, I knew as I had never known before, that certainly there
+was God.”
+
+He paused. “Tell me,” said the friend at his side; “tell me.”
+
+“It was as if a child running beside its mother, looked up and saw that
+he had never seen her face before, that she was not his mother, and that
+the words he had seemed to understand were--now that he listened--words
+in an unknown tongue.
+
+“You see, I am but a common sort of man, dear God; I have neither lived
+nor thought in any way greatly, I have gone from one day to the next day
+without looking very much farther than the end of the day, I have gone
+on as life has befallen; if no great trouble had come into my life, so
+I should have lived to the end of my days. But life which began for me
+easily and safely has become constantly more difficult and strange.
+I could have held my services and given my benedictions, I could have
+believed I believed in what I thought I believed.... But now I am lost
+and astray--crying out for God....”
+
+(9)
+
+
+“Let us talk a little about your troubles,” said the Angel. “Let us talk
+about God and this creed that worries you and this church of yours.”
+
+“I feel as though I had been struggling to this talk through all the
+years--since my doubts began.”
+
+“The story your Creed is trying to tell is much the same story that
+all religions try to tell. In your heart there is God, beyond the stars
+there is God. Is it the same God?”
+
+“I don't know,” said the bishop.
+
+“Does any one know?”
+
+“I thought I knew.”
+
+“Your creed is full of Levantine phrases and images, full of the patched
+contradictions of the human intelligence utterly puzzled. It is about
+those two Gods, the God beyond the stars and the God in your heart. It
+says that they are the same God, but different. It says that they have
+existed together for all time, and that one is the Son of the other. It
+has added a third Person--but we won't go into that.”
+
+The bishop was reminded suddenly of the dispute at Mrs. Garstein
+Fellows'. “We won't go into that,” he agreed. “No!”
+
+“Other religions have told the story in a different way. The Cathars and
+Gnostics did. They said that the God in your heart is a rebel against
+the God beyond the stars, that the Christ in your heart is like
+Prometheus--or Hiawatha--or any other of the sacrificial gods, a rebel.
+He arises out of man. He rebels against that high God of the stars and
+crystals and poisons and monsters and of the dead emptiness of space....
+The Manicheans and the Persians made out our God to be fighting
+eternally against that Being of silence and darkness beyond the stars.
+The Buddhists made the Lord Buddha the leader of men out of the futility
+and confusion of material existence to the great peace beyond. But it is
+all one story really, the story of the two essential Beings, always the
+same story and the same perplexity cropping up under different names,
+the story of one being who stirs us, calls to us, and leads us, and
+of another who is above and outside and in and beneath all things,
+inaccessible and incomprehensible. All these religions are trying to
+tell something they do not clearly know--of a relationship between these
+two, that eludes them, that eludes the human mind, as water escapes from
+the hand. It is unity and opposition they have to declare at the same
+time; it is agreement and propitiation, it is infinity and effort.”
+
+“And the truth?” said the bishop in an eager whisper. “You can tell me
+the truth.”
+
+The Angel's answer was a gross familiarity. He thrust his hand through
+the bishop's hair and ruffled it affectionately, and rested for a moment
+holding the bishop's cranium in his great palm.
+
+“But can this hold it?” he said....
+
+“Not with this little box of brains,” said the Angel. “You could as soon
+make a meal of the stars and pack them into your belly. You haven't the
+things to do it with inside this.”
+
+He gave the bishop's head a little shake and relinquished it.
+
+He began to argue as an elder brother might.
+
+“Isn't it enough for you to know something of the God that comes down to
+the human scale, who has been born on your planet and arisen out of Man,
+who is Man and God, your leader? He's more than enough to fill your mind
+and use up every faculty of your being. He is courage, he is adventure,
+he is the King, he fights for you and with you against death....”
+
+“And he is not infinite? He is not the Creator?” asked the bishop.
+
+“So far as you are concerned, no,” said the Angel.
+
+“So far as I am concerned?”
+
+“What have you to do with creation?”
+
+And at that question it seemed that a great hand swept carelessly across
+the blackness of the farther sky, and smeared it with stars and suns and
+shining nebulas as a brush might smear dry paint across a canvas.
+
+The bishop stared in front of him. Then slowly he bowed his head, and
+covered his face with his hands.
+
+“And I have been in orders,” he murmured; “I have been teaching people
+the only orthodox and perfect truth about these things for seven and
+twenty years.”
+
+And suddenly he was back in his gaiters and his apron and his shovel
+hat, a little black figure exceedingly small in a very great space....
+
+(10)
+
+
+It was a very great space indeed because it was all space, and the roof
+was the ebony of limitless space from which the stars swung flaming,
+held by invisible ties, and the soil beneath his feet was a dust of
+atoms and the little beginnings of life. And long before the bishop
+bared his face again, he knew that he was to see his God.
+
+He looked up slowly, fearing to be dazzled.
+
+But he was not dazzled. He knew that he saw only the likeness and
+bodying forth of a being inconceivable, of One who is greater than the
+earth and stars and yet no greater than a man. He saw a being for ever
+young, for ever beginning, for ever triumphant. The quality and texture
+of this being was a warm and living light like the effulgence at
+sunrise; He was hope and courage like a sunlit morning in spring. He
+was adventure for ever, and His courage and adventure flowed into and
+submerged and possessed the being of the man who beheld him. And this
+presence of God stood over the bishop, and seemed to speak to him in a
+wordless speech.
+
+He bade him surrender himself. He bade him come out upon the Adventure
+of Life, the great Adventure of the earth that will make the atoms our
+bond-slaves and subdue the stars, that will build up the white fires of
+ecstasy to submerge pain for ever, that will overcome death. In Him
+the spirit of creation had become incarnate, had joined itself to men,
+summoning men to Him, having need of them, having need of them, having
+need of their service, even as great kings and generals and leaders need
+and use men. For a moment, for an endless age, the bishop bowed himself
+in the being and glory of God, felt the glow of the divine courage and
+confidence in his marrow, felt himself one with God.
+
+For a timeless interval....
+
+Never had the bishop had so intense a sense of reality. It seemed that
+never before had he known anything real. He knew certainly that God was
+his King and master, and that his unworthy service could be acceptable
+to God. His mind embraced that idea with an absolute conviction that was
+also absolute happiness.
+
+(11)
+
+
+The thoughts and sensations of the bishop seemed to have lifted for
+a time clean away from the condition of time, and then through a vast
+orbit to be returning to that limitation.
+
+He was aware presently that things were changing, that the light was
+losing its diviner rays, that in some indescribable manner the glory and
+the assurance diminished.
+
+The onset of the new phase was by imperceptible degrees. From a glowing,
+serene, and static realization of God, everything relapsed towards
+change and activity. He was in time again and things were happening, it
+was as if the quicksands of time poured by him, and it was as if God
+was passing away from him. He fell swiftly down from the heaven
+of self-forgetfulness to a grotesque, pathetic and earthly
+self-consciousness.
+
+He became acutely aware of his episcopal livery. And that God was
+passing away from him.
+
+It was as if God was passing, and as if the bishop was unable to rise up
+and follow him.
+
+Then it was as if God had passed, and as if the bishop was in headlong
+pursuit of him and in a great terror lest he should be left behind. And
+he was surely being left behind.
+
+He discovered that in some unaccountable way his gaiters were loose;
+most of their buttons seemed to have flown off, and his episcopal
+sash had slipped down about his feet. He was sorely impeded. He kept
+snatching at these things as he ran, in clumsy attempts to get them off.
+
+At last he had to stop altogether and kneel down and fumble with the
+last obstinate button.
+
+“Oh God!” he cried, “God my captain! Wait for me! Be patient with me!”
+
+And as he did so God turned back and reached out his hand. It was indeed
+as if he stood and smiled. He stood and smiled as a kind man might do;
+he dazzled and blinded his worshipper, and yet it was manifest that he
+had a hand a man might clasp.
+
+Unspeakable love and joy irradiated the whole being of the bishop as he
+seized God's hand and clasped it desperately with both his own. It was
+as if his nerves and arteries and all his substance were inundated with
+golden light....
+
+It was again as if he merged with God and became God....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SIXTH - EXEGETICAL
+
+(1)
+
+
+WITHOUT any sense of transition the bishop found himself seated in the
+little North Library of the Athenaeum club and staring at the bust of
+John Wilson Croker. He was sitting motionless and musing deeply. He was
+questioning with a cool and steady mind whether he had seen a vision
+or whether he had had a dream. If it had been a dream it had been an
+extraordinarily vivid and convincing dream. He still seemed to be in the
+presence of God, and it perplexed him not at all that he should also
+be in the presence of Croker. The feeling of mental rottenness and
+insecurity that had weakened his thought through the period of his
+illness, had gone. He was secure again within himself.
+
+It did not seem to matter fundamentally whether it was an experience of
+things without or of things within him that had happened to him. It was
+clear to him that much that he had seen was at most expressive, that
+some was altogether symbolical. For example, there was that sudden
+absurd realization of his sash and gaiters, and his perception of them
+as encumbrances in his pursuit of God. But the setting and essential of
+the whole thing remained in his mind neither expressive nor symbolical,
+but as real and immediately perceived, and that was the presence and
+kingship of God. God was still with him and about him and over him and
+sustaining him. He was back again in his world and his ordinary life,
+in his clothing and his body and his club, but God had been made and
+remained altogether plain and manifest.
+
+Whether an actual vision had made his conviction, or whether the
+conviction of his own subconscious mind had made the dream, seemed but
+a small matter beside the conviction that this was indeed the God he had
+desired and the God who must rule his life.
+
+“The stuff? The stuff had little to do with it. It just cleared my
+head.... I have seen. I have seen really. I know.”
+
+(2)
+
+
+For a long time as it seemed the bishop remained wrapped in clouds of
+luminous meditation. Dream or vision it did not matter; the essential
+thing was that he had made up his mind about God, he had found God.
+Moreover, he perceived that his theological perplexities had gone. God
+was higher and simpler and nearer than any theological God, than the
+God of the Three Creeds. Those creeds lay about in his mind now like
+garments flung aside, no trace nor suspicion of divinity sustained them
+any longer. And now--Now he would go out into the world.
+
+The little Library of the Athenaeum has no visible door. He went to the
+book-masked entrance in the corner, and felt among the bookshelves
+for the hidden latch. Then he paused, held by a curious thought. What
+exactly was the intention of that symbolical struggle with his sash and
+gaiters, and why had they impeded his pursuit of God?
+
+To what particularly significant action was he going out?
+
+The Three Creeds were like garments flung aside. But he was still
+wearing the uniform of a priest in the service of those three creeds.
+
+After a long interval he walked into the big reading-room. He ordered
+some tea and dry toast and butter, and sat down very thoughtfully in a
+corner. He was still sitting and thinking at half-past eight.
+
+It may seem strange to the reader that this bishop who had been doubting
+and criticizing the church and his system of beliefs for four long
+years had never before faced the possibility of a severance from his
+ecclesiastical dignity. But he had grown up in the church, his life had
+been so entirely clerical and Anglican, that the widest separation he
+had hitherto been able to imagine from this past had left him still a
+bishop, heretical perhaps, innovating in the broadening of beliefs and
+the liberalizing of practice, defensive even as Chasters was defensive,
+but still with the palace and his dignities, differing in opinion rather
+than in any tangible reality from his previous self. For a bishop,
+disbelief in the Church is a far profounder scepticism than mere
+disbelief in God. God is unseen, and in daily things unfelt; but
+the Church is with the predestined bishop always. His concept of the
+extremest possible departure from orthodoxy had been something that
+Chasters had phrased as “a restatement of Christ.” It was a new idea, an
+idea that had come with an immense effect of severance and novelty, that
+God could be other than the God of the Creed, could present himself
+to the imagination as a figure totally unlike the white, gentle, and
+compromising Redeemer of an Anglican's thought. That the bishop should
+treat the whole teaching of the church and the church itself as wrong,
+was an idea so new that it fell upon him now like a thunderbolt out of a
+cloudless sky. But here, clear in his mind now, was a feeling, amounting
+to conviction, that it was the purpose and gesture of the true God that
+he should come right out of the church and all his professions.
+
+And in the first glow of his vision he felt this gesture imperative. He
+must step right out.... Whither? how? And when?
+
+To begin with it seemed to him that an immediate renunciation was
+demanded. But it was a momentous step. He wanted to think. And to go
+on thinking. Rather than to act precipitately. Although the imperative
+seemed absolute, some delaying and arresting instinct insisted that he
+must “think” If he went back to Princhester, the everyday duties of
+his position would confront him at once with an effect of a definite
+challenge. He decided to take one of the Reform club bedrooms for two or
+three days, and wire to Princhester that he was “unavoidably delayed in
+town,” without further explanations. Then perhaps this inhibitory force
+would give way.
+
+It did not, however, give way. His mind sat down for two days in a blank
+amazement at the course before him, and at the end of that time this
+reasonless and formless institution was as strong as ever. During that
+time, except for some incidental exchanges at his clubs, he talked to no
+one. At first he did not want to talk to any one. He remained mentally
+and practically active, with a still intensely vivid sense that God,
+the true God, stood watching him and waiting for him to follow. And to
+follow meant slipping right out of all the world he had ever known.
+To thrust his foot right over the edge of a cliff would scarcely have
+demanded more from the bishop's store of resolution. He stood on the
+very verge. The chief secretion of his mind was a shadowy experiment or
+so in explanation of why he did not follow.
+
+(3)
+
+
+Insensibly the extreme vividness of his sense of God's nearness
+decreased. But he still retained a persuasion of the reality of an
+immediate listener waiting, and of the need of satisfying him.
+
+On the third day he found his mind still further changed. He no longer
+felt that God was in Pall Mall or St. James's Park, whither he
+resorted to walk and muse. He felt now that God was somewhere about the
+horizon....
+
+He felt too no longer that he thought straight into the mind of God. He
+thought now of what he would presently say to God. He turned over and
+rehearsed phrases. With that came a desire to try them first on some
+other hearer. And from that to the attentive head of Lady Sunderbund,
+prettily bent towards him, was no great leap. She would understand,
+if any one could understand, the great change that had happened in his
+mind.
+
+He found her address in the telephone book. She could be quite alone
+to him if he wouldn't mind “just me.” It was, he said, exactly what he
+desired.
+
+But when he got to her great airy flat overlooking Hyde Park, with its
+Omega Workshop furniture and its arresting decoration, he was not so
+sure whether this encounter was so exactly the thing he had desired as
+he had supposed.
+
+The world had become opaque and real again as he walked up St. James's
+Street and past the Ritz. He had a feeling that he was taking an
+afternoon off from God. The adventurous modernity of the room in which
+he waited intensified that. One whole white wall was devoted to a small
+picture by Wyndham Lewis. It was like a picture of an earthquake in a
+city of aniline pink and grey and keen green cardboard, and he wished it
+had never existed.
+
+He turned his back upon it and stared out of the window over the trees
+and greenery. The balcony was decorated with white and pink geraniums in
+pots painted black and gold, and the railings of the balcony were black
+and gold with crimson shape like squares wildly out of drawing.
+
+Lady Sunderbund kept him waiting perhaps five minutes. Then she came
+sailing in to him.
+
+She was dressed in a way and moved across the room in a way that was
+more reminiscent of Botticelli's Spring than ever--only with a kind
+of superadded stiffish polonaise of lace--and he did not want to be
+reminded of Botticelli's Spring or wonder why she had taken to stiff
+lace polonaises. He did not enquire whether he had met Lady Sunderbund
+to better advantage at Mrs. Garstein Fellows' or whether his memory had
+overrated her or whether anything had happened to his standard of taste,
+but his feeling now was decidedly one of disappointment, and all the
+talk and self-examination he had promised himself seemed to wither and
+hide away within him. For a time he talked of her view, and then
+admired her room and its arrangement, which he thought really were quite
+unbecomingly flippant and undignified for a room. Then came the black
+tea-things on their orange tray, and he searched in his mind for small
+talk to sustain their interview.
+
+But he had already betrayed his disposition to “go on with our talk”
+ in his telephone enquiry, and Lady Sunderbund, perceiving his shyness,
+began to make openings for him, at first just little hinting openings,
+and then larger and larger ones, until at last one got him.
+
+“I'm so glad,” she said, “to see you again. I'm so glad to go on with
+our talk. I've thought about it and thought about it.”
+
+She beamed at him happily.
+
+“I've thought ova ev'y wo'd you said,” she went on, when she had
+finished conveying her pretty bliss to him. “I've been so helped by
+thinking the k'eeds are symbols. And all you said. And I've felt time
+after time, you couldn't stay whe' you we'. That what you we' saying to
+me, would have to be said 'ight out.”
+
+That brought him in. He could not very well evade that opening without
+incivility. After all he had asked to see her, and it was a foolish
+thing to let little decorative accidentals put him off his friendly
+purpose. A woman may have flower-pots painted gold with black checkers
+and still be deeply understanding. He determined to tell her what was in
+his mind. But he found something barred him from telling that he had
+had an actual vision of God. It was as if that had been a private and
+confidential meeting. It wasn't, he felt, for him either to boast a
+privilege or tell others of things that God had not chosen to show them.
+
+“Since I saw you,” he said, “I have thought a great deal--of the subject
+of our conversation.”
+
+“I have been t'ying to think,” she said in a confirmatory tone, as if
+she had co-operated.
+
+“My faith in God grows,” he said.
+
+She glowed. Her lips fell apart. She flamed attention.
+
+“But it grows less like the faith of the church, less and less. I was
+born and trained in Anglicanism, and it is with a sort of astonishment I
+find myself passing now out of every sort of Catholicism--seeing it from
+the outside....”
+
+“Just as one might see Buddhism,” she supplied.
+
+“And yet feeling nearer, infinitely nearer to God,” he said.
+
+“Yes,” she panted; “yes.”
+
+“I thought if one went out, one went out just to doubt and darkness.”
+
+“And you don't?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“You have gone at one step to a new 'iligion!”
+
+He stared for a moment at the phrase.
+
+“To religion,” he said.
+
+“It is so wondyful,” she said, with her hands straight down upon the
+couch upon which she was sitting, and leaning forward at him, so as to
+seem almost as much out of drawing as a modern picture.
+
+“It seems,” he reflected; “--as if it were a natural thing.”
+
+She came back to earth very slowly. She turned to the tea-things with
+hushed and solemn movements as though she administered a ceremony of
+peculiar significance. The bishop too rose slowly out of the profundity
+of his confession. “No sugar please,” he said, arresting the lump in mid
+air.
+
+It was only when they were embarked upon cups of tea and had a little
+refreshed themselves, that she carried the talk further.
+
+“Does it mean that you must leave the church?” she asked.
+
+“It seemed so at first,” he said. “But now I do not know. I do not know
+what I ought to do.”
+
+She awaited his next thought.
+
+“It is as if one had lived in a room all one's life and thought it the
+world--and then suddenly walked out through a door and discovered the
+sea and the mountains and stars. So it was with me and the Anglican
+Church. It seems so extraordinary now--and it would have seemed the
+most natural thing a year ago--to think that I ever believed that the
+Anglican Compromise was the final truth of religion, that nothing more
+until the end of the world could ever be known that Cosmo Gordon Lang
+did not know, that there could be no conception of God and his quality
+that Randall Davidson did not possess.”
+
+He paused.
+
+“I did,” he said.
+
+“I did,” she responded with round blue eyes of wonder.
+
+“At the utmost the Church of England is a tabernacle on a road.”
+
+“A 'oad that goes whe'?” she rhetorized.
+
+“Exactly,” said the bishop, and put down his cup.
+
+“You see, my dear Lady Sunderbund,” he resumed, “I am exactly in the
+same position of that man at the door.”
+
+She quoted aptly and softly: “The wo'ld was all befo' them whe' to
+choose.”
+
+He was struck by the aptness of the words.
+
+“I feel I have to come right out into the bare truth. What exactly then
+do I become? Do I lose my priestly function because I discover how great
+God is? But what am I to do?”
+
+He opened a new layer of his thoughts to her.
+
+“There is a saying,” he remarked, “once a priest, always a priest. I
+cannot imagine myself as other than what I am.”
+
+“But o'thodox no maw,” she said.
+
+“Orthodox--self-satisfied, no longer. A priest who seeks, an exploring
+priest.”
+
+“In a Chu'ch of P'og'ess and B'othe'hood,” she carried him on.
+
+“At any rate, in a progressive and learning church.”
+
+She flashed and glowed assent.
+
+“I have been haunted,” he said, “by those words spoken at Athens. 'Whom
+therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.' That comes
+to me with an effect of--guidance is an old-fashioned word--shall I
+say suggestion? To stand by the altar bearing strange names and ancient
+symbols, speaking plainly to all mankind of the one true God--!”
+
+(4)
+
+
+He did not get much beyond this point at the time, though he remained
+talking with Lady Sunderbund for nearly an hour longer. The rest was
+merely a beating out of what had already been said. But insensibly she
+renewed her original charm, and as he became accustomed to her he forgot
+a certain artificiality in her manner and the extreme modernity of her
+costume and furniture. She was a wonderful listener; nobody else could
+have helped him to expression in quite the same way, and when he left
+her he felt that now he was capable of stating his case in a coherent
+and acceptable form to almost any intelligent hearer. He had a point of
+view now that was no longer embarrassed by the immediate golden
+presence of God; he was no longer dazzled nor ecstatic; his problem had
+diminished to the scale of any other great human problem, to the scale
+of political problems and problems of integrity and moral principle,
+problems about which there is no such urgency as there is about a house
+on fire, for example.
+
+And now the desire for expression was running strong. He wanted to
+state his situation; if he did not state he would have to act; and as he
+walked back to the club dinner he turned over possible interlocutors
+in his thoughts. Lord Rampound sat with him at dinner, and he came near
+broaching the subject with him. But Lord Rampound that evening had
+that morbid running of bluish legal anecdotes which is so common an
+affliction with lawyers, and theology sinks and dies in that turbid
+stream.
+
+But as he lay in bed that night he thought of his old friend and helper
+Bishop Likeman, and it was borne in upon him that he should consult him.
+And this he did next day.
+
+Since the days when the bishop had been only plain Mr. Scrope, the
+youngest and most helpful of Likeman's historical band of curates, their
+friendship had continued. Likeman had been a second father to him; in
+particular his tact and helpfulness had shone during those days of doubt
+and anxiety when dear old Queen Victoria, God's representative on earth,
+had obstinately refused, at the eleventh hour, to make him a bishop. She
+had those pigheaded fits, and she was touchy about the bishops. She had
+liked Scrope on account of the excellence of his German pronunciation,
+but she had been irritated by newspaper paragraphs--nobody could ever
+find out who wrote them and nobody could ever find out who showed them
+to the old lady--anticipating his elevation. She had gone very red
+in the face and stiffened in the Guelphic manner whenever Scrope was
+mentioned, and so a rich harvest of spiritual life had remained untilled
+for some months. Likeman had brought her round.
+
+It seemed arguable that Scrope owed some explanation to Likeman before
+he came to any open breach with the Establishment.
+
+He found Likeman perceptibly older and more shrivelled on account of the
+war, but still as sweet and lucid and subtle as ever. His voice sounded
+more than ever like a kind old woman's.
+
+He sat buried in his cushions--for “nowadays I must save every scrap
+of vitality”--and for a time contented himself with drawing out his
+visitor's story.
+
+Of course, one does not talk to Likeman of visions or intuitions. “I am
+disturbed, I find myself getting out of touch;” that was the bishop's
+tone.
+
+Occasionally Likeman nodded slowly, as a physician might do at the
+recital of familiar symptoms. “Yes,” he said, “I have been through most
+of this.... A little different in the inessentials.... How clear you
+are!”
+
+“You leave our stupid old Trinities--as I left them long ago,” said old
+Likeman, with his lean hand feeling and clawing at the arm of his chair.
+
+“But--!”
+
+The old man raised his hand and dropped it. “You go away from it
+all--straight as a line. I did. You take the wings of the morning and
+fly to the uttermost parts of the earth. And there you find--”
+
+He held up a lean finger, and inclined it to tick off each point.
+
+“Fate--which is God the Father, the Power of the Heart, which is God
+the Son, and that Light which comes in upon us from the inaccessible
+Godhead, which is God the Holy Spirit.”
+
+“But I know of no God the Holy Spirit, and Fate is not God at all. I
+saw in my vision one sole God, uncrucified, militant--conquering and to
+conquer.”
+
+Old Likeman stared. “You saw!”
+
+The Bishop of Princhester had not meant to go so far. But he stuck to
+his words. “As if I saw with my eyes. A God of light and courage.”
+
+“You have had visions, Scrope?”
+
+“I seemed to see.”
+
+“No, you have just been dreaming dreams.”
+
+“But why should one not see?”
+
+“See! The things of the spirit. These symbols as realities! These
+metaphors as men walking!”
+
+“You talk like an agnostic.”
+
+“We are all agnostics. Our creeds are expressions of ourselves and our
+attitude and relationship to the unknown. The triune God is just the
+form of our need and disposition. I have always assumed that you took
+that for granted. Who has ever really seen or heard or felt God? God
+is neither of the senses nor of the mind; he is of the soul. You are
+realistic, you are materialistic....”
+
+His voice expostulated.
+
+The Bishop of Princhester reflected. The vision of God was far off
+among his memories now, and difficult to recall. But he said at last: “I
+believe there is a God and that he is as real a person as you or I. And
+he is not the theological God we set out before the world.”
+
+“Personification,” said Likeman. “In the eighteenth century they used to
+draw beautiful female figures as Science and Mathematics. Young men have
+loved Science--and Freedom--as Pygmalion loved Galatea. Have it so
+if you will. Have a visible person for your Deity. But let me keep up
+my--spirituality.”
+
+“Your spirituality seems as thin as a mist. Do you really
+believe--anything?”
+
+“Everything!” said Likeman emphatically, sitting up with a transitory
+vigour. “Everything we two have ever professed together. I believe that
+the creeds of my church do express all that can possibly be expressed in
+the relationship of--That”--he made a comprehensive gesture with a twist
+of his hand upon its wrist--“to the human soul. I believe that they
+express it as well as the human mind can express it. Where they seem
+to be contradictory or absurd, it is merely that the mystery is
+paradoxical. I believe that the story of the Fall and of the Redemption
+is a complete symbol, that to add to it or to subtract from it or to
+alter it is to diminish its truth; if it seems incredible at this point
+or that, then simply I admit my own mental defect. And I believe in our
+Church, Scrope, as the embodied truth of religion, the divine instrument
+in human affairs. I believe in the security of its tradition, in
+the complete and entire soundness of its teaching, in its essential
+authority and divinity.”
+
+He paused, and put his head a little on one side and smiled sweetly.
+“And now can you say I do not believe?”
+
+“But the historical Christ, the man Jesus?”
+
+“A life may be a metaphor. Why not? Yes, I believe it all. All.”
+
+The Bishop of Princhester was staggered by this complete acceptance. “I
+see you believe all you profess,” he said, and remained for a moment or
+so rallying his forces.
+
+“Your vision--if it was a vision--I put it to you, was just some single
+aspect of divinity,” said Likeman. “We make a mistake in supposing that
+Heresy has no truth in it. Most heresies are only a disproportionate
+apprehension of some essential truth. Most heretics are men who have
+suddenly caught a glimpse through the veil of some particular verity....
+They are dazzled by that aspect. All the rest has vanished.... They are
+obsessed. You are obsessed clearly by this discovery of the militancy of
+God. God the Son--as Hero. And you want to go out to the simple worship
+of that one aspect. You want to go out to a Dissenter's tent in the
+wilderness, instead of staying in the Great Temple of the Ages.”
+
+Was that true?
+
+For some moments it sounded true.
+
+The Bishop of Princhester sat frowning and looking at that. Very far
+away was the vision now of that golden Captain who bade him come. Then
+at a thought the bishop smiled.
+
+“The Great Temple of the Ages,” he repeated. “But do you remember the
+trouble we had when the little old Queen was so pigheaded?”
+
+“Oh! I remember, I remember,” said Likeman, smiling with unshaken
+confidence. “Why not?”
+
+“For sixty years all we bishops in what you call the Great Temple of
+the Ages, were appointed and bullied and kept in our places by that
+pink irascible bit of dignity. I remember how at the time I didn't dare
+betray my boiling indignation even to you--I scarcely dared admit it to
+myself....”
+
+He paused.
+
+“It doesn't matter at all,” and old Likeman waved it aside.
+
+“Not at all,” he confirmed, waving again.
+
+“I spoke of the whole church of Christ on earth,” he went on.
+“These things, these Victorias and Edwards and so on, are temporary
+accidents--just as the severance of an Anglican from a Roman communion
+and a Greek orthodox communion are temporary accidents. You will remark
+that wise men in all ages have been able to surmount the difficulty of
+these things. Why? Because they knew that in spite of all these splits
+and irregularities and defacements--like the cracks and crannies and
+lichens on a cathedral wall--the building held good, that it was shelter
+and security. There is no other shelter and security. And so I come to
+your problem. Suppose it is true that you have this incidental vision
+of the militant aspect of God, and he isn't, as you see him now that
+is,--he isn't like the Trinity, he isn't like the Creed, he doesn't seem
+to be related to the Church, then comes the question, are you going out
+for that? And whither do you go if you do go out? The Church remains. We
+alter doctrines not by changing the words but by shifting the accent. We
+can under-accentuate below the threshold of consciousness.”
+
+“But can we?”
+
+“We do. Where's Hell now? Eighty years ago it warmed the whole Church.
+It was--as some atheist or other put it the other day--the central
+heating of the soul. But never mind that point now. Consider the
+essential question, the question of breaking with the church. Ask
+yourself, whither would you go? To become an oddity! A Dissenter. A
+Negative. Self emasculated. The spirit that denies. You would just go
+out. You would just cease to serve Religion. That would be all. You
+wouldn't do anything. The Church would go on; everything else would go
+on. Only you would be lost in the outer wilderness.
+
+“But then--”
+
+Old Likeman leant forward and pointed a bony finger. “Stay in the Church
+and modify it. Bring this new light of yours to the altar.”
+
+There was a little pause.
+
+“No man,” the bishop thought aloud, “putteth new wine into old bottles.”
+
+Old Likeman began to speak and had a fit of coughing. “Some of these
+texts--whuff, whuff--like a conjuror's hat--whuff--make 'em--fit
+anything.”
+
+A man-servant appeared and handed a silver box of lozenges into which
+the old bishop dipped with a trembling hand.
+
+“Tricks of that sort,” he said, “won't do, Scrope--among professionals.
+
+“And besides,” he was inspired; “true religion is old wine--as old as
+the soul.
+
+“You are a bishop in the Church of Christ on Earth,” he summed it up.
+“And you want to become a detached and wandering Ancient Mariner from
+your shipwreck of faith with something to explain--that nobody wants to
+hear. You are going out I suppose you have means?”
+
+The old man awaited the answer to his abrupt enquiry with a handful of
+lozenges.
+
+“No,” said the Bishop of Princhester, “practically--I haven't.”
+
+“My dear boy!” it was as if they were once more rector and curate.
+“My dear brother! do you know what the value of an ex-bishop is in the
+ordinary labour market?”
+
+“I have never thought of that.”
+
+“Evidently. You have a wife and children?”
+
+“Five daughters.”
+
+“And your wife married you--I remember, she married you soon after you
+got that living in St. John's Wood. I suppose she took it for granted
+that you were fixed in an ecclesiastical career. That was implicit in
+the transaction.”
+
+“I haven't looked very much at that side of the matter yet,” said the
+Bishop of Princhester.
+
+“It shouldn't be a decisive factor,” said Bishop Likeman, “not decisive.
+But it will weigh. It should weigh....”
+
+The old man opened out fresh aspects of the case. His argument was for
+delay, for deliberation. He went on to a wider set of considerations. A
+man who has held the position of a bishop for some years is, he held, no
+longer a free man in matters of opinion. He has become an official part
+of a great edifice which supports the faith of multitudes of simple
+and dependant believers. He has no right to indulge recklessly in
+intellectual and moral integrities. He may understand, but how is the
+flock to understand? He may get his own soul clear, but what will happen
+to them? He will just break away their supports, astonish them, puzzle
+them, distress them, deprive them of confidence, convince them of
+nothing.
+
+“Intellectual egotism may be as grave a sin,” said Bishop Likeman, “as
+physical selfishness.
+
+“Assuming even that you are absolutely right,” said Bishop Likeman,
+“aren't you still rather in the position of a man who insists upon
+Swedish exercises and a strengthening dietary on a raft?”
+
+“I think you have made out a case for delay,” said his hearer.
+
+“Three months.”
+
+The Bishop of Princhester conceded three months.
+
+“Including every sort of service. Because, after all, even supposing
+it is damnable to repeat prayers and creeds you do not believe in, and
+administer sacraments you think superstition, nobody can be damned
+but yourself. On the other hand if you express doubts that are not yet
+perfectly digested--you experiment with the souls of others....”
+
+(5)
+
+
+The bishop found much to ponder in his old friend's counsels. They were
+discursive and many-fronted, and whenever he seemed to be penetrating or
+defeating the particular considerations under examination the others
+in the background had a way of appearing invincible. He had a strong
+persuasion that Likeman was wrong--and unanswerable. And the true God
+now was no more than the memory of a very vividly realized idea. It
+was clear to the bishop that he was no longer a churchman or in the
+generally accepted sense of the word a Christian, and that he was bound
+to come out of the church. But all sense of urgency had gone. It was a
+matter demanding deliberation and very great consideration for others.
+
+He took no more of Dale's stuff because he felt bodily sound and slept
+well. And he was now a little shy of this potent fluid. He went down
+to Princhester the next day, for his compromise of an interval of three
+months made it seem possible to face his episcopal routine again. It
+was only when he was back in his own palace that the full weight of
+his domestic responsibilities in the discussion of the course he had to
+take, became apparent.
+
+Lady Ella met him with affection and solicitude.
+
+“I was tired and mentally fagged,” he said. “A day or so in London had
+an effect of change.”
+
+She agreed that he looked much better, and remained for a moment or so
+scrutinizing him with the faint anxiety of one resolved to be completely
+helpful.
+
+He regarded her with a renewed sense of her grace and dignity and
+kindliness. She was wearing a grey dress of soft silky material, touched
+with blue and covered with what seemed to him very rich and beautiful
+lace; her hair flowed back very graciously from her broad brow, and
+about her wrist and neck were delicate lines of gold. She seemed
+tremendously at home and right just where she was, in that big
+hospitable room, cultured but Anglican, without pretensions or
+novelties, with a glow of bound books, with the grand piano that Miriam,
+his third daughter, was beginning to play so well, with the tea equipage
+of shining silver and fine porcelain.
+
+He sat down contentedly in the low armchair beside her.
+
+It wasn't a setting that one would rashly destroy....
+
+And that evening at dinner this sense of his home as a complex of finely
+adjusted things not to be rashly disturbed was still more in the mind of
+the bishop. At dinner he had all his domesticities about him. It was the
+family time, from eight until ten, at which latter hour he would usually
+go back from the drawing-room to his study. He surveyed the table.
+Eleanor was at home for a few days, looking a little thin and bright
+but very keen and happy. She had taken a first in the first part of
+the Moral Science Tripos, and she was working hard now for part two.
+Clementina was to go back to Newnham with her next September. She
+aspired to history. Miriam's bent was musical. She and Phoebe and Daphne
+and Clementina were under the care of skilful Mademoiselle Lafarge,
+most tactful of Protestant French-women, Protestant and yet not too
+Protestant, one of those rare French Protestants in whom a touch of
+Bergson and the Pasteur Monod
+
+     “scarce suspected, animates the whole.”
+
+And also they had lessons, so high are our modern standards of
+education, from Mr. Blent, a brilliant young mathematician in orders,
+who sat now next to Lady Ella. Mr. Whippham, the chaplain, was at the
+bishop's right hand, ready for any chance of making arrangements to
+clear off the small arrears of duty the little holiday in London had
+accumulated. The bishop surveyed all these bright young people between
+himself and the calm beauty of his wife. He spoke first to one and then
+another upon the things that interested them. It rejoiced his heart to
+be able to give them education and opportunity, it pleased him to see
+them in clothes that he knew were none the less expensive because of
+their complete simplicity. Miriam and Mr. Blent wrangled pleasantly
+about Debussy, and old Dunk waited as though in orders of some rare and
+special sort that qualified him for this service.
+
+All these people, the bishop reflected, counted upon him that this would
+go on....
+
+Eleanor was answering some question of her mother's. They were so oddly
+alike and so curiously different, and both in their several ways so
+fine. Eleanor was dark like his own mother. Perhaps she did a little
+lack Lady Ella's fine reserves; she could express more, she could feel
+more acutely, she might easily be very unhappy or very happy....
+
+All these people counted on him. It was indeed acutely true, as Likeman
+had said, that any sudden breach with his position would be a breach of
+faith--so far as they were concerned.
+
+And just then his eye fell upon the epergne, a very old and beautiful
+piece of silver, that graced the dinner-table. It had been given him,
+together with an episcopal ring, by his curates and choristers at the
+Church of the Holy Innocents, when he became bishop of Pinner. When they
+gave it him, had any one of them dreamt that some day he might be moved
+to strike an ungracious blow at the mother church that had reared them
+all?
+
+It was his custom to join the family in the drawing-room after dinner.
+To-night he was a little delayed by Whippham, with some trivialities
+about next month's confirmations in Pringle and Princhester. When he
+came in he found Miriam playing, and playing very beautifully one of
+those later sonatas of Beethoven, he could never remember whether it
+was Of. 109 or Of. 111, but he knew that he liked it very much; it
+was solemn and sombre with phases of indescribable sweetness--while
+Clementina, Daphne and Mademoiselle Lafarge went on with their war
+knitting and Phoebe and Mr. Blent bent their brows over chess. Eleanor
+was reading the evening paper. Lady Ella sat on a high chair by the
+coffee things, and he stood in the doorway surveying the peaceful scene
+for a moment or so, before he went across the room and sat down on the
+couch close to her.
+
+“You look tired,” she whispered softly.
+
+“Worries.”
+
+“That Chasters case?”
+
+“Things developing out of that. I must tell you later.” It would be, he
+felt, a good way of breaking the matter to her.
+
+“Is the Chasters case coming on again, Daddy?” asked Eleanor.
+
+He nodded.
+
+“It's a pity,” she said.
+
+“What?
+
+“That he can't be left alone.”
+
+“It's Sir Reginald Phipps. The Church would be much more tolerant if
+it wasn't for the House of Laymen. But they--they feel they must do
+something.”
+
+He seized the opportunity of the music ceasing to get away from the
+subject. “Miriam dear,” he asked, raising his voice; “is that 109 or
+111? I can never tell.”
+
+“That is always 111, Daddy,” said Miriam. “It's the other one is 109.”
+ And then evidently feeling that she had been pert: “Would you like me to
+play you 109, Daddy?”
+
+“I should love it, my dear.” And he leant back and prepared to listen in
+such a thorough way that Eleanor would have no chance of discussing the
+Chasters' heresies. But this was interrupted by the consummation of the
+coffee, and Mr. Blent, breaking a long silence with “Mate in three, if
+I'm not mistaken,” leapt to his feet to be of service. Eleanor, with the
+rough seriousness of youth, would not leave the Chasters case alone.
+
+“But need you take action against Mr. Chasters?” she asked at once.
+
+“It's a very complicated subject, my dear,” he said.
+
+“His arguments?”
+
+“The practical considerations.”
+
+“But what are practical considerations in such a case?”
+
+“That's a post-graduate subject, Norah,” her father said with a smile
+and a sigh.
+
+“But,” began Eleanor, gathering fresh forces.
+
+“Daddy is tired,” Lady Ella intervened, patting him on the head.
+
+“Oh, terribly!--of that,” he said, and so escaped Eleanor for the
+evening.
+
+But he knew that before very long he would have to tell his wife of
+the changes that hung over their lives; it would be shabby to let the
+avalanche fall without giving the longest possible warning; and before
+they parted that night he took her hands in his and said: “There is much
+I have to tell you, dear. Things change, the whole world changes. The
+church must not live in a dream....
+
+“No,” she whispered. “I hope you will sleep to-night,” and held up her
+grave sweet face to be kissed.
+
+(6)
+
+
+But he did not sleep perfectly that night.
+
+He did not sleep indeed very badly, but he lay for some time thinking,
+thinking not onward but as if he pressed his mind against very strong
+barriers that had closed again. His vision of God which had filled the
+heavens, had become now gem-like, a minute, hard, clear-cut conviction
+in his mind that he had to disentangle himself from the enormous
+complications of symbolism and statement and organization and
+misunderstanding in the church and achieve again a simple and living
+worship of a simple and living God. Likeman had puzzled and silenced
+him, only upon reflection to convince him that amidst such intricacies
+of explanation the spirit cannot live. Creeds may be symbolical, but
+symbols must not prevaricate. A church that can symbolize everything and
+anything means nothing.
+
+It followed from this that he ought to leave the church. But there came
+the other side of this perplexing situation. His feelings as he lay in
+his bed were exactly like those one has in a dream when one wishes to
+run or leap or shout and one can achieve no movement, no sound. He could
+not conceive how he could possibly leave the church.
+
+His wife became as it were the representative of all that held him
+helpless. She and he had never kept secret from one another any plan of
+action, any motive, that affected the other. It was clear to him that
+any movement towards the disavowal of doctrinal Christianity and the
+renunciation of his see must be first discussed with her. He must tell
+her before he told the world.
+
+And he could not imagine his telling her except as an incredibly
+shattering act.
+
+So he left things from day to day, and went about his episcopal
+routines. He preached and delivered addresses in such phrases as he knew
+people expected, and wondered profoundly why it was that it should be
+impossible for him to discuss theological points with Lady Ella. And one
+afternoon he went for a walk with Eleanor along the banks of the Prin,
+and found himself, in response to certain openings of hers, talking to
+her in almost exactly the same terms as Likeman had used to him.
+
+Then suddenly the problem of this theological eclaircissement was
+complicated in an unexpected fashion.
+
+He had just been taking his Every Second Thursday Talk with Diocesan
+Men Helpers. He had been trying to be plain and simple upon the needless
+narrowness of enthusiastic laymen. He was still in the Bishop Andrews
+cap and purple cassock he affected on these occasions; the Men Helpers
+loved purple; and he was disentangling himself from two or three
+resolute bores--for our loyal laymen can be at times quite superlative
+bores--when Miriam came to him.
+
+“Mummy says, 'Come to the drawing-room if you can.' There is a Lady
+Sunderbund who seems particularly to want to see you.”
+
+He hesitated for a moment, and then decided that this was a conversation
+he ought to control.
+
+He found Lady Sunderbund looking very tall and radiantly beautiful in
+a sheathlike dress of bright crimson trimmed with snow-white fur and a
+white fur toque. She held out a long white-gloved hand to him and
+cried in a tone of comradeship and profound understanding: “I've come,
+Bishop!”
+
+“You've come to see me?” he said without any sincerity in his polite
+pleasure.
+
+“I've come to P'inchesta to stay!” she cried with a bright triumphant
+rising note.
+
+She evidently considered Lady Ella a mere conversational stop-gap, to
+be dropped now that the real business could be commenced. She turned
+her pretty profile to that lady, and obliged the bishop with a compact
+summary of all that had preceded his arrival. “I have been telling
+Lady Ella,” she said, “I've taken a house, fu'nitua and all! Hea.
+In P'inchesta! I've made up my mind to sit unda you--as they say
+in Clapham. I've come 'ight down he' fo' good. I've taken a little
+house--oh! a sweet little house that will be all over 'oses next month.
+I'm living f'om 'oom to 'oom and having the othas done up. It's in that
+little quiet st'eet behind you' ga'den wall. And he' I am!”
+
+“Is it the old doctor's house?” asked Lady Ella.
+
+“Was it an old docta?” cried Lady Sunderbund. “How delightful! And now I
+shall be a patient!”
+
+She concentrated upon the bishop.
+
+“Oh, I've been thinking all the time of all the things you told me. Ova
+and ova. It's all so wondyful and so--so like a G'ate Daw opening. New
+light. As if it was all just beginning.”
+
+She clasped her hands.
+
+The bishop felt that there were a great number of points to this
+situation, and that it was extremely difficult to grasp them all
+at once. But one that seemed of supreme importance to his whirling
+intelligence was that Lady Ella should not know that he had gone to
+relieve his soul by talking to Lady Sunderbund in London. It had never
+occurred to him at the time that there was any shadow of disloyalty to
+Lady Ella in his going to Lady Sunderbund, but now he realized that this
+was a thing that would annoy Lady Ella extremely. The conversation had
+in the first place to be kept away from that. And in the second place it
+had to be kept away from the abrupt exploitation of the new theological
+developments.
+
+He felt that something of the general tension would be relieved if they
+could all three be got to sit down.
+
+“I've been talking for just upon two hours,” he said to Lady Ella. “It's
+good to see the water boiling for tea.”
+
+He put a chair for Lady Sunderbund to the right of Lady Ella, got her
+into it by infusing an ecclesiastical insistence into his manner, and
+then went and sat upon the music-stool on his wife's left, so as to
+establish a screen of tea-things and cakes and so forth against her more
+intimate enthusiasm. Meanwhile he began to see his way clearer and to
+develop his line.
+
+“Well, Lady Sunderbund,” he said, “I can assure you that I think you
+will be no small addition to the church life of Princhester. But I warn
+you this is a hard-working and exacting diocese. We shall take your
+money, all we can get of it, we shall take your time, we shall work you
+hard.”
+
+“Wo'k me hard!” cried Lady Sunderbund with passion.
+
+“We will, we will,” said the bishop in a tone that ignored her
+passionate note.
+
+“I am sure Lady Sunderbund will be a great help to us,” said Lady Ella.
+“We want brightening. There's a dinginess....”
+
+Lady Sunderbund beamed an acknowledgment. “I shall exact a 'eturn,” she
+said. “I don't mind wo'king, but I shall wo'k like the poo' students in
+the Middle Ages did, to get my teaching. I've got my own soul to save as
+well as help saving othas. Since oua last talk--”
+
+She found the bishop handing her bread and butter. For a time the bishop
+fought a delaying action with the tea-things, while he sought eagerly
+and vainly in his mind for some good practical topic in which he could
+entangle and suppress Lady Sunderbund's enthusiasms. From this she broke
+away by turning suddenly to Lady Ella.
+
+“Youa husband's views,” she said, “we'e a 'eal 'evelation to me. It was
+like not being blind--all at once.”
+
+Lady Ella was always pleased to hear her husband praised. Her colour
+brightened a little. “They seem very ordinary views,” she said modestly.
+
+“You share them?” cried Lady Sunderbund.
+
+“But of course,” said Lady Ella.
+
+“Wondyful!” cried Lady Sunderbund.
+
+“Tell me, Lady Sunderbund,” said the bishop, “are you going to alter the
+outer appearance of the old doctor's house?” And found that at last he
+had discovered the saving topic.
+
+“Ha'dly at all,” she said. “I shall just have it pointed white and do
+the doa--I'm not su' how I shall do the doa. Whetha I shall do the doa
+gold or a vehy, vehy 'itch blue.”
+
+For a time she and Lady Ella, to whom these ideas were novel, discussed
+the animation of grey and sombre towns by house painting. In such matter
+Lady Sunderbund had a Russian mind. “I can't bea' g'ey,” she said. “Not
+in my su'oundings, not in my k'eed, nowhe'e.” She turned to the bishop.
+“If I had my way I would paint you' cathed'al inside and out.”
+
+“They used to be painted,” said the bishop. “I don't know if you have
+seen Ely. There the old painting has been largely restored....”
+
+From that to the end there was no real danger, and at last the bishop
+found himself alone with his wife again.
+
+“Remarkable person,” he said tentatively. “I never met any one whose
+faults were more visible. I met her at Wimbush House.”
+
+He glanced at his watch.
+
+“What did she mean,” asked Lady Ella abruptly, “by talking of your new
+views? And about revelations?”
+
+“She probably misunderstood something I said at the Garstein Fellows',”
+ he said. “She has rather a leaping mind.”
+
+He turned to the window, looked at his nails, and appeared to be
+suddenly reminded of duties elsewhere....
+
+It was chiefly manifest to him that the difficulties in explaining the
+changes of his outlook to Lady Ella had now increased enormously.
+
+(7)
+
+
+A day or so after Lady Sunderbund's arrival in Princhester the bishop
+had a letter from Likeman. The old man was manifestly in doubt about the
+effect of their recent conversation.
+
+“My dear Scrope,” it began. “I find myself thinking continually about
+our interview and the difficulties you laid bare so frankly to me.
+We touched upon many things in that talk, and I find myself full of
+afterthoughts, and not perfectly sure either quite of what I said or
+of what I failed to say. I feel that in many ways I was not perhaps so
+clear and convincing as the justice of my case should have made me, and
+you are one of my own particular little company, you were one of the
+best workers in that band of good workers, your life and your career
+are very much my concern. I know you will forgive me if I still mingle
+something of the paternal with my fraternal admonitions. I watched you
+closely. I have still my old diaries of the St. Matthew's days, and I
+have been looking at them to remind me of what you once were. It was my
+custom to note my early impressions of all the men who worked with me,
+because I have a firm belief in the soundness of first impressions and
+the considerable risk one runs of having them obscured by the accidents
+and habituations of constant intercourse. I found that quite early in
+your days at St. Matthew's I wrote against your name 'enthusiastic, but
+a saving delicacy.' After all our life-long friendship I would not write
+anything truer. I would say of you to-day, 'This man might have been a
+revivalist, if he were not a gentleman.' There is the enthusiast,
+there is the revivalist, in you. It seems to me that the stresses and
+questions of this great crisis in the world's history have brought it
+nearer to the surface than I had ever expected it to come.
+
+“I quite understand and I sympathize with your impatience with
+the church at the present time; we present a spectacle of pompous
+insignificance hard to bear with. We are doing very little, and we are
+giving ourselves preposterous airs. There seems to be an opinion abroad
+that in some quasi-automatic way the country is going to collapse after
+the war into the arms of the church and the High Tories; a possibility
+I don't accept for a moment. Why should it? These forcible-feeble
+reactionaries are much more likely to explode a revolution that
+will disestablish us. And I quite understand your theological
+difficulties--quite. The creeds, if their entire symbolism is for a
+moment forgotten, if they are taken as opaque statements of fact, are
+inconsistent, incredible. So incredible that no one believes them;
+not even the most devout. The utmost they do is to avert their
+minds--reverentially. Credo quia impossibile. That is offensive to a
+Western mind. I can quite understand the disposition to cry out at such
+things, 'This is not the Church of God!'--to run out from it--
+
+“You have some dream, I suspect, of a dramatic dissidence.
+
+“Now, my dear Brother and erstwhile pupil, I ask you not to do this
+thing. Wait, I implore you. Give me--and some others, a little time. I
+have your promise for three months, but even after that, I ask you
+to wait. Let the reform come from within the church. The church is
+something more than either its creeds, its clergy, or its laymen. Look
+at your cathedral rising out of and dominating Princhester. It stands
+not simply for Athanasius; it stands but incidentally for Athanasius; it
+stands for all religion. Within that fabric--let me be as frank here
+as in our private conversation--doctrine has altered again and again.
+To-day two distinct religions worship there side by side; one that fades
+and one that grows brighter. There is the old quasi-materialistic belief
+of the barbarians, the belief in such things, for example, as that
+Christ the physical Son of God descended into hell and stayed there,
+seeing the sights I suppose like any tourist and being treated with
+diplomatic civilities for three terrestrial days; and on the other
+hand there is the truly spiritual belief that you and I share, which
+is absolutely intolerant of such grotesque ideas. My argument to you
+is that the new faith, the clearer vision, gains ground; that the
+only thing that can prevent or delay the church from being altogether
+possessed by what you call and I admit is, the true God, is that such
+men as yourself, as the light breaks upon you, should be hasty and leave
+the church. You see my point of view, do you not? It is not one that
+has been assumed for our discussion; it is one I came to long years ago,
+that I was already feeling my way to in my St. Matthew's Lenton sermons.
+
+“A word for your private ear. I am working. I cannot tell you fully
+because I am not working alone. But there are movements afoot in which
+I hope very shortly to be able to ask you to share. That much at least I
+may say at this stage. Obscure but very powerful influences are at
+work for the liberalizing of the church, for release from many
+narrow limitations, for the establishment of a modus vivendi with the
+nonconformist and dissentient bodies in Britain and America, and with
+the churches of the East. But of that no more now.
+
+“And in conclusion, my dear Scrope, let me insist again upon the eternal
+persistence of the essential Religious Fact:”
+
+(Greek Letters Here)
+
+(Rev. i. 18. “Fear not. I am the First and Last thing, the Living
+thing.”)
+
+And these promises which, even if we are not to take them as promises in
+the exact sense in which, let us say, the payment of five sovereigns
+is promised by a five-pound note, are yet assertions of practically
+inevitable veracity:
+
+(Greek Letters Here)
+
+(Phil. i. 6. “He who began... will perfect.” Eph. v. 14. “He will
+illuminate.”)
+
+
+The old man had written his Greek tags in shakily resolute capitals. It
+was his custom always to quote the Greek Testament in his letters,
+never the English version. It is a practice not uncommon with the more
+scholarly of our bishops. It is as if some eminent scientific man were
+to insist upon writing H2O instead of “water,” and “sodium chloride”
+ instead of “table salt” in his private correspondence. Or upon hanging
+up a stuffed crocodile in his hall to give the place tone. The Bishop
+of Princhester construed these brief dicta without serious exertion, he
+found them very congenial texts, but there were insuperable difficulties
+in the problem why Likeman should suppose they had the slightest weight
+upon his side of their discussion. The more he thought the less they
+seemed to be on Likeman's side, until at last they began to take on a
+complexion entirely opposed to the old man's insidious arguments, until
+indeed they began to bear the extraordinary interpretation of a special
+message, unwittingly delivered.
+
+(8)
+
+
+The bishop was still thinking over this communication when he was
+interrupted by Lady Ella. She came with a letter in her hand to ask him
+whether she might send five-and-twenty pounds to a poor cousin of his,
+a teacher in a girls' school, who had been incapacitated from work by
+a dislocation of the cartilage of her knee. If she could go to that
+unorthodox but successful practitioner, Mr. Barker, the bone-setter, she
+was convinced she could be restored to efficiency. But she had no ready
+money. The bishop agreed without hesitation. His only doubt was the
+certainty of the cure, but upon that point Lady Ella was convinced;
+there had been a great experience in the Walshingham family.
+
+“It is pleasant to be able to do things like this,” said Lady Ella,
+standing over him when this matter was settled.
+
+“Yes,” the bishop agreed; “it is pleasant to be in a position to do
+things like this....”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SEVENTH - THE SECOND VISION
+
+(1)
+
+
+A MONTH later found the bishop's original state of perplexity and
+insomnia returned and intensified. He had done none of all the things
+that had seemed so manifestly needing to be done after his vision in the
+Athenaeum. All the relief and benefit of his experience in London had
+vanished out of his life. He was afraid of Dr. Dale's drug; he knew
+certainly that it would precipitate matters; and all his instincts
+in the state of moral enfeeblement to which he had relapsed, were to
+temporize.
+
+Although he had said nothing further about his changed beliefs to Lady
+Ella, yet he perceived clearly that a shadow had fallen between them.
+She had a wife's extreme sensitiveness to fine shades of expression and
+bearing, and manifestly she knew that something was different. Meanwhile
+Lady Sunderbund had become a frequent worshipper in the cathedral, she
+was a figure as conspicuous in sombre Princhester as a bird of paradise
+would have been; common people stood outside her very very rich blue
+door on the chance of seeing her; she never missed an opportunity of
+hearing the bishop preach or speak, she wrote him several long
+and thoughtful letters with which he did not bother Lady Ella, she
+communicated persistently, and manifestly intended to become a very
+active worker in diocesan affairs.
+
+It was inevitable that she and the bishop should meet and talk
+occasionally in the cathedral precincts, and it was inevitable that he
+should contrast the flexibility of her rapid and very responsive mind
+with a certain defensiveness, a stoniness, in the intellectual bearing
+of Lady Ella.
+
+If it had been Lady Sunderbund he had had to explain to, instead of Lady
+Ella, he could have explained a dozen times a day.
+
+And since his mind was rehearsing explanations it was not unnatural they
+should overflow into this eagerly receptive channel, and that the less
+he told Lady Ella the fuller became his spiritual confidences to Lady
+Sunderbund.
+
+She was clever in realizing that they were confidences and treating them
+as such, more particularly when it chanced that she and Lady Ella and
+the bishop found themselves in the same conversation.
+
+She made great friends with Miriam, and initiated her by a whole
+collection of pretty costume plates into the mysteries of the “Ussian
+Ballet” and the works of Mousso'gski and “Imsky Ko'zakof.”
+
+The bishop liked a certain religiosity in the texture of Moussorgski's
+music, but failed to see the “significance “--of many of the costumes.
+
+(2)
+
+
+It was on a Sunday night--the fourth Sunday after Easter--that the
+supreme crisis of the bishop's life began. He had had a feeling all day
+of extreme dulness and stupidity; he felt his ministrations unreal, his
+ceremonies absurd and undignified. In the night he became bleakly and
+painfully awake. His mind occupied itself at first chiefly with the
+tortuousness and weakness of his own character. Every day he perceived
+that the difficulty of telling Lady Ella of the change in his faith
+became more mountainous. And every day he procrastinated. If he had
+told her naturally and simply on the evening of his return from
+London--before anything material intervened--everything would have been
+different, everything would have been simpler....
+
+He groaned and rolled over in his bed.
+
+There came upon him the acutest remorse and misery. For he saw that
+amidst these petty immediacies he had lost touch with God. The last
+month became incredible. He had seen God. He had touched God's hand. God
+had been given to him, and he had neglected the gift. He was still lost
+amidst the darkness and loneliness, the chaotic ends and mean shifts,
+of an Erastian world. For a month now and more, after a vision of God so
+vivid and real and reassuring that surely no saint nor prophet had ever
+had a better, he had made no more than vague responsive movements; he
+had allowed himself to be persuaded into an unreasonable and cowardly
+delay, and the fetters of association and usage and minor interests
+were as unbroken as they had been before ever the vision shone. Was it
+credible that there had ever been such a vision in a life so entirely
+dictated by immediacy and instinct as his? We are all creatures of the
+dark stream, we swim in needs and bodily impulses and small vanities; if
+ever and again a bubble of spiritual imaginativeness glows out of us, it
+breaks and leaves us where we were.
+
+“Louse that I am!” he cried.
+
+He still believed in God, without a shadow of doubt; he believed in the
+God that he had seen, the high courage, the golden intention, the light
+that had for a moment touched him. But what had he to do with God, he,
+the loiterer, the little thing?
+
+He was little, he was funny. His prevarications with his wife, for
+example, were comic. There was no other word for him but “funny.”
+
+He rolled back again and lay staring.
+
+“Who will deliver me from the body of this death?” What right has a
+little bishop in a purple stock and doeskin breeches, who hangs back in
+his palace from the very call of God, to a phrase so fine and tragic as
+“the body of this death?”
+
+He was the most unreal thing in the universe. He was a base insect
+giving himself airs. What advantage has a bishop over the Praying
+Mantis, that cricket which apes the attitude of piety? Does he matter
+more--to God?
+
+“To the God of the Universe, who can tell? To the God of man,--yes.”
+
+He sat up in bed struck by his own answer, and full of an indescribable
+hunger for God and an indescribable sense of his complete want of
+courage to make the one simple appeal that would satisfy that hunger.
+He tried to pray. “O God!” he cried, “forgive me! Take me!” It seemed to
+him that he was not really praying but only making believe to pray. It
+seemed to him that he was not really existing but only seeming to exist.
+He seemed to himself to be one with figures on a china plate, with
+figures painted on walls, with the flimsy imagined lives of men in
+stories of forgotten times. “O God!” he said, “O God,” acting a gesture,
+mimicking appeal.
+
+“Anaemic,” he said, and was given an idea.
+
+He got out of bed, he took his keys from the night-table at the bed head
+and went to his bureau.
+
+He stood with Dale's tonic in his hand. He remained for some time
+holding it, and feeling a curious indisposition to go on with the thing
+in his mind.
+
+He turned at last with an effort. He carried the little phial to his
+bedside, and into the tumbler of his water-bottle he let the drops fall,
+drop by drop, until he had counted twenty. Then holding it to the bulb
+of his reading lamp he added the water and stood watching the slow
+pearly eddies in the mixture mingle into an opalescent uniformity. He
+replaced the water-bottle and stood with the glass in his hand. But he
+did not drink.
+
+He was afraid.
+
+He knew that he had only to drink and this world of confusion would grow
+transparent, would roll back and reveal the great simplicities behind.
+And he was afraid.
+
+He was afraid of that greatness. He was afraid of the great imperatives
+that he knew would at once take hold of his life. He wanted to muddle
+on for just a little longer. He wanted to stay just where he was, in
+his familiar prison-house, with the key of escape in his hand. Before he
+took the last step into the very presence of truth, he would--think.
+
+He put down the glass and lay down upon his bed....
+
+(3)
+
+
+He awoke in a mood of great depression out of a dream of wandering
+interminably in an endless building of innumerable pillars, pillars so
+vast and high that the ceiling was lost in darkness. By the scale of
+these pillars he felt himself scarcely larger than an ant. He was always
+alone in these wanderings, and always missing something that passed
+along distant passages, something desirable, something in the nature
+of a procession or of a ceremony, something of which he was in futile
+pursuit, of which he heard faint echoes, something luminous of which he
+seemed at times to see the last fading reflection, across vast halls
+and wildernesses of shining pavement and through Cyclopaean archways. At
+last there was neither sound nor gleam, but the utmost solitude, and a
+darkness and silence and the uttermost profundity of sorrow....
+
+It was bright day. Dunk had just come into the room with his tea, and
+the tumbler of Dr. Dale's tonic stood untouched upon the night-table.
+The bishop sat up in bed. He had missed his opportunity. To-day was a
+busy day, he knew.
+
+“No,” he said, as Dunk hesitated whether to remove or leave the tumbler.
+“Leave that.”
+
+Dunk found room for it upon the tea-tray, and vanished softly with the
+bishop's evening clothes.
+
+The bishop remained motionless facing the day. There stood the draught
+of decision that he had lacked the decision even to touch.
+
+From his bed he could just read the larger items that figured upon the
+engagement tablet which it was Whippham's business to fill over-night
+and place upon his table. He had two confirmation services, first
+the big one in the cathedral and then a second one in the evening at
+Pringle, various committees and an interview with Chasters. He had not
+yet finished his addresses for these confirmation services....
+
+The task seemed mountainous--overwhelming.
+
+With a gesture of desperation he seized the tumblerful of tonic and
+drank it off at a gulp.
+
+(4)
+
+
+For some moments nothing seemed to happen.
+
+Then he began to feel stronger and less wretched, and then came a
+throbbing and tingling of artery and nerve.
+
+He had a sense of adventure, a pleasant fear in the thing that he had
+done. He got out of bed, leaving his cup of tea untasted, and began to
+dress. He had the sensation of relief a prisoner may feel who suddenly
+tries his cell door and finds it open upon sunshine, the outside world
+and freedom.
+
+He went on dressing although he was certain that in a few minutes the
+world of delusion about him would dissolve, and that he would find
+himself again in the great freedom of the place of God.
+
+This time the transition came much sooner and much more rapidly. This
+time the phases and quality of the experience were different. He felt
+once again that luminous confusion between the world in which a human
+life is imprisoned and a circumambient and interpenetrating world, but
+this phase passed very rapidly; it did not spread out over nearly half
+an hour as it had done before, and almost immediately he seemed to
+plunge away from everything in this life altogether into that outer
+freedom he sought. And this time there was not even the elemental
+scenery of the former vision. He stood on nothing; there was nothing
+below and nothing above him. There was no sense of falling, no terror,
+but a feeling as though he floated released. There was no light, but as
+it were a clear darkness about him. Then it was manifest to him that he
+was not alone, but that with him was that same being that in his former
+vision had called himself the Angel of God. He knew this without knowing
+why he knew this, and either he spoke and was answered, or he thought
+and his thought answered him back. His state of mind on this occasion
+was altogether different from the first vision of God; before it had
+been spectacular, but now his perception was altogether super-sensuous.
+
+(And nevertheless and all the time it seemed that very faintly he was
+still in his room.)
+
+It was he who was the first to speak. The great Angel whom he felt
+rather than saw seemed to be waiting for him to speak.
+
+“I have come,” he said, “because once more I desire to see God.”
+
+“But you have seen God.”
+
+“I saw God. God was light, God was truth. And I went back to my life,
+and God was hidden. God seemed to call me. He called. I heard him, I
+sought him and I touched his hand. When I went back to my life I was
+presently lost in perplexity. I could not tell why God had called me nor
+what I had to do.”
+
+“And why did you not come here before?”
+
+“Doubt and fear. Brother, will you not lay your hand on mine?”
+
+The figure in the darkness became distincter. But nothing touched the
+bishop's seeking hands.
+
+“I want to see God and to understand him. I want reassurance. I want
+conviction. I want to understand all that God asks me to do. The world
+is full of conflict and confusion and the spirit of war. It is dark and
+dreadful now with suffering and bloodshed. I want to serve God who could
+save it, and I do not know how.”
+
+It seemed to the bishop that now he could distinguish dimly but surely
+the form and features of the great Angel to whom he talked. For a little
+while there was silence, and then the Angel spoke.
+
+“It was necessary first,” said the Angel, “that you should apprehend God
+and desire him. That was the purport of your first vision. Now, since
+you require it, I will tell you and show you certain things about him,
+things that it seems you need to know, things that all men need to know.
+Know then first that the time is at hand when God will come into the
+world and rule it, and when men will know what is required of them.
+This time is close at hand. In a little while God will be made manifest
+throughout the earth. Men will know him and know that he is King. To you
+this truth is to be shown--that you may tell it to others.”
+
+“This is no vision?” said the bishop, “no dream that will pass away?”
+
+“Am I not here beside you?”
+
+(5)
+
+
+The bishop was anxious to be very clear. Things that had been
+shapelessly present in his mind now took form and found words for
+themselves.
+
+“The God I saw in my vision--He is not yet manifest in the world?”
+
+“He comes. He is in the world, but he is not yet manifested. He whom you
+saw in your vision will speedily be manifest in the world. To you this
+vision is given of the things that come. The world is already glowing
+with God. Mankind is like a smouldering fire that will presently, in
+quite a little time, burst out into flame.
+
+“In your former vision I showed you God,” said the Angel. “This time
+I will show you certain signs of the coming of God. And then you will
+understand the place you hold in the world and the task that is required
+of you.”
+
+(6)
+
+
+And as the Angel spoke he lifted up his hands with the palms upward, and
+there appeared above them a little round cloud, that grew denser until
+it had the likeness of a silver sphere. It was a mirror in the form of
+a ball, but a mirror not shining uniformly; it was discoloured with
+greyish patches that had a familiar shape. It circled slowly upon the
+Angel's hands. It seemed no greater than the compass of a human skull,
+and yet it was as great as the earth. Indeed it showed the whole
+earth. It was the earth. The hands of the Angel vanished out of sight,
+dissolved and vanished, and the spinning world hung free. All about the
+bishop the velvet darkness broke into glittering points that shaped out
+the constellations, and nearest to them, so near as to seem only a few
+million miles away in the great emptiness into which everything had
+resolved itself, shone the sun, a ball of red-tongued fires. The Angel
+was but a voice now; the bishop and the Angel were somewhere aloof from
+and yet accessible to the circling silver sphere.
+
+At the time all that happened seemed to happen quite naturally, as
+things happen in a dream. It was only later, when all this was a matter
+of memory, that the bishop realized how strange and incomprehensible his
+vision had been. The sphere was the earth with all its continents and
+seas, its ships and cities, its country-sides and mountain ranges. It
+was so small that he could see it all at once, and so great and full
+that he could see everything in it. He could see great countries like
+little patches upon it, and at the same time he could see the faces of
+the men upon the highways, he could see the feelings in men's hearts and
+the thoughts in their minds. But it did not seem in any way wonderful
+to the bishop that so he should see those things, or that it was to him
+that these things were shown.
+
+“This is the whole world,” he said.
+
+“This is the vision of the world,” the Angel answered.
+
+“It is very wonderful,” said the bishop, and stood for a moment
+marvelling at the compass of his vision. For here was India, here
+was Samarkand, in the light of the late afternoon; and China and the
+swarming cities upon her silvery rivers sinking through twilight to the
+night and throwing a spray and tracery of lantern spots upon the dark;
+here was Russia under the noontide, and so great a battle of artillery
+raging on the Dunajec as no man had ever seen before; whole lines of
+trenches dissolved into clouds of dust and heaps of blood-streaked
+earth; here close to the waiting streets of Constantinople were the
+hills of Gallipoli, the grave of British Imperialism, streaming to
+heaven with the dust and smoke of bursting shells and rifle fire and the
+smoke and flame of burning brushwood. In the sea of Marmora a big ship
+crowded with Turkish troops was sinking; and, purple under the clear
+water, he could see the shape of the British submarine which had
+torpedoed her and had submerged and was going away. Berlin prepared its
+frugal meals, still far from famine. He saw the war in Europe as if he
+saw it on a map, yet every human detail showed. Over hundreds of miles
+of trenches east and west of Germany he could see shells bursting and
+the men below dropping, and the stretcher-bearers going back with
+the wounded. The roads to every front were crowded with reserves and
+munitions. For a moment a little group of men indifferent to all this
+struggle, who were landing amidst the Antarctic wilderness, held his
+attention; and then his eyes went westward to the dark rolling Atlantic
+across which, as the edge of the night was drawn like a curtain, more
+and still more ships became visible beating upon their courses eastward
+or westward under the overtaking day.
+
+The wonder increased; the wonder of the single and infinitely
+multitudinous adventure of mankind.
+
+“So God perhaps sees it,” he whispered.
+
+(7)
+
+
+“Look at this man,” said the Angel, and the black shadow of a hand
+seemed to point.
+
+It was a Chinaman sitting with two others in a little low room separated
+by translucent paper windows from a noisy street of shrill-voiced
+people. The three had been talking of the ultimatum that Japan had sent
+that day to China, claiming a priority in many matters over European
+influences they were by no means sure whether it was a wrong or a
+benefit that had been done to their country. From that topic they had
+passed to the discussion of the war, and then of wars and national
+aggressions and the perpetual thrusting and quarrelling of mankind. The
+older man had said that so life would always be; it was the will of
+Heaven. The little, very yellow-faced, emaciated man had agreed with
+him. But now this younger man, to whose thoughts the Angel had so
+particularly directed the bishop's attention, was speaking. He did not
+agree with his companion.
+
+“War is not the will of Heaven,” he said; “it is the blindness of men.”
+
+“Man changes,” he said, “from day to day and from age to age. The
+science of the West has taught us that. Man changes and war changes and
+all things change. China has been the land of flowery peace, and she may
+yet give peace to all the world. She has put aside that puppet Emperor
+at Peking, she turns her face to the new learning of the West as a man
+lays aside his heavy robes, in order that her task may be achieved.”
+
+The older man spoke, his manner was more than a little incredulous, and
+yet not altogether contemptuous. “You believe that someday there will be
+no more war in the world, that a time will come when men will no longer
+plot and plan against the welfare of men?”
+
+“Even that last,” said the younger man. “Did any of us dream twenty-five
+years ago that here in China we should live to see a republic? The age
+of the republics draws near, when men in every country of the world will
+look straight up to the rule of Right and the empire of Heaven.”
+
+(“And God will be King of the World,” said the Angel. “Is not that
+faith exactly the faith that is coming to you?”)
+
+The two other Chinamen questioned their companion, but without
+hostility.
+
+“This war,” said the Chinaman, “will end in a great harvesting of
+kings.”
+
+“But Japan--” the older man began.
+
+The bishop would have liked to hear more of that conversation, but
+the dark hand of the Angel motioned him to another part of the world.
+“Listen to this,” said the Angel.
+
+He pointed the bishop to where the armies of Britain and Turkey lay in
+the heat of Mesopotamia. Along the sandy bank of a wide, slow-flowing
+river rode two horsemen, an Englishman and a Turk. They were returning
+from the Turkish lines, whither the Englishman had been with a flag of
+truce. When Englishmen and Turks are thrown together they soon
+become friends, and in this case matters had been facilitated by
+the Englishman's command of the Turkish language. He was quite an
+exceptional Englishman. The Turk had just been remarking cheerfully that
+it wouldn't please the Germans if they were to discover how amiably he
+and his charge had got on. “It's a pity we ever ceased to be friends,”
+ he said.
+
+“You Englishmen aren't like our Christians,” he went on.
+
+The Englishmen wanted to know why.
+
+“You haven't priests in robes. You don't chant and worship crosses and
+pictures, and quarrel among yourselves.”
+
+“We worship the same God as you do,” said the Englishman.
+
+“Then why do we fight?”
+
+“That's what we want to know.”
+
+“Why do you call yourselves Christians? And take part against us? All
+who worship the One God are brothers.”
+
+“They ought to be,” said the Englishman, and thought. He was struck by
+what seemed to him an amazingly novel idea.
+
+“If it weren't for religions all men would serve God together,” he
+said. “And then there would be no wars--only now and then perhaps just a
+little honest fighting....”
+
+“And see here,” said the Angel. “Here close behind this frightful
+battle, where the German phalanx of guns pounds its way through the
+Russian hosts. Here is a young German talking to two wounded Russian
+prisoners, who have stopped to rest by the roadside. He is a German of
+East Prussia; he knows and thinks a little Russian. And they too are
+saying, all three of them, that the war is not God's will, but the
+confusion of mankind.
+
+“Here,” he said, and the shadow of his hand hovered over the
+burning-ghats of Benares, where a Brahmin of the new persuasion watched
+the straight spires of funereal smoke ascend into the glow of the late
+afternoon, while he talked to an English painter, his friend, of the
+blind intolerance of race and caste and custom in India.
+
+“Or here.”
+
+The Angel pointed to a group of people who had gathered upon a little
+beach at the head of a Norwegian fiord. There were three lads, an old
+man and two women, and they stood about the body of a drowned German
+sailor which had been washed up that day. For a time they had talked in
+whispers, but now suddenly the old man spoke aloud.
+
+“This is the fourth that has come ashore,” he said. “Poor drowned souls!
+Because men will not serve God.”
+
+“But folks go to church and pray enough,” said one of the women.
+
+“They do not serve God,” said the old man. “They just pray to him as one
+nods to a beggar. They do not serve God who is their King. They set up
+their false kings and emperors, and so all Europe is covered with dead,
+and the seas wash up these dead to us. Why does the world suffer these
+things? Why did we Norwegians, who are a free-spirited people, permit
+the Germans and the Swedes and the English to set up a king over us?
+Because we lack faith. Kings mean secret counsels, and secret counsels
+bring war. Sooner or later war will come to us also if we give the soul
+of our nation in trust to a king.... But things will not always be thus
+with men. God will not suffer them for ever. A day comes, and it is no
+distant day, when God himself will rule the earth, and when men will do,
+not what the king wishes nor what is expedient nor what is customary,
+but what is manifestly right.”....
+
+“But men are saying that now in a thousand places,” said the Angel.
+“Here is something that goes a little beyond that.”
+
+His pointing hand went southward until they saw the Africanders riding
+down to Windhuk. Two men, Boer farmers both, rode side by side and
+talked of the German officer they brought prisoner with them. He had put
+sheep-dip in the wells of drinking-water; his life was fairly forfeit,
+and he was not to be killed. “We want no more hate in South Africa,”
+ they agreed. “Dutch and English and German must live here now side by
+side. Men cannot always be killing.”
+
+“And see his thoughts,” said the Angel.
+
+The German's mind was one amazement. He had been sure of being shot, he
+had meant to make a good end, fierce and scornful, a relentless fighter
+to the last; and these men who might have shot him like a man were going
+to spare him like a dog. His mind was a tumbled muddle of old and
+new ideas. He had been brought up in an atmosphere of the foulest and
+fiercest militarism; he had been trained to relentlessness, ruthlessness
+and so forth; war was war and the bitterer the better, frightfulness
+was your way to victory over every enemy. But these people had found a
+better way. Here were Dutch and English side by side; sixteen years ago
+they had been at war together and now they wore the same uniform and
+rode together, and laughed at him for a queer fellow because he was
+for spitting at them and defying them, and folding his arms and looking
+level at the executioners' rifles. There were to be no executioners'
+rifles.... If it was so with Dutch and English, why shouldn't it be so
+presently with French and Germans? Why someday shouldn't French, German,
+Dutch and English, Russian and Pole, ride together under this new star
+of mankind, the Southern Cross, to catch whatever last mischief-maker
+was left to poison the wells of goodwill?
+
+His mind resisted and struggled against these ideas. “Austere,” he
+whispered. “The ennobling tests of war.” A trooner rode up alongside,
+and offered him a drink of water
+
+“Just a mouthful,” he said apologetically. “We've had to go rather
+short.”...
+
+“There's another brain busy here with the same idea,” the Angel
+interrupted. And the bishop found himself looking into the bedroom of a
+young German attache in Washington, sleepless in the small hours.
+
+“Ach!” cried the young man, and sat up in bed and ran his hands through
+his fair hair.
+
+He had been working late upon this detestable business of the Lusitania;
+the news of her sinking had come to hand two days before, and all
+America was aflame with it. It might mean war. His task had been to pour
+out explanations and justifications to the press; to show that it was an
+act of necessity, to pretend a conviction that the great ship was loaded
+with munitions, to fight down the hostility and anger that blazed across
+a continent. He had worked to his limit. He had taken cup after cup of
+coffee, and had come to bed worked out not two hours ago. Now here he
+was awake after a nightmare of drowning women and children, trying to
+comfort his soul by recalling his own arguments. Never once since the
+war began had he doubted the rightness of the German cause. It seemed
+only a proof of his nervous exhaustion that he could doubt it now.
+Germany was the best organized, most cultivated, scientific and liberal
+nation the earth had ever seen, it was for the good of mankind that she
+should be the dominant power in the world; his patriotism had had the
+passion of a mission. The English were indolent, the French decadent,
+the Russians barbaric, the Americans basely democratic; the rest of the
+world was the “White man's Burthen”; the clear destiny of mankind
+was subservience to the good Prussian eagle. Nevertheless--those
+wet draggled bodies that swirled down in the eddies of the sinking
+Titan--Ach! He wished it could have been otherwise. He nursed his knees
+and prayed that there need not be much more of these things before the
+spirit of the enemy was broken and the great Peace of Germany came upon
+the world.
+
+And suddenly he stopped short in his prayer.
+
+Suddenly out of the nothingness and darkness about him came the
+conviction that God did not listen to his prayers....
+
+Was there any other way?
+
+It was the most awful doubt he had ever had, for it smote at the
+training of all his life. “Could it be possible that after all our old
+German God is not the proper style and title of the true God? Is our old
+German God perhaps only the last of a long succession of bloodstained
+tribal effigies--and not God at all?”
+
+For a long time it seemed that the bishop watched the thoughts that
+gathered in the young attache's mind. Until suddenly he broke into a
+quotation, into that last cry of the dying Goethe, for “Light. More
+Light!”...
+
+“Leave him at that,” said the Angel. “I want you to hear these two young
+women.”
+
+The hand came back to England and pointed to where Southend at the mouth
+of the Thames was all agog with the excitement of an overnight Zeppelin
+raid. People had got up hours before their usual time in order to
+look at the wrecked houses before they went up to their work in town.
+Everybody seemed abroad. Two nurses, not very well trained as nurses go
+nor very well-educated women, were snatching a little sea air upon the
+front after an eventful night. They were too excited still to sleep.
+They were talking of the horror of the moment when they saw the nasty
+thing “up there,” and felt helpless as it dropped its bombs. They had
+both hated it.
+
+“There didn't ought to be such things,” said one.
+
+“They don't seem needed,” said her companion.
+
+“Men won't always go on like this--making wars and all such wickedness.”
+
+“It's 'ow to stop them?”
+
+“Science is going to stop them.”
+
+“Science?”
+
+“Yes, science. My young brother--oh, he's a clever one--he says such
+things! He says that it's science that they won't always go on like
+this. There's more sense coming into the world and more--my young
+brother says so. Says it stands to reason; it's Evolution. It's science
+that men are all brothers; you can prove it. It's science that there
+oughtn't to be war. Science is ending war now by making it horrible like
+this, and making it so that no one is safe. Showing it up. Only when
+nobody is safe will everybody want to set up peace, he says. He says
+it's proved there could easily be peace all over the world now if it
+wasn't for flags and kings and capitalists and priests. They still
+manage to keep safe and out of it. He says the world ought to be just
+one state. The World State, he says it ought to be.”
+
+(“Under God,” said the bishop, “under God.”)
+
+“He says science ought to be King of the whole world.”
+
+“Call it Science if you will,” said the bishop. “God is wisdom.”
+
+“Out of the mouths of babes and elementary science students,” said the
+Angel. “The very children in the board schools are turning against this
+narrowness and nonsense and mischief of nations and creeds and kings.
+You see it at a thousand points, at ten thousand points, look, the
+world is all flashing and flickering; it is like a spinthariscope; it is
+aquiver with the light that is coming to mankind. It is on the verge of
+blazing even now.”
+
+“Into a light.”
+
+“Into the one Kingdom of God. See here! See here! And here! This brave
+little French priest in a helmet of steel who is daring to think for the
+first time in his life; this gentle-mannered emir from Morocco looking
+at the grave-diggers on the battlefield; this mother who has lost her
+son....
+
+“You see they all turn in one direction, although none of them seem to
+dream yet that they are all turning in the same direction. They turn,
+every one, to the rule of righteousness, which is the rule of God. They
+turn to that communism of effort in the world which alone permits men
+to serve God in state and city and their economic lives.... They are all
+coming to the verge of the same salvation, the salvation of one human
+brotherhood under the rule of one Righteousness, one Divine will.... Is
+that the salvation your church offers?”
+
+(8)
+
+
+“And now that we have seen how religion grows and spreads in men's
+hearts, now that the fields are white with harvest, I want you to look
+also and see what the teachers of religion are doing,” said the Angel.
+
+He smiled. His presence became more definite, and the earthly globe
+about them and the sun and the stars grew less distinct and less
+immediately there. The silence invited the bishop to speak.
+
+“In the light of this vision, I see my church plainly for the little
+thing it is,” he said.
+
+He wanted to be perfectly clear with the Angel and himself.
+
+“This church of which I am a bishop is just a part of our poor human
+struggle, small and pitiful as one thinks of it here in the light of the
+advent of God's Kingdom, but very great, very great indeed, ancient and
+high and venerable, in comparison with me. But mostly it is human. It is
+most human. For my story is the church's story, and the church's story
+is mine. Here I could almost believe myself the church itself. The
+world saw a light, the nations that were sitting in darkness saw a great
+light. Even as I saw God. And then the church began to forget and lose
+itself among secondary things. As I have done.... It tried to express
+the truth and lost itself in a maze of theology. It tried to bring order
+into the world and sold its faith to Constantine. These men who had
+professed the Invisible King of the World, shirked his service. It is a
+most terrible disaster that Christianity has sold itself to emperors and
+kings. They forged a saying of the Master's that we should render unto
+Ceasar the things that are Ceasar's and unto God the things that are
+God's....
+
+“Who is this Ceasar to set himself up to share mankind with God? Nothing
+that is Ceasar's can be any the less God's. But Constantine Caesar sat
+in the midst of the council, his guards were all about it, and the poor
+fanatics and trimmers and schemers disputed nervously with their eyes
+on him, disputed about homoousian and homoiousian, and grimaced and
+pretended to be very very fierce and exact to hide how much they were
+frightened and how little they knew, and because they did not dare to
+lay violent hands upon that usurper of the empire of the world....
+
+“And from that day forth the Christian churches have been damned and
+lost. Kept churches. Lackey churches. Roman, Russian, Anglican; it
+matters not. My church indeed was twice sold, for it doubled the sin of
+Nicaea and gave itself over to Henry and Elizabeth while it shammed
+a dispute about the sacraments. No one cared really about
+transubstantiation any more than the earlier betrayers cared about
+consubstantiality; that dispute did but serve to mask the betrayal.”
+
+He turned to the listening Angel. “What can you show me of my church
+that I do not know? Why! we Anglican bishops get our sees as footmen get
+a job. For months Victoria, that old German Frau, delayed me--because of
+some tittle-tattle.... The things we are! Snape, who afterwards became
+Bishop of Burnham, used to waylay the Prince Consort when he was riding
+in Hyde Park and give him, he boasts, 'a good loud cheer,' and then he
+would run very fast across the park so as to catch him as he came round,
+and do it again.... It is to that sort of thing we bearers of the light
+have sunken....
+
+“I have always despised that poor toady,” the bishop went on. “And
+yet here am I, and God has called me and shown me the light of his
+countenance, and for a month I have faltered. That is the mystery of the
+human heart, that it can and does sin against the light. What right have
+I, who have seen the light--and failed, what right have I--to despise
+any other human being? I seem to have been held back by a sort of
+paralysis.
+
+“Men are so small, so small still, that they cannot keep hold of the
+vision of God. That is why I want to see God again.... But if it were
+not for this strange drug that seems for a little while to lift my mind
+above the confusion and personal entanglements of every day, I doubt if
+even now I could be here. I am here, passionate to hold this moment and
+keep the light. As this inspiration passes, I shall go back, I know,
+to my home and my place and my limitations. The littleness of men! The
+forgetfulness of men! I want to know what my chief duty is, to have it
+plain, in terms so plain that I can never forget.
+
+“See in this world,” he said, turning to the globe, “while Chinese
+merchants and Turkish troopers, school-board boys and Norwegian
+fishermen, half-trained nurses and Boer farmers are full of the spirit
+of God, see how the priests of the churches of Nicaea spend their time.”
+
+And now it was the bishop whose dark hands ran over the great silver
+globe, and it was the Angel who stood over him and listened, as a
+teacher might stand over a child who is learning a lesson. The bishop's
+hand rested for a second on a cardinal who was planning a political
+intrigue to produce a reaction in France, then for a moment on a
+Pomeranian pastor who was going out to his well-tilled fields with his
+Sunday sermon, full of fierce hatred of England, still echoing in his
+head. Then he paused at a Mollah preaching the Jehad, in doubt whether
+he too wasn't a German pastor, and then at an Anglican clergyman still
+lying abed and thinking out a great mission of Repentance and Hope that
+should restore the authority of the established church--by incoherent
+missioning--without any definite sin indicated for repentance nor any
+clear hope for anything in particular arising out of such activities.
+The bishop's hand went seeking to and fro, but nowhere could he find
+any religious teacher, any religious body rousing itself to meet the new
+dawn of faith in the world. Some few men indeed seemed thoughtful, but
+within the limitation of their vows. Everywhere it was church and creed
+and nation and king and property and partisanship, and nowhere was it
+the True God that the priests and teachers were upholding. It was always
+the common unhampered man through whom the light of God was breaking; it
+was always the creed and the organization of the religious professionals
+that stood in the way to God....
+
+“God is putting the priests aside,” he cried, “and reaching out to
+common men. The churches do not serve God. They stand between man and
+God. They are like great barricades on the way to God.”
+
+The bishop's hand brushed over Archbishop Pontifex, who was just coming
+down to breakfast in his palace. This pompous old man was dressed in
+a purple garment that set off his tall figure very finely, and he was
+holding out his episcopal ring for his guests to kiss, that being the
+customary morning greeting of Archbishop Pontifex. The thought of that
+ring-kissing had made much hard work at lower levels “worth while”
+ to Archbishop Pontifex. And seventy miles away from him old Likeman
+breakfasted in bed on Benger's food, and searched his Greek Testament
+for tags to put to his letters. And here was the familiar palace at
+Princhester, and in an armchair in his bed-room sat Bishop Scrope
+insensible and motionless, in a trance in which he was dreaming of the
+coming of God.
+
+“I see my futility. I see my vanity. But what am I to do?” he said,
+turning to the darkness that now wrapped about the Angel again, fold
+upon fold. “The implications of yesterday bind me for the morrow. This
+is my world. This is what I am and what I am in. How can I save myself?
+How can I turn from these habits and customs and obligations to the
+service of the one true God? When I see myself, then I understand how it
+is with the others. All we priests and teachers are men caught in nets.
+I would serve God. Easily said! But how am I to serve God? How am I to
+help and forward His coming, to make myself part of His coming?”
+
+He perceived that he was returning into himself, and that the vision of
+the sphere and of the starry spaces was fading into non-existence.
+
+He struggled against this return. He felt that his demand was still
+unanswered. His wife's face had suddenly come very close to him, and he
+realized she intervened between him and that solution.
+
+What was she doing here?
+
+(9)
+
+
+The great Angel seemed still to be near at hand, limitless space was all
+about him, and yet the bishop perceived that he was now sitting in the
+arm-chair in his bedroom in the palace of Princhester. He was both
+there and not there. It seemed now as if he had two distinct yet kindred
+selves, and that the former watched the latter. The latter was now
+awakening to the things about him; the former marked his gestures and
+listened with an entire detachment to the words he was saying. These
+words he was saying to Lady Ella: “God is coming to rule the world, I
+tell you. We must leave the church.”
+
+Close to him sat Lady Ella, watching him with an expression in which
+dismay and resolution mingled. Upon the other side of him, upon a little
+occasional table, was a tray with breakfast things. He was no longer the
+watcher now, but the watched.
+
+Lady Ella bent towards him as he spoke. She seemed to struggle with and
+dismiss his astonishing statement.
+
+“Edward,” she said, “you have been taking a drug.” He looked round at
+his night table to see the little phial. It had gone. Then he saw that
+Lady Ella held it very firmly in her hand.
+
+“Dunk came to me in great distress. He said you were insensible and
+breathing heavily. I came. I realized. I told him to say nothing to any
+one, but to fetch me a tray with your breakfast. I have kept all the
+other servants away and I have waited here by you.... Dunk I think
+is safe.... You have been muttering and moving your head from side to
+side....”
+
+The bishop's mind was confused. He felt as though God must be standing
+just outside the room. “I have failed in my duty,” he said. “But I am
+very near to God.” He laid his hand on her arm. “You know, Ella, He is
+very close to us....”
+
+She looked perplexed.
+
+He sat up in his chair.
+
+“For some months now,” he said, “there have been new forces at work
+in my mind. I have been invaded by strange doubts and still stranger
+realizations. This old church of ours is an empty mask. God is not
+specially concerned in it.”
+
+“Edward!” she cried, “what are you saying?”
+
+“I have been hesitating to tell you. But I see now I must tell you
+plainly. Our church is a cast hull. It is like the empty skin of a
+snake. God has gone out of it.”
+
+She rose to her feet. She was so horrified that she staggered backward,
+pushing her chair behind her. “But you are mad,” she said.
+
+He was astonished at her distress. He stood up also.
+
+“My dear,” he said, “I can assure you I am not mad. I should have
+prepared you, I know....”
+
+She looked at him wild-eyed. Then she glanced at the phial, gripped in
+her hand.
+
+“Oh!” she exclaimed, and going swiftly to the window emptied out the
+contents of the little bottle. He realized what she was doing too late
+to prevent her.
+
+“Don't waste that!” he cried, and stepping forward caught hold of her
+wrist. The phial fell from her white fingers, and crashed upon the rough
+paved garden path below.
+
+“My dear,” he cried, “my dear. You do not understand.”
+
+They stood face to face. “It was a tonic,” he said. “I have been ill. I
+need it.”
+
+“It is a drug,” she answered. “You have been uttering blasphemies.”
+
+He dropped her arm and walked half-way across the room. Then he turned
+and faced her.
+
+“They are not blasphemies,” he said. “But I ought not to have surprised
+you and shocked you as I have done. I want to tell you of changes that
+have happened to my mind.”
+
+“Now!” she exclaimed, and then: “I will not hear them now. Until you are
+better. Until these fumes--”
+
+Her manner changed. “Oh, Edward!” she cried, “why have you done this?
+Why have you taken things secretly? I know you have been sleepless, but
+I have been so ready to help you. I have been willing--you know I have
+been willing--for any help. My life is all to be of use to you....”
+
+“Is there any reason,” she pleaded, “why you should have hidden things
+from me?”
+
+He stood remorseful and distressed. “I should have talked to you,” he
+said lamely.
+
+“Edward,” she said, laying her hands on his shoulders, “will you do one
+thing for me? Will you try to eat a little breakfast? And stay here? I
+will go down to Mr. Whippham and arrange whatever is urgent with him.
+Perhaps if you rest--There is nothing really imperative until the
+confirmation in the afternoon.... I do not understand all this. For some
+time--I have felt it was going on. But of that we can talk. The thing
+now is that people should not know, that nothing should be seen....
+Suppose for instance that horrible White Blackbird were to hear of
+it.... I implore you. If you rest here--And if I were to send for that
+young doctor who attended Miriam.”
+
+“I don't want a doctor,” said the bishop.
+
+“But you ought to have a doctor.”
+
+“I won't have a doctor,” said the bishop.
+
+It was with a perplexed but powerless dissent that the externalized
+perceptions of the bishop witnessed his agreement with the rest of Lady
+Ella's proposals so soon as this point about the doctor was conceded.
+
+(10)
+
+
+For the rest of that day until his breakdown in the cathedral the sense
+of being in two places at the same time haunted the bishop's mind. He
+stood beside the Angel in the great space amidst the stars, and at the
+same time he was back in his ordinary life, he was in his palace at
+Princhester, first resting in his bedroom and talking to his wife
+and presently taking up the routines of his duties again in his study
+downstairs.
+
+His chief task was to finish his two addresses for the confirmation
+services of the day. He read over his notes, and threw them aside
+and remained for a time thinking deeply. The Greek tags at the end
+of Likeman's letter came into his thoughts; they assumed a quality of
+peculiar relevance to this present occasion. He repeated the words:
+“Epitelesei. Epiphausei.”
+
+He took his little Testament to verify them. After some slight trouble
+he located the two texts. The first, from Philippians, ran in the old
+version, “He that hath begun a good work in you will perform it”;
+the second was expressed thus: “Christ shall give thee light.” He was
+dissatisfied with these renderings and resorted to the revised version,
+which gave “perfect” instead of “perform,” and “shall shine upon you”
+ for “give thee light.” He reflected profoundly for a time.
+
+Then suddenly his addresses began to take shape in his mind, and these
+little points lost any significance. He began to write rapidly, and as
+he wrote he felt the Angel stood by his right hand and read and approved
+what he was writing. There were moments when his mind seemed to be
+working entirely beyond his control. He had a transitory questioning
+whether this curious intellectual automatism was not perhaps what people
+meant by “inspiration.”
+
+(11)
+
+
+The bishop had always been sensitive to the secret fount of pathos that
+is hidden in the spectacle of youth. Long years ago when he and Lady
+Ella had been in Florence he had been moved to tears by the beauty
+of the fresh-faced eager Tobit who runs beside the great angel in the
+picture of Botticelli. And suddenly and almost as uncontrollably, that
+feeling returned at the sight of the young congregation below him,
+of all these scores of neophytes who were gathered to make a public
+acknowledgment of God. The war has invested all youth now with the
+shadow of tragedy; before it came many of us were a little envious of
+youth and a little too assured of its certainty of happiness. All that
+has changed. Fear and a certain tender solicitude mingle in our regard
+for every child; not a lad we pass in the street but may presently be
+called to face such pain and stress and danger as no ancient hero ever
+knew. The patronage, the insolent condescension of age, has vanished out
+of the world. It is dreadful to look upon the young.
+
+He stood surveying the faces of the young people as the rector read the
+Preface to the confirmation service. How simple they were, how innocent!
+Some were a little flushed by the excitement of the occasion; some a
+little pallid. But they were all such tender faces, so soft in outline,
+so fresh and delicate in texture and colour. They had soft credulous
+mouths. Some glanced sideways at one another; some listened with a
+forced intentness. The expression of one good-looking boy, sitting in a
+corner scat, struck the bishop as being curiously defiant. He stood
+very erect, he blinked his eyes as though they smarted, his lips were
+compressed bitterly. And then it seemed to the bishop that the Angel
+stood beside him and gave him understanding.
+
+“He is here,” the bishop knew, “because he could not avoid coming. He
+tried to excuse himself. His mother wept. What could he do? But the
+church's teaching nowadays fails even to grip the minds of boys.”
+
+The rector came to the end of his Preface: “They will evermore endeavour
+themselves faithfully to observe such things as they by their own
+confession have assented unto.”
+
+“Like a smart solicitor pinning them down,” said the bishop to himself,
+and then roused himself, unrolled the little paper in his hand, leant
+forward, and straightway began his first address.
+
+Nowadays it is possible to say very unorthodox things indeed in an
+Anglican pulpit unchallenged. There remains no alert doctrinal criticism
+in the church congregations. It was possible, therefore, for the bishop
+to say all that follows without either hindrance or disturbance. The
+only opposition, indeed, came from within, from a sense of dreamlike
+incongruity between the place and the occasion and the things that he
+found himself delivering.
+
+“All ceremonies,” he began, “grow old. All ceremonies are tainted even
+from the first by things less worthy than their first intention, and
+you, my dear sons and daughters, who have gathered to-day in this worn
+and ancient building, beneath these monuments to ancient vanities and
+these symbols of forgotten or abandoned theories about the mystery of
+God, will do well to distinguish in your minds between what is essential
+and what is superfluous and confusing in this dedication you make of
+yourselves to God our Master and King. For that is the real thing you
+seek to do today, to give yourselves to God. This is your spiritual
+coming of age, in which you set aside your childish dependence upon
+teachers and upon taught phrases, upon rote and direction, and stand up
+to look your Master in the face. You profess a great brotherhood when
+you do that, a brotherhood that goes round the earth, that numbers men
+of every race and nation and country, that aims to bring God into
+all the affairs of this world and make him not only the king of your
+individual lives but the king--in place of all the upstarts, usurpers,
+accidents, and absurdities who bear crowns and sceptres today--of an
+united mankind.”
+
+He paused, and in the pause he heard a little rustle as though the
+congregation before him was sitting up in its places, a sound that
+always nerves and reassures an experienced preacher.
+
+“This, my dear children, is the reality of this grave business to-day,
+as indeed it is the real and practical end of all true religion. This is
+your sacrament urn, your soldier's oath. You salute and give your fealty
+to the coming Kingdom of God. And upon that I would have you fix your
+minds to the exclusion of much that, I know only too well, has been
+narrow and evil and sectarian in your preparation for this solemn rite.
+God is like a precious jewel found among much rubble; you must cast the
+rubble from you. The crowning triumph of the human mind is simplicity;
+the supreme significance of God lies in his unity and universality. The
+God you salute to-day is the God of the Jews and Gentiles alike, the
+God of Islam, the God of the Brahmo Somaj, the unknown God of many a
+righteous unbeliever. He is not the God of those felted theologies and
+inexplicable doctrines with which your teachers may have confused your
+minds. I would have it very clear in your minds that having drunken the
+draught you should not reverence unduly the cracked old vessel that has
+brought it to your lips. I should be falling short of my duty if I did
+not make that and everything I mean by that altogether plain to you.”
+
+He saw the lad whose face of dull defiance he had marked before, sitting
+now with a startled interest in his eyes. The bishop leant over the desk
+before him, and continued in the persuasive tone of a man who speaks of
+things too manifest for laboured argument.
+
+“In all ages religion has come from God through broad-minded creative
+men, and in all ages it has fallen very quickly into the hands
+of intense and conservative men. These last--narrow, fearful, and
+suspicious--have sought in every age to save the precious gift of
+religion by putting it into a prison of formulae and asseverations. Bear
+that in mind when you are pressed to definition. It is as if you made a
+box hermetically sealed to save the treasure of a fresh breeze from the
+sea. But they have sought out exact statements and tortuous explanations
+of the plain truth of God, they have tried to take down God in writing,
+to commit him to documents, to embalm his living faith as though it
+would otherwise corrupt. So they have lost God and fallen into endless
+differences, disputes, violence, and darkness about insignificant
+things. They have divided religion between this creed and teacher and
+that. The corruption of the best is the worst, said Aristotle; and the
+great religions of the world, and especially this Christianity of ours,
+are the ones most darkened and divided and wasted by the fussings and
+false exactitudes of the creed-monger and the sectary. There is no lie
+so bad as a stale disfigured truth. There is no heresy so damnable as
+a narrow orthodoxy. All religious associations carry this danger of the
+over-statement that misstates and the over-emphasis that divides and
+betrays. Beware of that danger. Do not imagine, because you are gathered
+in this queerly beautiful old building today, because I preside here in
+this odd raiment of an odder compromise, because you see about you in
+coloured glass and carven stone the emblems of much vain disputation,
+that thereby you cut yourselves off and come apart from the great world
+of faith, Catholic, Islamic, Brahministic, Buddhistic, that grows now
+to a common consciousness of the near Advent of God our King. You enter
+that waiting world fraternity now, you do not leave it. This place, this
+church of ours, should be to you not a seclusion and a fastness but a
+door.
+
+“I could quote you a score of instances to establish that this simple
+universalism was also the teaching of Christ. But now I will only remind
+you that it was Mary who went to her lord simply, who was commended, and
+not Martha who troubled about many things. Learn from the Mary of
+Faith and not from these Marthas of the Creeds. Let us abandon the
+presumptions of an ignorant past. The perfection of doctrine is not
+for finite men. Give yourselves to God. Give yourselves to God. Not to
+churches and uses, but to God. To God simply. He is the first word of
+religion and the last. He is Alpha; he is Omega. Epitelesei; it is He
+who will finish the good work begun.”
+
+The bishop ended his address in a vivid silence. Then he began his
+interrogation.
+
+“Do you here, in the presence of God, and of this congregation, renew
+the solemn promise and vow that was made in your name at your Baptism;
+ratifying and confirming the same in your own persons, and acknowledging
+yourselves--”
+
+He stopped short. The next words were: “bound to believe and do all
+those things, which your Godfathers and Godmothers then undertook for
+you.”
+
+He could not stand those words. He hesitated, and then substituted:
+“acknowledge yourselves to be the true servants of the one God, who is
+the Lord of Mankind?”
+
+For a moment silence hung in the cathedral. Then one voice, a boy's
+voice, led a ragged response. “I do.”
+
+Then the bishop: “Our help is in the Name of the Lord.”
+
+The congregation answered doubtfully, with a glance at its prayer books:
+“Who hath made heaven and earth.”
+
+The bishop: “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
+
+The congregation said with returning confidence: “Henceforth, world
+without end.”
+
+(12)
+
+
+Before his second address the bishop had to listen to Veni Creator
+Spiritus, in its English form, and it seemed to him the worst of all
+possible hymns. Its defects became monstrously exaggerated to his
+hypersensitive mind. It impressed him in its Englished travesty as a
+grotesque, as a veritable Charlie Chaplin among hymns, and in truth it
+does stick out most awkward feet, it misses its accusatives, it catches
+absurdly upon points of abstruse doctrine. The great Angel stood
+motionless and ironical at the bishop's elbow while it was being sung.
+“Your church,” he seemed to say.
+
+“We must end this sort of thing,” whispered the bishop. “We must end
+this sort of thing--absolutely.” He glanced at the faces of the singers,
+and it became beyond all other things urgent, that he should lift them
+once for all above the sectarian dogmatism of that hymn to a simple
+vision of God's light....
+
+He roused himself to the touching business of the laying on of hands.
+While he did so the prepared substance of his second address was running
+through his mind. The following prayer and collects he read without
+difficulty, and so came to his second address. His disposition at first
+was explanatory.
+
+“When I spoke to you just now,” he began, “I fell unintentionally into
+the use of a Greek word, epitelesei. It was written to me in a letter
+from a friend with another word that also I am now going to quote to
+you. This letter touched very closely upon the things I want to say to
+you now, and so these two words are very much in my mind. The former one
+was taken from the Epistle to the Philippians; it signifies, 'He will
+complete the work begun'; the one I have now in mind comes from the
+Epistle to the Ephesians; it is Epiphausei--or, to be fuller, epiphausei
+soi ho Christos, which signifies that He will shine upon us. And this is
+very much in my thoughts now because I do believe that this world, which
+seemed so very far from God a little while ago, draws near now to an
+unexampled dawn. God is at hand.
+
+“It is your privilege, it is your grave and terrible position, that you
+have been born at the very end and collapse of a negligent age, of an
+age of sham kingship, sham freedom, relaxation, evasion, greed, waste,
+falsehood, and sinister preparation. Your lives open out in the midst
+of the breakdown for which that age prepared. To you negligence is no
+longer possible. There is cold and darkness, there is the heat of the
+furnace before you; you will live amidst extremes such as our youth
+never knew; whatever betide, you of your generation will have small
+chance of living untempered lives. Our country is at war and half
+mankind is at war; death and destruction trample through the world;
+men rot and die by the million, food diminishes and fails, there is
+a wasting away of all the hoarded resources, of all the accumulated
+well-being of mankind; and there is no clear prospect yet of any end to
+this enormous and frightful conflict. Why did it ever arise? What made
+it possible? It arose because men had forgotten God. It was possible
+because they worshipped simulacra, were loyal to phantoms of race and
+empire, permitted themselves to be ruled and misled by idiot princes and
+usurper kings. Their minds were turned from God, who alone can rule and
+unite mankind, and so they have passed from the glare and follies of
+those former years into the darkness and anguish of the present day. And
+in darkness and anguish they will remain until they turn to that King
+who comes to rule them, until the sword and indignation of God have
+overthrown their misleaders and oppressors, and the Justice of God, the
+Kingdom of God set high over the republics of mankind, has brought peace
+for ever to the world. It is to this militant and imminent God, to this
+immortal Captain, this undying Law-giver, that you devote yourselves
+to-day.
+
+“For he is imminent now. He comes. I have seen in the east and in the
+west, the hearts and the minds and the wills of men turning to him as
+surely as when a needle is magnetized it turns towards the north. Even
+now as I preach to you here, God stands over us all, ready to receive
+us....”
+
+And as he said these words, the long nave of the cathedral, the shadows
+of its fretted roof, the brown choir with its golden screen, the rows
+of seated figures, became like some picture cast upon a flimsy and
+translucent curtain. Once more it seemed to the bishop that he saw
+God plain. Once more the glorious effulgence poured about him, and the
+beautiful and wonderful conquest of men's hearts and lives was manifest
+to him.
+
+He lifted up his hands and cried to God, and with an emotion so
+profound, an earnestness so commanding, that very many of those who
+were present turned their faces to see the figure to which he looked and
+spoke. And some of the children had a strange persuasion of a presence
+there, as of a divine figure militant, armed, and serene....
+
+“Oh God our Leader and our Master and our Friend,” the bishop prayed,
+“forgive our imperfection and our little motives, take us and make us
+one with thy great purpose, use us and do not reject us, make us all
+here servants of thy kingdom, weave our lives into thy struggle to
+conquer and to bring peace and union to the world. We are small and
+feeble creatures, we are feeble in speech, feebler still in action,
+nevertheless let but thy light shine upon us and there is not one of
+us who cannot be lit by thy fire, and who cannot lose himself in thy
+salvation. Take us into thy purpose, O God. Let thy kingdom come into
+our hearts and into this world.”
+
+His voice ceased, and he stood for a measurable time with his arms
+extended and his face upturned....
+
+The golden clouds that whirled and eddied so splendidly in his brain
+thinned out, his sense of God's immediacy faded and passed, and he was
+left aware of the cathedral pulpit in which he stood so strangely posed,
+and of the astonished congregation below him. His arms sank to his side.
+His eyes fell upon the book in front of him and he felt for and gripped
+the two upper corners of it and, regardless of the common order and
+practice, read out the Benediction, changing the words involuntarily as
+he read:
+
+“The Blessing of God who is the Father, the Son, the Spirit and the King
+of all Mankind, be upon you and remain with you for ever. Amen.”
+
+Then he looked again, as if to look once more upon that radiant vision
+of God, but now he saw only the clear cool space of the cathedral vault
+and the coloured glass and tracery of the great rose window. And then,
+as the first notes of the organ came pealing above the departing stir of
+the congregation, he turned about and descended slowly, like one who is
+still half dreaming, from the pulpit.
+
+(13)
+
+
+In the vestry he found Canon Bliss. “Help me to take off these
+garments,” the bishop said. “I shall never wear them again.”
+
+“You are ill,” said the canon, scrutinizing his face.
+
+“Not ill. But the word was taken out of my mouth. I perceive now that
+I have been in a trance, a trance in which the truth is real. It is a
+fearful thing to find oneself among realities. It is a dreadful thing
+when God begins to haunt a priest.... I can never minister in the church
+again.”
+
+Whippham thrust forward a chair for the bishop to sit down. The bishop
+felt now extraordinarily fatigued. He sat down heavily, and rested his
+wrists on the arms of the chair. “Already,” he resumed presently, “I
+begin to forget what it was I said.”
+
+“You became excited,” said Bliss, “and spoke very loudly and clearly.”
+
+“What did I say?”
+
+“I don't know what you said; I have forgotten. I never want to remember.
+Things about the Second Advent. Dreadful things. You said God was close
+at hand. Happily you spoke partly in Greek. I doubt if any of those
+children understood. And you had a kind of lapse--an aphasia. You
+mutilated the interrogation and you did not pronounce the
+benediction properly. You changed words and you put in words. One sat
+frozen--waiting for what would happen next.”
+
+“We must postpone the Pringle confirmation,” said Whippham. “I wonder to
+whom I could telephone.”
+
+Lady Ella appeared, and came and knelt down by the bishop's chair. “I
+never ought to have let this happen,” she said, taking his wrists in her
+hands. “You are in a fever, dear.”
+
+“It seemed entirely natural to say what I did,” the bishop declared.
+
+Lady Ella looked up at Bliss.
+
+“A doctor has been sent for,” said the canon to Lady Ella.
+
+“I must speak to the doctor,” said Lady Ella as if her husband could
+not hear her. “There is something that will make things clearer to the
+doctor. I must speak to the doctor for a moment before he sees him.”
+
+Came a gust of pretty sounds and a flash of bright colour that shamed
+the rich vestments at hand. Over the shoulder of the rector and quite at
+the back, appeared Lady Sunderbund resolutely invading the vestry. The
+rector intercepted her, stood broad with extended arms.
+
+“I must come in and speak to him. If it is only fo' a moment.”
+
+The bishop looked up and saw Lady Ella's expression. Lady Ella was
+sitting up very stiffly, listening but not looking round.
+
+A vague horror and a passionate desire to prevent the entry of Lady
+Sunderbund at any cost, seized upon the bishop. She would, he felt, be
+the last overwhelming complication. He descended to a base subterfuge.
+He lay back in his chair slowly as though he unfolded himself, he
+covered his eyes with his hand and then groaned aloud.
+
+“Leave me alone!” he cried in a voice of agony. “Leave me alone! I can
+see no one.... I can--no more.”
+
+There was a momentous silence, and then the tumult of Lady Sunderbund
+receded.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE EIGHTH - THE NEW WORLD
+
+(1)
+
+
+THAT night the bishop had a temperature of a hundred and a half. The
+doctor pronounced him to be in a state of intense mental excitement,
+aggravated by some drug. He was a doctor modern and clear-minded enough
+to admit that he could not identify the drug. He overruled, every one
+overruled, the bishop's declaration that he had done with the church,
+that he could never mock God with his episcopal ministrations again,
+that he must proceed at once with his resignation. “Don't think of
+these things,” said the doctor. “Banish them from your mind until your
+temperature is down to ninety-eight. Then after a rest you may go into
+them.”
+
+Lady Ella insisted upon his keeping his room. It was with difficulty
+that he got her to admit Whippham, and Whippham was exasperatingly in
+order. “You need not trouble about anything now, my lord,” he said.
+“Everything will keep until you are ready to attend to it. It's well
+we're through with Easter. Bishop Buncombe of Eastern Blowdesia
+was coming here anyhow. And there is Canon Bliss. There's only two
+ordination candidates because of the war. We'll get on swimmingly.”
+
+The bishop thought he would like to talk to those two ordination
+candidates, but they prevailed upon him not to do so. He lay for the
+best part of one night confiding remarkable things to two imaginary
+ordination candidates.
+
+He developed a marked liking for Eleanor's company. She was home again
+now after a visit to some friends. It was decided that the best thing
+to do with him would be to send him away in her charge. A journey abroad
+was impossible. France would remind him too dreadfully of the war. His
+own mind turned suddenly to the sweet air of Hunstanton. He had gone
+there at times to read, in the old Cambridge days. “It is a terribly
+ugly place,” he said, “but it is wine in the veins.”
+
+Lady Ella was doubtful about Zeppelins. Thrice they had been right over
+Hunstanton already. They came in by the easy landmark of the Wash.
+
+“It will interest him,” said Eleanor, who knew her father better.
+
+(2)
+
+
+One warm and still and sunny afternoon the bishop found himself looking
+out upon the waters of the Wash. He sat where the highest pebble layers
+of the beach reached up to a little cliff of sandy earth perhaps a foot
+high, and he looked upon sands and sea and sky and saw that they were
+beautiful.
+
+He was a little black-gaitered object in a scene of the most exquisite
+and delicate colour. Right and left of him stretched the low grey salted
+shore, pale banks of marly earth surmounted by green-grey wiry grass
+that held and was half buried in fine blown sand. Above, the heavens
+made a complete hemisphere of blue in which a series of remote cumulus
+clouds floated and dissolved. Before him spread the long levels of the
+sands, and far away at its utmost ebb was the sea. Eleanor had gone to
+explore the black ribs of a wrecked fishing-boat that lay at the edge of
+a shallow lagoon. She was a little pink-footed figure, very bright
+and apparently transparent. She had reverted for a time to shameless
+childishness; she had hidden her stockings among the reeds of the bank,
+and she was running to and fro, from star-fish to razor shell and from
+cockle to weed. The shingle was pale drab and purple close at hand, but
+to the westward, towards Hunstanton, the sands became brown and
+purple, and were presently broken up into endless skerries of low flat
+weed-covered boulders and little intensely blue pools. The sea was
+a band of sapphire that became silver to the west; it met the silver
+shining sands in one delicate breathing edge of intensely white foam.
+Remote to the west, very small and black and clear against the afternoon
+sky, was a cart, and about it was a score or so of mussel-gatherers.
+A little nearer, on an apparently empty stretch of shining wet sand, a
+multitude of gulls was mysteriously busy. These two groups of activities
+and Eleanor's flitting translucent movements did but set off and
+emphasize the immense and soothing tranquillity.
+
+For a long time the bishop sat passively receptive to this healing
+beauty. Then a little flow of thought began and gathered in his mind. He
+had come out to think over two letters that he had brought with him.
+He drew these now rather reluctantly from his pocket, and after a long
+pause over the envelopes began to read them.
+
+He reread Likeman's letter first.
+
+Likeman could not forgive him.
+
+“My dear Scrope,” he wrote, “your explanation explains nothing. This
+sensational declaration of infidelity to our mother church, made under
+the most damning and distressing circumstances in the presence of young
+and tender minds entrusted to your ministrations, and in defiance of the
+honourable engagements implied in the confirmation service, confirms my
+worst apprehensions of the weaknesses of your character. I have always
+felt the touch of theatricality in your temperament, the peculiar
+craving to be pseudo-deeper, pseudo-simpler than us all, the need of
+personal excitement. I know that you were never quite contented
+to believe in God at second-hand. You wanted to be taken notice
+of--personally. Except for some few hints to you, I have never breathed
+a word of these doubts to any human being; I have always hoped that
+the ripening that comes with years and experience would give you an
+increasing strength against the dangers of emotionalism and against your
+strong, deep, quiet sense of your exceptional personal importance....”
+
+The bishop read thus far, and then sat reflecting.
+
+Was it just?
+
+He had many weaknesses, but had he this egotism? No; that wasn't
+the justice of the case. The old man, bitterly disappointed, was
+endeavouring to wound. Scrope asked himself whether he was to blame for
+that disappointment. That was a more difficult question....
+
+He dismissed the charge at last, crumpled up the letter in his hand, and
+after a moment's hesitation flung it away.... But he remained acutely
+sorry, not so much for himself as for the revelation of Likeman this
+letter made. He had had a great affection for Likeman and suddenly it
+was turned into a wound.
+
+(3)
+
+
+The second letter was from Lady Sunderbund, and it was an altogether
+more remarkable document. Lady Sunderbund wrote on a notepaper that was
+evidently the result of a perverse research, but she wrote a letter far
+more coherent than her speech, and without that curious falling away
+of the r's that flavoured even her gravest observations with an unjust
+faint aroma of absurdity. She wrote with a thin pen in a rounded boyish
+handwriting. She italicized with slashes of the pen.
+
+He held this letter in both hands between his knees, and considered
+it now with an expression that brought his eyebrows forward until they
+almost met, and that tucked in the corners of his mouth.
+
+“My dear Bishop,” it began.
+
+“I keep thinking and thinking and thinking of that wonderful service, of
+the wonderful, wonderful things you said, and the wonderful choice you
+made of the moment to say them--when all those young lives were coming
+to the great serious thing in life. It was most beautifully done. At any
+rate, dear Bishop and Teacher, it was most beautifully begun. And now we
+all stand to you like creditors because you have given us so much that
+you owe us ever so much more. You have started us and you have to go on
+with us. You have broken the shell of the old church, and here we are
+running about with nowhere to go. You have to make the shelter of a new
+church now for us, purged of errors, looking straight to God. The
+King of Mankind!--what a wonderful, wonderful phrase that is. It says
+everything. Tell us more of him and more. Count me first--not foremost,
+but just the little one that runs in first--among your disciples. They
+say you are resigning your position in the church. Of course that must
+be true. You are coming out of it--what did you call it?--coming out of
+the cracked old vessel from which you have poured the living waters. I
+called on Lady Ella yesterday. She did not tell me very much; I think
+she is a very reserved as well as a very dignified woman, but she said
+that you intended to go to London. In London then I suppose you will set
+up the first altar to the Divine King. I want to help.
+
+“Dear Bishop and Teacher, I want to help tremendously--with all my heart
+and all my soul. I want to be let do things for you.” (The “you” was
+erased by three or four rapid slashes, and “our King” substituted.)
+
+“I want to be privileged to help build that First Church of the World
+Unified under God. It is a dreadful thing to says but, you see, I am
+very rich; this dreadful war has made me ever so much richer--steel and
+shipping and things--it is my trustees have done it. I am ashamed to be
+so rich. I want to give. I want to give and help this great beginning of
+yours. I want you to let me help on the temporal side, to make it
+easy for you to stand forth and deliver your message, amidst suitable
+surroundings and without any horrid worries on account of the sacrifices
+you have made. Please do not turn my offering aside. I have never wanted
+anything so much in all my life as I want to make this gift. Unless I
+can make it I feel that for me there is no salvation! I shall stick with
+my loads and loads of stocks and shares and horrid possessions outside
+the Needle's Eye. But if I could build a temple for God, and just live
+somewhere near it so as to be the poor woman who sweeps out the chapels,
+and die perhaps and be buried under its floor! Don't smile at me. I
+mean every word of it. Years ago I thought of such a thing. After I had
+visited the Certosa di Pavia--do you know it? So beautiful, and those
+two still alabaster figures--recumbent. But until now I could never see
+my way to any such service. Now I do. I am all afire to do it. Help me!
+Tell me! Let me stand behind you and make your mission possible. I feel
+I have come to the most wonderful phase in my life. I feel my call has
+come....
+
+“I have written this letter over three times, and torn each of them up.
+I do so want to say all this, and it is so desperately hard to say. I am
+full of fears that you despise me. I know there is a sort of high colour
+about me. My passion for brightness. I am absurd. But inside of me is
+a soul, a real, living, breathing soul. Crying out to you: 'Oh, let me
+help! Let me help!' I will do anything, I will endure anything if only I
+can keep hold of the vision splendid you gave me in the cathedral. I see
+it now day and night, the dream of the place I can make for you--and you
+preaching! My fingers itch to begin. The day before yesterday I said
+to myself, 'I am quite unworthy, I am a worldly woman, a rich, smart,
+decorated woman. He will never accept me as I am.' I took off all
+my jewels, every one, I looked through all my clothes, and at last I
+decided I would have made for me a very simple straight grey dress, just
+simple and straight and grey. Perhaps you will think that too is absurd
+of me, too self-conscious. I would not tell of it to you if I did not
+want you to understand how alive I am to my utter impossibilities, how
+resolved I am to do anything so that I may be able to serve. But never
+mind about silly me; let me tell you how I see the new church.
+
+“I think you ought to have some place near the centre of London; not too
+west, for you might easily become fashionable, not too east because you
+might easily be swallowed up in merely philanthropic work, but somewhere
+between the two. There must be vacant sites still to be got round about
+Kingsway. And there we must set up your tabernacle, a very plain, very
+simple, very beautifully proportioned building in which you can
+give your message. I know a young man, just the very young man to do
+something of the sort, something quite new, quite modern, and yet solemn
+and serious. Lady Ella seemed to think you wanted to live somewhere in
+the north-west of London--but she would tell me very little. I seem to
+see you not there at all, not in anything between west-end and suburb,
+but yourself as central as your mind, in a kind of clergy house that
+will be part of the building. That is how it is in my dream anyhow. All
+that though can be settled afterwards. My imagination and my desire is
+running away with me. It is no time yet for premature plans. Not that
+I am not planning day and night. This letter is simply to offer. I just
+want to offer. Here I am and all my worldly goods. Take me, I pray you.
+And not only pray you. Take me, I demand of you, in the name of God our
+king. I have a right to be used. And you have no right to refuse me. You
+have to go on with your message, and it is your duty to take me--just as
+you are obliged to step on any steppingstone that lies on your way to
+do God service.... And so I am waiting. I shall be waiting--on thorns.
+I know you will take your time and think. But do not take too much time.
+Think of me waiting.
+
+“Your servant, your most humble helper in God (your God),
+
+“AGATHA SUNDERBUND.”
+
+
+And then scrawled along the margin of the last sheet:
+
+
+“If, when you know--a telegram. Even if you cannot say so much as
+'Agreed,' still such a word as 'Favourable.' I just hang over the Void
+until I hear.
+
+“AGATHA S.”
+
+
+A letter demanding enormous deliberation. She argued closely in spite of
+her italics. It had never dawned upon the bishop before how light is
+the servitude of the disciple in comparison with the servitude of the
+master. In many ways this proposal repelled and troubled him, in many
+ways it attracted him. And the argument of his clear obligation to
+accept her co-operation gripped him; it was a good argument.
+
+And besides it worked in very conveniently with certain other
+difficulties that perplexed him.
+
+(4)
+
+
+The bishop became aware that Eleanor was returning to him across the
+sands. She had made an end to her paddling, she had put on her shoes and
+stockings and become once more the grave and responsible young woman
+who had been taking care of him since his flight from Princhester. He
+replaced the two letters in his pocket, and sat ready to smile as she
+drew near; he admired her open brow, the toss of her hair, and the poise
+of her head upon her neck. It was good to note that her hard reading at
+Cambridge hadn't bent her shoulders in the least....
+
+“Well, old Dad!” she said as she drew near. “You've got back a colour.”
+
+“I've got back everything. It's time I returned to Princhester.”
+
+“Not in this weather. Not for a day or so.” She flung herself at his
+feet. “Consider your overworked little daughter. Oh,how good this is!”
+
+“No,” said the bishop in a grave tone that made her look up into his
+face. “I must go hack.”
+
+He met her clear gaze. “What do you think of all this business,
+Eleanor?” he asked abruptly. “Do you think I had a sort of fit in the
+cathedral?”
+
+He winced as he asked the question.
+
+“Daddy,” she said, after a little pause; “the things you said and did
+that afternoon were the noblest you ever did in your life. I wish I had
+been there. It must have been splendid to be there. I've not told you
+before--I've been dying to.... I'd promised not to say a word--not to
+remind you. I promised the doctor. But now you ask me, now you are well
+again, I can tell you. Kitty Kingdom has told me all about it, how it
+felt. It was like light and order coming into a hopeless dark muddle.
+What you said was like what we have all been trying to think--I mean all
+of us young people. Suddenly it was all clear.”
+
+She stopped short. She was breathless with the excitement of her
+confession.
+
+Her father too remained silent for a little while. He was reminded of
+his weakness; he was, he perceived, still a little hysterical. He felt
+that he might weep at her youthful enthusiasm if he did not restrain
+himself.
+
+“I'm glad,” he said, and patted her shoulder. “I'm glad, Norah.”
+
+She looked away from him out across the lank brown sands and water pools
+to the sea. “It was what we have all been feeling our way towards, the
+absolute simplification of religion, the absolute simplification of
+politics and social duty; just God, just God the King.”
+
+“But should I have said that--in the cathedral?”
+
+She felt no scruples. “You had to,” she said.
+
+“But now think what it means,” he said. “I must leave the church.”
+
+“As a man strips off his coat for a fight.”
+
+“That doesn't dismay you?”
+
+She shook her head, and smiled confidently to sea and sky.
+
+“I'm glad if you're with me,” he said. “Sometimes--I think--I'm not a
+very self-reliant man.”
+
+“You'll have all the world with you,” she was convinced, “in a little
+time.”
+
+“Perhaps rather a longer time than you think, Norah. In the meantime--”
+
+She turned to him once more.
+
+“In the meantime there are a great many things to consider. Young
+people, they say, never think of the transport that is needed to win a
+battle. I have it in my mind that I should leave the church. But I can't
+just walk out into the marketplace and begin preaching there. I see the
+family furniture being carried out of the palace and put into vans. It
+has to go somewhere....”
+
+“I suppose you will go to London.”
+
+“Possibly. In fact certainly. I have a plan. Or at least an
+opportunity.... But that isn't what I have most in mind. These things
+are not done without emotion and a considerable strain upon one's
+personal relationships. I do not think this--I do not think your mother
+sees things as we do.”
+
+“She will,” said young enthusiasm, “when she understands.”
+
+“I wish she did. But I have been unlucky in the circumstances of
+my explanations to her. And of course you understand all this means
+risks--poverty perhaps--going without things--travel, opportunity, nice
+possessions--for all of us. A loss of position too. All this sort of
+thing,” he stuck out a gaitered calf and smiled, “will have to go.
+People, some of them, may be disasagreeable to us....”
+
+“After all, Daddy,” she said, smiling, “it isn't so bad as the cross and
+the lions and burning pitch. And you have the Truth.”
+
+“You do believe--?” He left his sentence unfinished.
+
+She nodded, her face aglow. “We know you have the Truth.”
+
+“Of course in my own mind now it is very clear. I had a kind of
+illumination....” He would have tried to tell her of his vision, and
+he was too shy. “It came to me suddenly that the whole world was in
+confusion because men followed after a thousand different immediate
+aims, when really it was quite easy, if only one could be simple it was
+quite easy, to show that nearly all men could only be fully satisfied
+and made happy in themselves by one single aim, which was also the aim
+that would make the whole world one great order, and that aim was to
+make God King of one's heart and the whole world. I saw that all this
+world, except for a few base monstrous spirits, was suffering hideous
+things because of this war, and before the war it was full of folly,
+waste, social injustice and suspicion for the same reason, because it
+had not realized the kingship of God. And that is so simple; the essence
+of God is simplicity. The sin of this war lies with men like myself, men
+who set up to tell people about God, more than it lies with any other
+class--”
+
+“Kings?” she interjected. “Diplomatists? Finance?”
+
+“Yes. Those men could only work mischief in the world because the
+priests and teachers let them. All things human lie at last at the
+door of the priest and teacher. Who differentiate, who qualify and
+complicate, who make mean unnecessary elaborations, and so divide
+mankind. If it were not for the weakness and wickedness of the priests,
+every one would know and understand God. Every one who was modest enough
+not to set up for particular knowledge. Men disputed whether God is
+Finite or Infinite, whether he has a triple or a single aspect. How
+should they know? All we need to know is the face he turns to us. They
+impose their horrible creeds and distinctions. None of those things
+matter. Call him Christ the God or call him simply God, Allah, Heaven;
+it does not matter. He comes to us, we know, like a Helper and Friend;
+that is all we want to know. You may speculate further if you like, but
+it is not religion. They dispute whether he can set aside nature. But
+that is superstition. He is either master of nature and he knows that it
+is good, or he is part of nature and must obey. That is an argument for
+hair-splitting metaphysicians. Either answer means the same for us. It
+does not matter which way we come to believe that he does not idly set
+the course of things aside. Obviously he does not set the course of
+things aside. What he does do for certain is to give us courage and save
+us from our selfishness and the bitter hell it makes for us. And every
+one knows too what sort of things we want, and for what end we want
+to escape from ourselves. We want to do right. And right, if you think
+clearly, is just truth within and service without, the service of God's
+kingdom, which is mankind, the service of human needs and the increase
+of human power and experience. It is all perfectly plain, it is all
+quite easy for any one to understand, who isn't misled and chattered at
+and threatened and poisoned by evil priests and teachers.”
+
+“And you are going to preach that, Daddy?”
+
+“If I can. When I am free--you know I have still to resign and give
+up--I shall make that my message.”
+
+“And so God comes.”
+
+“God comes as men perceive him in his simplicity.... Let men but see God
+simply, and forthwith God and his kingdom possess the world.”
+
+She looked out to sea in silence for awhile.
+
+Then she turned to her father. “And you think that His Kingdom will
+come--perhaps in quite a little time--perhaps in our lifetimes? And
+that all these ridiculous or wicked little kings and emperors, and
+these political parties, and these policies and conspiracies, and
+this nationalist nonsense and all the patriotism and rowdyism, all the
+private profit-seeking and every baseness in life, all the things that
+it is so horrible and disgusting to be young among and powerless among,
+you think they will fade before him?”
+
+The bishop pulled his faith together.
+
+“They will fade before him--but whether it will take a lifetime or a
+hundred lifetimes or a thousand lifetimes, my Norah--”
+
+He smiled and left his sentence unfinished, and she smiled back at him
+to show she understood.
+
+And then he confessed further, because he did not want to seem merely
+sentimentally hopeful.
+
+“When I was in the cathedral, Norah--and just before that service, it
+seemed to me--it was very real.... It seemed that perhaps the Kingdom of
+God is nearer than we suppose, that it needs but the faith and courage
+of a few, and it may be that we may even live to see the dawning of his
+kingdom, even--who knows?--the sunrise. I am so full of faith and hope
+that I fear to be hopeful with you. But whether it is near or far--”
+
+“We work for it,” said Eleanor.
+
+Eleanor thought, eyes downcast for a little while, and then looked up.
+
+“It is so wonderful to talk to you like this, Daddy. In the old days, I
+didn't dream--Before I went to Newnham. I misjudged you. I thought Never
+mind what I thought. It was silly. But now I am so proud of you. And so
+happy to be back with you, Daddy, and find that your religion is after
+all just the same religion that I have been wanting.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE NINTH - THE THIRD VISION
+
+(1)
+
+
+ONE afternoon in October, four months and more after that previous
+conversation, the card of Mr. Edward Scrope was brought up to Dr.
+Brighton-Pomfrey. The name awakened no memories. The doctor descended to
+discover a man so obviously in unaccustomed plain clothes that he had a
+momentary disagreeable idea that he was facing a detective. Then he saw
+that this secular disguise draped the familiar form of his old friend,
+the former Bishop of Princhester. Scrope was pale and a little untidy;
+he had already acquired something of the peculiar, slightly faded
+quality one finds in a don who has gone to Hampstead and fallen amongst
+advanced thinkers and got mixed up with the Fabian Society. His anxious
+eyes and faintly propitiatory manner suggested an impending appeal.
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey had the savoir-faire of a successful consultant; he
+prided himself on being all things to all men; but just for an instant
+he was at a loss what sort of thing he had to be here. Then he adopted
+the genial, kindly, but by no means lavishly generous tone advisable
+in the case of a man who has suffered considerable social deterioration
+without being very seriously to blame.
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was a little round-faced man with defective
+eyesight and an unsuitable nose for the glasses he wore, and he
+flaunted--God knows why--enormous side-whiskers.
+
+“Well,” he said, balancing the glasses skilfully by throwing back his
+head, “and how are you? And what can I do for you? There's no external
+evidence of trouble. You're looking lean and a little pale, but
+thoroughly fit.”
+
+“Yes,” said the late bishop, “I'm fairly fit--”
+
+“Only--?” said the doctor, smiling his teeth, with something of the
+manner of an old bathing woman who tells a child to jump.
+
+“Well, I'm run down and--worried.”
+
+“We'd better sit down,” said the great doctor professionally, and looked
+hard at him. Then he pulled at the arm of a chair.
+
+The ex-bishop sat down, and the doctor placed himself between his
+patient and the light.
+
+“This business of resigning my bishopric and so forth has involved very
+considerable strains,” Scrope began. “That I think is the essence of the
+trouble. One cuts so many associations.... I did not realize how
+much feeling there would be.... Difficulties too of readjusting one's
+position.”
+
+“Zactly. Zactly. Zactly,” said the doctor, snapping his face and making
+his glasses vibrate. “Run down. Want a tonic or a change?”
+
+“Yes. In fact--I want a particular tonic.”
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey made his eyes and mouth round and interrogative.
+
+“While you were away last spring--”
+
+“Had to go,” said the doctor, “unavoidable. Gas gangrene. Certain
+enquiries. These young investigators all very well in their way. But we
+older reputations--Experience. Maturity of judgment. Can't do without
+us. Yes?”
+
+“Well, I came here last spring and saw, an assistant I suppose he was,
+or a supply,--do you call them supplies in your profession?--named, I
+think--Let me see--D--?”
+
+“Dale!”
+
+The doctor as he uttered this word set his face to the unaccustomed
+exercise of expressing malignity. His round blue eyes sought to blaze,
+small cherubic muscles exerted themselves to pucker his brows. His
+colour became a violent pink. “Lunatic!” he said. “Dangerous Lunatic! He
+didn't do anything--anything bad in your case, did he?”
+
+He was evidently highly charged with grievance in this matter. “That man
+was sent to me from Cambridge with the highest testimonials. The
+very highest. I had to go at twenty-four hours' notice. Enquiry--gas
+gangrene. There was nothing for it but to leave things in his hands.”
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey disavowed responsibility with an open,
+stumpy-fingered hand.
+
+“He did me no particular harm,” said Scrope.
+
+“You are the first he spared,” said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.
+
+“Did he--? Was he unskilful?”
+
+“Unskilful is hardly the word.”
+
+“Were his methods peculiar?”
+
+The little doctor sprang to his feet and began to pace about the room.
+“Peculiar!” he said. “It was abominable that they should send him to me.
+Abominable!”
+
+He turned, with all the round knobs that constituted his face, aglow.
+His side-whiskers waved apart like wings about to flap. He protruded his
+face towards his seated patient. “I am glad that he has been killed,” he
+said. “Glad! There!”
+
+His glasses fell off--shocked beyond measure. He did not heed them. They
+swung about in front of him as if they sought to escape while he poured
+out his feelings.
+
+“Fool!” he spluttered with demonstrative gestures. “Dangerous fool! His
+one idea--to upset everybody. Drugs, Sir! The most terrible drugs! I
+come back. Find ladies. High social position. Morphine-maniacs. Others.
+Reckless use of the most dangerous expedients.... Cocaine not in it.
+Stimulants--violent stimulants. In the highest quarters. Terrible.
+Exalted persons. Royalty! Anxious to be given war work and become
+anonymous.... Horrible! He's been a terrible influence. One idea--to
+disturb soul and body. Minds unhinged. Personal relations deranged.
+Shattered the practice of years. The harm he has done! The harm!”
+
+He looked as though he was trying to burst--as a final expression of
+wrath. He failed. His hands felt trembling to recover his pince-nez.
+Then from his tail pocket he produced a large silk handkerchief and
+wiped the glasses. Replaced them. Wriggled his head in his collar,
+running his fingers round his neck. Patted his tie.
+
+“Excuse this outbreak!” he said. “But Dr. Dale has inflicted injuries!”
+
+Scrope got up, walked slowly to the window, clasping his hands behind
+his back, and turned. His manner still retained much of his episcopal
+dignity. “I am sorry. But still you can no doubt tell from your books
+what it was he gave me. It was a tonic that had a very great effect on
+me. And I need it badly now.”
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was quietly malignant. “He kept no diary at all,”
+ he said. “No diary at all.”
+
+“But
+
+“If he did,” said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey, holding up a flat hand and
+wagging it from side to side, “I wouldn't follow his treatment.”
+ He intensified with the hand going faster. “I wouldn't follow his
+treatment. Not under any circumstances.”
+
+“Naturally,” said Scrope, “if the results are what you say. But in
+my case it wasn't a treatment. I was sleepless, confused in my mind,
+wretched and demoralized; I came here, and he just produced the
+stuff--It clears the head, it clears the mind. One seems to get away
+from the cloud of things, to get through to essentials and fundamentals.
+It straightened me out.... You must know such a stuff. Just now,
+confronted with all sorts of problems arising out of my resignation,
+I want that tonic effect again. I must have it. I have matters to
+decide--and I can't decide. I find myself uncertain, changeable from
+hour to hour. I don't ask you to take up anything of this man Dale's.
+This is a new occasion. But I want that drug.”
+
+At the beginning of this speech Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's hands had fallen
+to his hips. As Scrope went on the doctor's pose had stiffened. His head
+had gone a little on one side; he had begun to play with his glasses.
+At the end he gave vent to one or two short coughs, and then pointed his
+words with his glasses held out.
+
+“Tell me,” he said, “tell me.” (Cough.) “Had this drug that cleared your
+head--anything to do with your resignation?”
+
+And he put on his glasses disconcertingly, and threw his head back to
+watch the reply.
+
+“It did help to clear up the situation.”
+
+“Exactly,” said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey in a tone that defined his own
+position with remorseless clearness. “Exactly.” And he held up a flat,
+arresting hand. .
+
+“My dear Sir,” he said. “How can you expect me to help you to a drug so
+disastrous?--even if I could tell you what it is.”
+
+“But it was not disastrous to me,” said Scrope.
+
+“Your extraordinary resignation--your still more extraordinary way of
+proclaiming it!”
+
+“I don't think those were disasters.”
+
+“But my dear Sir!”
+
+“You don't want to discuss theology with me, I know. So let me tell you
+simply that from my point of view the illumination that came to me--this
+drug of Dr. Dale's helping--has been the great release of my life. It
+crystallized my mind. It swept aside the confusing commonplace things
+about me. Just for a time I saw truth clearly.... I want to do so
+again.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“There is a crisis in my affairs--never mind what. But I cannot see my
+way clear.”
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was meditating now with his eyes on his carpet
+and the corners of his mouth tucked in. He was swinging his glasses
+pendulum-wise. “Tell me,” he said, looking sideways at Scrope, “what
+were the effects of this drug? It may have been anything. How did it
+give you this--this vision of the truth--that led to your resignation?”
+
+Scrope felt a sudden shyness. But he wanted Dale's drug again so badly
+that he obliged himself to describe his previous experiences to the best
+of his ability.
+
+“It was,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, “a golden, transparent
+liquid. Very golden, like a warm-tinted Chablis. When water was added
+it became streaked and opalescent, with a kind of living quiver in it. I
+held it up to the light.”
+
+“Yes? And when you took it?”
+
+“I felt suddenly clearer. My mind--I had a kind of exaltation and
+assurance.”
+
+“Your mind,” Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey assisted, “began to go twenty-nine to
+the dozen.”
+
+“It felt stronger and clearer,” said Scrope, sticking to his quest.
+
+“And did things look as usual?” asked the doctor, protruding his knobby
+little face like a clenched fist.
+
+“No,” said Scrope and regarded him. How much was it possible to tell a
+man of this type?
+
+“They differed?” said the doctor, relaxing.
+
+“Yes.... Well, to be plain.... I had an immediate sense of God. I
+saw the world--as if it were a transparent curtain, and then God
+became--evident.... Is it possible for that to determine the drug?”
+
+“God became--evident,” the doctor said with some distaste, and shook his
+head slowly. Then in a sudden sharp cross-examining tone: “You mean you
+had a vision? Actually saw 'um?”
+
+“It was in the form of a vision.” Scrope was now mentally very
+uncomfortable indeed.
+
+The doctor's lips repeated these words noiselessly, with an effect of
+contempt. “He must have given you something--It's a little like morphia.
+But golden--opalescent? And it was this vision made you astonish us all
+with your resignation?”
+
+“That was part of a larger process,” said Scrope patiently. “I had been
+drifting into a complete repudiation of the Anglican positions long
+before that. All that this drug did was to make clear what was already
+in my mind. And give it value. Act as a developer.”
+
+The doctor suddenly gave way to a botryoidal hilarity. “To think that
+one should be consulted about visions of God--in Mount Street!” he said.
+“And you know, you know you half want to believe that vision was real.
+You know you do.”
+
+So far Scrope had been resisting his realization of failure. Now he
+gave way to an exasperation that made him reckless of Brighton-Pomfrey's
+opinion. “I do think,” he said, “that that drug did in some way make God
+real to me. I think I saw God.”
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey shook his head in a way that made Scrope want to
+hit him.
+
+“I think I saw God,” he repeated more firmly. “I had a sudden
+realization of how great he was and how great life was, and how timid
+and mean and sordid were all our genteel, professional lives. I was
+seized upon, for a time I was altogether possessed by a passion to serve
+him fitly and recklessly, to make an end to compromises with comfort and
+self-love and secondary things. And I want to hold to that. I want to
+get back to that. I am given to lassitudes. I relax. I am by temperament
+an easy-going man. I want to buck myself up, I want to get on with my
+larger purposes, and I find myself tired, muddled, entangled.... The
+drug was a good thing. For me it was a good thing. I want its help
+again.”
+
+“I know no more than you do what it was.”
+
+“Are there no other drugs that you do know, that have a kindred effect?
+If for example I tried morphia in some form?”
+
+“You'd get visions. They wouldn't be divine visions. If you took small
+quantities very discreetly you might get a temporary quickening. But
+the swift result of all repeated drug-taking is, I can assure you,
+moral decay--rapid moral decay. To touch drugs habitually is to become
+hopelessly unpunctual, untruthful, callously selfish and insincere. I am
+talking mere textbook, mere everyday common-places, to you when I tell
+you that.”
+
+“I had an idea. I had a hope....”
+
+“You've a stiff enough fight before you,” said the doctor, “without such
+a handicap as that.”
+
+“You won't help me?”
+
+The doctor walked up and down his hearthrug, and then delivered himself
+with an extended hand and waggling fingers.
+
+“I wouldn't if I could. For your good I wouldn't. And even if I would
+I couldn't, for I don't know the drug. One of his infernal brews,
+no doubt. Something--accidental. It's lost--for good--for your good,
+anyhow....”
+
+(2)
+
+
+Scrope halted outside the stucco portals of the doctor's house. He
+hesitated whether he should turn to the east or the west.
+
+“That door closes,” he said. “There's no getting back that way.”...
+
+He stood for a time on the kerb. He turned at last towards Park Lane and
+Hyde Park. He walked along thoughtfully, inattentively steering a course
+for his new home in Pembury Road, Notting Hill.
+
+(3)
+
+
+At the outset of this new phase in Scrope's life that had followed the
+crisis of the confirmation service, everything had seemed very clear
+before him. He believed firmly that he had been shown God, that he had
+himself stood in the presence of God, and that there had been a plain
+call to him to proclaim God to the world. He had realized God, and it
+was the task of every one who had realized God to help all mankind to
+the same realization. The proposal of Lady Sunderbund had fallen in with
+that idea. He had been steeling himself to a prospect of struggle and
+dire poverty, but her prompt loyalty had come as an immense relief to
+his anxiety for his wife and family. When he had talked to Eleanor
+upon the beach at Hunstanton it had seemed to him that his course was
+manifest, perhaps a little severe but by no means impossible. They had
+sat together in the sunshine, exalted by a sense of fine adventure and
+confident of success, they had looked out upon the future, upon
+the great near future in which the idea of God was to inspire and
+reconstruct the world.
+
+It was only very slowly that this pristine clearness became clouded and
+confused. It had not been so easy as Eleanor had supposed to win over
+the sympathy of Lady Ella with his resignation. Indeed it had not been
+won over. She had become a stern and chilling companion, mute now upon
+the issue of his resignation, but manifestly resentful. He was secretly
+disappointed and disconcerted by her tone. And the same hesitation of
+the mind, instinctive rather than reasoned, that had prevented a frank
+explanation of his earlier doubts to her, now restrained him from
+telling her naturally and at once of the part that Lady Sunderbund was
+to play in his future ministry. In his own mind he felt assured about
+that part, but in order to excuse his delay in being frank with his
+wife, he told himself that he was not as yet definitely committed to
+Lady Sunderbund's project. And in accordance with that idea he set
+up housekeeping in London upon a scale that implied a very complete
+cessation of income. “As yet,” he told Lady Ella, “we do not know where
+we stand. For a time we must not so much house ourselves as camp. We
+must take some quite small and modest house in some less expensive
+district. If possible I would like to take it for a year, until we know
+better how things are with us.”
+
+He reviewed a choice of London districts.
+
+Lady Ella said her bitterest thing. “Does it matter where we hide our
+heads?”
+
+That wrung him to: “We are not hiding our heads.”
+
+She repented at once. “I am sorry, Ted,” she said. “It slipped from
+me.”...
+
+He called it camping, but the house they had found in Pembury Road,
+Notting Hill, was more darkened and less airy than any camp. Neither he
+nor his wife had ever had any experience of middle-class house-hunting
+or middle-class housekeeping before, and they spent three of the most
+desolating days of their lives in looking for this cheap and modest
+shelter for their household possessions. Hitherto life had moved them
+from one established and comfortable home to another; their worst
+affliction had been the modern decorations of the Palace at Princhester,
+and it was altogether a revelation to them to visit house after house,
+ill-lit, ill-planned, with dingy paint and peeling wallpaper, kitchens
+for the most part underground, and either without bathrooms or with
+built-out bathrooms that were manifestly grudging afterthoughts, such
+as harbour the respectable middle classes of London. The house agents
+perceived intimations of helplessness in their manner, adopted a
+“rushing” method with them strange to people who had hitherto lived in
+a glowing halo of episcopal dignity. “Take it or leave it,” was the note
+of those gentlemen; “there are always people ready for houses.” The
+line that property in land and houses takes in England, the ex-bishop
+realized, is always to hold up and look scornful. The position of the
+land-owning, house-owning class in a crowded country like England is
+ultra-regal. It is under no obligation to be of use, and people are
+obliged to get down to the land somewhere. They cannot conduct business
+and rear families in the air. England's necessity is the landlord's
+opportunity....
+
+Scrope began to generalize about this, and develop a new and sincerer
+streak of socialism in his ideas. “The church has been very remiss,”
+ he said, as he and Lady Ella stared at the basement “breakfast room” of
+their twenty-seventh dismal possibility. “It should have insisted far
+more than it has done upon the landlord's responsibility. No one should
+tolerate the offer of such a house as this--at such a rent--to decent
+people. It is unrighteous.”
+
+At the house agent's he asked in a cold, intelligent ruling-class voice,
+the name of the offending landlord.
+
+“It's all the property of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners that side of
+the railway,” said the agent, picking his teeth with a pin. “Lazy
+lot. Dreadfully hard to get 'em to do anything. Own some of the worst
+properties in London.”
+
+Lady Ella saw things differently again. “If you had stayed in the
+church,” she said afterwards, “you might have helped to alter such
+things as that.”
+
+At the time he had no answer.
+
+“But,” he said presently as they went back in the tube to their modest
+Bloomsbury hotel, “if I had stayed in the church I should never have
+realized things like that.”
+
+(4)
+
+
+But it does no justice to Lady Ella to record these two unavoidable
+expressions of regret without telling also of the rallying courage with
+which she presently took over the task of resettling herself and her
+stricken family. Her husband's change of opinion had fallen upon her out
+of a clear sky, without any premonition, in one tremendous day. In one
+day there had come clamouring upon her, with an effect of revelation
+after revelation, the ideas of drugs, of heresy and blasphemy, of an
+alien feminine influence, of the entire moral and material breakdown of
+the man who had been the centre of her life. Never was the whole world
+of a woman so swiftly and comprehensively smashed. All the previous
+troubles of her life seemed infinitesimal in comparison with any single
+item in this dismaying debacle. She tried to consolidate it in the idea
+that he was ill, “disordered.” She assured herself that he would
+return from Hunstanton restored to health and orthodoxy, with all
+his threatenings of a resignation recalled; the man she had loved and
+trusted to succeed in the world and to do right always according to her
+ideas. It was only with extreme reluctance that she faced the fact that
+with the fumes of the drug dispelled and all signs of nervous exhaustion
+gone, he still pressed quietly but resolutely toward a severance from
+the church. She tried to argue with him and she found she could not
+argue. The church was a crystal sphere in which her life was wholly
+contained, her mind could not go outside it even to consider a
+dissentient proposition.
+
+While he was at Hunstanton, every day she had prayed for an hour, some
+days she had prayed for several hours, in the cathedral, kneeling upon
+a harsh hassock that hurt her knees. Even in her prayers she could not
+argue nor vary. She prayed over and over again many hundreds of times:
+“Bring him back, dear Lord. Bring him back again.”
+
+In the past he had always been a very kind and friendly mate to her, but
+sometimes he had been irritable about small things, especially during
+his seasons of insomnia; now he came back changed, a much graver man,
+rather older in his manner, carefully attentive to her, kinder and more
+watchful, at times astonishingly apologetic, but rigidly set upon his
+purpose of leaving the church. “I know you do not think with me in
+this,” he said. “I have to pray you to be patient with me. I have
+struggled with my conscience.... For a time it means hardship, I know.
+Poverty. But if you will trust me I think I shall be able to pull
+through. There are ways of doing my work. Perhaps we shall not have to
+undergo this cramping in this house for very long....”
+
+“It is not the poverty I fear,” said Lady Ella.
+
+And she did face the worldly situation, if a little sadly, at any
+rate with the courage of practical energy. It was she who stood in
+one ungainly house after another and schemed how to make discomforts
+tolerable, while Scrope raged unhelpfully at landlordism and the
+responsibility of the church for economic disorder. It was she who at
+last took decisions into her hands when he was too jaded to do anything
+but generalize weakly, and settled upon the house in Pembury Road which
+became their London home. She got him to visit Hunstanton again for half
+a week while she and Miriam, who was the practical genius of the family,
+moved in and made the new home presentable. At the best it was barely
+presentable. There were many plain hardships. The girls had to share one
+of the chief bedrooms in common instead of their jolly little individual
+dens at Princhester.... One little room was all that could be squeezed
+out as a study for “father”; it was not really a separate room, it was
+merely cut off by closed folding doors from the dining-room, folding
+doors that slowly transmitted the dinner flavours to a sensitive worker,
+and its window looked out upon a blackened and uneventful yard and the
+skylights of a populous, conversational, and high-spirited millinery
+establishment that had been built over the corresponding garden of the
+house in Restharrow Street. Lady Ella had this room lined with open
+shelves, and Clementina (in the absence of Eleanor at Newuham)
+arranged the pick of her father's books. It is to be noted as a fact of
+psychological interest that this cramped, ill-lit little room distressed
+Lady Ella more than any other of the discomforts of their new quarters.
+The bishop's writing-desk filled a whole side of it. Parsimony ruled her
+mind, but she could not resist the impulse to get him at least a seemly
+reading-lamp.
+
+He came back from Hunstanton full of ideas for work in London. He was,
+he thought, going to “write something” about his views. He was very
+grateful and much surprised at what she had done to that forbidding
+house, and full of hints and intimations that it would not be long
+before they moved to something roomier. She was disposed to seek some
+sort of salaried employment for Clementina and Miriam at least, but he
+would not hear of that. “They must go on and get educated,” he said, “if
+I have to give up smoking to do it. Perhaps I may manage even without
+that.” Eleanor, it seemed, had a good prospect of a scholarship at the
+London School of Economics that would practically keep her. There would
+be no Cambridge for Clementina, but London University might still be
+possible with a little pinching, and the move to London had really
+improved the prospects of a good musical training for Miriam. Phoebe and
+Daphne, Lady Ella believed, might get in on special terms at the Notting
+Hill High School.
+
+Scrope found it difficult to guess at what was going on in the heads
+of his younger daughters. None displayed such sympathy as Eleanor had
+confessed. He had a feeling that his wife had schooled them to say
+nothing about the change in their fortunes to him. But they quarrelled
+a good deal, he could hear, about the use of the one bathroom--there was
+never enough hot water after the second bath. And Miriam did not seem to
+enjoy playing the new upright piano in the drawing-room as much as
+she had done the Princhester grand it replaced. Though she was always
+willing to play that thing he liked; he knew now that it was the Adagio
+of Of. 111; whenever he asked for it.
+
+London servants, Lady Ella found, were now much more difficult to get
+than they had been in the Holy Innocents' days in St. John's Wood. And
+more difficult to manage when they were got. The households of the more
+prosperous clergy are much sought after by domestics of a serious and
+excellent type; an unfrocked clergyman's household is by no means
+so attractive. The first comers were young women of unfortunate
+dispositions; the first cook was reluctant and insolent, she went before
+her month was up; the second careless; she made burnt potatoes and
+cindered chops, underboiled and overboiled eggs; a “dropped” look about
+everything, harsh coffee and bitter tea seemed to be a natural aspect of
+the state of being no longer a bishop. He would often after a struggle
+with his nerves in the bedroom come humming cheerfully to breakfast, to
+find that Phoebe, who was a delicate eater, had pushed her plate away
+scarcely touched, while Lady Ella sat at the end of the table in a state
+of dangerous calm, framing comments for delivering downstairs that would
+be sure to sting and yet leave no opening for repartee, and trying at
+the same time to believe that a third cook, if the chances were risked
+again, would certainly be “all right.”
+
+The drawing-room was papered with a morose wallpaper that the landlord,
+in view of the fact that Scrope in his optimism would only take the
+house on a yearly agreement, had refused to replace; it was a design of
+very dark green leaves and grey gothic arches; and the apartment was lit
+by a chandelier, which spilt a pool of light in the centre of the room
+and splashed useless weak patches elsewhere. Lady Ella had to interfere
+to prevent the monopolization of this centre by Phoebe and Daphne for
+their home work. This light trouble was difficult to arrange; the plain
+truth was that there was not enough illumination to go round. In the
+Princhester drawing-room there had been a number of obliging little
+electric pushes. The size of the dining-room, now that the study was
+cut off from it, forbade hospitality. As it was, with only the family at
+home, the housemaid made it a grievance that she could scarcely squeeze
+by on the sideboard side to wait.
+
+The house vibrated to the trains in the adjacent underground railway.
+There was a lady next door but one who was very pluckily training a
+contralto voice that most people would have gladly thrown away. At the
+end of Restharrow Street was a garage, and a yard where chauffeurs were
+accustomed to “tune up” their engines. All these facts were persistently
+audible to any one sitting down in the little back study to think out
+this project of “writing something,” about a change in the government of
+the whole world. Petty inconveniences no doubt all these inconveniences
+were, but they distressed a rather oversensitive mind which was also
+acutely aware that even upon this scale living would cost certainly two
+hundred and fifty pounds if not more in excess of the little private
+income available.
+
+
+(5)
+
+
+These domestic details, irrelevant as they may seem in a spiritual
+history, need to be given because they added an intimate keenness
+to Scrope's readiness for this private chapel enterprise that he was
+discussing with Lady Sunderbund. Along that line and along that line
+alone, he saw the way of escape from the great sea of London dinginess
+that threatened to submerge his family. And it was also, he felt, the
+line of his duty; it was his “call.”
+
+At least that was how he felt at first. And then matters began to grow
+complicated again.
+
+Things had gone far between himself and Lady Sunderbund since that
+letter he had read upon the beach at Old Hunstanton. The blinds of the
+house with the very very blue door in Princhester had been drawn
+from the day when the first vanload of the renegade bishop's private
+possessions had departed from the palace. The lady had returned to
+the brightly decorated flat overlooking Hyde Park. He had seen her
+repeatedly since then, and always with a fairly clear understanding that
+she was to provide the chapel and pulpit in which he was to proclaim to
+London the gospel of the Simplicity and Universality of God. He was to
+be the prophet of a reconsidered faith, calling the whole world from
+creeds and sects, from egotisms and vain loyalties, from prejudices of
+race and custom, to the worship and service of the Divine King of all
+mankind. That in fact had been the ruling resolve in his mind, the
+resolve determining his relations not only with Lady Sunderbund but with
+Lady Ella and his family, his friends, enemies and associates. He had
+set out upon this course unchecked by any doubt, and overriding the
+manifest disapproval of his wife and his younger daughters. Lady
+Sunderbund's enthusiasm had been enormous and sustaining....
+
+Almost imperceptibly that resolve had weakened. Imperceptibly at first.
+Then the decline had been perceived as one sometimes perceives a thing
+in the background out of the corner of one's eye.
+
+In all his early anticipations of the chapel enterprise, he had imagined
+himself in the likeness of a small but eloquent figure standing in a
+large exposed place and calling this lost misled world back to God. Lady
+Sunderbund, he assumed, was to provide the large exposed place (which
+was dimly paved with pews) and guarantee that little matter which was
+to relieve him of sordid anxieties for his family, the stipend. He had
+agreed in an inattentive way that this was to be eight hundred a year,
+with a certain proportion of the subscriptions. “At first, I shall be
+the chief subscriber,” she said. “Before the rush comes.” He had been
+so content to take all this for granted and think no more about it--more
+particularly to think no more about it--that for a time he entirely
+disregarded the intense decorative activities into which Lady Sunderbund
+incontinently plunged. Had he been inclined to remark them he certainly
+might have done so, even though a considerable proportion was being
+thoughtfully veiled for a time from his eyes.
+
+For example, there was the young architect with the wonderful tie whom
+he met once or twice at lunch in the Hyde Park flat. This young man
+pulled the conversation again and again, Lady Sunderbund aiding and
+abetting, in the direction of the “ideal church.” It was his ambition,
+he said, someday, to build an ideal church, “divorced from tradition.”
+
+Scrope had been drawn at last into a dissertation. He said that hitherto
+all temples and places of worship had been conditioned by orientation
+due to the seasonal aspects of religion, they pointed to the west or--as
+in the case of the Egyptian temples--to some particular star, and by
+sacramentalism, which centred everything on a highly lit sacrificial
+altar. It was almost impossible to think of a church built upon other
+lines than that. The architect would be so free that--
+
+“Absolutely free,” interrupted the young architect. “He might, for
+example, build a temple like a star.”
+
+“Or like some wondyful casket,” said Lady Sunderbund....
+
+And also there was a musician with fuzzy hair and an impulsive way of
+taking the salted almonds, who wanted to know about religious music.
+
+Scrope hazarded the idea that a chanting people was a religious people.
+He said, moreover, that there was a fine religiosity about Moussorgski,
+but that the most beautiful single piece of music in the world
+was Beethoven's sonata, Opus 111,--he was thinking, he said, more
+particularly of the Adagio at the end, molto semplice e cantabile. It
+had a real quality of divinity.
+
+The musician betrayed impatience at the name of Beethoven, and thought,
+with his mouth appreciatively full of salted almonds, that nowadays we
+had got a little beyond that anyhow.
+
+“We shall be superhuman before we get beyond either Purcell or
+Beethoven,” said Scrope.
+
+Nor did he attach sufficient importance to Lady Sunderbund's disposition
+to invite Positivists, members of the Brotherhood Church, leaders among
+the Christian Scientists, old followers of the Rev. Charles Voysey,
+Swedenborgians, Moslem converts, Indian Theosophists, psychic phenomena
+and so forth, to meet him. Nevertheless it began to drift into his mind
+that he was by no means so completely in control of the new departure
+as he had supposed at first. Both he and Lady Sunderbund professed
+universalism; but while his was the universalism of one who would
+simplify to the bare fundamentals of a common faith, hers was the
+universalism of the collector. Religion to him was something that
+illuminated the soul, to her it was something that illuminated
+prayer-books. For a considerable time they followed their divergent
+inclinations without any realization of their divergence. None the less
+a vague doubt and dissatisfaction with the prospect before him arose to
+cloud his confidence.
+
+At first there was little or no doubt of his own faith. He was still
+altogether convinced that he had to confess and proclaim God in his
+life. He was as sure that God was the necessary king and saviour of
+mankind and of a man's life, as he was of the truth of the Binomial
+Theorem. But what began first to fade was the idea that he had been
+specially called to proclaim the True God to all the world. He would
+have the most amiable conference with Lady Sunderbund, and then as he
+walked back to Notting Hill he would suddenly find stuck into his
+mind like a challenge, Heaven knows how: “Another prophet?” Even if
+he succeeded in this mission enterprise, he found himself asking, what
+would he be but just a little West-end Mahomet? He would have founded
+another sect, and we have to make an end to all sects. How is there to
+be an end to sects, if there are still to be chapels--richly decorated
+chapels--and congregations, and salaried specialists in God?
+
+That was a very disconcerting idea. It was particularly active at night.
+He did his best to consider it with a cool detachment, regardless of
+the facts that his private income was just under three hundred pounds a
+year, and that his experiments in cultured journalism made it extremely
+improbable that the most sedulous literary work would do more than
+double this scanty sum. Yet for all that these nasty, ugly, sordid facts
+were entirely disregarded, they did somehow persist in coming in and
+squatting down, shapeless in a black corner of his mind--from which
+their eyes shone out, so to speak--whenever his doubt whether he ought
+to set up as a prophet at all was under consideration.
+
+(6)
+
+
+Then very suddenly on this October afternoon the situation had come to a
+crisis.
+
+He had gone to Lady Sunderbund's flat to see the plans and drawings for
+the new church in which he was to give his message to the world. They
+had brought home to him the complete realization of Lady Sunderbund's
+impossibility. He had attempted upon the spur of the moment an
+explanation of just how much they differed, and he had precipitated a
+storm of extravagantly perplexing emotions....
+
+She kept him waiting for perhaps ten minutes before she brought the
+plans to him. He waited in the little room with the Wyndham Lewis
+picture that opened upon the balcony painted with crazy squares of livid
+pink. On a golden table by the window a number of recently bought books
+were lying, and he went and stood over these, taking them up one after
+another. The first was “The Countess of Huntingdon and Her Circle,”
+ that bearder of lightminded archbishops, that formidable harbourer of
+Wesleyan chaplains. For some minutes he studied the grim portrait of
+this inspired lady standing with one foot ostentatiously on her coronet
+and then turned to the next volume. This was a life of Saint Teresa,
+that energetic organizer of Spanish nunneries. The third dealt with
+Madame Guyon. It was difficult not to feel that Lady Sunderbund was
+reading for a part.
+
+She entered.
+
+She was wearing a long simple dress of spangled white with a very high
+waist; she had a bracelet of green jade, a waistband of green silk,
+and her hair was held by a wreath of artificial laurel, very stiff and
+green. Her arms were full of big rolls of cartridge paper and tracing
+paper. “I'm so pleased,” she said. “It's 'eady at last and I can show
+you.”
+
+She banged the whole armful down upon a vivid little table of inlaid
+black and white wood. He rescued one or two rolls and a sheet of tracing
+paper from the floor.
+
+“It's the Temple,” she panted in a significant whisper. “It's the Temple
+of the One T'ue God!”
+
+She scrabbled among the papers, and held up the elevation of a strange
+square building to his startled eyes. “Iszi't it just pe'fect?” she
+demanded.
+
+He took the drawing from her. It represented a building, manifestly an
+enormous building, consisting largely of two great, deeply fluted towers
+flanking a vast archway approached by a long flight of steps. Between
+the towers appeared a dome. It was as if the Mosque of Saint Sophia had
+produced this offspring in a mesalliance with the cathedral of
+Wells. Its enormity was made manifest by the minuteness of the large
+automobiles that were driving away in the foreground after “setting
+down.” “Here is the plan,” she said, thrusting another sheet upon him
+before he could fully take in the quality of the design. “The g'eat Hall
+is to be pe'fectly 'ound, no aisle, no altar, and in lettas of sapphiah,
+'God is ev'ywhe'.'”
+
+She added with a note of solemnity, “It will hold th'ee thousand people
+sitting down.”
+
+“But--!” said Scrope.
+
+“The'e's a sort of g'andeur,” she said. “It's young Venable's wo'k. It's
+his fl'st g'ate oppo'tunity.”
+
+“But--is this to go on that little site in Aldwych?”
+
+“He says the' isn't 'oom the'!” she explained. “He wants to put it out
+at Golda's G'een.”
+
+“But--if it is to be this little simple chapel we proposed, then wasn't
+our idea to be central?”
+
+“But if the' isn't 'oem!” she said--conclusively. “And isn't this--isn't
+it rather a costly undertaking, rather more costly--”
+
+“That doesn't matta. I'm making heaps and heaps of money. Half my
+p'ope'ty is in shipping and a lot of the 'eat in munitions. I'm 'icher
+than eva. Isn't the' a sort of g'andeur?” she pressed.
+
+He put the elevation down. He took the plan from her hands and seemed to
+study it. But he was really staring blankly at the whole situation.
+
+“Lady Sunderbund,” he said at last, with an effort, “I am afraid all
+this won't do.”
+
+“Won't do!”
+
+“No. It isn't in the spirit of my intention. It isn't in a great
+building of this sort--so--so ornate and imposing, that the simple
+gospel of God's Universal Kingdom can be preached.”
+
+“But oughtn't so gate a message to have as g'ate a pulpit?”
+
+And then as if she would seize him before he could go on to further
+repudiations, she sought hastily among the drawings again.
+
+“But look,” she said. “It has ev'ything! It's not only a p'eaching
+place; it's a headquarters for ev'ything.”
+
+With the rapid movements of an excited child she began to thrust the
+remarkable features and merits of the great project upon him. The
+preaching dome was only the heart of it. There were to be a library,
+“'efecto'ies,” consultation rooms, classrooms, a publication department,
+a big underground printing establishment. “Nowadays,” she said, “ev'y
+gate movement must p'int.” There was to be music, she said, “a gate
+invisible o'gan,” hidden amidst the architectural details, and pouring
+out its sounds into the dome, and then she glanced in passing at
+possible “p'ocessions” round the preaching dome. This preaching dome
+was not a mere shut-in drum for spiritual reverberations, around it ran
+great open corridors, and in these corridors there were to be “chapels.”
+
+“But what for?” he asked, stemming the torrent. “What need is there for
+chapels? There are to be no altars, no masses, no sacraments?”
+
+“No,” she said, “but they are to be chapels for special int'ests; a
+chapel for science, a chapel for healing, a chapel for gov'ment. Places
+for peoples to sit and think about those things--with paintings and
+symbols.”
+
+“I see your intention,” he admitted. “I see your intention.”
+
+“The' is to be a gate da'k blue 'ound chapel for sta's and atoms and the
+myst'ry of matta.” Her voice grew solemn. “All still and deep and high.
+Like a k'ystal in a da'k place. You will go down steps to it. Th'ough
+a da'k 'ounded a'ch ma'ked with mathematical symbols and balances and
+scientific app'atus.... And the ve'y next to it, the ve'y next, is to be
+a little b'ight chapel for bi'ds and flowas!”
+
+“Yes,” he said, “it is all very fine and expressive. It is, I see, a
+symbolical building, a great artistic possibility. But is it the place
+for me? What I have to say is something very simple, that God is the
+king of the whole world, king of the ha'penny newspaper and the omnibus
+and the vulgar everyday things, and that they have to worship him and
+serve him as their leader in every moment of their lives. This isn't
+that. This is the old religions over again. This is taking God apart.
+This is putting him into a fresh casket instead of the old one. And....
+I don't like it.”
+
+“Don't like it,” she cried, and stood apart from him with her chin in
+the air, a tall astonishment and dismay.
+
+“I can't do the work I want to do with this.”
+
+“But--Isn't it you' idea?”
+
+“No. It is not in the least my idea. I want to tell the whole world
+of the one God that can alone unite it and save it--and you make this
+extravagant toy.”
+
+He felt as if he had struck her directly he uttered that last word.
+
+“Toy!” she echoed, taking it in, “you call it a Toy!”
+
+A note in her voice reminded him that there were two people who might
+feel strongly in this affair.
+
+“My dear Lady Sunderbund,” he said with a sudden change of manner, “I
+must needs follow the light of my own mind. I have had a vision of God,
+I have seen him as a great leader towering over the little lives of men,
+demanding the little lives of men, prepared to take them and guide them
+to the salvation of mankind and the conquest of pain and death. I have
+seen him as the God of the human affair, a God of politics, a God of
+such muddy and bloody wars as this war, a God of economics, a God of
+railway junctions and clinics and factories and evening schools, a God
+in fact of men. This God--this God here, that you want to worship, is a
+God of artists and poets--of elegant poets, a God of bric-a-brac, a God
+of choice allusions. Oh, it has its grandeur! I don't want you to think
+that what you are doing may not be altogether fine and right for you to
+do. But it is not what I have to do.... I cannot--indeed I cannot--go on
+with this project--upon these lines.”
+
+He paused, flushed and breathless. Lady Sunderbund had heard him to the
+end. Her bright face was brightly flushed, and there were tears in her
+eyes. It was like her that they should seem tears of the largest, most
+expensive sort, tears of the first water.
+
+“But,” she cried, and her red delicate mouth went awry with dismay and
+disappointment, and her expression was the half incredulous expression
+of a child suddenly and cruelly disappointed: “You won't go on with all
+this?”
+
+“No,” he said. “My dear Lady Sunderbund--”
+
+“Oh! don't Lady Sunderbund me!” she cried with a novel rudeness. “Don't
+you see I've done it all for you?”
+
+He winced and felt boorish. He had never liked and disapproved of Lady
+Sunderbund so much as he did at that moment. And he had no words for
+her.
+
+“How can I stop it all at once like this?”
+
+And still he had no answer.
+
+She pursued her advantage. “What am I to do?” she cried.
+
+She turned upon him passionately. “Look what you've done!” She marked
+her points with finger upheld, and gave odd suggestions in her face of
+an angry coster girl. “Eva' since I met you, I've wo'shipped you. I've
+been 'eady to follow you anywhe'--to do anything. Eva' since that night
+when you sat so calm and dignified, and they baited you and wo'id you.
+When they we' all vain and cleva, and you--you thought only of God
+and 'iligion and didn't mind fo' you'self.... Up to then--I'd been
+living--oh! the emptiest life...”
+
+The tears ran. “Pe'haps I shall live it again....” She dashed her grief
+away with a hand beringed with stones as big as beetles.
+
+“I said to myself, this man knows something I don't know. He's got the
+seeds of ete'nal life su'ely. I made up my mind then and the' I'd follow
+you and back you and do all I could fo' you. I've lived fo' you. Eve'
+since. Lived fo' you. And now when all my little plans are 'ipe, you--!
+Oh!”
+
+She made a quaint little gesture with pink fists upraised, and then
+stood with her hand held up, staring at the plans and drawings that were
+littered over the inlaid table. “I've planned and planned. I said, I
+will build him a temple. I will be his temple se'vant.... Just a me'
+se'vant....”
+
+She could not go on.
+
+“But it is just these temples that have confused mankind,” he said.
+
+“Not my temple,” she said presently, now openly weeping over the gay
+rejected drawings. “You could have explained....”
+
+“Oh!” she said petulantly, and thrust them away from her so that they
+went sliding one after the other on to the floor. For some long-drawn
+moments there was no sound in the room but the slowly accelerated slide
+and flop of one sheet of cartridge paper after another.
+
+“We could have been so happy,” she wailed, “se'ving oua God.”
+
+And then this disconcerting lady did a still more disconcerting thing.
+She staggered a step towards Scrape, seized the lapels of his coat,
+bowed her head upon his shoulder, put her black hair against his cheek,
+and began sobbing and weeping.
+
+“My dear lady!” he expostulated, trying weakly to disengage her.
+
+“Let me k'y,” she insisted, gripping more resolutely, and following his
+backward pace. “You must let me k'y. You must let me k'y.”
+
+His resistance ceased. One hand supported her, the other patted her
+shining hair. “My dear child!” he said. “My dear child! I had no idea.
+That you would take it like this....”
+
+(7)
+
+
+That was but the opening of an enormous interview. Presently he had
+contrived in a helpful and sympathetic manner to seat the unhappy lady
+on a sofa, and when after some cramped discourse she stood up before
+him, wiping her eyes with a wet wonder of lace, to deliver herself the
+better, a newborn appreciation of the tactics of the situation made
+him walk to the other side of the table under colour of picking up a
+drawing.
+
+In the retrospect he tried to disentangle the threads of a discussion
+that went to and fro and contradicted itself and began again far
+back among things that had seemed forgotten and disposed of. Lady
+Sunderbund's mind was extravagantly untrained, a wild-grown mental
+thicket. At times she reproached him as if he were a heartless God; at
+times she talked as if he were a recalcitrant servant. Her mingling of
+utter devotion and the completest disregard for his thoughts and wishes
+dazzled and distressed his mind. It was clear that for half a year her
+clear, bold, absurd will had been crystallized upon the idea of giving
+him exactly what she wanted him to want. The crystal sphere of those
+ambitions lay now shattered between them.
+
+She was trying to reconstruct it before his eyes.
+
+She was, she declared, prepared to alter her plans in any way that would
+meet his wishes. She had not understood. “If it is a Toy,” she cried,
+“show me how to make it not a Toy! Make it 'eal!”
+
+He said it was the bare idea of a temple that made it impossible. And
+there was this drawing here; what did it mean? He held it out to her. It
+represented a figure, distressingly like himself, robed as a priest in
+vestments.
+
+She snatched the offending drawing from him and tore it to shreds.
+
+“If you don't want a Temple, have a meeting-house. You wanted a
+meeting-house anyhow.”
+
+“Just any old meeting-house,” he said. “Not that special one. A place
+without choirs and clergy.”
+
+“If you won't have music,” she responded, “don't have music. If God
+doesn't want music it can go. I can't think God does not app'ove of
+music, but--that is for you to settle. If you don't like the' being
+o'naments, we'll make it all plain. Some g'ate g'ey Dome--all g'ey and
+black. If it isn't to be beautiful, it can be ugly. Yes, ugly. It can
+be as ugly”--she sobbed--“as the City Temple. We will get some otha
+a'chitect--some City a'chitect. Some man who has built B'anch Banks or
+'ailway stations. That's if you think it pleases God.... B'eak young
+Venable's hea't.... Only why should you not let me make a place fo' you'
+message? Why shouldn't it be me? You must have a place. You've got 'to
+p'each somewhe'.”
+
+“As a man, not as a priest.”
+
+“Then p'each as a man. You must still wea' something.”
+
+“Just ordinary clothes.”
+
+“O'dina'y clothes a' clothes in the fashion,” she said. “You would
+have to go to you' taila for a new p'eaching coat with b'aid put on
+dif'ently, or two buttons instead of th'ee....”
+
+“One needn't be fashionable.”
+
+“Ev'ybody is fash'nable. How can you help it? Some people wea' old
+fashions; that's all.... A cassock's an old fashion. There's nothing so
+plain as a cassock.”
+
+“Except that it's a clerical fashion. I want to be just as I am now.”
+
+“If you think that--that owoble suit is o'dina'y clothes!” she said, and
+stared at him and gave way to tears of real tenderness.
+
+“A cassock,” she cried with passion. “Just a pe'fectly plain cassock.
+Fo' deecency!... Oh, if you won't--not even that!”
+
+(8)
+
+
+As he walked now after his unsuccessful quest of Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey
+towards the Serpentine he acted that stormy interview with Lady
+Sunderbund over again. At the end, as a condition indeed of his
+departure, he had left things open. He had assented to certain promises.
+He was to make her understand better what it was he needed. He was not
+to let anything that had happened affect that “spi'tual f'enship.”
+ She was to abandon all her plans, she was to begin again “at the ve'y
+beginning.” But he knew that indeed there should be no more beginning
+again with her. He knew that quite beyond these questions of the
+organization of a purified religion, it was time their association
+ended. She had wept upon him; she had clasped both his hands at parting
+and prayed to be forgiven. She was drawing him closer to her by their
+very dissension. She had infected him with the softness of remorse; from
+being a bright and spirited person, she had converted herself into a
+warm and touching person. Her fine, bright black hair against his cheek
+and the clasp of her hand on his shoulder was now inextricably in the
+business. The perplexing, the astonishing thing in his situation was
+that there was still a reluctance to make a conclusive breach.
+
+He was not the first of men who have tried to find in vain how and when
+a relationship becomes an entanglement. He ought to break off now, and
+the riddle was just why he should feel this compunction in breaking off
+now. He had disappointed her, and he ought not to have disappointed
+her; that was the essential feeling. He had never realized before as
+he realized now this peculiar quality of his own mind and the gulf into
+which it was leading him. It came as an illuminating discovery.
+
+He was a social animal. He had an instinctive disposition to act
+according to the expectations of the people about him, whether they were
+reasonable or congenial expectations or whether they were not. That, he
+saw for the first time, had been the ruling motive of his life; it was
+the clue to him. Man is not a reasonable creature; he is a socially
+responsive creature trying to be reasonable in spite of that fact. From
+the days in the rectory nursery when Scrope had tried to be a good boy
+on the whole and just a little naughty sometimes until they stopped
+smiling, through all his life of school, university, curacy, vicarage
+and episcopacy up to this present moment, he perceived now that he had
+acted upon no authentic and independent impulse. His impulse had always
+been to fall in with people and satisfy them. And all the painful
+conflicts of those last few years had been due to a growing realization
+of jarring criticisms, of antagonized forces that required from him
+incompatible things. From which he had now taken refuge--or at any rate
+sought refuge--in God. It was paradoxical, but manifestly in God he not
+only sank his individuality but discovered it.
+
+It was wonderful how much he had thought and still thought of the
+feelings and desires of Lady Sunderbund, and how little he thought of
+God. Her he had been assiduously propitiating, managing, accepting, for
+three months now. Why? Partly because she demanded it, and there was
+a quality in her demand that had touched some hidden spring--of vanity
+perhaps it was--in him, that made him respond. But partly also it was
+because after the evacuation of the palace at Princhester he had felt
+more and more, felt but never dared to look squarely in the face, the
+catastrophic change in the worldly circumstances of his family.
+Only this chapel adventure seemed likely to restore those fallen and
+bedraggled fortunes. He had not anticipated a tithe of the dire quality
+of that change. They were not simply uncomfortable in the Notting Hill
+home. They were miserable. He fancied they looked to him with something
+between reproach and urgency. Why had he brought them here? What next
+did he propose to do? He wished at times they would say it out instead
+of merely looking it. Phoebe's failing appetite chilled his heart.
+
+That concern for his family, he believed, had been his chief motive in
+clinging to Lady Sunderbund's projects long after he had realized how
+little they would forward the true service of God. No doubt there had
+been moments of flattery, moments of something, something rather in the
+nature of an excited affection; some touch of the magnificent in
+her, some touch of the infantile,--both appealed magnetically to his
+imagination; but the real effective cause was his habitual solicitude
+for his wife and children and his consequent desire to prosper
+materially. As his first dream of being something between Mohammed and
+Peter the Hermit in a new proclamation of God to the world lost colour
+and life in his mind, he realized more and more clearly that there was
+no way of living in a state of material prosperity and at the same time
+in a state of active service to God. The Church of the One True God (by
+favour of Lady Sunderbund) was a gaily-coloured lure.
+
+And yet he wanted to go on with it. All his imagination and intelligence
+was busy now with the possibility of in some way subjugating Lady
+Sunderbund, and modifying her and qualifying her to an endurable
+proposition. Why?
+
+Why?
+
+There could be but one answer, he thought. Brought to the test of
+action, he did not really believe in God! He did not believe in God as
+he believed in his family. He did not believe in the reality of either
+his first or his second vision; they had been dreams, autogenous
+revelations, exaltations of his own imaginations. These beliefs were
+upon different grades of reality. Put to the test, his faith in God gave
+way; a sword of plaster against a reality of steel.
+
+And yet he did believe in God. He was as persuaded that there was a
+God as he was that there was another side to the moon. His
+intellectual conviction was complete. Only, beside the living,
+breathing--occasionally coughing--reality of Phoebe, God was something
+as unsubstantial as the Binomial Theorem....
+
+Very like the Binomial Theorem as one thought over that comparison.
+
+By this time he had reached the banks of the Serpentine and was
+approaching the grey stone bridge that crosses just where Hyde Park
+ends and Kensington Gardens begins. Following upon his doubts of his
+religious faith had come another still more extraordinary question:
+“Although there is a God, does he indeed matter more in our ordinary
+lives than that same demonstrable Binomial Theorem? Isn't one's duty to
+Phoebe plain and clear?” Old Likeman's argument came back to him with
+novel and enhanced powers. Wasn't he after all selfishly putting his
+own salvation in front of his plain duty to those about him? What did
+it matter if he told lies, taught a false faith, perjured and damned
+himself, if after all those others were thereby saved and comforted?
+
+“But that is just where the whole of this state of mind is false
+and wrong,” he told himself. “God is something more than a priggish
+devotion, an intellectual formula. He has a hold and a claim--he should
+have a hold and a claim--exceeding all the claims of Phoebe, Miriam,
+Daphne, Clementina--all of them.... But he hasn't'!...”
+
+It was to that he had got after he had left Lady Sunderbund, and to that
+he now returned. It was the thinness and unreality of his thought of God
+that had driven him post-haste to Brighton-Pomfrey in search for that
+drug that had touched his soul to belief.
+
+Was God so insignificant in comparison with his family that after
+all with a good conscience he might preach him every Sunday in Lady
+Sunderbund's church, wearing Lady Sunderbund's vestments?
+
+Before him he saw an empty seat. The question was so immense and
+conclusive, it was so clearly a choice for all the rest of his life
+between God and the dear things of this world, that he felt he could not
+decide it upon his legs. He sat down, threw an arm along the back of the
+seat and drummed with his fingers.
+
+If the answer was “yes” then it was decidedly a pity that he had not
+stayed in the church. It was ridiculous to strain at the cathedral gnat
+and then swallow Lady Sunderbund's decorative Pantechnicon.
+
+For the first time, Scrope definitely regretted his apostasy.
+
+A trivial matter, as it may seem to the reader, intensified that regret.
+Three weeks ago Borrowdale, the bishop of Howeaster, had died, and
+Scrope would have been the next in rotation to succeed him on the
+bench of bishops. He had always looked forward to the House of Lords,
+intending to take rather a new line, to speak more, and to speak more
+plainly and fully upon social questions than had hitherto been the
+practice of his brethren. Well, that had gone....
+
+(9)
+
+
+Regrets were plain now. The question before his mind was growing clear;
+whether he was to persist in this self-imposed martyrdom of himself and
+his family or whether he was to go back upon his outbreak of visionary
+fanaticism and close with this last opportunity that Lady Sunderbund
+offered of saving at least the substance of the comfort and social
+status of his wife and daughters. In which case it was clear to him
+he would have to go to great lengths and exercise very considerable
+subtlety--and magnetism--in the management of Lady Sunderbund....
+
+He found himself composing a peculiar speech to her, very frank and
+revealing, and one that he felt would dominate her thoughts.... She
+attracted him oddly.... At least this afternoon she had attracted
+him....
+
+And repelled him....
+
+A wholesome gust of moral impatience stirred him. He smacked the back of
+the seat hard, as though he smacked himself.
+
+No. He did not like it....
+
+A torn sunset of purple and crimson streamed raggedly up above and
+through the half stripped trecs of Kensington Gardens, and he found
+himself wishing that Heaven would give us fewer sublimities in sky and
+mountain and more in our hearts. Against the background of darkling
+trees and stormily flaming sky a girl was approaching him. There was
+little to be seen of her but her outline. Something in her movement
+caught his eye and carried his memory back to a sundown at Hunstanton.
+Then as she came nearer he saw that it was Eleanor.
+
+It was odd to see her here. He had thought she was at Newnham.
+
+But anyhow it was very pleasant to see her. And there was something in
+Eleanor that promised an answer to his necessity. The girl had a kind
+of instinctive wisdom. She would understand the quality of his situation
+better perhaps than any one. He would put the essentials of that
+situation as fully and plainly as he could to her. Perhaps she, with
+that clear young idealism of hers, would give him just the lift and the
+light of which he stood in need. She would comprehend both sides of it,
+the points about Phoebe as well as the points about God.
+
+When first he saw her she seemed to be hurrying, but now she had fallen
+to a loitering pace. She looked once or twice behind her and then ahead,
+almost as though she expected some one and was not sure whether this
+person would approach from east or west. She did not observe her father
+until she was close upon him.
+
+Then she was so astonished that for a moment she stood motionless,
+regarding him. She made an odd movement, almost as if she would have
+walked on, that she checked in its inception. Then she came up to him
+and stood before him. “It's Dad,” she said.
+
+“I didn't know you were in London, Norah,” he began.
+
+“I came up suddenly.”
+
+“Have you been home?”
+
+“No. I wasn't going home. At least--not until afterwards.”
+
+Then she looked away from him, east and then west, and then met his eye
+again.
+
+“Won't you sit down, Norah?”
+
+“I don't know whether I can.”
+
+She consulted the view again and seemed to come to a decision. “At
+least, I will for a minute.”
+
+She sat down. For a moment neither of them spoke....
+
+“What are you doing here, little Norah?”
+
+She gathered her wits. Then she spoke rather volubly. “I know it looks
+bad, Daddy. I came up to meet a boy I know, who is going to France
+to-morrow. I had to make excuses--up there. I hardly remember what
+excuses I made.”
+
+“A boy you know?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Do we know him?”
+
+“Not yet.”
+
+For a time Scrope forgot the Church of the One True God altogether. “Who
+is this boy?” he asked.
+
+With a perceptible effort Eleanor assumed a tone of commonsense
+conventionality. “He's a boy I met first when we were skating last year.
+His sister has the study next to mine.”
+
+Father looked at daughter, and she met his eyes. “Well?”
+
+“It's all happened so quickly, Daddy,” she said, answering all that was
+implicit in that “Well?” She went on, “I would have told you about him
+if he had seemed to matter. But it was just a friendship. It didn't
+seem to matter in any serious way. Of course we'd been good friends--and
+talked about all sorts of things. And then suddenly you see,”--her tone
+was offhand and matter-of-fact--“he has to go to France.”
+
+She stared at her father with the expression of a hostess who talks
+about the weather. And then the tears gathered and ran down her cheek.
+
+She turned her face to the Serpentine and clenched her fist.
+
+But she was now fairly weeping. “I didn't know he cared. I didn't know I
+cared.”
+
+His next question took a little time in coming.
+
+“And it's love, little Norah?” he asked.
+
+She was comfortably crying now, the defensive altogether abandoned.
+“It's love, Daddy.... Oh! love!.... He's going tomorrow.” For a minute
+or so neither spoke. Scrope's mind was entirely made up in the matter.
+He approved altogether of his daughter. But the traditions of parentage,
+his habit of restrained decision, made him act a judicial part. “I'd
+like just to see this boy,” he said, and added: “If it isn't rather
+interfering....”
+
+“Dear Daddy!” she said. “Dear Daddy!” and touched his hand. “He'll be
+coming here....”
+
+“If you could tell me a few things about him,” said Scrope. “Is he an
+undergraduate?”
+
+“You see,” began Eleanor and paused to marshal her facts. “He graduated
+this year. Then he's been in training at Cambridge. Properly he'd have
+a fellowship. He took the Natural Science tripos, zoology chiefly.
+He's good at philosophy, but of course our Cambridge philosophy is so
+silly--McTaggart blowing bubbles.... His father's a doctor, Sir Hedley
+Riverton.”
+
+As she spoke her eyes had been roving up the path and down. “He's
+coming,” she interrupted. She hesitated. “Would you mind if I went and
+spoke to him first, Daddy?”
+
+“Of course go to him. Go and warn him I'm here,” said Scrope.
+
+Eleanor got up, and was immediately greeted with joyful gestures by an
+approaching figure in khaki. The two young people quickened their paces
+as they drew nearer one another. There was a rapid greeting; they stood
+close together and spoke eagerly. Scrope could tell by their movements
+when he became the subject of their talk. He saw the young man start
+and look over Eleanor's shoulder, and he assumed an attitude of
+philosophical contemplation of the water, so as to give the young man
+the liberty of his profile.
+
+He did not look up until they were quite close to him, and when he did
+he saw a pleasant, slightly freckled fair face a little agitated, and
+very honest blue eyes. “I hope you don't think, Sir, that it's bad form
+of me to ask Eleanor to come up and see me as I've done. I telegraphed
+to her on an impulse, and it's been very kind of her to come up to me.”
+
+“Sit down,” said Scrope, “sit down. You're Mr. Riverton?”
+
+“Yes, Sir,” said the young man. He had the frequent “Sir” of the
+subaltern. Scrope was in the centre of the seat, and the young officer
+sat down on one side of him while Eleanor took up a watching position on
+her father's other hand. “You see, Sir, we've hardly known each other--I
+mean we've been associated over a philosophical society and all that
+sort of thing, but in a more familiar way, I mean....”
+
+He hung for a moment, just a little short of breath. Scrope helped
+him with a grave but sympathetic movement of the head. “It's a little
+difficult to explain,” the young man apologized.
+
+“We hadn't understood, I think, either of us very much. We'd just
+been friendly--and liked each other. And so it went on even when I was
+training. And then when I found I had to go out--I'm going out a little
+earlier than I expected--I thought suddenly I wouldn't ever go to
+Cambridge again at all perhaps--and there was something in one of her
+letters.... I thought of it a lot, Sir, I thought it all over, and I
+thought it wasn't right for me to do anything and I didn't do anything
+until this morning. And then I sort of had to telegraph. I know it was
+frightful cheek and bad form and all that, Sir. It is. It would be
+worse if she wasn't different--I mean, Sir, if she was just an ordinary
+girl.... But I had a sort of feeling--just wanting to see her. I don't
+suppose you've ever felt anything, Sir, as I felt I wanted to see
+her--and just hear her speak to me....”
+
+He glanced across Scrope at Eleanor. It was as if he justified himself
+to them both.
+
+Scrope glanced furtively at his daughter who was leaning forward with
+tender eyes on her lover, and his heart went out to her. But his manner
+remained judicial.
+
+“All this is very sudden,” he said.
+
+“Or you would have heard all about it, Sir,” said young Riverton.
+“It's just the hurry that has made this seem furtive. All that there is
+between us, Sir, is just the two telegrams we've sent, hers and mine.
+I hope you won't mind our having a little time together. We won't do
+anything very committal. It's as much friendship as anything. I go by
+the evening train to-morrow.”
+
+“Mm,” said Serope with his eye on Eleanor.
+
+“In these uncertain times,” he began.
+
+“Why shouldn't I take a risk too, Daddy?” said Eleanor sharply.
+
+“I know there's that side of it,” said the young man. “I oughtn't to
+have telegraphed,” he said.
+
+“Can't I take a risk?” exclaimed Eleanor. “I'm not a doll. I don't want
+to live in wadding until all the world is safe for me.”
+
+Scrope looked at the glowing face of the young man.
+
+“Is this taking care of her?” he asked.
+
+“If you hadn't telegraphed--!” she cried with a threat in her voice, and
+left it at that.
+
+“Perhaps I feel about her--rather as if she was as strong as I am--in
+those ways. Perhaps I shouldn't. I could hardly endure myself, Sir--cut
+off from her. And a sort of blank. Nothing said.”
+
+“You want to work out your own salvation,” said Scrope to his daughter.
+
+“No one else can,” she answered. “I'm--I'm grown up.”
+
+“Even if it hurts?”
+
+“To live is to be hurt somehow,” she said. “This--This--” She flashed
+her love. She intimated by a gesture that it is better to be stabbed
+with a clean knife than to be suffocated or poisoned or to decay....
+
+Scrope turned his eyes to the young man again. He liked him. He liked
+the modelling of his mouth and chin and the line of his brows. He liked
+him altogether. He pronounced his verdict slowly. “I suppose, after
+all,” he said, “that this is better than the tender solicitude of a
+safe and prosperous middleaged man. Eleanor, my dear, I've been thinking
+to-day that a father who stands between his children and hardship, by
+doing wrong, may really be doing them a wrong. You are a dear girl to
+me. I won't stand between you two. Find your own salvation.” He got up.
+“I go west,” he said, “presently. You, I think, go east.”
+
+“I can assure you, Sir,” the young man began.
+
+Scrope held his hand out. “Take your life in your own way,” he said.
+
+He turned to Eleanor. “Talk as you will,” he said.
+
+She clasped his hand with emotion. Then she turned to the waiting young
+man, who saluted.
+
+“You'll come back to supper?” Scrope said, without thinking out the
+implications of that invitation.
+
+She assented as carelessly. The fact that she and her lover were to
+go, with their meeting legalized and blessed, excluded all other
+considerations. The two young people turned to each other.
+
+Scrope stood for a moment or so and then sat down again.
+
+For a time he could think only of Eleanor.... He watched the two young
+people as they went eastward. As they walked their shoulders and elbows
+bumped amicably together.
+
+(10)
+
+
+Presently he sought to resume the interrupted thread of his thoughts.
+He knew that he had been dealing with some very tremendous and urgent
+problem when Eleanor had appeared. Then he remembered that Eleanor at
+the time of her approach had seemed to be a solution rather than an
+interruption. Well, she had her own life. She was making her own life.
+Instead of solving his problems she was solving her own. God bless those
+dear grave children! They were nearer the elemental things than he was.
+That eastward path led to Victoria--and thence to a very probable death.
+The lad was in the infantry and going straight into the trenches.
+
+Love, death, God; this war was bringing the whole world back to
+elemental things, to heroic things. The years of comedy and comfort were
+at an end in Europe; the age of steel and want was here. And he had been
+thinking--What had he been thinking?
+
+He mused, and the scheme of his perplexities reshaped itself in his
+mind. But at that time he did not realize that a powerful new light
+was falling upon it now, cast by the tragic illumination of these young
+lovers whose love began with a parting. He did not see how reality had
+come to all things through that one intense reality. He reverted to
+the question as he had put it to himself, before first he recognized
+Eleanor. Did he believe in God? Should he go on with this Sunderbund
+adventure in which he no longer believed? Should he play for safety and
+comfort, trusting to God's toleration? Or go back to his family and warn
+them of the years of struggle and poverty his renunciation cast upon
+them?
+
+Somehow Lady Sunderbund's chapel was very remote and flimsy now, and the
+hardships of poverty seemed less black than the hardship of a youthful
+death.
+
+Did he believe in God? Again he put that fundamental question to
+himself.
+
+He sat very still in the sunset peace, with his eyes upon the steel
+mirror of the waters. The question seemed to fill the whole scene, to
+wait, even as the water and sky and the windless trees were waiting....
+
+And then by imperceptible degrees there grew in Scrope's mind the
+persuasion that he was in the presence of the living God. This time
+there was no vision of angels nor stars, no snapping of bow-strings, no
+throbbing of the heart nor change of scene, no magic and melodramatic
+drawing back of the curtain from the mysteries; the water and the
+bridge, the ragged black trees, and a distant boat that broke the
+silvery calm with an arrow of black ripples, all these things were still
+before him. But God was there too. God was everywhere about him. This
+persuasion was over him and about him; a dome of protection, a power in
+his nerves, a peace in his heart. It was an exalting beauty; it was a
+perfected conviction.... This indeed was the coming of God, the real
+coming of God. For the first time Scrope was absolutely sure that
+for the rest of his life he would possess God. Everything that had so
+perplexed him seemed to be clear now, and his troubles lay at the foot
+of this last complete realization like a litter of dust and leaves in
+the foreground of a sunlit, snowy mountain range.
+
+It was a little incredible that he could ever have doubted.
+
+(11)
+
+
+It was a phase of extreme intellectual clairvoyance. A multitude of
+things that hitherto had been higgledy-piggledy, contradictory and
+incongruous in his mind became lucid, serene, full and assured. He
+seemed to see all things plainly as one sees things plainly through
+perfectly clear still water in the shadows of a summer noon. His doubts
+about God, his periods of complete forgetfulness and disregard of God,
+this conflict of his instincts and the habits and affections of
+his daily life with the service of God, ceased to be perplexing
+incompatibilities and were manifest as necessary, understandable aspects
+of the business of living.
+
+It was no longer a riddle that little immediate things should seem
+of more importance than great and final things. For man is a creature
+thrusting his way up from the beast to divinity, from the blindness of
+individuality to the knowledge of a common end. We stand deep in
+the engagements of our individual lives looking up to God, and only
+realizing in our moments of exaltation that through God we can escape
+from and rule and alter the whole world-wide scheme of individual lives.
+Only in phases of illumination do we realize the creative powers that
+lie ready to man's hand. Personal affections, immediate obligations,
+ambitions, self-seeking, these are among the natural and essential
+things of our individual lives, as intimate almost as our primordial
+lusts and needs; God, the true God, is a later revelation, a newer, less
+natural thing in us; a knowledge still remote, uncertain, and confused
+with superstition; an apprehension as yet entangled with barbaric
+traditions of fear and with ceremonial surgeries, blood sacrifices, and
+the maddest barbarities of thought. We are only beginning to realize
+that God is here; so far as our minds go he is still not here
+continually; we perceive him and then again we are blind to him. God
+is the last thing added to the completeness of human life. To most His
+presence is imperceptible throughout their lives; they know as little
+of him as a savage knows of the electric waves that beat through us
+for ever from the sun. All this appeared now so clear and necessary
+to Scrope that he was astonished he had ever found the quality of
+contradiction in these manifest facts.
+
+In this unprecedented lucidity that had now come to him, Scrope saw as
+a clear and simple necessity that there can be no such thing as a
+continuous living presence of God in our lives. That is an unreasonable
+desire. There is no permanent exaltation of belief. It is contrary to
+the nature of life. One cannot keep actively believing in and realizing
+God round all the twenty-four hours any more than one can keep awake
+through the whole cycle of night and day, day after day. If it were
+possible so to apprehend God without cessation, life would dissolve in
+religious ecstasy. But nothing human has ever had the power to hold the
+curtain of sense continually aside and retain the light of God always.
+We must get along by remembering our moments of assurance. Even Jesus
+himself, leader of all those who have hailed the coming kingdom of God,
+had cried upon the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
+ The business of life on earth, life itself, is a thing curtained off, as
+it were, from such immediate convictions. That is in the constitution of
+life. Our ordinary state of belief, even when we are free from doubt,
+is necessarily far removed from the intuitive certainty of sight and
+hearing. It is a persuasion, it falls far short of perception....
+
+“We don't know directly,” Scrope said to himself with a checking gesture
+of the hand, “we don't see. We can't. We hold on to the remembered
+glimpse, we go over our reasons.”...
+
+And it was clear too just because God is thus manifest like the
+momentary drawing of a curtain, sometimes to this man for a time and
+sometimes to that, but never continuously to any, and because the
+perception of him depends upon the ability and quality of the perceiver,
+because to the intellectual man God is necessarily a formula, to the
+active man a will and a commandment, and to the emotional man love,
+there can be no creed defining him for all men, and no ritual and
+special forms of service to justify a priesthood. “God is God,” he
+whispered to himself, and the phrase seemed to him the discovery of
+a sufficient creed. God is his own definition; there is no other
+definition of God. Scrope had troubled himself with endless arguments
+whether God was a person, whether he was concerned with personal
+troubles, whether he loved, whether he was finite. It were as reasonable
+to argue whether God was a frog or a rock or a tree. He had imagined God
+as a figure of youth and courage, had perceived him as an effulgence
+of leadership, a captain like the sun. The vision of his drug-quickened
+mind had but symbolized what was otherwise inexpressible. Of that he was
+now sure. He had not seen the invisible but only its sign and visible
+likeness. He knew now that all such presentations were true and that all
+such presentations were false. Just as much and just as little was God
+the darkness and the brightness of the ripples under the bows of the
+distant boat, the black beauty of the leaves and twigs of those trees
+now acid-clear against the flushed and deepening sky. These riddles of
+the profundities were beyond the compass of common living. They were
+beyond the needs of common living. He was but a little earth parasite,
+sitting idle in the darkling day, trying to understand his infinitesimal
+functions on a minor planet. Within the compass of terrestrial living
+God showed himself in its own terms. The life of man on earth was a
+struggle for unity of spirit and for unity with his kind, and the aspect
+of God that alone mattered to man was a unifying kingship without and
+within. So long as men were men, so would they see God. Only when they
+reached the crest could they begin to look beyond. So we knew God, so
+God was to us; since we struggled, he led our struggle, since we were
+finite and mortal he defined an aim, his personality was the answer to
+our personality; but God, except in so far as he was to us, remained
+inaccessible, inexplicable, wonderful, shining through beauty, shining
+beyond research, greater than time or space, above good and evil and
+pain and pleasure.
+
+(12)
+
+
+Serope's mind was saturated as it had never been before by his sense of
+the immediate presence of God. He floated in that realization. He
+was not so much thinking now as conversing starkly with the divine
+interlocutor, who penetrated all things and saw into and illuminated
+every recess of his mind. He spread out his ideas to the test of this
+presence; he brought out his hazards and interpretations that this light
+might judge them.
+
+There came back to his mind the substance of his two former visions;
+they assumed now a reciprocal quality, they explained one another and
+the riddle before him. The first had shown him the personal human aspect
+of God, he had seen God as the unifying captain calling for his personal
+service, the second had set the stage for that service in the spectacle
+of mankind's adventure. He had been shown a great multitude of human
+spirits reaching up at countless points towards the conception of the
+racial unity under a divine leadership, he had seen mankind on the
+verge of awakening to the kingdom of God. “That solves no mystery,”
+ he whispered, gripping the seat and frowning at the water; “mysteries
+remain mysteries; but that is the reality of religion. And now, now,
+what is my place? What have I to do? That is the question I have been
+asking always; the question that this moment now will answer; what have
+I to do?...”
+
+God was coming into the life of all mankind in the likeness of a captain
+and a king; all the governments of men, all the leagues of men, their
+debts and claims and possessions, must give way to the world republic
+under God the king. For five troubled years he had been staring religion
+in the face, and now he saw that it must mean this--or be no more than
+fetishism, Obi, Orphic mysteries or ceremonies of Demeter, a legacy
+of mental dirtiness, a residue of self-mutilation and superstitious
+sacrifices from the cunning, fear-haunted, ape-dog phase of human
+development. But it did mean this. And every one who apprehended as much
+was called by that very apprehension to the service of God's kingdom.
+To live and serve God's kingdom on earth, to help to bring it about, to
+propagate the idea of it, to establish the method of it, to incorporate
+all that one made and all that one did into its growing reality, was the
+only possible life that could be lived, once that God was known.
+
+He sat with his hands gripping his knees, as if he were holding on to
+his idea. “And now for my part,” he whispered, brows knit, “now for my
+part.”
+
+Ever since he had given his confirmation addresses he had been clear
+that his task, or at least a considerable portion of his task, was
+to tell of this faith in God and of this conception of service in his
+kingdom as the form and rule of human life and human society. But up to
+now he had been floundering hopelessly in his search for a method and
+means of telling. That, he saw, still needed to be thought out. For
+example, one cannot run through the world crying, “The Kingdom of God
+is at hand.” Men's minds were still so filled with old theological ideas
+that for the most part they would understand by that only a fantasy of
+some great coming of angels and fiery chariots and judgments, and hardly
+a soul but would doubt one's sanity and turn scornfully away. But one
+must proclaim God not to confuse but to convince men's minds. It was
+that and the habit of his priestly calling that had disposed him towards
+a pulpit. There he could reason and explain. The decorative genius
+of Lady Sunderbund had turned that intention into a vast iridescent
+absurdity.
+
+This sense he had of thinking openly in the sight of God, enabled him to
+see the adventure of Lady Sunderbund without illusion and without shame.
+He saw himself at once honest and disingenuous, divided between two
+aims. He had no doubt now of the path he had to pursue. A stronger man
+of permanently clear aims might possibly turn Lady Sunderbund into a
+useful opportunity, oblige her to provide the rostrum he needed; but for
+himself, he knew he had neither the needed strength nor clearness;
+she would smother him in decoration, overcome him by her picturesque
+persistence. It might be ridiculous to run away from her, but it was
+necessary. And he was equally clear now that for him there must be
+no idea of any pulpit, of any sustained mission. He was a man of
+intellectual moods; only at times, he realized, had he the inspiration
+of truth; upon such uncertain snatches and glimpses he must live; to
+make his life a ministry would be to face phases when he would simply be
+“carrying on,” with his mind blank and his faith asleep.
+
+His thought spread out from this perennial decision to more general
+things again. Had God any need of organized priests at all? Wasn't that
+just what had been the matter with religion for the last three thousand
+years?
+
+His vision and his sense of access to God had given a new courage to
+his mind; in these moods of enlightenment he could see the world as a
+comprehensible ball, he could see history as an understandable drama. He
+had always been on the verge of realizing before, he realized now, the
+two entirely different and antagonistic strands that interweave in the
+twisted rope of contemporary religion; the old strand of the priest,
+the fetishistic element of the blood sacrifice and the obscene rite, the
+element of ritual and tradition, of the cult, the caste, the consecrated
+tribe; and interwoven with this so closely as to be scarcely separable
+in any existing religion was the new strand, the religion of the
+prophets, the unidolatrous universal worship of the one true God. Priest
+religion is the antithesis to prophet religion. He saw that the
+founders of all the great existing religions of the world had been like
+himself--only that he was a weak and commonplace man with no creative
+force, and they had been great men of enormous initiative--men reaching
+out, and never with a complete definition, from the old kind of religion
+to the new. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus, whom the priests killed when
+Pilate would have spared him, Mohammed, Buddha, had this much in common
+that they had sought to lead men from temple worship, idol worship, from
+rites and ceremonies and the rule of priests, from anniversaryism and
+sacramentalism, into a direct and simple relation to the simplicity of
+God. Religious progress had always been liberation and simplification.
+But none of these efforts had got altogether clear. The organizing
+temper in men, the disposition to dogmatic theorizing, the distrust
+of the discretion of the young by the wisdom of age, the fear of
+indiscipline which is so just in warfare and so foolish in education,
+the tremendous power of the propitiatory tradition, had always caught
+and crippled every new gospel before it had run a score of years. Jesus
+for example gave man neither a theology nor a church organization; His
+sacrament was an innocent feast of memorial; but the fearful, limited,
+imitative men he left to carry on his work speedily restored all these
+three abominations of the antiquated religion, theology, priest, and
+sacrifice. Jesus indeed, caught into identification with the ancient
+victim of the harvest sacrifice and turned from a plain teacher into
+a horrible blood bath and a mock cannibal meal, was surely the supreme
+feat of the ironies of chance....
+
+“It is curious how I drift back to Jesus,” said Scrope. “I have never
+seen how much truth and good there was in his teaching until I broke
+away from Christianity and began to see him plain. If I go on as I am
+going, I shall end a Nazarene....”
+
+He thought on. He had a feeling of temerity, but then it seemed as if
+God within him bade him be of good courage.
+
+Already in a glow of inspiration he had said practically as much as
+he was now thinking in his confirmation address, but now he realized
+completely what it was he had then said. There could be no priests,
+no specialized ministers of the one true God, because every man to
+the utmost measure of his capacity was bound to be God's priest and
+minister. Many things one may leave to specialists: surgery, detailed
+administration, chemistry, for example; but it is for every man to think
+his own philosophy and think out his own religion. One man may tell
+another, but no man may take charge of another. A man may avail himself
+of electrician or gardener or what not, but he must stand directly
+before God; he may suffer neither priest nor king. These other things
+are incidental, but God, the kingdom of God, is what he is for.
+
+“Good,” he said, checking his reasoning. “So I must bear witness to
+God--but neither as priest nor pastor. I must write and talk about him
+as I can. No reason why I should not live by such writing and talking if
+it does not hamper my message to do so. But there must be no high place,
+no ordered congregation. I begin to see my way....”
+
+The evening was growing dark and chill about him now, the sky was barred
+with deep bluish purple bands drawn across a chilly brightness that
+had already forgotten the sun, the trees were black and dim, but his
+understanding of his place and duty was growing very definite.
+
+“And this duty to bear witness to God's kingdom and serve it is so plain
+that I must not deflect my witness even by a little, though to do
+so means comfort and security for my wife and children. God comes
+first....”
+
+“They must not come between God and me....”
+
+“But there is more in it than that.”
+
+He had come round at last through the long clearing-up of his mind, to
+his fundamental problem again. He sat darkly reluctant.
+
+“I must not play priest or providence to them,” he admitted at last. “I
+must not even stand between God and them.”
+
+He saw now what he had been doing; it had been the flaw in his faith
+that he would not trust his family to God. And he saw too that this
+distrust has been the flaw in the faith of all religious systems
+hitherto....
+
+(13)
+
+
+In this strange voyage of the spirit which was now drawing to its end,
+in which Scrope had travelled from the confused, unanalyzed formulas and
+assumptions and implications of his rectory upbringing to his present
+stark and simple realization of God, he had at times made some
+remarkable self-identifications. He was naturally much given to analogy;
+every train of thought in his mind set up induced parallel currents. He
+had likened himself to the Anglican church, to the whole Christian body,
+as, for example, in his imagined second conversation with the angel
+of God. But now he found himself associating himself with a still more
+far-reaching section of mankind. This excess of solicitude was traceable
+perhaps in nearly every one in all the past of mankind who had ever had
+the vision of God. An excessive solicitude to shield those others from
+one's own trials and hardships, to preserve the exact quality of the
+revelation, for example, had been the fruitful cause of crippling
+errors, spiritual tyrannies, dogmatisms, dissensions, and futilities.
+“Suffer little children to come unto me”; the text came into his head
+with an effect of contribution. The parent in us all flares out at the
+thought of the younger and weaker minds; we hide difficulties, seek to
+spare them from the fires that temper the spirit, the sharp edge of
+the truth that shapes the soul. Christian is always trying to have a
+carriage sent back from the Celestial City for his family. Why, we ask,
+should they flounder dangerously in the morasses that we escaped, or
+wander in the forest in which we lost ourselves? Catch these souls
+young, therefore, save them before they know they exist, kidnap them to
+heaven; vaccinate them with a catechism they may never understand, lull
+them into comfort and routine. Instinct plays us false here as it plays
+the savage mother false when she snatches her fevered child from the
+doctor's hands. The last act of faith is to trust those we love to
+God....
+
+Hitherto he had seen the great nets of theological overstatement and
+dogma that kept mankind from God as if they were the work of purely evil
+things in man, of pride, of self-assertion, of a desire to possess and
+dominate the minds and souls of others. It was only now that he saw how
+large a share in the obstruction of God's Kingdom had been played by the
+love of the elder and the parent, by the carefulness, the fussy care,
+of good men and women. He had wandered in wildernesses of unbelief, in
+dangerous places of doubt and questioning, but he had left his wife and
+children safe and secure in the self-satisfaction of orthodoxy. To none
+of them except to Eleanor had he ever talked with any freedom of his
+new apprehensions of religious reality. And that had been at Eleanor's
+initiative. There was, he saw now, something of insolence and something
+of treachery in this concealment. His ruling disposition throughout the
+crisis had been to force comfort and worldly well-being upon all those
+dependants even at the price of his own spiritual integrity. In no way
+had he consulted them upon the bargain.... While we have pottered, each
+for the little good of his own family, each for the lessons and clothes
+and leisure of his own children, assenting to this injustice, conforming
+to that dishonest custom, being myopically benevolent and fundamentally
+treacherous, our accumulated folly has achieved this catastrophe. It is
+not so much human wickedness as human weakness that has permitted the
+youth of the world to go through this hell of blood and mud and fire.
+The way to the kingdom of God is the only way to the true safety, the
+true wellbeing of the children of men....
+
+It wasn't fair to them. But now he saw how unfair it was to them in a
+light that has only shone plainly upon European life since the great
+interlude of the armed peace came to an end in August, 1914. Until
+that time it had been the fashion to ignore death and evade poverty and
+necessity for the young. We can shield our young no longer, death has
+broken through our precautions and tender evasions--and his eyes went
+eastward into the twilight that had swallowed up his daughter and her
+lover.
+
+The tumbled darkling sky, monstrous masses of frowning blue, with icy
+gaps of cold light, was like the great confusions of the war. All our
+youth has had to go into that terrible and destructive chaos--because of
+the kings and churches and nationalities sturdier-souled men would have
+set aside.
+
+Everything was sharp and clear in his mind now. Eleanor after all had
+brought him his solution.
+
+He sat quite still for a little while, and then stood up and turned
+northward towards Notting Hill.
+
+The keepers were closing Kensington Gardens, and he would have to skirt
+the Park to Victoria Gate and go home by the Bayswater Road....
+
+(14)
+
+
+As he walked he rearranged in his mind this long-overdue apology for his
+faith that he was presently to make to his family. There was no one to
+interrupt him and nothing to embarrass him, and so he was able to
+set out everything very clearly and convincingly. There was perhaps a
+disposition to digress into rather voluminous subordinate explanations,
+on such themes, for instance, as sacramentalism, whereon he found
+himself summarizing Frazer's Golden Bough, which the Chasters'
+controversy had first obliged him to read, and upon the irrelevance of
+the question of immortality to the process of salvation. But the reality
+of his eclaircissement was very different from anything he prepared in
+these anticipations.
+
+Tea had been finished and put away, and the family was disposed about
+the dining-room engaged in various evening occupations; Phoebe sat at
+the table working at some mathematical problem, Clementina was reading
+with her chin on her fist and a frown on her brow; Lady Ella, Miriam and
+Daphne were busy making soft washing cloths for the wounded; Lady
+Ella had brought home the demand for them from the Red Cross centre
+in Burlington House. The family was all downstairs in the dining-room
+because the evening was chilly, and there were no fires upstairs yet
+in the drawing-room. He came into the room and exchanged greetings with
+Lady Ella. Then he stood for a time surveying his children. Phoebe, he
+noted, was a little flushed; she put passion into her work; on the whole
+she was more like Eleanor than any other of them. Miriam knitted with a
+steady skill. Clementina's face too expressed a tussle. He took up one
+of the rough-knit washing-cloths upon the side-table, and asked how many
+could be made in an hour. Then he asked some idle obvious question
+about the fire upstairs. Clementina made an involuntary movement; he was
+disturbing her. He hovered for a moment longer. He wanted to catch his
+wife's eye and speak to her first. She looked up, but before he could
+convey his wish for a private conference with her, she smiled at him and
+then bent over her work again.
+
+He went into the back study and lit his gas fire. Hitherto he had always
+made a considerable explosion when he did so, but this time by taking
+thought and lighting his match before he turned on the gas he did it
+with only a gentle thud. Then he lit his reading-lamp and pulled down
+the blind--pausing for a time to look at the lit dressmaker's opposite.
+Then he sat down thoughtfully before the fire. Presently Ella would come
+in and he would talk to her. He waited a long time, thinking only weakly
+and inconsecutively, and then he became restless. Should he call her?
+
+But he wanted their talk to begin in a natural-seeming way. He did not
+want the portentousness of “wanting to speak” to her and calling her out
+to him. He got up at last and went back into the other room. Clementina
+had gone upstairs, and the book she had been reading was lying closed on
+the sideboard. He saw it was one of Chasters' books, he took it up, it
+was “The Core of Truth in Christianity,” and he felt an irrational
+shock at the idea of Clementina reading it. In spite of his own
+immense changes of opinion he had still to revise his conception of the
+polemical Chasters as an evil influence in religion. He fidgeted
+past his wife to the mantel in search of an imaginary mislaid pencil.
+Clementina came down with some bandage linen she was cutting out. He
+hung over his wife in a way that he felt must convey his desire for a
+conversation. Then he picked up Chasters' book again. “Does any one want
+this?” he asked.
+
+“Not if I may have it again,” consented Clementina.
+
+He took it back with him and began to read again those familiar
+controversial pages. He read for the best part of an hour with his knees
+drying until they smoked over the gas. What curious stuff it was! How
+it wrangled! Was Chasters a religious man? Why did he write these
+books? Had he really a passion for truth or only a Swift-like hatred
+of weakly-thinking people? None of this stuff in his books was really
+wrong, provided it was religious-spirited. Much of it had been indeed
+destructively illuminating to its reader. It let daylight through all
+sorts of walls. Indeed, the more one read the more vividly true its
+acid-bit lines became.... And yet, and yet, there was something hateful
+in the man's tone. Scrope held the book and thought. He had seen
+Chasters once or twice. Chasters had the sort of face, the sort of
+voice, the sort of bearing that made one think of his possibly saying
+upon occasion, rudely and rejoicing, “More fool you!” Nevertheless
+Scrope perceived now with an effort of discovery that it was from
+Chasters that he had taken all the leading ideas of the new faith that
+was in him. Here was the stuff of it. He had forgotten how much of it
+was here. During those months of worried study while the threat of
+a Chasters prosecution hung over him his mind had assimilated almost
+unknowingly every assimilable element of the Chasters doctrine; he
+had either assimilated and transmuted it by the alchemy of his own
+temperament, or he had reacted obviously and filled in Chasters' gaps
+and pauses. Chasters could beat a road to the Holy of Holies, and shy
+at entering it. But in spite of all the man's roughness, in spite of a
+curious flavour of baseness and malice about him, the spirit of truth
+had spoken through him. God has a use for harsh ministers. In one man
+God lights the heart, in another the reason becomes a consuming fire.
+God takes his own where he finds it. He does not limit himself to nice
+people. In these matters of evidence and argument, in his contempt for
+amiable, demoralizing compromise, Chasters served God as Scrope could
+never hope to serve him. Scrope's new faith had perhaps been altogether
+impossible if the Chasters controversy had not ploughed his mind.
+
+For a time Scrope dwelt upon this remarkable realization. Then as
+he turned over the pages his eyes rested on a passage of uncivil and
+ungenerous sarcasm. Against old Likeman of all people!...
+
+What did a girl like Clementina make of all this? How had she got the
+book? From Eleanor? The stuff had not hurt Eleanor. Eleanor had been
+able to take the good that Chasters taught, and reject the evil of his
+spirit....
+
+He thought of Eleanor, gallantly working out her own salvation. The
+world was moving fast to a phase of great freedom--for the young and the
+bold.... He liked that boy....
+
+His thoughts came back with a start to his wife. The evening was
+slipping by and he had momentous things to say to her. He went and just
+opened the door.
+
+“Ella!” he said.
+
+“Did you want me?”
+
+“Presently.”
+
+She put a liberal interpretation upon that “presently,” so that after
+what seemed to him a long interval he had to call again, “Ella!”
+
+“Just a minute,” she answered.
+
+(15)
+
+
+Lady Ella was still, so to speak, a little in the other room when she
+came to him.
+
+“Shut that door, please,” he said, and felt the request had just that
+flavour of portentousness he wished to avoid.
+
+“What is it?” she asked.
+
+“I wanted to talk to you--about some things. I've done something rather
+serious to-day. I've made an important decision.”
+
+Her face became anxious. “What do you mean?” she asked.
+
+“You see,” he said, leaning upon the mantelshelf and looking down at the
+gas flames, “I've never thought that we should all have to live in this
+crowded house for long.”
+
+“All!” she interrupted in a voice that made him look up sharply. “You're
+not going away, Ted?”
+
+“Oh, no. But I hoped we should all be going away in a little time. It
+isn't so.”
+
+“I never quite understood why you hoped that.”
+
+“It was plain enough.”
+
+“How?”
+
+“I thought I should have found something to do that would have enabled
+us to live in better style. I'd had a plan.”
+
+“What plan?”
+
+“It's fallen through.”
+
+“But what plan was it?”
+
+“I thought I should be able to set up a sort of broad church chapel. I
+had a promise.”
+
+Her voice was rich with indignation. “And she has betrayed you?”
+
+“No,” he said, “I have betrayed her.”
+
+Lady Ella's face showed them still at cross purposes. He looked down
+again and frowned. “I can't do that chapel business,” he said. “I've had
+to let her down. I've got to let you all down. There's no help for it.
+It isn't the way. I can't have anything to do with Lady Sunderbund and
+her chapel.”
+
+“But,” Lady Ella was still perplexed.
+
+“It's too great a sacrifice.”
+
+“Of us?”
+
+“No, of myself. I can't get into her pulpit and do as she wants and keep
+my conscience. It's been a horrible riddle for me. It means plunging
+into all this poverty for good. But I can't work with her, Ella. She's
+impossible.”
+
+“You mean--you're going to break with Lady Sunderbund?”
+
+“I must.”
+
+“Then, Teddy!”--she was a woman groping for flight amidst intolerable
+perplexities--“why did you ever leave the church?”
+
+“Because I have ceased to believe--”
+
+“But had it nothing to do with Lady Sunderbund?”
+
+He stared at her in astonishment.
+
+“If it means breaking with that woman,” she said.
+
+“You mean,” he said, beginning for the first time to comprehend her,
+“that you don't mind the poverty?”
+
+“Poverty!” she cried. “I cared for nothing but the disgrace.”
+
+“Disgrace?”
+
+“Oh, never mind, Ted! If it isn't true, if I've been dreaming....”
+
+Instead of a woman stunned by a life sentence of poverty, he saw his
+wife rejoicing as if she had heard good news.
+
+Their minds were held for a minute by the sound of some one knocking
+at the house door; one of the girls opened the door, there was a brief
+hubbub in the passage and then they heard a cry of “Eleanor!” through
+the folding doors.
+
+“There's Eleanor,” he said, realizing he had told his wife nothing of
+the encounter in Hyde Park.
+
+They heard Eleanor's clear voice: “Where's Mummy? Or Daddy?” and then:
+“Can't stay now, dears. Where's Mummy or Daddy?”
+
+“I ought to have told you,” said Scrope quickly. “I met Eleanor in the
+Park. By accident. She's come up unexpectedly. To meet a boy going to
+the front. Quite a nice boy. Son of Riverton the doctor. The parting had
+made them understand one another. It's all right, Ella. It's a little
+irregular, but I'd stake my life on the boy. She's very lucky.”
+
+Eleanor appeared through the folding doors. She came to business at
+once.
+
+“I promised you I'd come back to supper here, Daddy,” she said. “But I
+don't want to have supper here. I want to stay out late.”
+
+She saw her mother look perplexed. “Hasn't Daddy told you?”
+
+“But where is young Riverton?”
+
+“He's outside.”
+
+Eleanor became aware of a broad chink in the folding doors that was
+making the dining-room an auditorium for their dialogue. She shut them
+deftly.
+
+“I have told Mummy,” Scrope explained. “Bring him in to supper. We ought
+to see him.”
+
+Eleanor hesitated. She indicated her sisters beyond the folding doors.
+“They'll all be watching us, Mummy,” she said. “We'd be uncomfortable.
+And besides--”
+
+“But you can't go out and dine with him alone!”
+
+“Oh, Mummy! It's our only chance.”
+
+“Customs are changing,” said Scrope.
+
+“But can they?” asked Lady Ella.
+
+“I don't see why not.”
+
+The mother was still doubtful, but she was in no mood to cross her
+husband that night. “It's an exceptional occasion,” said Scrope, and
+Eleanor knew her point was won. She became radiant. “I can be late?”
+
+Scrope handed her his latch-key without a word.
+
+“You dear kind things,” she said, and went to the door. Then turned and
+came back and kissed her father. Then she kissed her mother. “It is
+so kind of you,” she said, and was gone. They listened to her passage
+through a storm of questions in the dining-room.
+
+“Three months ago that would have shocked me,” said Lady Ella.
+
+“You haven't seen the boy,” said Scrope.
+
+“But the appearances!”
+
+“Aren't we rather breaking with appearances?” he said.
+
+“And he goes to-morrow--perhaps to get killed,” he added. “A lad like
+a schoolboy. A young thing. Because of the political foolery that we
+priests and teachers have suffered in the place of the Kingdom of God,
+because we have allowed the religion of Europe to become a lie; because
+no man spoke the word of God. You see--when I see that--see those two,
+those children of one-and-twenty, wrenched by tragedy, beginning with
+a parting.... It's like a knife slashing at all our appearances and
+discretions.... Think of our lovemaking....”
+
+The front door banged.
+
+He had some idea of resuming their talk. But his was a scattered mind
+now.
+
+“It's a quarter to eight,” he said as if in explanation.
+
+“I must see to the supper,” said Lady Ella.
+
+(16)
+
+
+There was an air of tension at supper as though the whole family felt
+that momentous words impended. But Phoebe had emerged victorious from
+her mathematical struggle, and she seemed to eat with better appetite
+than she had shown for some time. It was a cold meat supper; Lady Ella
+had found it impossible to keep up the regular practice of a cooked
+dinner in the evening, and now it was only on Thursdays that the
+Scropes, to preserve their social tradition, dressed and dined; the rest
+of the week they supped. Lady Ella never talked very much at supper;
+this evening was no exception. Clementina talked of London University
+and Bedford College; she had been making enquiries; Daphne described
+some of the mistresses at her new school. The feeling that something was
+expected had got upon Scrope's nerves. He talked a little in a flat and
+obvious way, and lapsed into thoughtful silences. While supper was being
+cleared away he went back into his study.
+
+Thence he returned to the dining-room hearthrug as his family resumed
+their various occupations.
+
+He tried to speak in a casual conversational tone.
+
+“I want to tell you all,” he said, “of something that has happened
+to-day.”
+
+He waited. Phoebe had begun to figure at a fresh sheet of computations.
+Miriam bent her head closer over her work, as though she winced at what
+was coming. Daphne and Clementina looked at one another. Their eyes said
+“Eleanor!” But he was too full of his own intention to read that glance.
+Only his wife regarded him attentively.
+
+“It concerns you all,” he said.
+
+He looked at Phoebe. He saw Lady Ella's hand go out and touch the girl's
+hand gently to make her desist. Phoebe obeyed, with a little sigh.
+
+“I want to tell you that to-day I refused an income that would certainly
+have exceeded fifteen hundred pounds a year.”
+
+Clementina looked up now. This was not what she expected. Her expression
+conveyed protesting enquiry.
+
+“I want you all to understand why I did that and why we are in the
+position we are in, and what lies before us. I want you to know what has
+been going on in my mind.”
+
+He looked down at the hearthrug, and tried to throw off a memory of his
+Princhester classes for young women, that oppressed him. His manner
+he forced to a more familiar note. He stuck his hands into his trouser
+pockets.
+
+“You know, my dears, I had to give up the church. I just simply didn't
+believe any more in orthodox Church teaching. And I feel I've never
+explained that properly to you. Not at all clearly. I want to explain
+that now. It's a queer thing, I know, for me to say to you, but I want
+you to understand that I am a religious man. I believe that God matters
+more than wealth or comfort or position or the respect of men, that he
+also matters more than your comfort and prosperity. God knows I have
+cared for your comfort and prosperity. I don't want you to think that in
+all these changes we have been through lately, I haven't been aware of
+all the discomfort into which you have come--the relative discomfort.
+Compared with Princhester this is dark and crowded and poverty-stricken.
+I have never felt crowded before, but in this house I know you are
+horribly crowded. It is a house that seems almost contrived for small
+discomforts. This narrow passage outside; the incessant going up and
+down stairs. And there are other things. There is the blankness of our
+London Sundays. What is the good of pretending? They are desolating.
+There's the impossibility too of getting good servants to come into our
+dug-out kitchen. I'm not blind to all these sordid consequences. But all
+the same, God has to be served first. I had to come to this. I felt I
+could not serve God any longer as a bishop in the established church,
+because I did not believe that the established church was serving God.
+I struggled against that conviction--and I struggled against it largely
+for your sakes. But I had to obey my conviction.... I haven't talked
+to you about these things as much as I should have done, but partly at
+least that is due to the fact that my own mind has been changing and
+reconsidering, going forward and going back, and in that fluid state
+it didn't seem fair to tell you things that I might presently find
+mistaken. But now I begin to feel that I have really thought out things,
+and that they are definite enough to tell you....”
+
+He paused and resumed. “A number of things have helped to change the
+opinions in which I grew up and in which you have grown up. There were
+worries at Princhester; I didn't let you know much about them, but there
+were. There was something harsh and cruel in that atmosphere. I saw for
+the first time--it's a lesson I'm still only learning--how harsh and
+greedy rich people and employing people are to poor people and working
+people, and how ineffective our church was to make things better. That
+struck me. There were religious disputes in the diocese too, and they
+shook me. I thought my faith was built on a rock, and I found it was
+built on sand. It was slipping and sliding long before the war. But the
+war brought it down. Before the war such a lot of things in England and
+Europe seemed like a comedy or a farce, a bad joke that one tolerated.
+One tried half consciously, half avoiding the knowledge of what one was
+doing, to keep one's own little circle and life civilized. The war shook
+all those ideas of isolation, all that sort of evasion, down. The world
+is the rightful kingdom of God; we had left its affairs to kings and
+emperors and suchlike impostors, to priests and profit-seekers and
+greedy men. We were genteel condoners. The war has ended that. It
+thrusts into all our lives. It brings death so close--A fortnight ago
+twenty-seven people were killed and injured within a mile of this by
+Zeppelin bombs.... Every one loses some one.... Because through all that
+time men like myself were going through our priestly mummeries, abasing
+ourselves to kings and politicians, when we ought to have been crying
+out: 'No! No! There is no righteousness in the world, there is no right
+government, except it be the kingdom of God.'”
+
+He paused and looked at them. They were all listening to him now. But he
+was still haunted by a dread of preaching in his own family. He dropped
+to the conversational note again.
+
+“You see what I had in mind. I saw I must come out of this, and preach
+the kingdom of God. That was my idea. I don't want to force it upon you,
+but I want you to understand why I acted as I did. But let me come to
+the particular thing that has happened to-day. I did not think when I
+made my final decision to leave the church that it meant such poverty as
+this we are living in--permanently. That is what I want to make clear to
+you. I thought there would be a temporary dip into dinginess, but that
+was all. There was a plan; at the time it seemed a right and reasonable
+plan; for setting up a chapel in London, a very plain and simple
+undenominational chapel, for the simple preaching of the world kingdom
+of God. There was some one who seemed prepared to meet all the immediate
+demands for such a chapel.”
+
+“Was it Lady Sunderbund?” asked Clementina.
+
+Scrope was pulled up abruptly. “Yes,” he said. “It seemed at first a
+quite hopeful project.”
+
+“We'd have hated that,” said Clementina, with a glance as if for assent,
+at her mother. “We should all have hated that.”
+
+“Anyhow it has fallen through.”
+
+“We don't mind that,” said Clementina, and Daphne echoed her words.
+
+“I don't see that there is any necessity to import this note
+of--hostility to Lady Sunderbund into this matter.” He addressed
+himself rather more definitely to Lady Ella. “She's a woman of a very
+extraordinary character, highly emotional, energetic, generous to an
+extraordinary extent....”
+
+Daphne made a little noise like a comment.
+
+A faint acerbity in her father's voice responded.
+
+“Anyhow you make a mistake if you think that the personality of Lady
+Sunderbund has very much to do with this thing now. Her quality may have
+brought out certain aspects of the situation rather more sharply than
+they might have been brought out under other circumstances, but if
+this chapel enterprise had been suggested by quite a different sort of
+person, by a man, or by a committee, in the end I think I should have
+come to the same conclusion. Leave Lady Sunderbund out. Any chapel was
+impossible. It is just this specialization that has been the trouble
+with religion. It is just this tendency to make it the business of
+a special sort of man, in a special sort of building, on a special
+day--Every man, every building, every day belongs equally to God.
+That is my conviction. I think that the only possible existing sort of
+religions meeting is something after the fashion of the Quaker meeting.
+In that there is no professional religious man at all; not a trace of
+the sacrifices to the ancient gods.... And no room for a professional
+religions man....” He felt his argument did a little escape him. He
+snatched, “That is what I want to make clear to you. God is not a
+speciality; he is a universal interest.”
+
+He stopped. Both Daphne and Clementina seemed disposed to say something
+and did not say anything.
+
+Miriam was the first to speak. “Daddy,” she said, “I know I'm stupid.
+But are we still Christians?”
+
+“I want you to think for yourselves.”
+
+“But I mean,” said Miriam, “are we--something like Quakers--a sort of
+very broad Christians?”
+
+“You are what you choose to be. If you want to keep in the church, then
+you must keep in the church. If you feel that the Christian doctrine is
+alive, then it is alive so far as you are concerned.”
+
+“But the creeds?” asked Clementina.
+
+He shook his head. “So far as Christianity is defined by its creeds,
+I am not a Christian. If we are going to call any sort of religious
+feeling that has a respect for Jesus, Christianity, then no doubt I am
+a Christian. But so was Mohammed at that rate. Let me tell you what I
+believe. I believe in God, I believe in the immediate presence of God in
+every human life, I believe that our lives have to serve the Kingdom of
+God....”
+
+“That practically is what Mr. Chasters calls 'The Core of Truth in
+Christianity.'”
+
+“You have been reading him?”
+
+“Eleanor lent me the book. But Mr. Chasters keeps his living.”
+
+“I am not Chasters,” said Scrope stiffly, and then relenting: “What he
+does may be right for him. But I could not do as he does.”
+
+Lady Ella had said no word for some time.
+
+“I would be ashamed,” she said quietly, “if you had not done as you
+have done. I don't mind--The girls don't mind--all this.... Not when we
+understand--as we do now.”
+
+That was the limit of her eloquence.
+
+“Not now that we understand, Daddy,” said Clementina, and a faint
+flavour of Lady Sunderbund seemed to pass and vanish.
+
+There was a queer little pause. He stood rather distressed and
+perplexed, because the talk had not gone quite as he had intended it
+to go. It had deteriorated towards personal issues. Phoebe broke the
+awkwardness by jumping up and coming to her father. “Dear Daddy,” she
+said, and kissed him.
+
+“We didn't understand properly,” said Clementina, in the tone of one who
+explains away much--that had never been spoken....
+
+“Daddy,” said Miriam with an inspiration, “may I play something to you
+presently?”
+
+“But the fire!” interjected Lady Ella, disposing of that idea.
+
+“I want you to know, all of you, the faith I have,” he said.
+
+Daphne had remained seated at the table.
+
+“Are we never to go to church again?” she asked, as if at a loss.
+
+(17)
+
+
+Scrope went back into his little study. He felt shy and awkward with his
+daughters now. He felt it would be difficult to get back to usualness
+with them. To-night it would be impossible. To-morrow he must come
+down to breakfast as though their talk had never occurred.... In his
+rehearsal of this deliverance during his walk home he had spoken much
+more plainly of his sense of the coming of God to rule the world and end
+the long age of the warring nations and competing traders, and he had
+intended to speak with equal plainness of the passionate subordination
+of the individual life to this great common purpose of God and man, an
+aspect he had scarcely mentioned at all. But in that little room, in the
+presence of those dear familiar people, those great horizons of life
+had vanished. The room with its folding doors had fixed the scale.
+The wallpaper had smothered the Kingdom of God; he had been, he felt,
+domestic; it had been an after-supper talk. He had been put out, too, by
+the mention of Lady Sunderbund and the case of Chasters....
+
+In his study he consoled himself for this diminution of his intention.
+It had taken him five years, he reflected, to get to his present real
+sense of God's presence and to his personal subordination to God's
+purpose. It had been a little absurd, he perceived, to expect these
+girls to leap at once to a complete understanding of the halting hints,
+the allusive indications of the thoughts that now possessed his soul. He
+tried like some maiden speaker to recall exactly what it was he had said
+and what it was he had forgotten to say.... This was merely a beginning,
+merely a beginning.
+
+After the girls had gone to bed, Lady Ella came to him and she was
+glowing and tender; she was in love again as she had not been since the
+shadow had first fallen between them. “I was so glad you spoke to them,”
+ she said. “They had been puzzled. But they are dear loyal girls.”
+
+He tried to tell her rather more plainly what he felt about the whole
+question of religion in their lives, but eloquence had departed from
+him.
+
+“You see, Ella, life cannot get out of tragedy--and sordid
+tragedy--until we bring about the Kingdom of God. It's no unreality that
+has made me come out of the church.”
+
+“No, dear. No,” she said soothingly and reassuringly. “With all these
+mere boys going to the most dreadful deaths in the trenches, with death,
+hardship and separation running amok in the world--”
+
+“One has to do something,” she agreed.
+
+“I know, dear,” he said, “that all this year of doubt and change has
+been a dreadful year for you.”
+
+“It was stupid of me,” she said, “but I have been so unhappy. It's
+over now--but I was wretched. And there was nothing I could say....
+I prayed.... It isn't the poverty I feared ever, but the disgrace.
+Now--I'm happy. I'm happy again.
+
+“But how far do you come with me?”
+
+“I'm with you.”
+
+“But,” he said, “you are still a churchwoman?”
+
+“I don't know,” she said. “I don't mind.”
+
+He stared at her.
+
+“But I thought always that was what hurt you most, my breach with the
+church.”
+
+“Things are so different now,” she said.
+
+Her heart dissolved within her into tender possessiveness. There came
+flooding into her mind the old phrases of an ancient story: “Whither
+thou goest I will go... thy people shall be my people and thy God my
+God.... The Lord do so to me and more also if aught but death part thee
+and me.”
+
+Just those words would Lady Ella have said to her husband now, but she
+was capable of no such rhetoric.
+
+“Whither thou goest,” she whispered almost inaudibly, and she could get
+no further. “My dear,” she said.
+
+(18)
+
+
+At two o'clock the next morning Scrope was still up. He was sitting over
+the snoring gas fire in his study. He did not want to go to bed. His
+mind was too excited, he knew, for any hope of sleep. In the last twelve
+hours, since he had gone out across the park to his momentous talk with
+Lady Sunderbund, it seemed to him that his life had passed through its
+cardinal crisis and come to its crown and decision. The spiritual voyage
+that had begun five years ago amidst a stormy succession of theological
+nightmares had reached harbour at last. He was established now in the
+sure conviction of God's reality, and of his advent to unify the lives
+of men and to save mankind. Some unobserved process in his mind had
+perfected that conviction, behind the cloudy veil of his vacillations
+and moods. Surely that work was finished now, and the day's experience
+had drawn the veil and discovered God established for ever.
+
+He contrasted this simple and overruling knowledge of God as the supreme
+fact in a practical world with that vague and ineffective subject for
+sentiment who had been the “God” of his Anglican days. Some theologian
+once spoke of God as “the friend behind phenomena”; that Anglican deity
+had been rather a vague flummery behind court and society, wealth,
+“respectability,” and the comfortable life. And even while he had lived
+in lipservice to that complaisant compromise, this true God had been
+here, this God he now certainly professed, waiting for his allegiance,
+waiting to take up the kingship of this distraught and bloodstained
+earth. The finding of God is but the stripping of bandages from the
+eyes. Seek and ye shall find....
+
+He whispered four words very softly: “The Kingdom of God!”
+
+He was quite sure he had that now, quite sure.
+
+The Kingdom of God!
+
+That now was the form into which all his life must fall. He recalled his
+vision of the silver sphere and of ten thousand diverse minds about the
+world all making their ways to the same one conclusion. Here at last was
+a king and emperor for mankind for whom one need have neither contempt
+nor resentment; here was an aim for which man might forge the steel
+and wield the scalpel, write and paint and till and teach. Upon this
+conception he must model all his life. Upon this basis he must found
+friendships and co-operations. All the great religions, Christianity,
+Islam, in the days of their power and honesty, had proclaimed the advent
+of this kingdom of God. It had been their common inspiration. A religion
+surrenders when it abandons the promise of its Millennium. He had
+recovered that ancient and immortal hope. All men must achieve it, and
+with their achievement the rule of God begins. He muttered his faith. It
+made it more definite to put it into words and utter it. “It comes.
+It surely comes. To-morrow I begin. I will do no work that goes not
+Godward. Always now it shall be the truth as near as I can put it.
+Always now it shall be the service of the commonweal as well as I can
+do it. I will live for the ending of all false kingship and priestcraft,
+for the eternal growth of the spirit of man....”
+
+He was, he knew clearly, only one common soldier in a great army that
+was finding its way to enlistment round and about the earth. He was not
+alone. While the kings of this world fought for dominion these others
+gathered and found themselves and one another, these others of the faith
+that grows plain, these men who have resolved to end the bloodstained
+chronicles of the Dynasts and the miseries of a world that trades in
+life, for ever. They were many men, speaking divers tongues. He was
+but one who obeyed the worldwide impulse. He could smile at the artless
+vanity that had blinded him to the import of his earlier visions, that
+had made him imagine himself a sole discoverer, a new Prophet, that had
+brought him so near to founding a new sect. Every soldier in the new
+host was a recruiting sergeant according to his opportunity.... And none
+was leader. Only God was leader....
+
+“The achievement of the Kingdom of God;” this was his calling.
+Henceforth this was his business in life....
+
+For a time he indulged in vague dreams of that kingdom of God on earth
+of which he would be one of the makers; it was a dream of a shadowy
+splendour of cities, of great scientific achievements, of a universal
+beauty, of beautiful people living in the light of God, of a splendid
+adventure, thrusting out at last among the stars. But neither his
+natural bent nor his mental training inclined him to mechanical or
+administrative explicitness. Much more was his dream a vision of
+men inwardly ennobled and united in spirit. He saw history growing
+reasonable and life visibly noble as mankind realized the divine aim.
+All the outward peace and order, the joy of physical existence finely
+conceived, the mounting power and widening aim were but the expression
+and verification of the growth of God within. Then we would bear
+children for finer ends than the blood and mud of battlefields. Life
+would tower up like a great flame. By faith we reached forward to that.
+The vision grew more splendid as it grew more metaphorical. And the
+price one paid for that; one gave sham dignities, false honour, a
+Levitical righteousness, immediate peace, one bartered kings and
+churches for God.... He looked at the mean, poverty-struck room, he
+marked the dinginess and tawdriness of its detail and all the sordid
+evidences of ungracious bargaining and grudging service in its
+appointments. For all his life now he would have to live in such rooms.
+He who had been one of the lucky ones.... Well, men were living in
+dug-outs and dying gaily in muddy trenches, they had given limbs and
+lives, eyes and the joy of movement, prosperity and pride, for a smaller
+cause and a feebler assurance than this that he had found....
+
+(19)
+
+
+Presently his thoughts were brought back to his family by the sounds of
+Eleanor's return. He heard her key in the outer door; he heard her move
+about in the hall and then slip lightly up to bed. He did not go out to
+speak to her, and she did not note the light under his door.
+
+He would talk to her later when this discovery of her own emotions no
+longer dominated her mind. He recalled her departing figure and how she
+had walked, touching and looking up to her young mate, and he a little
+leaning to her....
+
+“God bless them and save them,” he said....
+
+He thought of her sisters. They had said but little to his clumsy
+explanations. He thought of the years and experience that they must
+needs pass through before they could think the fulness of his present
+thoughts, and so he tempered his disappointment. They were a gallant
+group, he felt. He had to thank Ella and good fortune that so they were.
+There was Clementina with her odd quick combatant sharpness, a harder
+being than Eleanor, but nevertheless a fine-spirited and even more
+independent. There was Miriam, indefatigably kind. Phoebe too had a real
+passion of the intellect and Daphne an innate disposition to service.
+But it was strange how they had taken his proclamation of a conclusive
+breach with the church as though it was a command they must, at least
+outwardly, obey. He had expected them to be more deeply shocked; he had
+thought he would have to argue against objections and convert them to
+his views. Their acquiescence was strange. They were content he should
+think all this great issue out and give his results to them. And his
+wife, well as he knew her, had surprised him. He thought of her words:
+“Whither thou goest--”
+
+He was dissatisfied with this unconditional agreement. Why could not
+his wife meet God as he had met God? Why must Miriam put the fantastic
+question--as though it was not for her to decide: “Are we still
+Christians?” And pursuing this thought, why couldn't Lady Sunderbund set
+up in religion for herself without going about the world seeking for
+a priest and prophet. Were women Undines who must get their souls from
+mortal men? And who was it tempted men to set themselves up as priests?
+It was the wife, the disciple, the lover, who was the last, the most
+fatal pitfall on the way to God.
+
+He began to pray, still sitting as he prayed.
+
+“Oh God!” he prayed. “Thou who has shown thyself to me, let me never
+forget thee again. Save me from forgetfulness. And show thyself to those
+I love; show thyself to all mankind. Use me, O God, use me; but keep my
+soul alive. Save me from the presumption of the trusted servant; save me
+from the vanity of authority....
+
+“And let thy light shine upon all those who are so dear to me.... Save
+them from me. Take their dear loyalty....”
+
+He paused. A flushed, childishly miserable face that stared indignantly
+through glittering tears, rose before his eyes. He forgot that he had
+been addressing God.
+
+“How can I help you, you silly thing?” he said. “I would give my own
+soul to know that God had given his peace to you. I could not do as you
+wished. And I have hurt you!... You hurt yourself.... But all the time
+you would have hampered me and tempted me--and wasted yourself. It was
+impossible.... And yet you are so fine!”
+
+He was struck by another aspect.
+
+“Ella was happy--partly because Lady Sunderbund was hurt and left
+desolated....”
+
+“Both of them are still living upon nothings. Living for nothings. A
+phantom way of living....”
+
+He stared blankly at the humming blue gas jets amidst the incandescent
+asbestos for a space.
+
+“Make them understand,” he pleaded, as though he spoke confidentially of
+some desirable and reasonable thing to a friend who sat beside him. “You
+see it is so hard for them until they understand. It is easy enough when
+one understands. Easy--” He reflected for some moments--“It is as if
+they could not exist--except in relationship to other definite people.
+I want them to exist--as now I exist--in relationship to God. Knowing
+God....”
+
+But now he was talking to himself again.
+
+“So far as one can know God,” he said presently.
+
+For a while he remained frowning at the fire. Then he bent forward,
+turned out the gas, arose with the air of a man who relinquishes a
+difficult task. “One is limited,” he said. “All one's ideas must fall
+within one's limitations. Faith is a sort of tour de force. A feat of
+the imagination. For such things as we are. Naturally--naturally.... One
+perceives it clearly only in rare moments.... That alters nothing....”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:
+
+     LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
+     KIPPS
+     MR. POLLY
+     THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
+     THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
+     ANN VERONICA
+     TONO BUNGAY
+     MARRIAGE
+     BEALBY
+     THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
+     THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
+     THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+     MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
+
+     The following fantastic and imaginative romances:
+     THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
+     THE TIME MACHINE
+     THE WONDERFUL VISIT
+     THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
+     THE SEA LADY
+     THE SLEEPER AWAKES
+     THE FOOD OF THE GODS
+     THE WAR IN THE AIR
+     THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
+     IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
+     THE WORLD SET FREE
+
+     And numerous Short Stories now collected in
+     One Volume under the title of
+     THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
+
+     A Series of books upon Social, Religious and
+     Political questions:
+     ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
+     MANKIND IN THE MAKING
+     FIRST AND LAST THINGS (RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY)
+     NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
+     A MODERN UTOPIA
+     THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
+     AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
+     WHAT IS COMING?
+     WAR AND THE FUTURE
+     GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
+
+     And two little books about children's play, called:
+     FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Soul of a Bishop, by H. G. Wells
+
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+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Soul of a Bishop, by H. G. Wells
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
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+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Soul of a Bishop, by H. G. Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Soul of a Bishop
+
+Author: H. G. Wells
+
+Release Date: February 18, 2006 [EBook #1269]
+Last Updated: March 2, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOUL OF A BISHOP ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By H. G. Wells
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <big><b>THE SOUL OF A BISHOP</b></big> </a>
+    </p>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER THE FIRST </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE DREAM
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER THE SECOND</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER THE THIRD</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          INSOMNIA
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER THE FOURTH</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER THE FIFTH</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE FIRST VISION
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER THE SIXTH</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          EXEGETICAL
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER THE SEVENTH&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE SECOND VISION
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER THE EIGHTH</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE NEW WORLD
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER THE NINTH</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE THIRD VISION
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FIRST - THE DREAM
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      IT was a scene of bitter disputation. A hawk-nosed young man with a
+      pointing finger was prominent. His face worked violently, his lips moved
+      very rapidly, but what he said was inaudible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Behind him the little rufous man with the big eyes twitched at his robe
+      and offered suggestions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And behind these two clustered a great multitude of heated, excited,
+      swarthy faces....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The emperor sat on his golden throne in the midst of the gathering,
+      commanding silence by gestures, speaking inaudibly to them in a tongue the
+      majority did not use, and then prevailing. They ceased their
+      interruptions, and the old man, Arius, took up the debate. For a time all
+      those impassioned faces were intent upon him; they listened as though they
+      sought occasion, and suddenly as if by a preconcerted arrangement they
+      were all thrusting their fingers into their ears and knitting their brows
+      in assumed horror; some were crying aloud and making as if to fly. Some
+      indeed tucked up their garments and fled. They spread out into a pattern.
+      They were like the little monks who run from St. Jerome's lion in the
+      picture by Carpaccio. Then one zealot rushed forward and smote the old man
+      heavily upon the mouth....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hall seemed to grow vaster and vaster, the disputing, infuriated
+      figures multiplied to an innumerable assembly, they drove about like
+      snowflakes in a gale, they whirled in argumentative couples, they spun in
+      eddies of contradiction, they made extraordinary patterns, and then amidst
+      the cloudy darkness of the unfathomable dome above them there appeared and
+      increased a radiant triangle in which shone an eye. The eye and the
+      triangle filled the heavens, sent out flickering rays, glowed to a
+      blinding incandescence, seemed to be speaking words of thunder that were
+      nevertheless inaudible. It was as if that thunder filled the heavens, it
+      was as if it were nothing but the beating artery in the sleeper's ear. The
+      attention strained to hear and comprehend, and on the very verge of
+      comprehension snapped like a fiddle-string.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nicoea!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The word remained like a little ash after a flare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sleeper had awakened and lay very still, oppressed by a sense of
+      intellectual effort that had survived the dream in which it had arisen.
+      Was it so that things had happened? The slumber-shadowed mind, moving
+      obscurely, could not determine whether it was so or not. Had they indeed
+      behaved in this manner when the great mystery was established? Who said
+      they stopped their ears with their fingers and fled, shouting with horror?
+      Shouting? Was it Eusebius or Athanasius? Or Sozomen.... Some letter or
+      apology by Athanasius?... And surely it was impossible that the Trinity
+      could have appeared visibly as a triangle and an eye. Above such an
+      assembly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was mere dreaming, of course. Was it dreaming after Raphael? After
+      Raphael? The drowsy mind wandered into a side issue. Was the picture that
+      had suggested this dream the one in the Vatican where all the Fathers of
+      the Church are shown disputing together? But there surely God and the Son
+      themselves were painted with a symbol&mdash;some symbol&mdash;also? But
+      was that disputation about the Trinity at all? Wasn't it rather about a
+      chalice and a dove? Of course it was a chalice and a dove! Then where did
+      one see the triangle and the eye? And men disputing? Some such picture
+      there was....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What a lot of disputing there had been! What endless disputing! Which had
+      gone on. Until last night. When this very disagreeable young man with the
+      hawk nose and the pointing finger had tackled one when one was sorely
+      fagged, and disputed; disputed. Rebuked and disputed. &ldquo;Answer me this,&rdquo; he
+      had said.... And still one's poor brains disputed and would not rest....
+      About the Trinity....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The brain upon the pillow was now wearily awake. It was at once hopelessly
+      awake and active and hopelessly unprogressive. It was like some floating
+      stick that had got caught in an eddy in a river, going round and round and
+      round. And round. Eternally&mdash;eternally&mdash;eternally begotten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what possible meaning do you attach then to such a phrase as
+      eternally begotten?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The brain upon the pillow stared hopelessly at this question, without an
+      answer, without an escape. The three repetitions spun round and round,
+      became a swiftly revolving triangle, like some electric sign that had got
+      beyond control, in the midst of which stared an unwinking and resentful
+      eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every one knows that expedient of the sleepless, the counting of sheep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You lie quite still, you breathe regularly, you imagine sheep jumping over
+      a gate, one after another, you count them quietly and slowly until you
+      count yourself off through a fading string of phantom numbers to number
+      Nod....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But sheep, alas! suggest an episcopal crook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And presently a black sheep had got into the succession and was struggling
+      violently with the crook about its leg, a hawk-nosed black sheep full of
+      reproof, with disordered hair and a pointing finger. A young man with a
+      most disagreeable voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At which the other sheep took heart and, deserting the numbered
+      succession, came and sat about the fire in a big drawing-room and argued
+      also. In particular there was Lady Sunderbund, a pretty fragile tall woman
+      in the corner, richly jewelled, who sat with her pretty eyes watching and
+      her lips compressed. What had she thought of it? She had said very little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is an unusual thing for a mixed gathering of this sort to argue about
+      the Trinity. Simply because a tired bishop had fallen into their party. It
+      was not fair to him to pretend that the atmosphere was a liberal and
+      inquiring one, when the young man who had sat still and dormant by the
+      table was in reality a keen and bitter Irish Roman Catholic. Then the
+      question, a question-begging question, was put quite suddenly, without
+      preparation or prelude, by surprise. &ldquo;Why, Bishop, was the Spermaticos
+      Logos identified with the Second and not the Third Person of the Trinity?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was indiscreet, it was silly, to turn upon the speaker and affect an
+      air of disengagement and modernity and to say: &ldquo;Ah, that indeed is the
+      unfortunate aspect of the whole affair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whereupon the fierce young man had exploded with: &ldquo;To that, is it, that
+      you Anglicans have come?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole gathering had given itself up to the disputation, Lady
+      Sunderbund, an actress, a dancer&mdash;though she, it is true, did not say
+      very much&mdash;a novelist, a mechanical expert of some sort, a railway
+      peer, geniuses, hairy and Celtic, people of no clearly definable position,
+      but all quite unequal to the task of maintaining that air of reverent
+      vagueness, that tenderness of touch, which is by all Anglican standards
+      imperative in so deep, so mysterious, and, nowadays, in mixed society at
+      least, so infrequent a discussion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was like animals breaking down a fence about some sacred spot. Within a
+      couple of minutes the affair had become highly improper. They had raised
+      their voices, they had spoken with the utmost familiarity of almost
+      unspeakable things. There had been even attempts at epigram. Athanasian
+      epigrams. Bent the novelist had doubted if originally there had been a
+      Third Person in the Trinity at all. He suggested a reaction from a
+      too-Manichaean dualism at some date after the time of St. John's Gospel.
+      He maintained obstinately that that Gospel was dualistic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The unpleasant quality of the talk was far more manifest in the retrospect
+      than it had been at the time. It had seemed then bold and strange, but not
+      impossible; now in the cold darkness it seemed sacrilegious. And the
+      bishop's share, which was indeed only the weak yielding of a tired man to
+      an atmosphere he had misjudged, became a disgraceful display of levity and
+      bad faith. They had baited him. Some one had said that nowadays every one
+      was an Arian, knowingly or unknowingly. They had not concealed their
+      conviction that the bishop did not really believe in the Creeds he
+      uttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that unfortunate first admission stuck terribly in his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh! Why had he made it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sleep had gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The awakened sleeper groaned, sat up in the darkness, and felt gropingly
+      in this unaccustomed bed and bedroom first for the edge of the bed and
+      then for the electric light that was possibly on the little bedside table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The searching hand touched something. A water-bottle. The hand resumed its
+      exploration. Here was something metallic and smooth, a stem. Either above
+      or below there must be a switch....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The switch was found, grasped, and turned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The darkness fled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a mirror the sleeper saw the reflection of his face and a corner of the
+      bed in which he lay. The lamp had a tilted shade that threw a slanting bar
+      of shadow across the field of reflection, lighting a right-angled triangle
+      very brightly and leaving the rest obscure. The bed was a very great one,
+      a bed for the Anakim. It had a canopy with yellow silk curtains,
+      surmounted by a gilded crown of carved wood. Between the curtains was a
+      man's face, clean-shaven, pale, with disordered brown hair and weary,
+      pale-blue eyes. He was clad in purple pyjamas, and the hand that now ran
+      its fingers through the brown hair was long and lean and shapely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beside the bed was a convenient little table bearing the light, a
+      water-bottle and glass, a bunch of keys, a congested pocket-book, a
+      gold-banded fountain pen, and a gold watch that indicated a quarter past
+      three. On the lower edge of the picture in the mirror appeared the back of
+      a gilt chair, over which a garment of peculiar construction had been
+      carelessly thrown. It was in the form of that sleeveless cassock of
+      purple, opening at the side, whose lower flap is called a bishop's apron;
+      the corner of the frogged coat showed behind the chair-back, and the sash
+      lay crumpled on the floor. Black doeskin breeches, still warmly lined with
+      their pants, lay where they had been thrust off at the corner of the bed,
+      partly covering black hose and silver-buckled shoes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment the tired gaze of the man in the bed rested upon these
+      evidences of his episcopal dignity. Then he turned from them to the watch
+      at the bedside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He groaned helplessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These country doctors were no good. There wasn't a physician in the
+      diocese. He must go to London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked into the weary eyes of his reflection and said, as one makes a
+      reassuring promise, &ldquo;London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was being worried. He was being intolerably worried, and he was ill and
+      unable to sustain his positions. This doubt, this sudden discovery of
+      controversial unsoundness, was only one aspect of his general
+      neurasthenia. It had been creeping into his mind since the &ldquo;Light Unden
+      the Altar&rdquo; controversy. Now suddenly it had leapt upon him from his own
+      unwary lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The immediate trouble arose from his loyalty. He had followed the King's
+      example; he had become a total abstainer and, in addition, on his own
+      account he had ceased to smoke. And his digestion, which Princhester had
+      first made sensitive, was deranged. He was suffering chemically, suffering
+      one of those nameless sequences of maladjustments that still defy our
+      ordinary medical science. It was afflicting him with a general malaise, it
+      was affecting his energy, his temper, all the balance and comfort of his
+      nerves. All day he was weary; all night he was wakeful. He was estranged
+      from his body. He was distressed by a sense of detachment from the things
+      about him, by a curious intimation of unreality in everything he
+      experienced. And with that went this levity of conscience, a heaviness of
+      soul and a levity of conscience, that could make him talk as though the
+      Creeds did not matter&mdash;as though nothing mattered....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If only he could smoke!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was persuaded that a couple of Egyptian cigarettes, or three at the
+      outside, a day, would do wonders in restoring his nervous calm. That, and
+      just a weak whisky and soda at lunch and dinner. Suppose now&mdash;!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His conscience, his sense of honour, deserted him. Latterly he had had
+      several of these conscience-blanks; it was only when they were over that
+      he realized that they had occurred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One might smoke up the chimney, he reflected. But he had no cigarettes!
+      Perhaps if he were to slip downstairs....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why had he given up smoking?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He groaned aloud. He and his reflection eyed one another in mutual
+      despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There came before his memory the image of a boy's face, a swarthy little
+      boy, grinning, grinning with a horrible knowingness and pointing his
+      finger&mdash;an accusing finger. It had been the most exasperating,
+      humiliating, and shameful incident in the bishop's career. It was the
+      afternoon for his fortnightly address to the Shop-girls' Church
+      Association, and he had been seized with a panic fear, entirely irrational
+      and unjustifiable, that he would not be able to deliver the address. The
+      fear had arisen after lunch, had gripped his mind, and then as now had
+      come the thought, &ldquo;If only I could smoke!&rdquo; And he had smoked. It seemed
+      better to break a vow than fail the Association. He had fallen to the
+      temptation with a completeness that now filled him with shame and horror.
+      He had stalked Dunk, his valet-butler, out of the dining-room, had
+      affected to need a book from the book-case beyond the sideboard, had gone
+      insincerely to the sideboard humming &ldquo;From Greenland's icy mountains,&rdquo; and
+      then, glancing over his shoulder, had stolen one of his own cigarettes,
+      one of the fatter sort. With this and his bedroom matches he had gone off
+      to the bottom of the garden among the laurels, looked everywhere except
+      above the wall to be sure that he was alone, and at last lit up, only as
+      he raised his eyes in gratitude for the first blissful inhalation to
+      discover that dreadful little boy peeping at him from the crotch in the
+      yew-tree in the next garden. As though God had sent him to be a witness!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their eyes had met. The bishop recalled with an agonized distinctness
+      every moment, every error, of that shameful encounter. He had been too
+      surprised to conceal the state of affairs from the pitiless scrutiny of
+      those youthful eyes. He had instantly made as if to put the cigarette
+      behind his back, and then as frankly dropped it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His soul would not be more naked at the resurrection. The little boy had
+      stared, realized the state of affairs slowly but surely, pointed his
+      finger....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never had two human beings understood each other more completely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A dirty little boy! Capable no doubt of a thousand kindred scoundrelisms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed ages before the conscience-stricken bishop could tear himself
+      from the spot and walk back, with such a pretence of dignity as he could
+      muster, to the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And instead of the discourse he had prepared for the Shop-girls' Church
+      Association, he had preached on temptation and falling, and how he knew
+      they had all fallen, and how he understood and could sympathize with the
+      bitterness of a secret shame, a moving but unsuitable discourse that had
+      already been subjected to misconstruction and severe reproof in the local
+      press of Princhester.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the haunting thing in the bishop's memory was the face and gesture of
+      the little boy. That grubby little finger stabbed him to the heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, God!&rdquo; he groaned. &ldquo;The meanness of it! How did I bring myself&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned out the light convulsively, and rolled over in the bed, making a
+      sort of cocoon of himself. He bored his head into the pillow and groaned,
+      and then struggled impatiently to throw the bed-clothes off himself. Then
+      he sat up and talked aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must go to Brighton-Pomfrey,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And get a medical dispensation.
+      If I do not smoke&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused for a long time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then his voice sounded again in the darkness, speaking quietly, speaking
+      with a note almost of satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall go mad. I must smoke or I shall go mad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a long time he sat up in the great bed with his arms about his knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fearful things came to him; things at once dreadfully blasphemous and
+      entirely weak-minded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The triangle and the eye became almost visible upon the black background
+      of night. They were very angry. They were spinning round and round faster
+      and faster. Because he was a bishop and because really he did not believe
+      fully and completely in the Trinity. At one and the same time he did not
+      believe in the Trinity and was terrified by the anger of the Trinity at
+      his unbelief.... He was afraid. He was aghast.... And oh! he was weary....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rubbed his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I could have a cup of tea!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he perceived with surprise that he had not thought of praying. What
+      should he say? To what could he pray?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried not to think of that whizzing Triangle, that seemed now to be
+      nailed like a Catherine wheel to the very centre of his forehead, and yet
+      at the same time to be at the apex of the universe. Against that&mdash;for
+      protection against that&mdash;he was praying. It was by a great effort
+      that at last he pronounced the words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord ....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently he had turned up his light, and was prowling about the room. The
+      clear inky dinginess that comes before the raw dawn of a spring morning,
+      found his white face at the window, looking out upon the great terrace and
+      the park.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE SECOND - THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      IT was only in the last few years that the bishop had experienced these
+      nervous and mental crises. He was a belated doubter. Whatever questionings
+      had marked his intellectual adolescence had either been very slight or had
+      been too adequately answered to leave any serious scars upon his
+      convictions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And even now he felt that he was afflicted physically rather than
+      mentally, that some protective padding of nerve-sheath or brain-case had
+      worn thin and weak, and left him a prey to strange disturbances, rather
+      than that any new process of thought was eating into his mind. These
+      doubts in his mind were still not really doubts; they were rather alien
+      and, for the first time, uncontrolled movements of his intelligence. He
+      had had a sheltered upbringing; he was the well-connected son of a
+      comfortable rectory, the only son and sole survivor of a family of three;
+      he had been carefully instructed and he had been a willing learner; it had
+      been easy and natural to take many things for granted. It had been very
+      easy and pleasant for him to take the world as he found it and God as he
+      found Him. Indeed for all his years up to manhood he had been able to take
+      life exactly as in his infancy he took his carefully warmed and prepared
+      bottle&mdash;unquestioningly and beneficially.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And indeed that has been the way with most bishops since bishops began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a busy continuous process that turns boys into bishops, and it will
+      stand few jars or discords. The student of ecclesiastical biography will
+      find that an early vocation has in every age been almost universal among
+      them; few are there among these lives that do not display the incipient
+      bishop from the tenderest years. Bishop How of Wakefield composed hymns
+      before he was eleven, and Archbishop Benson when scarcely older possessed
+      a little oratory in which he conducted services and&mdash;a pleasant touch
+      of the more secular boy&mdash;which he protected from a too inquisitive
+      sister by means of a booby trap. It is rare that those marked for
+      episcopal dignities go so far into the outer world as Archbishop Lang of
+      York, who began as a barrister. This early predestination has always been
+      the common episcopal experience. Archbishop Benson's early attempts at
+      religious services remind one both of St. Thomas a Becket, the &ldquo;boy
+      bishop,&rdquo; and those early ceremonies of St. Athanasius which were observed
+      and inquired upon by the good bishop Alexander. (For though still a tender
+      infant, St. Athanasius with perfect correctness and validity was baptizing
+      a number of his innocent playmates, and the bishop who &ldquo;had paused to
+      contemplate the sports of the child remained to confirm the zeal of the
+      missionary.&rdquo;) And as with the bishop of the past, so with the bishop of
+      the future; the Rev. H. J. Campbell, in his story of his soul's
+      pilgrimage, has given us a pleasant picture of himself as a child stealing
+      out into the woods to build himself a little altar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such minds as these, settled as it were from the outset, are either
+      incapable of real scepticism or become sceptical only after catastrophic
+      changes. They understand the sceptical mind with difficulty, and their
+      beliefs are regarded by the sceptical mind with incredulity. They have
+      determined their forms of belief before their years of discretion, and
+      once those forms are determined they are not very easily changed. Within
+      the shell it has adopted the intelligence may be active and lively enough,
+      may indeed be extraordinarily active and lively, but only within the
+      shell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is an entire difference in the mental quality of those who are
+      converts to a faith and those who are brought up in it. The former know it
+      from outside as well as from within. They know not only that it is, but
+      also that it is not. The latter have a confidence in their creed that is
+      one with their apprehension of sky or air or gravitation. It is a primary
+      mental structure, and they not only do not doubt but they doubt the good
+      faith of those who do. They think that the Atheist and Agnostic really
+      believe but are impelled by a mysterious obstinacy to deny. So it had been
+      with the Bishop of Princhester; not of cunning or design but in simple
+      good faith he had accepted all the inherited assurances of his native
+      rectory, and held by Church, Crown, Empire, decorum, respectability,
+      solvency&mdash;and compulsory Greek at the Little Go&mdash;as his father
+      had done before him. If in his undergraduate days he had said a thing or
+      two in the modern vein, affected the socialism of William Morris and
+      learnt some Swinburne by heart, it was out of a conscious wildness. He did
+      not wish to be a prig. He had taken a far more genuine interest in the
+      artistry of ritual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through all the time of his incumbency of the church of the Holy
+      Innocents, St. John's Wood, and of his career as the bishop suffragan of
+      Pinner, he had never faltered from his profound confidence in those
+      standards of his home. He had been kind, popular, and endlessly active.
+      His undergraduate socialism had expanded simply and sincerely into a
+      theory of administrative philanthropy. He knew the Webbs. He was as
+      successful with working-class audiences as with fashionable congregations.
+      His home life with Lady Ella (she was the daughter of the fifth Earl of
+      Birkenholme) and his five little girls was simple, beautiful, and happy as
+      few homes are in these days of confusion. Until he became Bishop of
+      Princhester&mdash;he followed Hood, the first bishop, as the reign of his
+      Majesty King Edward the Peacemaker drew to its close&mdash;no anticipation
+      of his coming distress fell across his path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came to Princhester an innocent and trustful man. The home life at the
+      old rectory of Otteringham was still his standard of truth and reality.
+      London had not disillusioned him. It was a strange waste of people, it
+      made him feel like a missionary in infidel parts, but it was a kindly
+      waste. It was neither antagonistic nor malicious. He had always felt there
+      that if he searched his Londoner to the bottom, he would find the
+      completest recognition of the old rectory and all its data and
+      implications.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Princhester was different.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Princhester made one think that recently there had been a second and much
+      more serious Fall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Princhester was industrial and unashamed. It was a countryside savagely
+      invaded by forges and mine shafts and gaunt black things. It was scarred
+      and impeded and discoloured. Even before that invasion, when the heather
+      was not in flower it must have been a black country. Its people were dour
+      uncandid individuals, who slanted their heads and knitted their brows to
+      look at you. Occasionally one saw woods brown and blistered by the gases
+      from chemical works. Here and there remained old rectories, closely
+      reminiscent of the dear old home at Otteringham, jostled and elbowed and
+      overshadowed by horrible iron cylinders belching smoke and flame. The fine
+      old abbey church of Princhester, which was the cathedral of the new
+      diocese, looked when first he saw it like a lady Abbess who had taken to
+      drink and slept in a coal truck. She minced apologetically upon the
+      market-place; the parvenu Town Hall patronized and protected her as if she
+      were a poor relation....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old aristocracy of the countryside was unpicturesquely decayed. The
+      branch of the Walshinghams, Lady Ella's cousins, who lived near Pringle,
+      was poor, proud and ignoble. And extremely unpopular. The rich people of
+      the country were self-made and inclined to nonconformity, the
+      working-people were not strictly speaking a &ldquo;poor,&rdquo; they were highly paid,
+      badly housed, and deeply resentful. They went in vast droves to football
+      matches, and did not care a rap if it rained. The prevailing wind was
+      sarcastic. To come here from London was to come from atmospheric
+      blue-greys to ashen-greys, from smoke and soft smut to grime and black
+      grimness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop had been charmed by the historical associations of Princhester
+      when first the see was put before his mind. His realization of his diocese
+      was a profound shock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only one hint had he had of what was coming. He had met during his season
+      of congratulations Lord Gatling dining unusually at the Athenaeum. Lord
+      Gatling and he did not talk frequently, but on this occasion the great
+      racing peer came over to him. &ldquo;You will feel like a cherub in a
+      stokehole,&rdquo; Lord Gatling had said....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They used to heave lumps of slag at old Hood's gaiters,&rdquo; said Lord
+      Gatling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In London a bishop's a lord and a lark and nobody minds him,&rdquo; said Lord
+      Gatling, &ldquo;but Princhester is different. It isn't used to bishops.... Well,&mdash;I
+      hope you'll get to like 'em.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Trouble began with a fearful row about the position of the bishop's
+      palace. Hood had always evaded this question, and a number of
+      strong-willed self-made men of wealth and influence, full of local
+      patriotism and that competitive spirit which has made England what it is,
+      already intensely irritated by Hood's prevarications, were resolved to pin
+      his successor to an immediate decision. Of this the new bishop was
+      unaware. Mindful of a bishop's constant need to travel, he was disposed to
+      seek a home within easy reach of Pringle Junction, from which nearly every
+      point in the diocese could be simply and easily reached. This fell in with
+      Lady Ella's liking for the rare rural quiet of the Kibe valley and the
+      neighbourhood of her cousins the Walshinghams. Unhappily it did not fall
+      in with the inflexible resolution of each and every one of the six leading
+      towns of the see to put up, own, obtrude, boast, and swagger about the
+      biggest and showiest thing in episcopal palaces in all industrial England,
+      and the new bishop had already taken a short lease and gone some way
+      towards the acquisition of Ganford House, two miles from Pringle, before
+      he realized the strength and fury of these local ambitions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first the magnates and influences seemed to be fighting only among
+      themselves, and he was so ill-advised as to broach the Ganford House
+      project as a compromise that would glorify no one unfairly, and leave the
+      erection of an episcopal palace for some future date when he perhaps would
+      have the good fortune to have passed to &ldquo;where beyond these voices there
+      is peace,&rdquo; forgetting altogether among other oversights the importance of
+      architects and builders in local affairs. His proposal seemed for a time
+      to concentrate the rich passions of the whole countryside upon himself and
+      his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Because they did not leave Lady Ella alone. The Walshinghams were already
+      unpopular in their county on account of a poverty and shyness that made
+      them seem &ldquo;stuck up&rdquo; to successful captains of industry only too ready
+      with the hand of friendship, the iron grip indeed of friendship,
+      consciously hospitable and eager for admission and endorsements. And
+      Princhester in particular was under the sway of that enterprising weekly,
+      The White Blackbird, which was illustrated by, which indeed monopolized
+      the gifts of, that brilliant young caricaturist &ldquo;The Snicker.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It had seemed natural for Lady Ella to acquiesce in the proposals of the
+      leading Princhester photographer. She had always helped where she could in
+      her husband's public work, and she had been popular upon her own merits in
+      Wealdstone. The portrait was abominable enough in itself; it dwelt on her
+      chin, doubled her age, and denied her gentleness, but it was a mere
+      starting-point for the subtle extravagance of The Snicker's poisonous
+      gift.... The thing came upon the bishop suddenly from the book-stall at
+      Pringle Junction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kept it carefully from Lady Ella.... It was only later that he found
+      that a copy of The White Blackbird had been sent to her, and that she was
+      keeping the horror from him. It was in her vein that she should reproach
+      herself for being a vulnerable side to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even when the bishop capitulated in favour of Princhester, that decision
+      only opened a fresh trouble for him. Princhester wanted the palace to be a
+      palace; it wanted to combine all the best points of Lambeth and Fulham
+      with the marble splendours of a good modern bank. The bishop's
+      architectural tastes, on the other hand, were rationalistic. He was all
+      for building a useful palace in undertones, with a green slate roof and
+      long horizontal lines. What he wanted more than anything else was a quite
+      remote wing with a lot of bright little bedrooms and a sitting-room and so
+      on, complete in itself, examination hall and everything, with a long
+      intricate connecting passage and several doors, to prevent the ordination
+      candidates straying all over the place and getting into the talk and the
+      tea. But the diocese wanted a proud archway&mdash;and turrets, and did not
+      care a rap if the ordination candidates slept about on the carpets in the
+      bishop's bedroom. Ordination candidates were quite outside the sphere of
+      its imagination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he disappointed Princhester with his equipage. Princhester had a
+      feeling that it deserved more for coming over to the church from
+      nonconformity as it was doing. It wanted a bishop in a mitre and a gilt
+      coach. It wanted a pastoral crook. It wanted something to go with its mace
+      and its mayor. And (obsessed by The Snicker) it wanted less of Lady Ella.
+      The cruelty and unreason of these attacks upon his wife distressed the
+      bishop beyond measure, and baffled him hopelessly. He could not see any
+      means of checking them nor of defending or justifying her against them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The palace was awaiting its tenant, but the controversies and bitternesses
+      were still swinging and swaying and developing when King George was being
+      crowned. Close upon that event came a wave of social discontent, the great
+      railway strike, a curious sense of social and political instability, and
+      the first beginnings of the bishop's ill health.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There came a day of exceptional fatigue and significance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The industrial trouble was a very real distress to the bishop. He had a
+      firm belief that it is a function of the church to act as mediator between
+      employer and employed. It was a common saying of his that the aim of
+      socialism&mdash;the right sort of socialism&mdash;was to Christianize
+      employment. Regardless of suspicion on either hand, regardless of very
+      distinct hints that he should &ldquo;mind his own business,&rdquo; he exerted himself
+      in a search for methods of reconciliation. He sought out every one who
+      seemed likely to be influential on either side, and did his utmost to
+      discover the conditions of a settlement. As far as possible and with the
+      help of a not very efficient chaplain he tried to combine such interviews
+      with his more normal visiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At times, and this was particularly the case on this day, he seemed to be
+      discovering nothing but the incurable perversity and militancy of human
+      nature. It was a day under an east wind, when a steely-blue sky full of
+      colourless light filled a stiff-necked world with whitish high lights and
+      inky shadows. These bright harsh days of barometric high pressure in
+      England rouse and thwart every expectation of the happiness of spring. And
+      as the bishop drove through the afternoon in a hired fly along a rutted
+      road of slag between fields that were bitterly wired against the Sunday
+      trespasser, he fell into a despondent meditation upon the political and
+      social outlook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His thoughts were of a sort not uncommon in those days. The world was
+      strangely restless. Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had been
+      an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact
+      and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people's ideas, and as if
+      at once they had begun to blow about anyhow. Not that Queen Victoria had
+      really been a paper-weight or any weight at all, but it happened that she
+      died as an epoch closed, an epoch of tremendous stabilities. Her son,
+      already elderly, had followed as the selvedge follows the piece, he had
+      passed and left the new age stripped bare. In nearly every department of
+      economic and social life now there was upheaval, and it was an upheaval
+      very different in character from the radicalism and liberalism of the
+      Victorian days. There were not only doubt and denial, but now there were
+      also impatience and unreason. People argued less and acted quicker. There
+      was a pride in rebellion for its own sake, an indiscipline and disposition
+      to sporadic violence that made it extremely hard to negotiate any
+      reconciliations or compromises. Behind every extremist it seemed stood a
+      further extremist prepared to go one better....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop had spent most of the morning with one of the big employers, a
+      tall dark man, lean and nervous, and obviously tired and worried by the
+      struggle. He did not conceal his opinion that the church was meddling with
+      matters quite outside its sphere. Never had it been conveyed to the bishop
+      before how remote a rich and established Englishman could consider the
+      church from reality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've got no hold on them,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It isn't your sphere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And again: &ldquo;They'll listen to you&mdash;if you speak well. But they don't
+      believe you know anything about it, and they don't trust your good
+      intentions. They won't mind a bit what you say unless you drop something
+      they can use against us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop tried a few phrases. He thought there might be something in
+      co-operation, in profit-sharing, in some more permanent relationship
+      between the business and the employee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There isn't,&rdquo; said the employer compactly. &ldquo;It's just the malice of being
+      inferior against the man in control. It's just the spirit of
+      insubordination and boredom with duty. This trouble's as old as the
+      Devil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that is exactly the business of the church,&rdquo; said the bishop
+      brightly, &ldquo;to reconcile men to their duty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By chanting the Athanasian creed at 'em, I suppose,&rdquo; said the big
+      employer, betraying the sneer he had been hiding hitherto.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This thing is a fight,&rdquo; said the big employer, carrying on before the
+      bishop could reply. &ldquo;Religion had better get out of the streets until this
+      thing is over. The men won't listen to reason. They don't mean to. They're
+      bit by Syndicalism. They're setting out, I tell you, to be unreasonable
+      and impossible. It isn't an argument; it's a fight. They don't want to
+      make friends with the employer. They want to make an end to the employer.
+      Whatever we give them they'll take and press us for more. Directly we make
+      terms with the leaders the men go behind it.... It's a raid on the whole
+      system. They don't mean to work the system&mdash;anyhow. I'm the
+      capitalist, and the capitalist has to go. I'm to be bundled out of my
+      works, and some&mdash;some &ldquo;&mdash;he seemed to be rejecting unsuitable
+      words&mdash;&ldquo;confounded politician put in. Much good it would do them. But
+      before that happens I'm going to fight. You would.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop walked to the window and stood staring at the brilliant spring
+      bulbs in the big employer's garden, and at a long vista of newly-mown lawn
+      under great shapely trees just budding into green.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't admit,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that these troubles lie outside the sphere of
+      the church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The employer came and stood beside him. He felt he was being a little hard
+      on the bishop, but he could not see any way of making things easier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One doesn't want Sacred Things,&rdquo; he tried, &ldquo;in a scrap like this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've got to mend things or end things,&rdquo; continued the big employer.
+      &ldquo;Nothing goes on for ever. Things can't last as they are going on now....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he went on abruptly to something that for a time he had been keeping
+      back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course just at present the church may do a confounded lot of harm.
+      Some of you clerical gentlemen are rather too fond of talking socialism
+      and even preaching socialism. Don't think I want to be overcritical. I
+      admit there's no end of things to be said for a proper sort of socialism,
+      Ruskin, and all that. We're all Socialists nowadays. Ideals&mdash;excellent.
+      But&mdash;it gets misunderstood. It gives the men a sense of moral
+      support. It makes them fancy that they are It. Encourages them to forget
+      duties and set up preposterous claims. Class war and all that sort of
+      thing. You gentlemen of the clergy don't quite realize that socialism may
+      begin with Ruskin and end with Karl Marx. And that from the Class War to
+      the Commune is just one step.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this conversation the bishop had made his way to the vicarage of
+      Mogham Banks. The vicar of Mogham Banks was a sacerdotal socialist of the
+      most advanced type, with the reputation of being closely in touch with the
+      labour extremists. He was a man addicted to banners, prohibited ornaments,
+      special services at unusual hours, and processions in the streets. His
+      taste in chasubles was loud, he gardened in a cassock and, it was said, he
+      slept in his biretta; he certainly slept in a hair shirt, and he littered
+      his church with flowers, candles, side altars, confessional boxes,
+      requests for prayers for the departed, and the like. There had already
+      been two Kensitite demonstrations at his services, and altogether he was a
+      source of considerable anxiety to the bishop. The bishop did his best not
+      to know too exactly what was going on at Mogham Banks. Sooner or later he
+      felt he would be forced to do something&mdash;and the longer he could put
+      that off the better. But the Rev. Morrice Deans had promised to get
+      together three or four prominent labour leaders for tea and a frank talk,
+      and the opportunity was one not to be missed. So the bishop, after a hasty
+      and not too digestible lunch in the refreshment room at Pringle, was now
+      in a fly that smelt of straw and suggested infectious hospital patients,
+      on his way through the industry-scarred countryside to this second
+      conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The countryside had never seemed so scarred to him as it did that day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was probably the bright hard spring sunshine that emphasized the
+      contrast between that dear England of hedges and homes and the south-west
+      wind in which his imagination lived, and the crude presences of a
+      mechanical age. Never before had the cuttings and heapings, the smashing
+      down of trees, the obtrusion of corrugated iron and tar, the belchings of
+      smoke and the haste, seemed so harsh and disregardful of all the bishop's
+      world. Across the fields a line of gaunt iron standards, abominably
+      designed, carried an electric cable to some unknown end. The curve of the
+      hill made them seem a little out of the straight, as if they hurried and
+      bent forward furtively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where are they going?&rdquo; asked the bishop, leaning forward to look out of
+      the window of the fly, and then: &ldquo;Where is it all going?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And presently the road was under repair, and was being done at a great
+      pace with a huge steam-roller, mechanically smashed granite, and kettles
+      of stinking stuff, asphalt or something of that sort, that looked and
+      smelt like Milton's hell. Beyond, a gaunt hoarding advertised extensively
+      the Princhester Music Hall, a mean beastly place that corrupted boys and
+      girls; and also it clamoured of tyres and potted meats....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The afternoon's conference gave him no reassuring answer to his question,
+      &ldquo;Where is it all going?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The afternoon's conference did no more than intensify the new and strange
+      sense of alienation from the world that the morning's talk had evoked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The three labour extremists that Morrice Deans had assembled obviously
+      liked the bishop and found him picturesque, and were not above a certain
+      snobbish gratification at the purple-trimmed company they were in, but it
+      was clear that they regarded his intervention in the great dispute as if
+      it were a feeble waving from the bank across the waters of a great river.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's an incurable misunderstanding between the modern employer and the
+      modern employed,&rdquo; the chief labour spokesman said, speaking in a broad
+      accent that completely hid from him and the bishop and every one the fact
+      that he was by far the best-read man of the party. &ldquo;Disraeli called them
+      the Two Nations, but that was long ago. Now it's a case of two species.
+      Machinery has made them into different species. The employer lives away
+      from his work-people, marries a wife foreign, out of a county family or
+      suchlike, trains his children from their very birth in a different manner.
+      Why, the growth curve is different for the two species. They haven't even
+      a common speech between them. One looks east and the other looks west. How
+      can you expect them to agree? Of course they won't agree. We've got to
+      fight it out. They say we're their slaves for ever. Have you ever read
+      Lady Bell's 'At the Works'? A well-intentioned woman, but she gives the
+      whole thing away. We say, No! It's our sort and not your sort. We'll do
+      without you. We'll get a little more education and then we'll do without
+      you. We're pressing for all we can get, and when we've got that we'll take
+      breath and press for more. We're the Morlocks. Coming up. It isn't our
+      fault that we've differentiated.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you haven't understood the drift of Christianity,&rdquo; said the bishop.
+      &ldquo;It's just to assert that men are One community and not two.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's not much of that in the Creeds,&rdquo; said a second labour leader who
+      was a rationalist. &ldquo;There's not much of that in the services of the
+      church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The vicar spoke before his bishop, and indeed he had plenty of time to
+      speak before his bishop. &ldquo;Because you will not set yourselves to
+      understand the symbolism of her ritual,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If the church chooses to speak in riddles,&rdquo; said the rationalist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Symbols,&rdquo; said Morrice Deans, &ldquo;need not be riddles,&rdquo; and for a time the
+      talk eddied about this minor issue and the chief labour spokesman and the
+      bishop looked at one another. The vicar instanced and explained certain
+      apparently insignificant observances, his antagonist was contemptuously
+      polite to these explanations. &ldquo;That's all very pratty,&rdquo; he said....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop wished that fine points of ceremonial might have been left out
+      of the discussion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something much bigger than that was laying hold of his intelligence, the
+      realization of a world extravagantly out of hand. The sky, the wind, the
+      telegraph poles, had been jabbing in the harsh lesson of these men's
+      voices, that the church, as people say, &ldquo;wasn't in it.&rdquo; And that at the
+      same time the church held the one remedy for all this ugliness and
+      contention in its teaching of the universal fatherhood of God and the
+      universal brotherhood of men. Only for some reason he hadn't the phrases
+      and he hadn't the voice to assert this over their wrangling and their
+      stiff resolution. He wanted to think the whole business out thoroughly,
+      for the moment he had nothing to say, and there was the labour leader
+      opposite waiting smilingly to hear what he had to say so soon as the bout
+      between the vicar and the rationalist was over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (6)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That morning in the long galleries of the bishop's imagination a fresh
+      painting had been added. It was a big wall painting rather in the manner
+      of Puvis de Chavannes. And the central figure had been the bishop of
+      Princhester himself. He had been standing upon the steps of the great door
+      of the cathedral that looks upon the marketplace where the tram-lines
+      meet, and he had been dressed very magnificently and rather after the
+      older use. He had been wearing a tunicle and dalmatic under a chasuble, a
+      pectoral cross, purple gloves, sandals and buskins, a mitre and his
+      presentation ring. In his hand he had borne his pastoral staff. And the
+      clustering pillars and arches of the great doorway were painted with a
+      loving flat particularity that omitted nothing but the sooty tinge of the
+      later discolourations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On his right hand had stood a group of employers very richly dressed in
+      the fashion of the fifteenth century, and on the left a rather more
+      numerous group of less decorative artisans. With them their wives and
+      children had been shown, all greatly impressed by the canonicals. Every
+      one had been extremely respectful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had been reconciling the people and blessing them and calling them his
+      &ldquo;sheep&rdquo; and his &ldquo;little children.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But all this was so different.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither party resembled sheep or little children in the least degree. .
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The labour leader became impatient with the ritualistic controversy; he
+      set his tea-cup aside out of danger and leant across the corner of the
+      table to the bishop and spoke in a sawing undertone. &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; he said,
+      &ldquo;the church does not talk our language. I doubt if it understands our
+      language. I doubt if we understand clearly where we are ourselves. These
+      things have to be fought out and hammered out. It's a big dusty dirty
+      noisy job. It may be a bloody job before it's through. You can't suddenly
+      call a halt in the middle of the scrap and have a sort of millennium just
+      because you want it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course if the church had a plan,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;if it had a proposal to
+      make, if it had anything more than a few pious palliatives to suggest,
+      that might be different. But has it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop had a bankrupt feeling. On the spur of the moment he could say
+      no more than: &ldquo;It offers its mediation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (7)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Full as he was with the preoccupation of these things and so a little slow
+      and inattentive in his movements, the bishop had his usual luck at Pringle
+      Junction and just missed the 7.27 for Princhester. He might perhaps have
+      got it by running through the subway and pushing past people, but bishops
+      must not run through subways and push past people. His mind swore at the
+      mischance, even if his lips refrained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was hungry and, tired; he would not get to the palace now until long
+      after nine; dinner would be over and Lady Ella would naturally suppose he
+      had dined early with the Rev. Morrice Deans. Very probably there would be
+      nothing ready for him at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to think he was exercising self-control, but indeed all his
+      sub-conscious self was busy in a manner that would not have disgraced
+      Tertullian with the eternal welfare of those city fathers whose obstinacy
+      had fixed the palace at Princhester. He walked up and down the platform,
+      gripping his hands very tightly behind him, and maintaining a serene
+      upcast countenance by a steadfast effort. It seemed a small matter to him
+      that the placards of the local evening papers should proclaim &ldquo;Lloyd
+      George's Reconciliation Meeting at Wombash Broken up by Suffragettes.&rdquo; For
+      a year now he had observed a strict rule against buying the products of
+      the local press, and he saw no reason for varying this protective
+      regulation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mind was full of angry helplessness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was he to blame, was the church to blame, for its powerlessness in these
+      social disputes? Could an abler man with a readier eloquence have done
+      more?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He envied the cleverness of Cardinal Manning. Manning would have got right
+      into the front of this affair. He would have accumulated credit for his
+      church and himself....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But would he have done much?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop wandered along the platform to its end, and stood contemplating
+      the convergent ways that gather together beyond the station and plunge
+      into the hillside and the wilderness of sidings and trucks, signal-boxes,
+      huts, coal-pits, electric standards, goods sheds, turntables, and
+      engine-houses, that ends in a bluish bricked-up cliff against the hill. A
+      train rushed with a roar and clatter into the throat of the great tunnel
+      and was immediately silenced; its rear lights twinkled and vanished, and
+      then out of that huge black throat came wisps of white steam and curled
+      slowly upward like lazy snakes until they caught the slanting sunshine.
+      For the first time the day betrayed a softness and touched this scene of
+      black energy to gold. All late afternoons are beautiful, whatever the day
+      has been&mdash;if only there is a gleam of sun. And now a kind of
+      mechanical greatness took the place of mere black disorder in the bishop's
+      perception of his see. It was harsh, it was vast and strong, it was no
+      lamb he had to rule but a dragon. Would it ever be given to him to
+      overcome his dragon, to lead it home, and bless it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood at the very end of the platform, with his gaitered legs wide
+      apart and his hands folded behind him, staring beyond all visible things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Should he do something very bold and striking? Should he invite both men
+      and masters to the cathedral, and preach tremendous sermons to them upon
+      these living issues?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Short sermons, of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But stating the church's attitude with a new and convincing vigour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a vision of the great aisle strangely full and alive and astir. The
+      organ notes still echoed in the fretted vaulting, as the preacher made his
+      way from the chancel to the pulpit. The congregation was tense with
+      expectation, and for some reason his mind dwelt for a long time upon the
+      figure of the preacher ascending the steps of the pulpit. Outside the day
+      was dark and stormy, so that the stained-glass windows looked absolutely
+      dead. For a little while the preacher prayed. Then in the attentive
+      silence the tenor of the preacher would begin, a thin jet of sound, a ray
+      of light in the darkness, speaking to all these men as they had never been
+      spoken to before....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Surely so one might call a halt to all these harsh conflicts. So one might
+      lay hands afresh upon these stubborn minds, one might win them round to
+      look at Christ the Master and Servant....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That, he thought, would be a good phrase: &ldquo;Christ the Master and
+      Servant.&rdquo;....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Members of one Body,&rdquo; that should be his text.... At last it was
+      finished. The big congregation, which had kept so still, sighed and
+      stirred. The task of reconciliation was as good as done. &ldquo;And now to God
+      the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Outside the day had become suddenly bright, the threatening storm had
+      drifted away, and great shafts of coloured light from the pictured windows
+      were smiting like arrows amidst his hearers....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This idea of a great sermon upon capital and labour did so powerfully grip
+      the bishop's imagination that he came near to losing the 8.27 train also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He discovered it when it was already in the station. He had to walk down
+      the platform very quickly. He did not run, but his gaiters, he felt,
+      twinkled more than a bishop's should.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (8)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Directly he met his wife he realized that he had to hear something
+      important and unpleasant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood waiting for him in the inner hall, looking very grave and still.
+      The light fell upon her pale face and her dark hair and her long white
+      silken dress, making her seem more delicate and unworldly than usual and
+      making the bishop feel grimy and sordid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must have a wash,&rdquo; he said, though before he had thought of nothing but
+      food. &ldquo;I have had nothing to eat since tea-time&mdash;and that was mostly
+      talk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella considered. &ldquo;There are cold things.... You shall have a tray in
+      the study. Not in the dining-room. Eleanor is there. I want to tell you
+      something. But go upstairs first and wash your poor tired face.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing serious, I hope?&rdquo; he asked, struck by an unusual quality in her
+      voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will tell you,&rdquo; she evaded, and after a moment of mutual scrutiny he
+      went past her upstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since they had come to Princhester Lady Ella had changed very markedly.
+      She seemed to her husband to have gained in dignity; she was stiller and
+      more restrained; a certain faint arrogance, a touch of the &ldquo;ruling class&rdquo;
+       manner had dwindled almost to the vanishing point. There had been a time
+      when she had inclined to an authoritative hauteur, when she had seemed
+      likely to develop into one of those aggressive and interfering old ladies
+      who play so overwhelming a part in British public affairs. She had been
+      known to initiate adverse judgments, to exercise the snub, to cut and
+      humiliate. Princhester had done much to purge her of such tendencies.
+      Princhester had made her think abundantly, and had put a new and subtler
+      quality into her beauty. It had taken away the least little disposition to
+      rustle as she moved, and it had softened her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, when presently she stood in the study, she showed a new
+      circumspection in her treatment of her husband. She surveyed the tray
+      before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ought not to drink that Burgundy,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I can see you are
+      dog-tired. It was uncorked yesterday, and anyhow it is not very
+      digestible. This cold meat is bad enough. You ought to have one of those
+      quarter bottles of champagne you got for my last convalescence. There's
+      more than a dozen left over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop felt that this was a pretty return of his own kindly thoughts
+      &ldquo;after many days,&rdquo; and soon Dunk, his valet-butler, was pouring out the
+      precious and refreshing glassful....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now, dear?&rdquo; said the bishop, feeling already much better.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella had come round to the marble fireplace. The mantel-piece was a
+      handsome work by a Princhester artist in the Gill style&mdash;with
+      contemplative ascetics as supporters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am worried about Eleanor,&rdquo; said Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is in the dining-room now,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;having some dinner. She came
+      in about a quarter past eight, half way through dinner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where had she been?&rdquo; asked the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her dress was torn&mdash;in two places. Her wrist had been twisted and a
+      little sprained.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her face&mdash;Grubby! And she had been crying.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, my dear, what had happened to her? You don't mean&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Husband and wife stared at one another aghast. Neither of them said the
+      horrid word that flamed between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Merciful heaven!&rdquo; said the bishop, and assumed an attitude of despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know she knew any of them. But it seems it is the second
+      Walshingham girl&mdash;Phoebe. It's impossible to trace a girl's thoughts
+      and friends. She persuaded her to go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But did she understand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's the serious thing,&rdquo; said Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to consider whether he could bear the blow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She understands all sorts of things. She argues.... I am quite unable to
+      argue with her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About this vote business?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About all sorts of things. Things I didn't imagine she had heard of. I
+      knew she had been reading books. But I never imagined that she could have
+      understood....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop laid down his knife and fork.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One may read in books, one may even talk of things, without fully
+      understanding,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella tried to entertain this comforting thought. &ldquo;It isn't like
+      that,&rdquo; she said at last. &ldquo;She talks like a grown-up person. This&mdash;this
+      escapade is just an accident. But things have gone further than that. She
+      seems to think&mdash;that she is not being educated properly here, that
+      she ought to go to a College. As if we were keeping things from her....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop reconsidered his plate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what things?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She says we get all round her,&rdquo; said Lady Ella, and left the implications
+      of that phrase to unfold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (9)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time the bishop said very little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella had found it necessary to make her first announcement standing
+      behind him upon the hearthrug, but now she sat upon the arm of the great
+      armchair as close to him as possible, and spoke in a more familiar tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing, she said, had come to her as a complete surprise. Everything
+      had seemed so safe. Eleanor had been thoughtful, it was true, but it had
+      never occurred to her mother that she had really been thinking&mdash;about
+      such things as she had been thinking about. She had ranged in the library,
+      and displayed a disposition to read the weekly papers and the monthly
+      reviews. But never a sign of discontent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I don't understand,&rdquo; said the bishop. &ldquo;Why is she discontented? What
+      is there that she wants different?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has got this idea that life here is secluded in some way,&rdquo; she
+      expanded. &ldquo;She used words like 'secluded' and 'artificial' and&mdash;what
+      was it?&mdash;'cloistered.' And she said&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella paused with an effect of exact retrospection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Out there,' she said, 'things are alive. Real things are happening.' It
+      is almost as if she did not fully believe&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella paused again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop sat with his arm over the back of his chair, and his face
+      downcast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The ferment of youth,&rdquo; he said at last. &ldquo;The ferment of youth. Who has
+      given her these ideas?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella did not know. She could have thought a school like St. Aubyns
+      would have been safe, but nowadays nothing was safe. It was clear the
+      girls who went there talked as girls a generation ago did not talk. Their
+      people at home encouraged them to talk and profess opinions about
+      everything. It seemed that Phoebe Walshingham and Lady Kitty Kingdom were
+      the leaders in these premature mental excursions. Phoebe aired religious
+      doubts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But little Phoebe!&rdquo; said the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kitty,&rdquo; said Lady Ella, &ldquo;has written a novel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Already!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With elopements in it&mdash;and all sorts of things. She's had it typed.
+      You'd think Mary Crosshampton would know better than to let her daughter
+      go flourishing the family imagination about in that way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eleanor told you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By way of showing that they think of&mdash;things in general.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop reflected. &ldquo;She wants to go to College.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They want to go in a set.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder if college can be much worse than school.... She's eighteen&mdash;?
+      But I will talk to her....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (10)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All our children are changelings. They are perpetually fresh strangers.
+      Every day they vanish and a new person masquerades as yesterday's child
+      until some unexpected development betrays the cheat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop had still to learn this perennial newness of the young. He
+      learnt it in half an hour at the end of a fatiguing day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went into the dining-room. He went in as carelessly as possible and
+      smoking a cigarette. He had an honourable dread of being portentous in his
+      family; almost ostentatiously he laid the bishop aside. Eleanor had
+      finished her meal, and was sitting in the arm-chair by the fire with one
+      hand holding her sprained wrist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, and strolled to the hearthrug. He had had an odd idea
+      that he would find her still dirty, torn, and tearful, as her mother had
+      described her, a little girl in a scrape. But she had changed into her
+      best white evening frock and put up her hair, and became in the firelight
+      more of a lady, a very young lady but still a lady, than she had ever been
+      to him before. She was dark like her mother, but not of the same willowy
+      type; she had more of her father's sturdy build, and she had developed her
+      shoulders at hockey and tennis. The firelight brought out the gracious
+      reposeful lines of a body that ripened in adolescence. And though there
+      was a vibration of resolution in her voice she spoke like one who is under
+      her own control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother has told you that I have disgraced myself,&rdquo; she began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the bishop, weighing it. &ldquo;No. But you seem to have been
+      indiscreet, little Norah.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I got excited,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;They began turning out the other women&mdash;roughly.
+      I was indignant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn't go to interrupt?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She considered. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;But I went.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He liked her disposition to get it right. &ldquo;On that side,&rdquo; he assisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't the same thing as really meaning, Daddy,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then things happened?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said to the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A pause followed. If they had been in a law-court, her barrister would
+      have said, &ldquo;That is my case, my lord.&rdquo; The bishop prepared to open the
+      next stage in the proceedings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think, Norah, you shouldn't have been there at all,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother says that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man in my position is apt to be judged by his family. You commit more
+      than yourself when you commit an indiscretion. Apart from that, it wasn't
+      the place for a girl to be at. You are not a child now. We give you
+      freedom&mdash;more freedom than most girls get&mdash;because we think you
+      will use it wisely. You knew&mdash;enough to know that there was likely to
+      be trouble.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl looked into the fire and spoke very carefully. &ldquo;I don't think
+      that I oughtn't to know the things that are going on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop studied her face for an instant. It struck him that they had
+      reached something very fundamental as between parent and child. His
+      modernity showed itself in the temperance of his reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think, my dear, that on the whole your mother and I, who have
+      lived longer and know more, are more likely to know when it is best that
+      you should begin to know&mdash;this or that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl knitted her brows and seemed to be reading her answer out of the
+      depths of the coals. She was on the verge of speaking, altered her mind
+      and tried a different beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think that every one must do their thinking&mdash;his thinking&mdash;for&mdash;oneself,&rdquo;
+       she said awkwardly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean you can't trust&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't trusting. But one knows best for oneself when one is hungry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you find yourself hungry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to find out for myself what all this trouble about votes and
+      things means.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And we starve you&mdash;intellectually?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know I don't think that. But you are busy....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren't you being perhaps a little impatient, Eleanor? After all&mdash;you
+      are barely eighteen.... We have given you all sorts of liberties.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her silence admitted it. &ldquo;But still,&rdquo; she said after a long pause, &ldquo;there
+      are other girls, younger than I am, in these things. They talk about&mdash;oh,
+      all sorts of things. Freely....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've been awfully good to me,&rdquo; she said irrelevantly. &ldquo;And of course
+      this meeting was all pure accident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father and daughter remained silent for awhile, seeking a better grip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What exactly do you want, Eleanor?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up at him. &ldquo;Generally?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your mother has the impression that you are discontented.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Discontented is a horrid word.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;unsatisfied.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She remained still for a time. She felt the moment had come to make her
+      demand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would like to go to Newnham or Somerville&mdash;and work. I feel&mdash;so
+      horribly ignorant. Of all sorts of things. If I were a son I should go&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye&mdash;es,&rdquo; said the bishop and reflected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had gone rather far in the direction of the Woman Suffrage people; he
+      had advocated equality of standard in all sorts of matters, and the memory
+      of these utterances hampered him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could read here,&rdquo; he tried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I were a son, you wouldn't say that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His reply was vague. &ldquo;But in this home,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;we have a certain
+      atmosphere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He left her to imply her differences in sensibility and response from the
+      hardier male.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her hesitation marked the full gravity of her reply. &ldquo;It's just that,&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;One feels&mdash;&rdquo; She considered it further. &ldquo;As if we were living
+      in a kind of magic world&mdash;not really real. Out there&mdash;&rdquo; she
+      glanced over her shoulder at the drawn blind that hid the night. &ldquo;One
+      meets with different sorts of minds and different&mdash;atmospheres. All
+      this is very beautiful. I've had the most wonderful home. But there's a
+      sort of feeling as though it couldn't really go on, as though all these
+      strikes and doubts and questionings&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped short at questionings, for the thing was said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop took her meaning gallantly and honestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The church of Christ, little Norah, is built upon a rock.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no answer. She moved her head very slightly so that he could not
+      see her face, and remained sitting rather stiffly and awkwardly with her
+      eyes upon the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her silence was the third and greatest blow the bishop received that
+      day....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed very long indeed before either of them spoke. At last he said:
+      &ldquo;We must talk about these things again, Norah, when we are less tired and
+      have more time.... You have been reading books.... When Caxton set up his
+      printing-press he thrust a new power between church and disciple and
+      father and child.... And I am tired. We must talk it over a little later.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl stood up. She took her father's hands. &ldquo;Dear, dear Daddy,&rdquo; she
+      said, &ldquo;I am so sorry to be a bother. I am so sorry I went to that
+      meeting.... You look tired out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must talk&mdash;properly,&rdquo; said the bishop, patting one hand, then
+      discovering from her wincing face that it was the sprained one. &ldquo;Your poor
+      wrist,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's so hard to talk, but I want to talk to you, Daddy. It isn't that I
+      have hidden things....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She kissed him, and the bishop had the odd fancy that she kissed him as
+      though she was sorry for him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It occurred to him that really there could be no time like the present for
+      discussing these &ldquo;questionings&rdquo; of hers, and then his fatigue and shyness
+      had the better of him again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (11)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The papers got hold of Eleanor's share in the suffragette disturbance. The
+      White Blackbird said things about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It did not attack her. It did worse. It admired her ...impudently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It spoke of her once as &ldquo;Norah,&rdquo; and once as &ldquo;the Scrope Flapper.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Its headline proclaimed: &ldquo;Plucky Flappers Hold Up L. G.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE THIRD - INSOMNIA
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      THE night after his conversation with Eleanor was the first night of the
+      bishop's insomnia. It was the definite beginning of a new phase in his
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doctors explain to us that the immediate cause of insomnia is always some
+      poisoned or depleted state of the body, and no doubt the fatigues and
+      hasty meals of the day had left the bishop in a state of unprecedented
+      chemical disorder, with his nerves irritated by strange compounds and
+      unsoothed by familiar lubricants. But chemical disorders follow mental
+      disturbances, and the core and essence of his trouble was an intellectual
+      distress. For the first time in his life he was really in doubt, about
+      himself, about his way of living, about all his persuasions. It was a
+      general doubt. It was not a specific suspicion upon this point or that. It
+      was a feeling of detachment and unreality at once extraordinarily vague
+      and extraordinarily oppressive. It was as if he discovered himself flimsy
+      and transparent in a world of minatory solidity and opacity. It was as if
+      he found himself made not of flesh and blood but of tissue paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this intellectual insecurity extended into his physical sensations. It
+      affected his feeling in his skin, as if it were not absolutely his own
+      skin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as he lay there, a weak phantom mentally and bodily, an endless
+      succession and recurrence of anxieties for which he could find no
+      reassurance besieged him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chief of this was his distress for Eleanor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was the central figure in this new sense of illusion in familiar and
+      trusted things. It was not only that the world of his existence which had
+      seemed to be the whole universe had become diaphanous and betrayed vast
+      and uncontrollable realities beyond it, but his daughter had as it were
+      suddenly opened a door in this glassy sphere of insecurity that had been
+      his abiding refuge, a door upon the stormy rebel outer world, and she
+      stood there, young, ignorant, confident, adventurous, ready to step out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could it be possible that she did not believe?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw her very vividly as he had seen her in the dining-room, slender and
+      upright, half child, half woman, so fragile and so fearless. And the door
+      she opened thus carelessly gave upon a stormy background like one of the
+      stormy backgrounds that were popular behind portrait Dianas in eighteenth
+      century paintings. Did she believe that all he had taught her, all the
+      life he led was&mdash;what was her phrase?&mdash;a kind of magic world,
+      not really real?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He groaned and turned over and repeated the words: &ldquo;A kind of magic world&mdash;not
+      really real!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The wind blew through the door she opened, and scattered everything in the
+      room. And still she held the door open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was astonished at himself. He started up in swift indignation. Had he
+      not taught the child? Had he not brought her up in an atmosphere of faith?
+      What right had she to turn upon him in this matter? It was&mdash;indeed it
+      was&mdash;a sort of insolence, a lack of reverence....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was strange he had not perceived this at the time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But indeed at the first mention of &ldquo;questionings&rdquo; he ought to have
+      thundered. He saw that quite clearly now. He ought to have cried out and
+      said, &ldquo;On your knees, my Norah, and ask pardon of God!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Because after all faith is an emotional thing....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to think very rapidly and copiously of things he ought to have
+      said to Eleanor. And now the eloquence of reverie was upon him. In a
+      little time he was also addressing the tea-party at Morrice Deans'. Upon
+      them too he ought to have thundered. And he knew now also all that he
+      should have said to the recalcitrant employer. Thunder also. Thunder is
+      surely the privilege of the higher clergy&mdash;under Jove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But why hadn't he thundered?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gesticulated in the darkness, thrust out a clutching hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are situations that must be gripped&mdash;gripped firmly. And
+      without delay. In the middle ages there had been grip enough in a purple
+      glove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From these belated seizures of the day's lost opportunities the bishop
+      passed to such a pessimistic estimate of the church as had never entered
+      his mind before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was as if he had fallen suddenly out of a spiritual balloon into a
+      world of bleak realism. He found himself asking unprecedented and
+      devastating questions, questions that implied the most fundamental
+      shiftings of opinion. Why was the church such a failure? Why had it no
+      grip upon either masters or men amidst this vigorous life of modern
+      industrialism, and why had it no grip upon the questioning young? It was a
+      tolerated thing, he felt, just as sometimes he had felt that the Crown was
+      a tolerated thing. He too was a tolerated thing; a curious survival....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was not as things should be. He struggled to recover a proper
+      attitude. But he remained enormously dissatisfied....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The church was no Levite to pass by on the other side away from the
+      struggles and wrongs of the social conflict. It had no right when the
+      children asked for the bread of life to offer them Gothic stone....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to make interminable weak plans for fulfilling his duty to his
+      diocese and his daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What could he do to revivify his clergy? He wished he had more personal
+      magnetism, he wished he had a darker and a larger presence. He wished he
+      had not been saddled with Whippham's rather futile son as his chaplain. He
+      wished he had a dean instead of being his own dean. With an unsympathetic
+      rector. He wished he had it in him to make some resounding appeal. He
+      might of course preach a series of thumping addresses and sermons, rather
+      on the lines of &ldquo;Fors Clavigera,&rdquo; to masters and men, in the Cathedral.
+      Only it was so difficult to get either masters or men into the Cathedral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, if the people will not come to the bishop the bishop must go out to
+      the people. Should he go outside the Cathedral&mdash;to the place where
+      the trains met?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Interweaving with such thoughts the problem of Eleanor rose again into his
+      consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Weren't there books she ought to read? Weren't there books she ought to be
+      made to read? And books&mdash;and friends&mdash;that ought to be
+      imperatively forbidden? Imperatively!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But how to define the forbidden?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to compose an address on Modern Literature (so-called).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It became acrimonious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before dawn the birds began to sing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mind had seemed to be a little tranquillized, there had been a
+      distinct feeling of subsidence sleepwards, when first one and then another
+      little creature roused itself and the bishop to greet the gathering
+      daylight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It became a little clamour, a misty sea of sound in which individuality
+      appeared and disappeared. For a time a distant cuckoo was very
+      perceptible, like a landmark looming up over a fog, like the cuckoo in the
+      Pastoral Symphony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop tried not to heed these sounds, but they were by their very
+      nature insistent sounds. He lay disregarding them acutely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently he pulled the coverlet over his ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little later he sat up in bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again in a slight detail he marked his strange and novel detachment from
+      the world of his upbringing. His hallucination of disillusionment had
+      spread from himself and his church and his faith to the whole animate
+      creation. He knew that these were the voices of &ldquo;our feathered songsters,&rdquo;
+       that this was &ldquo;a joyous chorus&rdquo; greeting the day. He knew that a wakeful
+      bishop ought to bless these happy creatures, and join with them by
+      reciting Ken's morning hymn. He made an effort that was more than half
+      habit, to repeat and he repeated with a scowling face and the voice of a
+      schoolmaster:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Awake my soul, and with the sun Thy daily stage of duty run....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got no further. He stopped short, sat still, thinking what utterly
+      detestable things singing birds were. A. blackbird had gripped his
+      attention. Never had he heard such vain repetitions. He struggled against
+      the dark mood of criticism. &ldquo;He prayeth best who loveth best&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No, he did not love the birds. It was useless to pretend. Whatever one may
+      say about other birds a cuckoo is a low detestable cad of a bird.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the bishop began to be particularly tormented by a bird that made a
+      short, insistent, wheezing sound at regular intervals of perhaps twenty
+      seconds. If a bird could have whooping-cough, that, he thought, was the
+      sort of whoop it would have. But even if it had whooping-cough he could
+      not pity it. He hung in its intervals waiting for the return of the
+      wheeze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then that blackbird reasserted itself. It had a rich boastful note; it
+      seemed proud of its noisy reiteration of simple self-assertion. For some
+      obscure reason the phrase &ldquo;oleographic sounds&rdquo; drifted into the bishop's
+      thoughts. This bird produced the peculiar and irrational impression that
+      it had recently made a considerable sum of money by shrewd industrialism.
+      It was, he thought grimly, a genuine Princhester blackbird.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This wickedly uncharitable reference to his diocese ran all unchallenged
+      through the bishop's mind. And others no less wicked followed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once during his summer holidays in Florence he and Lady Ella had
+      subscribed to an association for the protection of song-birds. He recalled
+      this now with a mild wonder. It seemed to him that perhaps after all it
+      was as well to let fruit-growers and Italians deal with singing-birds in
+      their own way. Perhaps after all they had a wisdom....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He passed his hands over his face. The world after all is not made
+      entirely for singing-birds; there is such a thing as proportion.
+      Singing-birds may become a luxury, an indulgence, an excess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Did the birds eat the fruit in Paradise?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps there they worked for some collective musical effect, had some
+      sort of conductor in the place of this&mdash;hullabaloo....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He decided to walk about the room for a time and then remake his bed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sunrise found the bishop with his head and shoulders out of the window
+      trying to see that blackbird. He just wanted to look at it. He was
+      persuaded it was a quite exceptional blackbird.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again came that oppressive sense of the futility of the contemporary
+      church, but this time it came in the most grotesque form. For hanging half
+      out of the casement he was suddenly reminded of St. Francis of Assisi, and
+      how at his rebuke the wheeling swallow stilled their cries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was all so different then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only after he had passed four similar nights, with intervening days
+      of lassitude and afternoon siestas, that the bishop realized that he was
+      in the grip of insomnia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not go at once to a doctor, but he told his trouble to every one he
+      met and received much tentative advice. He had meant to have his talk with
+      Eleanor on the morning next after their conversation in the dining-room,
+      but his bodily and spiritual anaemia prevented him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fifth night was the beginning of the Whitsuntide Ember week, and he
+      wore a red cassock and had a distracting and rather interesting day
+      welcoming his ordination candidates. They had a good effect upon him; we
+      spiritualize ourselves when we seek to spiritualize others, and he went to
+      bed in a happier frame of mind than he had done since the day of the
+      shock. He woke in the night, but he woke much more himself than he had
+      been since the trouble began. He repeated that verse of Ken's:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When in the night I sleepless lie, My soul with heavenly thoughts supply;
+      Let no ill dreams disturb my rest, No powers of darkness me molest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost immediately after these there floated into his mind, as if it were
+      a message, the dear familiar words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He giveth his Beloved sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These words irradiated and soothed him quite miraculously, the clouds of
+      doubt seemed to dissolve and vanish and leave him safe and calm under a
+      clear sky; he knew those words were a promise, and very speedily he fell
+      asleep and slept until he was called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the next day was a troubled one. Whippham had muddled his timetable
+      and crowded his afternoon; the strike of the transport workers had begun,
+      and the ugly noises they made at the tramway depot, where they were booing
+      some one, penetrated into the palace. He had to snatch a meal between
+      services, and the sense of hurry invaded his afternoon lectures to the
+      candidates. He hated hurry in Ember week. His ideal was one of quiet
+      serenity, of grave things said slowly, of still, kneeling figures, of a
+      sort of dark cool spiritual germination. But what sort of dark cool
+      spiritual germination is possible with an ass like Whippham about?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the fresh courage of the morning the bishop had arranged for that talk
+      with Eleanor he had already deferred too long, and this had proved less
+      satisfactory than he had intended it to be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop's experience with the ordination candidates was following the
+      usual course. Before they came there was something bordering upon distaste
+      for the coming invasion; then always there was an effect of surprise at
+      the youth and faith of the neophytes and a real response of the spirit to
+      the occasion. Throughout the first twenty-four hours they were all simply
+      neophytes, without individuality to break up their uniformity of
+      self-devotion. Then afterwards they began to develop little personal
+      traits, and scarcely ever were these pleasing traits. Always one or two of
+      them would begin haunting the bishop, giving way to an appetite for
+      special words, special recognitions. He knew the expression of that
+      craving on their faces. He knew the way-laying movements in room and
+      passage that presently began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This time in particular there was a freckled underbred young man who
+      handed in what was evidently a carefully prepared memorandum upon what he
+      called &ldquo;my positions.&rdquo; Apparently he had a muddle of doubts about the
+      early fathers and the dates of the earlier authentic copies of the
+      gospels, things of no conceivable significance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop glanced through this bale of papers&mdash;it had of course no
+      index and no synopsis, and some of the pages were not numbered&mdash;handed
+      it over to Whippham, and when he proved, as usual, a broken reed, the
+      bishop had the brilliant idea of referring the young man to Canon Bliss
+      (of Pringle), &ldquo;who has a special knowledge quite beyond my own in this
+      field.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he knew from the young man's eye even as he said this that it was not
+      going to put him off for more than a day or so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The immediate result of glancing over these papers was, however, to
+      enhance in the bishop's mind a growing disposition to minimize the
+      importance of all dated and explicit evidences and arguments for orthodox
+      beliefs, and to resort to vague symbolic and liberal interpretations, and
+      it was in this state that he came to his talk with Eleanor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not give her much time to develop her objections. He met her half
+      way and stated them for her, and overwhelmed her with sympathy and
+      understanding. She had been &ldquo;too literal.&rdquo; &ldquo;Too literal&rdquo; was his keynote.
+      He was a little astonished at the liberality of his own views. He had been
+      getting along now for some years without looking into his own opinions too
+      closely and he was by no means prepared to discover how far he had come to
+      meet his daughter's scepticisms. But he did meet them. He met them so
+      thoroughly that he almost conveyed that hers was a needlessly conservative
+      and oldfashioned attitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Occasionally he felt he was being a little evasive, but she did not seem
+      to notice it. As she took his drift, her relief and happiness were
+      manifest. And he had never noticed before how clear and pretty her eyes
+      were; they were the most honest eyes he had ever seen. She looked at him
+      very steadily as he explained, and lit up at his points. She brightened
+      wonderfully as she realized that after all they were not apart, they had
+      not differed; simply they had misunderstood....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And before he knew where he was, and in a mere parenthetical declaration
+      of liberality, he surprised himself by conceding her demand for Newnham
+      even before she had repeated it. It helped his case wonderfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Call in every exterior witness you can. The church will welcome them....
+      No, I want you to go, my dear....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But his mind was stirred again to its depths by this discussion. And in
+      particular he was surprised and a little puzzled by this Newnham
+      concession and the necessity of making his new attitude clear to Lady
+      Ella....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was with a sense of fatality that he found himself awake again that
+      night, like some one lying drowned and still and yet perfectly conscious
+      at the bottom of deep cold water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He repeated, &ldquo;He giveth his Beloved sleep,&rdquo; but all the conviction had
+      gone out of the words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither the bishop's insomnia nor his incertitudes about himself and his
+      faith developed in a simple and orderly manner. There were periods of
+      sustained suffering and periods of recovery; it was not for a year or so
+      that he regarded these troubles as more than acute incidental
+      interruptions of his general tranquillity or realized that he was passing
+      into a new phase of life and into a new quality of thought. He told every
+      one of the insomnia and no one of his doubts; these he betrayed only by an
+      increasing tendency towards vagueness, symbolism, poetry and toleration.
+      Eleanor seemed satisfied with his exposition; she did not press for
+      further enlightenment. She continued all her outward conformities except
+      that after a time she ceased to communicate; and in September she went
+      away to Newnham. Her doubts had not visibly affected Clementina or her
+      other sisters, and the bishop made no further attempts to explore the
+      spiritual life of his family below the surface of its formal acquiescence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a matter of fact his own spiritual wrestlings were almost exclusively
+      nocturnal. During his spells of insomnia he led a curiously double
+      existence. In the daytime he was largely the self he had always been,
+      able, assured, ecclesiastical, except that he was a little jaded and
+      irritable or sleepy instead of being quick and bright; he believed in God
+      and the church and the Royal Family and himself securely; in the wakeful
+      night time he experienced a different and novel self, a bare-minded self,
+      bleakly fearless at its best, shamelessly weak at its worst, critical,
+      sceptical, joyless, anxious. The anxiety was quite the worst element of
+      all. Something sat by his pillow asking grey questions: &ldquo;What are you
+      doing? Where are you going? Is it really well with the children? Is it
+      really well with the church? Is it really well with the country? Are you
+      indeed doing anything at all? Are you anything more than an actor wearing
+      a costume in an archaic play? The people turn their backs on you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He would twist over on his pillow. He would whisper hymns and prayers that
+      had the quality of charms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He giveth his Beloved sleep&rdquo;; that answered many times, and many times it
+      failed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The labour troubles of 1912 eased off as the year wore on, and the
+      bitterness of the local press over the palace abated very considerably.
+      Indeed there was something like a watery gleam of popularity when he
+      brought down his consistent friend, the dear old Princess Christiana of
+      Hoch and Unter, black bonnet, deafness, and all, to open a new wing of the
+      children's hospital. The Princhester conservative paper took the occasion
+      to inform the diocese that he was a fluent German scholar and consequently
+      a persona grata with the royal aunts, and that the Princess Christiana was
+      merely just one of a number of royalties now practically at the beck and
+      call of Princhester. It was not true, but it was very effective locally,
+      and seemed to justify a little the hauteur of which Lady Ella was so
+      unjustly suspected. Yet it involved a possibility of disappointments in
+      the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went to Brighton-Pomfrey too upon the score of his general health, and
+      Brighton-Pomfrey revised his general regimen, discouraged indiscreet
+      fasting, and suggested a complete abstinence from red wine except white
+      port, if indeed that can be called a red wine, and a moderate use of
+      Egyptian cigarettes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But 1913 was a strenuous year. The labour troubles revived, the
+      suffragette movement increased greatly in violence and aggressiveness, and
+      there sprang up no less than three ecclesiastical scandals in the diocese.
+      First, the Kensitites set themselves firmly to make presentations and
+      prosecutions against Morrice Deans, who was reserving the sacrament,
+      wearing, they said, &ldquo;Babylonish garments,&rdquo; going beyond all reason in the
+      matter of infant confession, and generally brightening up Mogham Banks;
+      next, a popular preacher in Wombash, published a book under the
+      exasperating title, &ldquo;The Light Under the Altar,&rdquo; in which he showed
+      himself as something between an Arian and a Pantheist, and treated the
+      dogma of the Trinity with as little respect as one would show to an
+      intrusive cat; while thirdly, an obscure but overworked missioner of a tin
+      mission church in the new working-class district at Pringle, being
+      discovered in some sort of polygamous relationship, had seen fit to
+      publish in pamphlet form a scandalous admission and defence, a pamphlet
+      entitled &ldquo;Marriage True and False,&rdquo; taking the public needlessly into his
+      completest confidence and quoting the affairs of Abraham and Hosea,
+      reviving many points that are better forgotten about Luther, and appealing
+      also to such uncanonical authorities as Milton, Plato, and John Humphrey
+      Noyes. This abnormal concurrence of indiscipline was extremely unlucky for
+      the bishop. It plunged him into strenuous controversy upon three fronts,
+      so to speak, and involved a great number of personal encounters far too
+      vivid for his mental serenity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pringle polygamist was the most moving as Morrice Deans was the most
+      exacting and troublesome and the Wombash Pantheist the most insidiously
+      destructive figure in these three toilsome disputes. The Pringle man's
+      soul had apparently missed the normal distribution of fig-leaves; he was
+      an illiterate, open-eyed, hard-voiced, freckled, rational-minded creature,
+      with large expository hands, who had come by a side way into the church
+      because he was an indefatigable worker, and he insisted upon telling the
+      bishop with an irrepressible candour and completeness just exactly what
+      was the matter with his intimate life. The bishop very earnestly did not
+      want these details, and did his utmost to avoid the controversial
+      questions that the honest man pressed respectfully but obstinately upon
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even St. Paul, my lord, admitted that it is better to marry than burn,&rdquo;
+       said the Pringle misdemeanant, &ldquo;and here was I, my lord, married and still
+      burning!&rdquo; and, &ldquo;I think you would find, my lord, considering all
+      Charlotte's peculiarities, that the situation was really much more trying
+      than the absolute celibacy St. Paul had in view.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop listened to these arguments as little as possible, and did not
+      answer them at all. But afterwards the offender came and wept and said he
+      was ruined and heartbroken and unfairly treated because he wasn't a
+      gentleman, and that was distressing. It was so exactly true&mdash;and so
+      inevitable. He had been deprived, rather on account of his voice and
+      apologetics than of his offence, and public opinion was solidly with the
+      sentence. He made a gallant effort to found what he called a Labour Church
+      in Pringle, and after some financial misunderstandings departed with his
+      unambiguous menage to join the advanced movement on the Clyde.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Morrice Deans enquiry however demanded an amount of erudition that
+      greatly fatigued the bishop. He had a very fair general knowledge of
+      vestments, but he had never really cared for anything but the poetry of
+      ornaments, and he had to work strenuously to master the legal side of the
+      question. Whippham, his chaplain, was worse than useless as a helper. The
+      bishop wanted to end the matter as quickly, quietly, and favourably to
+      Morrice Deans as possible; he thought Morrice Deans a thoroughly good man
+      in his parish, and he believed that the substitution of a low churchman
+      would mean a very complete collapse of church influence in Mogham Banks,
+      where people were now thoroughly accustomed to a highly ornate service.
+      But Morrice Deans was intractable and his pursuers indefatigable, and on
+      several occasions the bishop sat far into the night devising compromises
+      and equivocations that should make the Kensitites think that Morrice Deans
+      wasn't wearing vestments when he was, and that should make Morrice Deans
+      think he was wearing vestments when he wasn't. And it was Whippham who
+      first suggested green tea as a substitute for coffee, which gave the
+      bishop indigestion, as his stimulant for these nocturnal bouts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now green tea is the most lucid of poisons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And while all this extra activity about Morrice Deans, these vigils and
+      crammings and writings down, were using all and more energy than the
+      bishop could well spare, he was also doing his quiet utmost to keep &ldquo;The
+      Light under the Altar&rdquo; ease from coming to a head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This man he hated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he dreaded him as well as hated him. Chasters, the author of &ldquo;The
+      Light under the Altar,&rdquo; was a man who not only reasoned closely but
+      indelicately. There was a demonstrating, jeering, air about his preaching
+      and writing, and everything he said and did was saturated by the spirit of
+      challenge. He did not so much imitate as exaggerate the style of Matthew
+      Arnold. And whatever was done publicly against him would have to be done
+      very publicly because his book had got him a London reputation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the bishop's point of view Chasters was one of nature's ignoblemen.
+      He seemed to have subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles and passed all
+      the tests and taken all the pledges that stand on the way to ordination,
+      chiefly for the pleasure of attacking them more successfully from the
+      rear; he had been given the living of Wombash by a cousin, and filled it
+      very largely because it was not only more piquant but more remunerative
+      and respectable to be a rationalist lecturer in a surplice. And in a hard
+      kind of ultra-Protestant way his social and parochial work was not badly
+      done. But his sermons were terrible. &ldquo;He takes a text,&rdquo; said one
+      informant, &ldquo;and he goes on firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly, like
+      somebody tearing the petals from a flower. 'Finally,' he says, and throws
+      the bare stalk into the dustbin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop avoided &ldquo;The Light under the Altar&rdquo; for nearly a year. It was
+      only when a second book was announced with the winning title of &ldquo;The Core
+      of Truth in Christianity&rdquo; that he perceived he must take action. He sat up
+      late one night with a marked copy, a very indignantly marked copy, of the
+      former work that an elderly colonel, a Wombash parishioner, an orthodox
+      Layman of the most virulent type, had sent him. He perceived that he had
+      to deal with a dialectician of exceptional ability, who had concentrated a
+      quite considerable weight of scholarship upon the task of explaining away
+      every scrap of spiritual significance in the Eucharist. From Chasters the
+      bishop was driven by reference to the works of Legge and Frazer, and for
+      the first time he began to measure the dimensions and power of the modern
+      criticism of church doctrine and observance. Green tea should have lit his
+      way to refutation; instead it lit up the whole inquiry with a light of
+      melancholy confirmation. Neither by night nor by day could the bishop find
+      a proper method of opening a counter attack upon Chasters, who was
+      indisputably an intellectually abler man and a very ruthless beast indeed
+      to assail, and meanwhile the demand that action should be taken increased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The literature of church history and the controversies arising out of
+      doctrinal development became the employment of the bishop's leisure and a
+      commanding preoccupation. He would have liked to discuss with some one
+      else the network of perplexities in which he was entangling himself, and
+      more particularly with Canon Bliss, but his own positions were becoming so
+      insecure that he feared to betray them by argument. He had grown up with a
+      kind of intellectual modesty. Some things he had never yet talked about;
+      it made his mind blench to think of talking about them. And his great
+      aching gaps of wakefulness began now, thanks to the green tea, to be
+      interspersed with theological dreams and visions of an extravagant
+      vividness. He would see Frazer's sacrificial kings butchered picturesquely
+      and terribly amidst strange and grotesque rituals; he would survey long
+      and elaborate processions and ceremonials in which the most remarkable
+      symbols were borne high in the sight of all men; he would cower before a
+      gigantic and threatening Heaven. These green-tea dreams and visions were
+      not so much phases of sleep as an intensification and vivid furnishing
+      forth of insomnia. It added greatly to his disturbance that&mdash;exceeding
+      the instructions of Brighton-Pomfrey&mdash;he had now experimented
+      ignorantly and planlessly with one or two narcotics and sleeping mixtures
+      that friends and acquaintances had mentioned in his hearing. For the first
+      time in his life he became secretive from his wife. He knew he ought not
+      to take these things, he knew they were physically and morally evil, but a
+      tormenting craving drove him to them. Subtly and insensibly his character
+      was being undermined by the growing nervous trouble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He astonished himself by the cunning and the hypocritical dignity he could
+      display in procuring these drugs. He arranged to have a tea-making set in
+      his bedroom, and secretly substituted green tea, for which he developed a
+      powerful craving, in the place of the delicate China tea Lady Ella
+      procured him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These doctrinal and physical anxieties and distresses were at their worst
+      in the spring and early summer of 1914. That was a time of great mental
+      and moral disturbance. There was premonition in the air of those days. It
+      was like the uneasiness sensitive people experience before a thunderstorm.
+      The moral atmosphere was sullen and close. The whole world seemed
+      irritable and mischievous. The suffragettes became extraordinarily
+      malignant; the democratic movement went rotten with sabotage and with a
+      cant of being &ldquo;rebels&rdquo;; the reactionary Tories and a crew of noisy old
+      peeresses set themselves to create incurable confusion again in the
+      healing wounds of Ireland, and feuds and frantic folly broke out at every
+      point of the social and political edifice. And then a bomb burst at
+      Sarajevo that silenced all this tumult. The unstable polity of Europe
+      heeled over like a ship that founders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the swiftest, tensest week in history Europe capsized into war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (6)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first effect of the war upon the mind of the bishop, as upon most
+      imaginative minds, was to steady and exalt it. Trivialities and
+      exasperations seemed swept out of existence. Men lifted up their eyes from
+      disputes that had seemed incurable and wrangling that promised to be
+      interminable, and discovered a plain and tragic issue that involved every
+      one in a common call for devotion. For a great number of men and women who
+      had been born and bred in security, the August and September of 1914 were
+      the supremely heroic period of their lives. Myriads of souls were born
+      again to ideas of service and sacrifice in those tremendous days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Black and evil thing as the war was, it was at any rate a great thing; it
+      did this much for countless minds that for the first time they realized
+      the epic quality of history and their own relationship to the destinies of
+      the race. The flimsy roof under which we had been living our lives of
+      comedy fell and shattered the floor under our feet; we saw the stars above
+      and the abyss below. We perceived that life was insecure and adventurous,
+      part of one vast adventure in space and time....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently the smoke and dust of battle hid the great distances again, but
+      they could not altogether destroy the memories of this revelation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the first two months the bishop's attention was so detached from his
+      immediate surroundings and employments, so absorbed by great events, that
+      his history if it were told in detail would differ scarcely at all from
+      the histories of most comparatively unemployed minds during those first
+      dramatic days, the days when the Germans made their great rush upon Paris
+      and it seemed that France was down, France and the whole fabric of liberal
+      civilization. He emerged from these stunning apprehensions after the
+      Battle of the Marne, to find himself busy upon a score of dispersed and
+      disconnected war jobs, and trying to get all the new appearances and
+      forces and urgencies of the war into relations with himself. One thing
+      became very vivid indeed, that he wasn't being used in any real and
+      effective way in the war. There was a mighty going to and fro upon Red
+      Cross work and various war committees, a vast preparation for wounded men
+      and for the succour of dislocated families; a preparation, that proved to
+      be needless, for catastrophic unemployment. The war problem and the puzzle
+      of German psychology ousted for a time all other intellectual interests;
+      like every one else the bishop swam deep in Nietzsche, Bernhardi, Houston
+      Stewart Chamberlain, and the like; he preached several sermons upon German
+      materialism and the astonishing decay of the German character. He also
+      read every newspaper he could lay his hands on&mdash;like any secular man.
+      He signed an address to the Russian Orthodox church, beginning &ldquo;Brethren,&rdquo;
+       and he revised his impressions of the Filioque controversy. The idea of a
+      reunion of the two great state churches of Russia and England had always
+      attracted him. But hitherto it had been a thing quite out of scale,
+      visionary, utopian. Now in this strange time of altered perspectives it
+      seemed the most practicable of suggestions. The mayor and corporation and
+      a detachment of the special reserve in uniform came to a great
+      intercession service, and in the palace there were two conferences of
+      local influential people, people of the most various types, people who had
+      never met tolerantly before, expressing now opinions of unprecedented
+      breadth and liberality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this sort of thing was fresh and exciting at first, and then it began
+      to fall into a routine and became habitual, and as it became habitual he
+      found that old sense of detachment and futility was creeping back again.
+      One day he realized that indeed the whole flood and tumult of the war
+      would be going on almost exactly as it was going on now if there had been
+      neither cathedral nor bishop in Princhester. It came to him that if
+      archbishops were rolled into patriarchs and patriarchs into archbishops,
+      it would matter scarcely more in the world process that was afoot than if
+      two men shook hands while their house was afire. At times all of us have
+      inappropriate thoughts. The unfortunate thought that struck the bishop as
+      a bullet might strike a man in an exposed trench, as he was hurrying
+      through the cloisters to a special service and address upon that doubly
+      glorious day in our English history, the day of St. Crispin, was of
+      Diogenes rolling his tub.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a poisonous thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It arose perhaps out of an article in a weekly paper at which he had
+      glanced after lunch, an article written by one of those sceptical spirits
+      who find all too abundant expression in our periodical literature. The
+      writer boldly charged the &ldquo;Christian churches&rdquo; with absolute
+      ineffectiveness. This war, he declared, was above all other wars a war of
+      ideas, of material organization against rational freedom, of violence
+      against law; it was a war more copiously discussed than any war had ever
+      been before, the air was thick with apologetics. And what was the voice of
+      the church amidst these elemental issues? Bishops and divines who were
+      patriots one heard discordantly enough, but where were the bishops and
+      divines who spoke for the Prince of Peace? Where was the blessing of the
+      church, where was the veto of the church? When it came to that one
+      discovered only a broad preoccupied back busied in supplementing the Army
+      Medical Corps with Red Cross activities, good work in its way&mdash;except
+      that the canonicals seemed superfluous. Who indeed looked to the church
+      for any voice at all? And so to Diogenes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop's mind went hunting for an answer to that indictment. And came
+      back and came back to the image of Diogenes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was with that image dangling like a barbed arrow from his mind that the
+      bishop went into the pulpit to preach upon St. Crispin's day, and looked
+      down upon a thin and scattered congregation in which the elderly, the
+      childless, and the unoccupied predominated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night insomnia resumed its sway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course the church ought to be controlling this great storm, the
+      greatest storm of war that had ever stirred mankind. It ought to be
+      standing fearlessly between the combatants like a figure in a wall
+      painting, with the cross of Christ uplifted and the restored memory of
+      Christendom softening the eyes of the armed nations. &ldquo;Put down those
+      weapons and listen to me,&rdquo; so the church should speak in irresistible
+      tones, in a voice of silver trumpets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instead it kept a long way from the fighting, tucked up its vestments, and
+      was rolling its local tubs quite briskly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (7)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then came the aggravation of all these distresses by an abrupt
+      abandonment of smoking and alcohol. Alcoholic relaxation, a necessary
+      mitigation of the unreality of peacetime politics, becomes a grave danger
+      in war, and it was with an understandable desire to forward the interests
+      of his realm that the King decided to set his statesmen an example&mdash;which
+      unhappily was not very widely followed&mdash;by abstaining from alcohol
+      during the continuance of the struggle. It did however swing over the
+      Bishop of Princhester to an immediate and complete abandonment of both
+      drink and tobacco. At that time he was finding comfort for his nerves in
+      Manila cheroots, and a particularly big and heavy type of Egyptian
+      cigarette with a considerable amount of opium, and his disorganized system
+      seized upon this sudden change as a grievance, and set all his jangling
+      being crying aloud for one cigarette&mdash;just one cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cheroots, it seemed, he could better spare, but a cigarette became his
+      symbol for his lost steadiness and ease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It brought him low.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reader has already been told the lamentable incident of the stolen
+      cigarette and the small boy, and how the bishop, tormented by that
+      shameful memory, cried aloud in the night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop rolled his tub, and is there any tub-rolling in the world more
+      busy and exacting than a bishop's? He rolled in it spite of ill-health and
+      insomnia, and all the while he was tormented by the enormous background of
+      the world war, by his ineffective realization of vast national needs, by
+      his passionate desire, for himself and his church, not to be ineffective.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The distressful alternation between nights of lucid doubt and days of dull
+      acquiescence was resumed with an intensification of its contrasts. The
+      brief phase of hope that followed the turn of the fighting upon the Maine,
+      the hope that after all the war would end swiftly, dramatically, and
+      justly, and everything be as it had been before&mdash;but pleasanter, gave
+      place to a phase that bordered upon despair. The fall of Antwerp and the
+      doubts and uncertainties of the Flanders situation weighed terribly upon
+      the bishop. He was haunted for a time by nightmares of Zeppelins presently
+      raining fire upon London. These visions became Apocalyptic. The Zeppelins
+      came to England with the new year, and with the close of the year came the
+      struggle for Ypres that was so near to being a collapse of the allied
+      defensive. The events of the early spring, the bloody failure of British
+      generalship at Neuve Chapelle, the naval disaster in the Dardanelles, the
+      sinking of the Falaba, the Russian defeat in the Masurian Lakes, all
+      deepened the bishop's impression of the immensity of the nation's
+      difficulties and of his own unhelpfulness. He was ashamed that the church
+      should hold back its curates from enlistment while the French priests were
+      wearing their uniforms in the trenches; the expedition of the Bishop of
+      London to hold open-air services at the front seemed merely to accentuate
+      the tub-rolling. It was rolling the tub just where it was most in the way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was wrong? What was wanting?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Westminster Gazette, The Spectator, and several other of the most
+      trusted organs of public opinion were intermittently discussing the same
+      question. Their discussions implied at once the extreme need that was felt
+      for religion by all sorts of representative people, and the universal
+      conviction that the church was in some way muddling and masking her
+      revelation. &ldquo;What is wrong with the Churches?&rdquo; was, for example, the
+      general heading of The Westminster Gazette's correspondence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day the bishop skimmed a brief incisive utterance by Sir Harry
+      Johnston that pierced to the marrow of his own shrinking convictions. Sir
+      Harry is one of those people who seem to write as well as speak in a quick
+      tenor. &ldquo;Instead of propounding plainly and without the acereted mythology
+      of Asia Minor, Greece and Rome, the pure Gospel of Christ.... they present
+      it overloaded with unbelievable myths (such as, among a thousand others,
+      that Massacre of the Innocents which never took place).... bore their
+      listeners by a Tibetan repetition of creeds that have ceased to be
+      credible.... Mutually contradictory propositions.... Prayers and litanies
+      composed in Byzantine and mediaeval times.... the want of actuality, the
+      curious silliness which has, ever since the destruction of Jerusalem, hung
+      about the exposition of Christianity.... But if the Bishops continue to
+      fuss about the trappings of religion.... the maintenance of codes compiled
+      by people who lived sixteen hundred or two thousand five hundred years
+      ago.... the increasingly educated and practical-minded working classes
+      will not come to church, weekday or Sunday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop held the paper in his hand, and with a mind that he felt to be
+      terribly open, asked himself how true that sharp indictment might be, and,
+      granting its general truth, what was the duty of the church, that is to
+      say of the bishops, for as Cyprian says, ecelesia est in episcopo. We say
+      the creeds; how far may we unsay them?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far he had taken no open action against Chasters. Suppose now he were
+      to side with Chasters and let the whole diocese, the church of
+      Princhester, drift as far as it chose under his inaction towards an
+      extreme modernism, risking a conflict with, and if necessary fighting, the
+      archbishop.... It was but for a moment that his mind swung to this
+      possibility and then recoiled. The Laymen, that band of bigots, would
+      fight. He could not contemplate litigation and wrangling about the
+      teaching of the church. Besides, what were the &ldquo;trappings of religion&rdquo; and
+      what the essentials? What after all was &ldquo;the pure gospel of Christ&rdquo; of
+      which this writer wrote so glibly? He put the paper down and took a New
+      Testament from his desk and opened it haphazard. He felt a curious wish
+      that he could read it for the first time. It was over-familiar. Everything
+      latterly in his theology and beliefs had become over-familiar. It had all
+      become mechanical and dead and unmeaning to his tired mind....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whippham came with a reminder of more tub-rolling, and the bishop's
+      speculations were broken off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FOURTH - THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      THAT night when he cried aloud at the memory of his furtive cigarette, the
+      bishop was staying with a rich man named Garstein Fellows. These Garstein
+      Fellows people were steel people with a financial side to them; young
+      Garstein Fellows had his fingers in various chemical businesses, and the
+      real life of the firm was in various minor partners called Hartstein and
+      Blumenhart and so forth, who had acquired a considerable amount of
+      ungentlemanly science and energy in Germany and German Switzerland. But
+      the Fellows element was good old Princhester stuff. There had been a
+      Fellows firm in Princhester in 1819. They were not people the bishop liked
+      and it was not a house the bishop liked staying at, but it had become part
+      of his policy to visit and keep in touch with as many of the local
+      plutocracy as he could, to give and take with them, in order to make the
+      presence of the church a reality to them. It had been not least among the
+      negligences and evasions of the sainted but indolent Hood that he had
+      invariably refused overnight hospitality whenever it was possible for him
+      to get back to his home. The morning was his working time. His books and
+      hymns had profited at the cost of missing many a generous after-dinner
+      subscription, and at the expense of social unity. From the outset Scrope
+      had set himself to alter this. A certain lack of enthusiasm on Lady Ella's
+      part had merely provoked him to greater effort on his own. His ideal of
+      what was needed with the people was something rather jolly and familiar,
+      something like a very good and successful French or Irish priest,
+      something that came easily and readily into their homes and laid a
+      friendly hand on their shoulders. The less he liked these rich people
+      naturally the more familiar his resolution to be successfully intimate
+      made him. He put down the names and brief characteristics of their sons
+      and daughters in a little note-book and consulted it before every visit so
+      as to get his most casual enquiries right. And he invited himself to the
+      Garstein Fellows house on this occasion by telegram.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A special mission and some business in Wombash may I have a scrap of
+      supper and a bed?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now Mrs. Garstein Fellows was a thoroughly London woman; she was one of
+      the banking Grunenbaums, the fair tall sort, and she had a very decided
+      tendency to smartness. She had a little party in the house, a sort of long
+      week-end party, that made her hesitate for a minute or so before she
+      framed a reply to the bishop's request.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the intention of Mrs. Garstein Fellows to succeed very
+      conspicuously in the British world, and the British world she felt was a
+      complicated one; it is really not one world but several, and if you would
+      surely succeed you must keep your peace with all the systems and be a
+      source of satisfaction to all of them. So at least Mrs. Garstein Fellows
+      saw it, and her method was to classify her acquaintances according to
+      their systems, to keep them in their proper bundles, and to give every one
+      the treatment he or she was accustomed to receive. And since all things
+      British are now changing and passing away, it may not be uninteresting to
+      record the classification Mrs. Garstein Fellows adopted. First she set
+      apart as most precious and desirable, and requiring the most careful
+      treatment, the &ldquo;court dowdies &ldquo;&mdash;for so it was that the dignity and
+      quiet good taste that radiated from Buckingham Palace impressed her
+      restless, shallow mind&mdash;the sort of people who prefer pair horse
+      carriages to automobiles, have quiet friendships in the highest quarters,
+      quietly do not know any one else, busy themselves with charities, dress
+      richly rather than impressively, and have either little water-colour
+      accomplishments or none at all, and no other relations with &ldquo;art.&rdquo; At the
+      skirts of this crowning British world Mrs. Garstein Fellows tugged
+      industriously and expensively. She did not keep a carriage and pair and an
+      old family coachman because that, she felt, would be considered pushing
+      and presumptuous; she had the sense to stick to her common unpretending 80
+      h.p. Daimler; but she wore a special sort of blackish hat-bonnet for such
+      occasions as brought her near the centre of honour, which she got from a
+      little good shop known only to very few outside the inner ring, which
+      hat-bonnet she was always careful to sit on for a few minutes before
+      wearing. And it was to this first and highest and best section of her
+      social scheme that she considered that bishops properly belonged. But some
+      bishops, and in particular such a comparatively bright bishop as the
+      Bishop of Princhester, she also thought of as being just as comfortably
+      accommodated in her second system, the &ldquo;serious liberal lot,&rdquo; which was
+      more fatiguing and less boring, which talked of books and things, visited
+      the Bells, went to all first-nights when Granville Barker was the
+      producer, and knew and valued people in the grey and earnest plains
+      between the Cecils and the Sidney Webbs. And thirdly there were the smart
+      intellectual lot, again not very well marked off, and on the whole
+      practicable to bishops, of whom fewer particulars are needed because
+      theirs is a perennial species, and then finally there was that fourth
+      world which was paradoxically at once very brilliant and a little shady,
+      which had its Night Club side, and seemed to set no limit to its
+      eccentricities. It seemed at times to be aiming to shock and yet it had
+      its standards, but here it was that the dancers and actresses and forgiven
+      divorcees came in&mdash;and the bishops as a rule, a rule hitherto always
+      respected, didn't. This was the ultimate world of Mrs. Garstein Fellows;
+      she had no use for merely sporting people and the merely correct smart and
+      the duller county families, sets that led nowhere, and it was from her
+      fourth system of the Glittering Doubtfuls that this party which made her
+      hesitate over the bishop's telegram, was derived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She ran over their names as she sat considering her reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was there for a bishop to object to? There was that admirable
+      American widow, Lady Sunderbund. She was enormously rich, she was
+      enthusiastic. She was really on probation for higher levels; it was her
+      decolletage delayed her. If only she kept off theosophy and the Keltic
+      renascence and her disposition to profess wild intellectual passions,
+      there would be no harm in her. Provided she didn't come down to dinner in
+      anything too fantastically scanty&mdash;but a word in season was possible.
+      No! there was no harm in Lady Sunderbund. Then there were Ridgeway Kelso
+      and this dark excitable Catholic friend of his, Paidraig O'Gorman. Mrs.
+      Garstein Fellows saw no harm in them. Then one had to consider Lord
+      Gatling and Lizzie Barusetter. But nothing showed, nothing was likely to
+      show even if there was anything. And besides, wasn't there a Church and
+      Stage Guild?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Except for those people there seemed little reason for alarm. Mrs.
+      Garstein Fellows did not know that Professor Hoppart, who so amusingly
+      combined a professorship of political economy with the writing of
+      music-hall lyrics, was a keen amateur theologian, nor that Bent, the
+      sentimental novelist, had a similar passion. She did not know that her own
+      eldest son, a dark, romantic-looking youngster from Eton, had also come to
+      the theological stage of development. She did however weigh the
+      possibilities of too liberal opinions on what are called social questions
+      on the part of Miss Sharsper, the novelist, and decided that if that lady
+      was watched nothing so terrible could be said even in an undertone; and as
+      for the Mariposa, the dancer, she had nothing but Spanish and bad French,
+      she looked all right, and it wasn't very likely she would go out of her
+      way to startle an Anglican bishop. Simply she needn't dance. Besides which
+      even if a man does get a glimpse of a little something&mdash;it isn't as
+      if it was a woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But of course if the party mustn't annoy the bishop, the bishop must do
+      his duty by the party. There must be the usual purple and the silver
+      buckles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She wired back:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A little party but it won't put you out send your man with your change.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In making that promise Mrs. Garstein Fellows reckoned without the morbid
+      sensibility of the bishop's disorganized nervous system and the
+      unsuspected theological stirrings beneath the apparent worldliness of
+      Hoppart and Bent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The trouble began in the drawing-room after dinner. Out of deference to
+      the bishop's abstinence the men did not remain to smoke, but came in to
+      find the Mariposa and Lady Sunderbund smoking cigarettes, which these
+      ladies continued to do a little defiantly. They had hoped to finish them
+      before the bishop came up. The night was chilly, and a cheerful wood fire
+      cracking and banging on the fireplace emphasized the ordinary heating.
+      Mrs. Garstein Fellows, who had not expected so prompt an appearance of the
+      men, had arranged her chairs in a semicircle for a little womanly gossip,
+      and before she could intervene she found her party, with the exception of
+      Lord Gatling, who had drifted just a little too noticeably with Miss
+      Barnsetter into a window, sitting round with a conscious air, that was
+      perhaps just a trifle too apparent, of being &ldquo;good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Mr. Bent plunged boldly into general conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you reading anything now, Mrs. Garstein Fellows?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;I'm an
+      interested party.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was standing at the side of the fireplace. She bit her lip and looked
+      at the cornice and meditated with a girlish expression. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said.
+      &ldquo;I am reading again. I didn't think I should but I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For a time,&rdquo; said Hoppart, &ldquo;I read nothing but the papers. I bought from
+      a dozen to twenty a day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is wearing off,&rdquo; said the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The first thing I began to read again,&rdquo; said Mrs. Garstein Fellows, &ldquo;&mdash;I'm
+      not saying it for your sake, Bishop&mdash;was the Bible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went to the Bible,&rdquo; said Bent as if he was surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've heard that before,&rdquo; said Ridgeway Kelso, in that slightly explosive
+      manner of his. &ldquo;All sorts of people who don't usually read the Bible&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Mr. Kelso!&rdquo; protested their hostess with raised eyebrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was thinking of Bent. But anyhow there's been a great wave of
+      seriousness, a sudden turning to religion and religious things. I don't
+      know if it comes your way, Bishop....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've had no rows of penitents yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We may be coming,&rdquo; said Hoppart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned sideways to face the bishop. &ldquo;I think we should be coming if&mdash;if
+      it wasn't for old entangled difficulties. I don't know if you will mind my
+      saying it to you, but....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop returned his frank glance. &ldquo;I'd like to know above all things,&rdquo;
+       he said. &ldquo;If Mrs. Garstein Fellow will permit us. It's my business to
+      know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We all want to know,&rdquo; said Lady Sunderbund, speaking from the low chair
+      on the other side of the fireplace. There was a vibration in her voice and
+      a sudden gleam of enthusiasm in her face. &ldquo;Why shouldn't people talk
+      se'iously sometimes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, take my own case,&rdquo; said Hoppart. &ldquo;In the last few weeks, I've been
+      reading not only in the Bible but in the Fathers. I've read most of
+      Athanasius, most of Eusebius, and&mdash;I'll confess it&mdash;Gibbon. I
+      find all my old wonder come back. Why are we pinned to&mdash;to the amount
+      of creed we are pinned to? Why for instance must you insist on the
+      Trinity?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the Eton boy explosively, and flushed darkly to find he had
+      spoken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is a time when men ask for God,&rdquo; said Hoppart. &ldquo;And you give them
+      three!&rdquo; cried Bent rather cheaply. &ldquo;I confess I find the way encumbered by
+      these Alexandrian elaborations,&rdquo; Hoppart completed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Need it be?&rdquo; whispered Lady Sunderbund very softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the bishop, and leant back in his armchair and knitted his
+      brow at the fire. &ldquo;I do not think,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that men coming to God think
+      very much of the nature of God. Nevertheless,&rdquo; he spoke slowly and patted
+      the arm of his chair, &ldquo;nevertheless the church insists that certain
+      vitally important truths have to be conveyed, certain mortal errors are
+      best guarded against, by these symbols.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You admit they are symbols.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So the church has always called them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hoppart showed by a little movement and grimace that he thought the bishop
+      quibbled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In every sense of the word,&rdquo; the bishop hastened to explain, &ldquo;the creeds
+      are symbolical. It is clear they seek to express ineffable things by at
+      least an extended use of familiar words. I suppose we are all agreed
+      nowadays that when we speak of the Father and of the Son we mean something
+      only in a very remote and exalted way parallel with&mdash;with biological
+      fatherhood and sonship.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Sunderbund nodded eagerly. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;oh, yes,&rdquo; and held up an
+      expectant face for more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our utmost words, our most elaborately phrased creeds, can at the best be
+      no better than the shadow of something unseen thrown upon the screen of
+      experience.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He raised his rather weary eyes to Hoppart as if he would know what else
+      needed explanation. He was gratified by Lady Sunderbund's approval, but he
+      affected not to see or hear it. But it was Bent who spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke in the most casual way. He made the thing seem the most
+      incidental of observations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What puzzles me,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is why the early Christians identified the
+      Spermaticos Logos of the Stoics with the second and not with the third
+      person of the Trinity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To which the bishop, rising artlessly to the bait, replied, &ldquo;Ah! that
+      indeed is the unfortunate aspect of the whole affair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then the Irish Catholic came down on him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How the bishop awakened in the night after this dispute has been told
+      already in the opening section of this story. To that night of discomfort
+      we now return after this comprehensive digression. He awoke from
+      nightmares of eyes and triangles to bottomless remorse and perplexity. For
+      the first time he fully measured the vast distances he had travelled from
+      the beliefs and attitudes of his early training, since his coming to
+      Princhester. Travelled&mdash;or rather slipped and fallen down the long
+      slopes of doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That clear inky dimness that comes before dawn found his white face at the
+      window looking out upon the great terrace and the park.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a bout of mental distress and sleeplessness the bishop would
+      sometimes wake in the morning not so much exhausted as in a state of thin
+      mental and bodily activity. This was more particularly so if the night had
+      produced anything in the nature of a purpose. So it was on this occasion.
+      The day was clear before him; at least it could be cleared by sending
+      three telegrams; his man could go back to Princhester and so leave him
+      perfectly free to go to Brighton-Pomfrey in London and secure that
+      friendly dispensation to smoke again which seemed the only alternative to
+      a serious mental breakdown. He would take his bag, stay the night in
+      London, smoke, sleep well, and return the next morning. Dunk, his
+      valet-butler, found him already bathed and ready for a cup of tea and a
+      Bradshaw at half-past seven. He went on dressing although the good train
+      for London did not start until 10.45.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Garstein Fellows was by nature and principle a late riser; the
+      breakfast-room showed small promise yet of the repast, though the table
+      was set and bright with silver and fresh flowers, and a wood fire popped
+      and spurted to greet and encourage the March sunshine. But standing in the
+      doorway that led to the promise and daffodils and crocuses of Mrs.
+      Garstein Fellows' garden stood Lady Sunderbund, almost with an effect of
+      waiting, and she greeted the bishop very cheerfully, doubted the immediate
+      appearance of any one else, and led him in the most natural manner into
+      the new but already very pleasant shrubbery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In some indefinable special way the bishop had been aware of Lady
+      Sunderbund's presence since first he had met her, but it was only now that
+      he could observe her with any particularity. She was tall like his own
+      Lady Ella but not calm and quiet; she was electric, her eyes, her smiles,
+      her complexion had as it were an established brightness that exceeded the
+      common lustre of things. This morning she was dressed in grey that was
+      nevertheless not grey but had an effect of colour, and there was a thread
+      of black along the lines of her body and a gleam of gold. She carried her
+      head back with less dignity than pride; there was a little frozen movement
+      in her dark hair as if it flamed up out of her head. There were silver
+      ornaments in her hair. She spoke with a pretty little weakness of the r's
+      that had probably been acquired abroad. And she lost no time in telling
+      him, she was eager to tell him, that she had been waylaying him. &ldquo;I did so
+      want to talk to you some maw,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I was shy last night and they
+      we' all so noisy and eaga'. I p'ayed that you might come down early.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's an oppo'tunity I've longed for,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did her very pretty best to convey what it was had been troubling her.
+      'iligion bad been worrying her for years. Life was&mdash;oh&mdash;just
+      ornaments and games and so wea'isome, so wea'isome, unless it was
+      'iligious. And she couldn't get it 'iligious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop nodded his head gravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You unde'stand?&rdquo; she pressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand too well&mdash;the attempt to get hold&mdash;and keep hold.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I knew you would!&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She went on with an impulsive rapidity. O'thodoxy had always 'ipelled her,&mdash;always.
+      She had felt herself confronted by the most insurmountable difficulties,
+      and yet whenever she had gone away from Christianity&mdash;she had gone
+      away from Christianity, to the Theosophists and the Christian Scientists&mdash;she
+      had felt she was only &ldquo;st'aying fu'tha.&rdquo; And then suddenly when he was
+      speaking last night, she had felt he knew. It was so wonderful to hear the
+      &ldquo;k'eed was only a symbol.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Symbol is the proper name for it,&rdquo; said the bishop. &ldquo;It wasn't for
+      centuries it was called the Creed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, and so what it really meant was something quite different from what
+      it did mean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop felt that this sentence also was only a symbol, and nodded
+      encouragingly&mdash;but gravely, warily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there she was, and the point was there were thousands and thousands
+      and thousands of educated people like her who were dying to get through
+      these old-fashioned symbols to the true faith that lay behind them. That
+      they knew lay behind them. She didn't know if he had read &ldquo;The Light under
+      the Altar&rdquo;?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's vicar of Wombash&mdash;in my diocese,&rdquo; said the bishop with
+      restraint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's wonde'ful stuff,&rdquo; said Lady Sunderbund. &ldquo;It's spi'tually cold, but
+      it's intellectually wonde'ful. But we want that with spi'tuality. We want
+      it so badly. If some one&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She became daring. She bit her under lip and flashed her spirit at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you&mdash;&rdquo; she said and paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could think aloud,&rdquo; said the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, nodding rapidly, and became breathless to hear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would certainly be an astonishing end to the Chasters difficulty if the
+      bishop went over to the heretic, the bishop reflected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear lady, I won't disguise,&rdquo; he began; &ldquo;in fact I don't see how I
+      could, that for some years I have been growing more and more discontented
+      with some of our most fundamental formulae. But it's been very largely a
+      shapeless discontent&mdash;hitherto. I don't think I've said a word to a
+      single soul. No, not a word. You are the first person to whom I've ever
+      made the admission that even my feelings are at times unorthodox.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She lit up marvellously at his words. &ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But she did not need to tell him to go on. Now that he had once broached
+      the casket of his reserves he was only too glad of a listener. He talked
+      as if they were intimate and loving friends, and so it seemed to both of
+      them they were. It was a wonderful release from a long and painful
+      solitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To certain types it is never quite clear what has happened to them until
+      they tell it. So that now the bishop, punctuated very prettily by Lady
+      Sunderbund, began to measure for the first time the extent of his
+      departure from the old innate convictions of Otteringham Rectory. He said
+      that it was strange to find doubt coming so late in life, but perhaps it
+      was only in recent years that his faith had been put to any really severe
+      tests. It had been sheltered and unchallenged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This fearful wa',&rdquo; Lady Sunderbund interjected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Princhester had been a critical and trying change, and &ldquo;The Light
+      under the Altar&rdquo; case had ploughed him deeply. It was curious that his
+      doubts always seemed to have a double strand; there was a moral objection
+      based on the church's practical futility and an intellectual strand
+      subordinated to this which traced that futility largely to its
+      unconvincing formulae.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet you know,&rdquo; said the bishop, &ldquo;I find I can't go with Chasters. He
+      beats at the church; he treats her as though she were wrong. I feel like a
+      son, growing up, who finds his mother isn't quite so clear-spoken nor
+      quite so energetic as she seemed to be once. She's right, I feel sure.
+      I've never doubted her fundamental goodness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Lady Sunderbund, very eagerly, &ldquo;yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet there's this futility.... You know, my dear lady, I don't know
+      what to do. One feels on the one hand, that here is a cloud of witnesses,
+      great men, sainted men, subtle men, figures permanently historical, before
+      whom one can do nothing but bow down in the utmost humility, here is a
+      great instrument and organization&mdash;what would the world be without
+      the witness of the church?&mdash;and on the other hand here are our masses
+      out of hand and hostile, our industrial leaders equally hostile; there is
+      a failure to grip, and that failure to grip is so clearly traceable to the
+      fact that our ideas are not modern ideas, that when we come to profess our
+      faith we find nothing in our mouths but antiquated Alexandrian subtleties
+      and phrases and ideas that may have been quite alive, quite significant,
+      quite adequate in Asia Minor or Egypt, among men essentially orientals,
+      fifteen hundred years ago, but which now&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He expressed just what they came to now by a gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She echoed his gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Probably I'm not alone among my brethren,&rdquo; he went on, and then: &ldquo;But
+      what is one to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With her hands she acted her sense of his difficulty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One may be precipitate,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;There's a kind of loyalty and
+      discipline that requires one to keep the ranks until one's course of
+      action is perfectly clear. One owes so much to so many. One has to
+      consider how one may affect&mdash;oh! people one has never seen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was lugging things now into speech that so far had been scarcely above
+      the threshold of his conscious thought. He went on to discuss the entire
+      position of the disbelieving cleric. He discovered a fine point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If there was something else, an alternative, another religion, another
+      Church, to which one could go, the whole case would be different. But to
+      go from the church to nothingness isn't to go from falsehood to truth.
+      It's to go from truth, rather badly expressed, rather conservatively
+      hidden by its protections, truth in an antiquated costume, to the blackest
+      lie&mdash;in the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took that point very brightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One must hold fast to 'iligion,&rdquo; she said, and looked earnestly at him
+      and gripped fiercely, pink thumbs out, with her beautiful hands held up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was it, exactly. He too was gripping. But while on the outside the
+      Midianites of denial were prowling for these clinging souls, within the
+      camp they were assailed by a meticulous orthodoxy that was only too eager
+      to cast them forth. The bishop dwelt for a time upon the curious
+      fierceness orthodoxy would sometimes display. Nowadays atheism can be
+      civil, can be generous; it is orthodoxy that trails a scurrilous fringe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who was that young man with a strong Irish accent&mdash;who contradicted
+      me so suddenly?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The dark young man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The noisy young man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was Mist' Pat'ick O'Go'man. He is a Kelt and all that. Spells
+      Pat'ick with eva so many letters. You know. They say he spends ouas and
+      ouas lea'ning E'se. He wo'ies about it. They all t'y to lea'n E'se, and it
+      wo'ies them and makes them hate England moa and moa.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is orthodox. He&mdash;is what I call orthodox to the ridiculous
+      extent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'idiculous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A deep-toned gong proclaimed breakfast over a square mile or so of
+      territory, and Lady Sunderbund turned about mechanically towards the
+      house. But they continued their discussion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She started indeed a new topic. &ldquo;Shall we eva, do 'ou think, have a new
+      'iligion&mdash;t'ua and betta?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was a revolutionary idea to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was still fending it off from him when a gap in the shrubs brought them
+      within sight of the house and of Mrs. Garstein Fellows on the portico
+      waving a handkerchief and crying &ldquo;Break-fast.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish we could talk for houas,&rdquo; said Lady Sunderbund.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been glad of this talk,&rdquo; said the bishop. &ldquo;Very glad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She lifted her soft abundant skirts and trotted briskly across the still
+      dewy lawn towards the house door. The bishop followed gravely and slowly
+      with his hands behind his back and an unusually peaceful expression upon
+      his face. He was thinking how rare and precious a thing it is to find
+      intelligent friendship in women. More particularly when they were
+      dazzlingly charming and pretty. It was strange, but this was really his
+      first woman friend. If, as he hoped, she became his friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Sunderbund entered the breakfast room in a gusty abundance like
+      Botticelli's Primavera, and kissed Mrs. Garstein Fellows good-morning. She
+      exhaled a glowing happiness. &ldquo;He is wondyful,&rdquo; she panted. &ldquo;He is most
+      wondyful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Hidgeway Kelso?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, the dee' bishop! I love him. Are those the little sausages I like?
+      May I take th'ee? I've been up houas.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The dee' bishop appeared in the sunlit doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop felt more contentment in the London train than he had felt for
+      many weeks. He had taken two decisive and relieving steps. One was that he
+      had stated his case to another human being, and that a very charming and
+      sympathetic human being, he was no longer a prey to a current of secret
+      and concealed thoughts running counter to all the appearances of his
+      outward life; and the other was that he was now within an hour or so of
+      Brighton-Pomfrey and a cigarette. He would lunch on the train, get to
+      London about two, take a taxi at once to the wise old doctor, catch him
+      over his coffee in a charitable and understanding mood, and perhaps be
+      smoking a cigarette publicly and honourably and altogether satisfyingly
+      before three.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far as Brighton-Pomfrey's door this program was fulfilled without a
+      hitch. The day was fine and he had his taxi opened, and noted with a
+      patriotic satisfaction as he rattled through the streets, the glare of the
+      recruiting posters on every vacant piece of wall and the increasing number
+      of men in khaki in the streets. But at the door he had a disappointment.
+      Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was away at the front&mdash;of all places; he had
+      gone for some weeks; would the bishop like to see Dr. Dale?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop hesitated. He had never set eyes on this Dr. Dale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, he had never heard of Dr. Dale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Seeing his old friend Brighton-Pomfrey and being gently and tactfully told
+      to do exactly what he was longing to do was one thing; facing some strange
+      doctor and going slowly and elaborately through the whole story of his
+      illness, his vow and his breakdown, and perhaps having his reaction time
+      tested and all sorts of stripping and soundings done, was quite another.
+      He was within an ace of turning away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If he had turned away his whole subsequent life would have been different.
+      It was the very slightest thing in the world tipped the beam. It was the
+      thought that, after all, whatever inconvenience and unpleasantness there
+      might be in this interview, there was at the end of it a very reasonable
+      prospect of a restored and legitimate cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FIFTH - THE FIRST VISION
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Dr. DALE exceeded the bishop's worst apprehensions. He was a lean, lank,
+      dark young man with long black hair and irregular, rather prolonged
+      features; his chin was right over to the left; he looked constantly at the
+      bishop's face with a distinctly sceptical grey eye; he could not have
+      looked harder if he had been a photographer or a portrait painter. And his
+      voice was harsh, and the bishop was particularly sensitive to voices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began by understanding far too much of the bishop's illness, and he
+      insisted on various familiarities with the bishop's heart and tongue and
+      eye and knee that ruffled the bishop's soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brighton-Pomfrey talked of neurasthenia?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;That was his
+      diagnosis,&rdquo; said the bishop. &ldquo;Neurasthenia,&rdquo; said the young man as though
+      he despised the word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop went on buttoning up his coat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't of course want to break your vows about drinking and smoking,&rdquo;
+       said the young man with the very faintest suggestion of derision in his
+      voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not if it can possibly be avoided,&rdquo; the bishop asserted. &ldquo;Without a loss,
+      that is, of practical efficiency,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;For I have much to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think that it is possible to keep your vow,&rdquo; said the young man, and
+      the bishop could have sworn at him. &ldquo;I think we can manage that all
+      right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop sat at the table resting his arm upon it and awaiting the next
+      development of this unsatisfactory interview. He was on the verge of
+      asking as unpleasantly as possible when Brighton-Pomfrey would return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man stood upon Brighton-Pomfrey's hearth-rug and was evidently
+      contemplating dissertations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; he said, as though he discussed a problem with himself, &ldquo;you
+      must have some sort of comfort. You must get out of this state, one way or
+      another.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop nodded assent. He had faint hopes of this young man's ideas of
+      comfort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Dale reflected. Then he went off away from the question of comfort
+      altogether. &ldquo;You see, the trouble in such a case as this is peculiarly
+      difficult to trace to its sources because it comes just upon the
+      border-line of bodily and mental things. You may take a drug or alter your
+      regimen and it disturbs your thoughts, you may take an idea and it
+      disturbs your health. It is easy enough to say, as some do, that all ideas
+      have a physical substratum; it is almost as easy to say with the Christian
+      Scientist that all bodily states are amenable to our ideas. The truth
+      doesn't, I think, follow the border between those opposite opinions very
+      exactly on either side. I can't, for instance, tell you to go home and
+      pray against these uncertainties and despairs, because it is just these
+      uncertainties and despairs that rob you of the power of efficient prayer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not seem to expect anything from the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see that because a case brings one suddenly right up against the
+      frontier of metaphysics, why a doctor should necessarily pull up short at
+      that, why one shouldn't go on into either metaphysics or psychology if
+      such an extension is necessary for the understanding of the case. At any
+      rate if you'll permit it in this consultation....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; said the bishop, holding on to that promise of comfort. &ldquo;The best
+      thing is to thrash out the case in your own way. And then come to what is
+      practical.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is really the matter here&mdash;the matter with you that is&mdash;is
+      a disorganization of your tests of reality. It's one of a group of states
+      hitherto confused. Neurasthenia, that comprehensive phrase&mdash;well, it
+      is one of the neurasthenias. Here, I confess, I begin to talk of work I am
+      doing, work still to be published, finished first and then published....
+      But I go off from the idea that every living being lives in a state not
+      differing essentially from a state of hallucination concerning the things
+      about it. Truth, essential truth, is hidden. Always. Of course there must
+      be a measure of truth in our working illusions, a working measure of
+      truth, or the creature would smash itself up and end itself, but beyond
+      that discretion of the fire and the pitfall lies a wide margin of error
+      about which we may be deceived for years. So long as it doesn't matter, it
+      doesn't matter. I don't know if I make myself clear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I follow you,&rdquo; said the bishop a little wearily, &ldquo;I follow you. Phenomena
+      and noumena and so on and so on. Kant and so forth. Pragmatism. Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And all that,&rdquo; completed Dr. Dale in a voice that suggested mockery. &ldquo;But
+      you see we grow into a way of life, we settle down among habits and
+      conventions, we say 'This is all right' and 'That is always so.' We get
+      more and more settled into our life as a whole and more and more
+      confident. Unless something happens to shake us out of our sphere of
+      illusion. That may be some violent contradictory fact, some accident, or
+      it may be some subtle change in one's health and nerves that makes us feel
+      doubtful. Or a change of habits. Or, as I believe, some subtle quickening
+      of the critical faculty. Then suddenly comes the feeling as though we were
+      lost in a strange world, as though we had never really seen the world
+      before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop was reluctantly interested. &ldquo;That does describe something&mdash;of
+      the mental side,&rdquo; he admitted. &ldquo;I never believe in concealing my own
+      thoughts from an intelligent patient,&rdquo; said Dr. Dale, with a quiet
+      offensiveness. &ldquo;That sort of thing belongs to the dark ages of the
+      'pothecary's art. I will tell you exactly my guesses and suppositions
+      about you. At the base of it all is a slight and subtle kidney trouble,
+      due I suggest to your going to Princhester and drinking the local water&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it's excellent water. They boast of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By all the established tests. As a matter of fact many of our best
+      drinking waters have all sorts of unspecified qualities. Burton water, for
+      example, is radioactive by Beetham's standards up to the ninth degree. But
+      that is by the way. My theory about your case is that this produced a
+      change in your blood, that quickened your sensibilities and your critical
+      faculties just at a time when a good many bothers&mdash;I don't of course
+      know what they were, but I can, so to speak, see the marks all over you&mdash;came
+      into your life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were uprooted. You moved from house to house, and failed to get that
+      curled up safe feeling one has in a real home in any of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you saw the fireplaces and the general decoration of the new palace!&rdquo;
+       admitted the bishop. &ldquo;I had practically no control.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That confirms me,&rdquo; said Dr. Dale. &ldquo;Insomnia followed, and increased the
+      feeling of physical strangeness by increasing the bodily disturbance. I
+      suspect an intellectual disturbance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was,&rdquo; said the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were no longer at home anywhere. You were no longer at home in your
+      diocese, in your palace, in your body, in your convictions. And then came
+      the war. Quite apart from everything else the mind of the whole world is
+      suffering profoundly from the shock of this war&mdash;much more than is
+      generally admitted. One thing you did that you probably did not observe
+      yourself doing, you drank rather more at your meals, you smoked a lot
+      more. That was your natural and proper response to the shock.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said the bishop, and brightened up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was remarked by Tolstoy, I think, that few intellectual men would
+      really tolerate the world as it is if it were not for smoking and
+      drinking. Even novelists have their moments of lucidity. Certainly these
+      things soothe the restlessness in men's minds, deaden their sceptical
+      sensibilities. And just at the time when you were getting most dislodged&mdash;you
+      gave them up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the sooner I go back to them the better,&rdquo; said the bishop brightly.
+      &ldquo;I quite see that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wouldn't say that,&rdquo; said Dr. Dale....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; said Dr. Dale, &ldquo;is just where my treatment of this case differs
+      from the treatment of &ldquo;&mdash;he spoke the name reluctantly as if he
+      disliked the mere sound of it&mdash;&ldquo;Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hitherto, of course,&rdquo; said the bishop, &ldquo;I've been in his hands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He,&rdquo; said Dr. Dale, &ldquo;would certainly set about trying to restore your old
+      sphere of illusion, your old familiar sensations and ideas and
+      confidences. He would in fact turn you back. He would restore all your
+      habits. He would order you a rest. He would send you off to some holiday
+      resort, fresh in fact but familiar in character, the High lands, North
+      Italy, or Switzerland for example. He would forbid you newspapers and
+      order you to botanize and prescribe tranquillizing reading; Trollope's
+      novels, the Life of Gladstone, the works of Mr. A. C. Benson, memoirs and
+      so on. You'd go somewhere where there was a good Anglican chaplain, and
+      you'd take some of the services yourself. And we'd wash out the effects of
+      the Princhester water with Contrexeville, and afterwards put you on
+      Salutaris or Perrier. I don't know whether I shouldn't have inclined to
+      some such treatment before the war began. Only&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Dale's face betrayed a sudden sombre passion. &ldquo;It won't do now,&rdquo; he
+      said in a voice of quiet intensity. &ldquo;It won't do now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He remained darkly silent for so long that at last the bishop spoke. &ldquo;Then
+      what,&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;do you suggest?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose we don't try to go back,&rdquo; said Dr. Dale. &ldquo;Suppose we go on and go
+      through.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To reality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know it's doubtful, I know it's dangerous,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;but I am
+      convinced that now we can no longer keep men's minds and souls in these
+      feathered nests, these spheres of illusion. Behind these veils there is
+      either God or the Darkness.... Why should we not go on?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop was profoundly perplexed. He heard himself speaking. &ldquo;It would
+      be unworthy of my cloth,&rdquo; he was saying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Dale completed the sentence: &ldquo;to go back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me explain a little more,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;what I mean by 'going on.' I
+      think that this loosening of the ties of association that bind a man to
+      his everyday life and his everyday self is in nine cases out of ten a
+      loosening of the ties that bind him to everyday sanity. One common form of
+      this detachment is the form you have in those cases of people who are
+      found wandering unaware of their names, unaware of their places of
+      residence, lost altogether from themselves. They have not only lost their
+      sense of identity with themselves, but all the circumstances of their
+      lives have faded out of their minds like an idle story in a book that has
+      been read and put aside. I have looked into hundreds of such cases. I
+      don't think that loss of identity is a necessary thing; it's just another
+      side of the general weakening of the grip upon reality, a kind of anaemia
+      of the brain so that interest fades and fails. There is no reason why you
+      should forget a story because you do not believe it&mdash;if your brain is
+      strong enough to hold it. But if your brain is tired and weak, then so
+      soon as you lose faith in your records, your mind is glad to let them go.
+      When you see these lost identity people that is always your first
+      impression, a tired brain that has let go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop felt extremely like letting go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how does this apply to my case?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I come to that,&rdquo; said Dr. Dale, holding up a long large hand. &ldquo;What if we
+      treat this case of yours in a new way? What if we give you not narcotics
+      but stimulants and tonics? What if we so touch the blood that we increase
+      your sense of physical detachment while at the same time feeding up your
+      senses to a new and more vivid apprehension of things about you?&rdquo; He
+      looked at his patient's hesitation and added: &ldquo;You'd lose all that craving
+      feeling, that you fancy at present is just the need of a smoke. The world
+      might grow a trifle&mdash;transparent, but you'd keep real. Instead of
+      drugging oneself back to the old contentment&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd drug me on to the new,&rdquo; said the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But just one word more!&rdquo; said Dr. Dale. &ldquo;Hear why I would do this! It was
+      easy and successful to rest and drug people back to their old states of
+      mind when the world wasn't changing, wasn't spinning round in the wildest
+      tornado of change that it has ever been in. But now&mdash;Where can I send
+      you for a rest? Where can I send you to get you out of sight and hearing
+      of the Catastrophe? Of course old Brighton-Pomfrey would go on sending
+      people away for rest and a nice little soothing change if the Day of
+      Judgment was coming in the sky and the earth was opening and the sea was
+      giving up its dead. He'd send 'em to the seaside. Such things as that
+      wouldn't shake his faith in the Channel crossing. My idea is that it's not
+      only right for you to go through with this, but that it's the only thing
+      to do. If you go right on and right through with these doubts and
+      intimations&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You may die like a madman,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but you won't die like a tame
+      rabbit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop sat reflecting. What fascinated and attracted him was the
+      ending of all the cravings and uneasinesses and restlessness that had
+      distressed his life for over four years; what deterred him was the
+      personality of this gaunt young man with his long grey face, his excited
+      manner, his shock of black hair. He wanted that tonic&mdash;with grave
+      misgivings. &ldquo;If you think this tonic is the wiser course,&rdquo; he began. &ldquo;I'd
+      give it you if you were my father,&rdquo; said Dr. Dale. &ldquo;I've got everything
+      for it,&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean you can make it up&mdash;without a prescription.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't give you a prescription. The essence of it&mdash;It's a
+      distillate I have been trying. It isn't in the Pharmacopeia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the bishop had a twinge of misgiving.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the end he succumbed. He didn't want to take the stuff, but also he
+      did not want to go without his promised comfort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently Dale had given him a little phial&mdash;and was holding up to
+      the window a small medicine glass into which he was pouring very carefully
+      twenty drops of the precious fluid. &ldquo;Take it only,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;when you
+      feel you must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the most golden of liquids,&rdquo; said the bishop, peering at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you want more I will make you more. Later of course, it will be
+      possible to write a prescription. Now add the water&mdash;so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It becomes opalescent. How beautifully the light plays in it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop dismissed his last discretion and drank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; said Dr. Dale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am still here,&rdquo; said the bishop, smiling, and feeling a joyous tingling
+      throughout his body. &ldquo;It stirs me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop stood on the pavement outside Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's house. The
+      massive door had closed behind him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had been an act of courage, of rashness if you will, to take this
+      draught. He was acutely introspective, ready for anything, for the most
+      disagreeable or the most bizarre sensations. He was asking himself, Were
+      his feet steady? Was his head swimming?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His doubts glowed into assurance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he perceived that he was sure of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not perhaps of the God of Nicaea, but what did these poor little
+      quibblings and definitions of the theologians matter? He had been worrying
+      about these definitions and quibblings for four long restless years. Now
+      they were just failures to express&mdash;what surely every one knew&mdash;and
+      no one would ever express exactly. Because here was God, and the kingdom
+      of God was manifestly at hand. The visible world hung before him as a mist
+      might hang before the rising sun. He stood proudly and masterfully facing
+      a universe that had heretofore bullied him into doubt and apologetics, a
+      universe that had hitherto been opaque and was now betrayed translucent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the first effect of the new tonic, complete reassurance, complete
+      courage. He turned to walk towards Mount Street and Berkeley Square as a
+      sultan might turn to walk among his slaves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the tonic was only beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before he had gone a dozen steps he was aware that he seemed more solid
+      and larger than the people about him. They had all a curious miniature
+      effect, as though he was looking at them through the wrong end of an opera
+      glass. The houses on either side of the street and the traffic shared this
+      quality in an equal measure. It was as if he was looking at the world
+      through apertures in a miniature cinematograph peep-show. This surprised
+      him and a little dashed his first glow of satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He passed a man in khaki who, he fancied, looked at him with an odd
+      expression. He observed the next passers-by narrowly and suspiciously, a
+      couple of smartish young men, a lady with a poodle, a grocer's boy with a
+      basket, but none seemed to observe anything remarkable about him. Then he
+      caught the eye of a taxi-driver and became doubtful again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a feeling that this tonic was still coming in like a tide. It
+      seemed to be filling him and distending him, in spite of the fact that he
+      was already full. After four years of flaccidity it was pleasant to be
+      distended again, but already he felt more filled than he had ever been
+      before. At present nothing was showing, but all his body seemed braced and
+      uplifted. He must be careful not to become inflated in his bearing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet it was difficult not to betray a little inflation. He was so
+      filled with assurance that things were right with him and that God was
+      there with him. After all it was not mere fancy; he was looking through
+      the peepholes of his eyes at the world of illusion and appearance. The
+      world that was so intent upon its immediate business, so regardless of
+      eternal things, that had so dominated him but a little while ago, was
+      after all a thing more mortal than himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another man in khaki passed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the first time he saw the war as something measurable, as something
+      with a beginning and an end, as something less than the immortal spirit in
+      man. He had been too much oppressed by it. He perceived all these people
+      in the street were too much oppressed by it. He wanted to tell them as
+      much, tell them that all was well with them, bid them be of good cheer. He
+      wanted to bless them. He found his arm floating up towards gestures of
+      benediction. Self-control became increasingly difficult.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the way down Berkeley Square the bishop was in full-bodied struggle
+      with himself. He was trying to control himself, trying to keep within
+      bounds. He felt that he was stepping too high, that his feet were not
+      properly reaching the ground, that he was walking upon cushions of air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The feeling of largeness increased, and the feeling of transparency in
+      things about him. He avoided collision with passers-by&mdash;excessively.
+      And he felt his attention was being drawn more and more to something that
+      was going on beyond the veil of visible things. He was in Piccadilly now,
+      but at the same time Piccadilly was very small and he was walking in the
+      presence of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a feeling that God was there though he could not see him. And at
+      the same time he was in this transitory world, with people going to and
+      fro, men with umbrellas tucked dangerously under their arms, men in a
+      hurry, policemen, young women rattling Red Cross collecting boxes, smart
+      people, loafers. They distracted one from God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He set out to cross the road just opposite Prince's, and jumping
+      needlessly to give way to an omnibus had the narrowest escape from a
+      taxicab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused on the pavement edge to recover himself. The shock of his near
+      escape had, as people say, pulled him together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was he to do? Manifestly this opalescent draught was overpowering
+      him. He ought never to have taken it. He ought to have listened to the
+      voice of his misgivings. It was clear that he was not in a fit state to
+      walk about the streets. He was&mdash;what had been Dr. Dale's term?&mdash;losing
+      his sense of reality. What was he to do? He was alarmed but not dismayed.
+      His thoughts were as full-bodied as the rest of his being, they came
+      throbbing and bumping into his mind. What was he to do?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brighton-Pomfrey ought never to have left his practice in the hands of
+      this wild-eyed experimenter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Strange that after a lifetime of discretion and men's respect one should
+      be standing on the Piccadilly pavement&mdash;intoxicated!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It came into his head that he was not so very far from the Athenaeum, and
+      surely there if anywhere a bishop may recover his sense of being&mdash;ordinary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And behind everything, behind the tall buildings and the swarming people
+      there was still the sense of a wide illuminated space, of a light of
+      wonder and a Presence. But he must not give way to that again! He had
+      already given way altogether too much. He repeated to himself in a
+      whisper, &ldquo;I am in Piccadilly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      If he kept tight hold upon himself he felt he might get to the Athenaeum
+      before&mdash;before anything more happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He murmured directions to himself. &ldquo;Keep along the pavement. Turn to the
+      right at the Circus. Now down the hill. Easily down the hill. Don't float!
+      Junior Army and Navy Stores. And the bookseller.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And presently he had a doubt of his name and began to repeat it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Edward Princhester. Edward Scrope, Lord Bishop of Princhester.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And all the while voices within him were asserting, &ldquo;You are in the
+      kingdom of Heaven. You are in the presence of God. Place and time are a
+      texture of illusion and dreamland. Even now, you are with God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (6)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The porter of the Athenaeum saw him come in, looking well&mdash;flushed
+      indeed&mdash;but queer in expression; his blue eyes were wide open and
+      unusually vague and blue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wandered across towards the dining-room, hesitated, went to look at the
+      news, seemed in doubt whether he would not go into the smoking-room, and
+      then went very slowly upstairs, past the golden angel up to the great
+      drawing-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the drawing-room he found only Sir James Mounce, the man who knew the
+      novels of Sir Walter Scott by heart and had the minutest and most
+      unsparing knowledge of every detail in the life of that supreme giant of
+      English literature. He had even, it was said, acquired a Scotch burr in
+      the enthusiasm of his hero-worship. It was usually sufficient only to turn
+      an ear towards him for him to talk for an hour or so. He was now studying
+      Bradshaw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop snatched at him desperately. He felt that if he went away there
+      would be no hold left upon the ordinary things of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir James,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I was wondering the other day when was the exact
+      date of the earliest public ascription of Waverley to Scott.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh!&rdquo; said Sir James, &ldquo;but I'd like to talk that over with ye. Indeed I
+      would. It would be depending very largely on what ye called 'public.' But&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He explained something about an engagement in Birmingham that night, a
+      train to catch. Reluctantly but relentlessly he abandoned the proffered
+      ear. But he promised that the next time they met in the club he would go
+      into the matter &ldquo;exhausteevely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The door closed upon him. The bishop was alone. He was flooded with the
+      light of the world that is beyond this world. The things about him became
+      very small and indistinct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would take himself into a quiet corner in the library of this doll's
+      house, and sit his little body down in one of the miniature armchairs.
+      Then if he was going to faint or if the trancelike feeling was to become
+      altogether a trance&mdash;well, a bishop asleep in an armchair in the
+      library of the Athenaeum is nothing to startle any one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of that convenient hidden room, the North Library, in which is
+      the bust of Croker. There often one can be quite alone.... It was empty,
+      and he went across to the window that looks out upon Pall Mall and sat
+      down in the little uncomfortable easy chair by the desk with its back to
+      the Benvenuto Cellini.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as he sat down, something snapped&mdash;like the snapping of a lute
+      string&mdash;in his brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (7)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a sigh of deep relief the bishop realized that this world had
+      vanished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was in a golden light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He perceived it as a place, but it was a place without buildings or trees
+      or any very definite features. There was a cloudy suggestion of distant
+      hills, and beneath his feet were little gem-like flowers, and a feeling of
+      divinity and infinite friendliness pervaded his being. His impressions
+      grew more definite. His feet seemed to be bare. He was no longer a bishop
+      nor clad as a bishop. That had gone with the rest of the world. He was
+      seated on a slab of starry rock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This he knew quite clearly was the place of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was unable to disentangle thoughts from words. He seemed to be speaking
+      in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been very foolish and confused and perplexed. I have been like a
+      creature caught among thorns.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You served the purpose of God among those thorns.&rdquo; It seemed to him at
+      first that the answer also was among his thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I seemed so silly and so little. My wits were clay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Clay full of desires.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Such desires!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Blind desires. That will presently come to the light.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall we come to the light?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But here it is, and you see it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (8)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It became clearer in the mind of the bishop that a figure sat beside him,
+      a figure of great strength and beauty, with a smiling face and kindly
+      eyes. A strange thought and a strange courage came to the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; he whispered, &ldquo;are you God?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am the Angel of God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop thought over that for some moments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to know about God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want,&rdquo; he said, with a deepening passion of the soul, &ldquo;to know about
+      God. Slowly through four long years I have been awakening to the need of
+      God. Body and soul I am sick for the want of God and the knowledge of God.
+      I did not know what was the matter with me, why my life had become so
+      disordered and confused that my very appetites and habits are all astray.
+      But I am perishing for God as a waterless man upon a raft perishes for
+      drink, and there is nothing but madness if I touch the seas about me. Not
+      only in my thoughts but in my under thoughts and in my nerves and bones
+      and arteries I have need of God. You see I grew up in the delusion that I
+      knew God, I did not know that I was unprovisioned and unprovided against
+      the tests and strains and hardships of life. I thought that I was secure
+      and safe. I was told that we men&mdash;who were apes not a quarter of a
+      million years ago, who still have hair upon our arms and ape's teeth in
+      our jaws&mdash;had come to the full and perfect knowledge of God. It was
+      all put into a creed. Not a word of it was to be altered, not a sentence
+      was to be doubted any more. They made me a teacher of this creed. They
+      seemed to explain it to me. And when I came to look into it, when my need
+      came and I turned to my creed, it was old and shrivelled up, it was the
+      patched-up speculations of vanished Greeks and Egyptians, it was a mummy
+      of ancient disputes, old and dry, that fell to dust as I unwrapped it. And
+      I was dressed up in the dress of old dead times and put before an altar of
+      forgotten sacrifices, and I went through ceremonies as old as the first
+      seedtime; and suddenly I knew clearly that God was not there, God was not
+      in my Creed, not in my cathedral, not in my ceremonies, nowhere in my
+      life. And at the same time I knew, I knew as I had never known before,
+      that certainly there was God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused. &ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; said the friend at his side; &ldquo;tell me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was as if a child running beside its mother, looked up and saw that he
+      had never seen her face before, that she was not his mother, and that the
+      words he had seemed to understand were&mdash;now that he listened&mdash;words
+      in an unknown tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, I am but a common sort of man, dear God; I have neither lived
+      nor thought in any way greatly, I have gone from one day to the next day
+      without looking very much farther than the end of the day, I have gone on
+      as life has befallen; if no great trouble had come into my life, so I
+      should have lived to the end of my days. But life which began for me
+      easily and safely has become constantly more difficult and strange. I
+      could have held my services and given my benedictions, I could have
+      believed I believed in what I thought I believed.... But now I am lost and
+      astray&mdash;crying out for God....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (9)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us talk a little about your troubles,&rdquo; said the Angel. &ldquo;Let us talk
+      about God and this creed that worries you and this church of yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel as though I had been struggling to this talk through all the years&mdash;since
+      my doubts began.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The story your Creed is trying to tell is much the same story that all
+      religions try to tell. In your heart there is God, beyond the stars there
+      is God. Is it the same God?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; said the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does any one know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I knew.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your creed is full of Levantine phrases and images, full of the patched
+      contradictions of the human intelligence utterly puzzled. It is about
+      those two Gods, the God beyond the stars and the God in your heart. It
+      says that they are the same God, but different. It says that they have
+      existed together for all time, and that one is the Son of the other. It
+      has added a third Person&mdash;but we won't go into that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop was reminded suddenly of the dispute at Mrs. Garstein Fellows'.
+      &ldquo;We won't go into that,&rdquo; he agreed. &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Other religions have told the story in a different way. The Cathars and
+      Gnostics did. They said that the God in your heart is a rebel against the
+      God beyond the stars, that the Christ in your heart is like Prometheus&mdash;or
+      Hiawatha&mdash;or any other of the sacrificial gods, a rebel. He arises
+      out of man. He rebels against that high God of the stars and crystals and
+      poisons and monsters and of the dead emptiness of space.... The Manicheans
+      and the Persians made out our God to be fighting eternally against that
+      Being of silence and darkness beyond the stars. The Buddhists made the
+      Lord Buddha the leader of men out of the futility and confusion of
+      material existence to the great peace beyond. But it is all one story
+      really, the story of the two essential Beings, always the same story and
+      the same perplexity cropping up under different names, the story of one
+      being who stirs us, calls to us, and leads us, and of another who is above
+      and outside and in and beneath all things, inaccessible and
+      incomprehensible. All these religions are trying to tell something they do
+      not clearly know&mdash;of a relationship between these two, that eludes
+      them, that eludes the human mind, as water escapes from the hand. It is
+      unity and opposition they have to declare at the same time; it is
+      agreement and propitiation, it is infinity and effort.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the truth?&rdquo; said the bishop in an eager whisper. &ldquo;You can tell me the
+      truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Angel's answer was a gross familiarity. He thrust his hand through the
+      bishop's hair and ruffled it affectionately, and rested for a moment
+      holding the bishop's cranium in his great palm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But can this hold it?&rdquo; he said....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not with this little box of brains,&rdquo; said the Angel. &ldquo;You could as soon
+      make a meal of the stars and pack them into your belly. You haven't the
+      things to do it with inside this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave the bishop's head a little shake and relinquished it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to argue as an elder brother might.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn't it enough for you to know something of the God that comes down to
+      the human scale, who has been born on your planet and arisen out of Man,
+      who is Man and God, your leader? He's more than enough to fill your mind
+      and use up every faculty of your being. He is courage, he is adventure, he
+      is the King, he fights for you and with you against death....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he is not infinite? He is not the Creator?&rdquo; asked the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So far as you are concerned, no,&rdquo; said the Angel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So far as I am concerned?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have you to do with creation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And at that question it seemed that a great hand swept carelessly across
+      the blackness of the farther sky, and smeared it with stars and suns and
+      shining nebulas as a brush might smear dry paint across a canvas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop stared in front of him. Then slowly he bowed his head, and
+      covered his face with his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I have been in orders,&rdquo; he murmured; &ldquo;I have been teaching people the
+      only orthodox and perfect truth about these things for seven and twenty
+      years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And suddenly he was back in his gaiters and his apron and his shovel hat,
+      a little black figure exceedingly small in a very great space....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (10)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a very great space indeed because it was all space, and the roof
+      was the ebony of limitless space from which the stars swung flaming, held
+      by invisible ties, and the soil beneath his feet was a dust of atoms and
+      the little beginnings of life. And long before the bishop bared his face
+      again, he knew that he was to see his God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked up slowly, fearing to be dazzled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he was not dazzled. He knew that he saw only the likeness and bodying
+      forth of a being inconceivable, of One who is greater than the earth and
+      stars and yet no greater than a man. He saw a being for ever young, for
+      ever beginning, for ever triumphant. The quality and texture of this being
+      was a warm and living light like the effulgence at sunrise; He was hope
+      and courage like a sunlit morning in spring. He was adventure for ever,
+      and His courage and adventure flowed into and submerged and possessed the
+      being of the man who beheld him. And this presence of God stood over the
+      bishop, and seemed to speak to him in a wordless speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He bade him surrender himself. He bade him come out upon the Adventure of
+      Life, the great Adventure of the earth that will make the atoms our
+      bond-slaves and subdue the stars, that will build up the white fires of
+      ecstasy to submerge pain for ever, that will overcome death. In Him the
+      spirit of creation had become incarnate, had joined itself to men,
+      summoning men to Him, having need of them, having need of them, having
+      need of their service, even as great kings and generals and leaders need
+      and use men. For a moment, for an endless age, the bishop bowed himself in
+      the being and glory of God, felt the glow of the divine courage and
+      confidence in his marrow, felt himself one with God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a timeless interval....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never had the bishop had so intense a sense of reality. It seemed that
+      never before had he known anything real. He knew certainly that God was
+      his King and master, and that his unworthy service could be acceptable to
+      God. His mind embraced that idea with an absolute conviction that was also
+      absolute happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (11)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thoughts and sensations of the bishop seemed to have lifted for a time
+      clean away from the condition of time, and then through a vast orbit to be
+      returning to that limitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was aware presently that things were changing, that the light was
+      losing its diviner rays, that in some indescribable manner the glory and
+      the assurance diminished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The onset of the new phase was by imperceptible degrees. From a glowing,
+      serene, and static realization of God, everything relapsed towards change
+      and activity. He was in time again and things were happening, it was as if
+      the quicksands of time poured by him, and it was as if God was passing
+      away from him. He fell swiftly down from the heaven of self-forgetfulness
+      to a grotesque, pathetic and earthly self-consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He became acutely aware of his episcopal livery. And that God was passing
+      away from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was as if God was passing, and as if the bishop was unable to rise up
+      and follow him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then it was as if God had passed, and as if the bishop was in headlong
+      pursuit of him and in a great terror lest he should be left behind. And he
+      was surely being left behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He discovered that in some unaccountable way his gaiters were loose; most
+      of their buttons seemed to have flown off, and his episcopal sash had
+      slipped down about his feet. He was sorely impeded. He kept snatching at
+      these things as he ran, in clumsy attempts to get them off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last he had to stop altogether and kneel down and fumble with the last
+      obstinate button.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh God!&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;God my captain! Wait for me! Be patient with me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And as he did so God turned back and reached out his hand. It was indeed
+      as if he stood and smiled. He stood and smiled as a kind man might do; he
+      dazzled and blinded his worshipper, and yet it was manifest that he had a
+      hand a man might clasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unspeakable love and joy irradiated the whole being of the bishop as he
+      seized God's hand and clasped it desperately with both his own. It was as
+      if his nerves and arteries and all his substance were inundated with
+      golden light....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was again as if he merged with God and became God....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE SIXTH - EXEGETICAL
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      WITHOUT any sense of transition the bishop found himself seated in the
+      little North Library of the Athenaeum club and staring at the bust of John
+      Wilson Croker. He was sitting motionless and musing deeply. He was
+      questioning with a cool and steady mind whether he had seen a vision or
+      whether he had had a dream. If it had been a dream it had been an
+      extraordinarily vivid and convincing dream. He still seemed to be in the
+      presence of God, and it perplexed him not at all that he should also be in
+      the presence of Croker. The feeling of mental rottenness and insecurity
+      that had weakened his thought through the period of his illness, had gone.
+      He was secure again within himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It did not seem to matter fundamentally whether it was an experience of
+      things without or of things within him that had happened to him. It was
+      clear to him that much that he had seen was at most expressive, that some
+      was altogether symbolical. For example, there was that sudden absurd
+      realization of his sash and gaiters, and his perception of them as
+      encumbrances in his pursuit of God. But the setting and essential of the
+      whole thing remained in his mind neither expressive nor symbolical, but as
+      real and immediately perceived, and that was the presence and kingship of
+      God. God was still with him and about him and over him and sustaining him.
+      He was back again in his world and his ordinary life, in his clothing and
+      his body and his club, but God had been made and remained altogether plain
+      and manifest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether an actual vision had made his conviction, or whether the
+      conviction of his own subconscious mind had made the dream, seemed but a
+      small matter beside the conviction that this was indeed the God he had
+      desired and the God who must rule his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The stuff? The stuff had little to do with it. It just cleared my
+      head.... I have seen. I have seen really. I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a long time as it seemed the bishop remained wrapped in clouds of
+      luminous meditation. Dream or vision it did not matter; the essential
+      thing was that he had made up his mind about God, he had found God.
+      Moreover, he perceived that his theological perplexities had gone. God was
+      higher and simpler and nearer than any theological God, than the God of
+      the Three Creeds. Those creeds lay about in his mind now like garments
+      flung aside, no trace nor suspicion of divinity sustained them any longer.
+      And now&mdash;Now he would go out into the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little Library of the Athenaeum has no visible door. He went to the
+      book-masked entrance in the corner, and felt among the bookshelves for the
+      hidden latch. Then he paused, held by a curious thought. What exactly was
+      the intention of that symbolical struggle with his sash and gaiters, and
+      why had they impeded his pursuit of God?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To what particularly significant action was he going out?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Three Creeds were like garments flung aside. But he was still wearing
+      the uniform of a priest in the service of those three creeds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a long interval he walked into the big reading-room. He ordered some
+      tea and dry toast and butter, and sat down very thoughtfully in a corner.
+      He was still sitting and thinking at half-past eight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may seem strange to the reader that this bishop who had been doubting
+      and criticizing the church and his system of beliefs for four long years
+      had never before faced the possibility of a severance from his
+      ecclesiastical dignity. But he had grown up in the church, his life had
+      been so entirely clerical and Anglican, that the widest separation he had
+      hitherto been able to imagine from this past had left him still a bishop,
+      heretical perhaps, innovating in the broadening of beliefs and the
+      liberalizing of practice, defensive even as Chasters was defensive, but
+      still with the palace and his dignities, differing in opinion rather than
+      in any tangible reality from his previous self. For a bishop, disbelief in
+      the Church is a far profounder scepticism than mere disbelief in God. God
+      is unseen, and in daily things unfelt; but the Church is with the
+      predestined bishop always. His concept of the extremest possible departure
+      from orthodoxy had been something that Chasters had phrased as &ldquo;a
+      restatement of Christ.&rdquo; It was a new idea, an idea that had come with an
+      immense effect of severance and novelty, that God could be other than the
+      God of the Creed, could present himself to the imagination as a figure
+      totally unlike the white, gentle, and compromising Redeemer of an
+      Anglican's thought. That the bishop should treat the whole teaching of the
+      church and the church itself as wrong, was an idea so new that it fell
+      upon him now like a thunderbolt out of a cloudless sky. But here, clear in
+      his mind now, was a feeling, amounting to conviction, that it was the
+      purpose and gesture of the true God that he should come right out of the
+      church and all his professions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the first glow of his vision he felt this gesture imperative. He
+      must step right out.... Whither? how? And when?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To begin with it seemed to him that an immediate renunciation was
+      demanded. But it was a momentous step. He wanted to think. And to go on
+      thinking. Rather than to act precipitately. Although the imperative seemed
+      absolute, some delaying and arresting instinct insisted that he must
+      &ldquo;think&rdquo; If he went back to Princhester, the everyday duties of his
+      position would confront him at once with an effect of a definite
+      challenge. He decided to take one of the Reform club bedrooms for two or
+      three days, and wire to Princhester that he was &ldquo;unavoidably delayed in
+      town,&rdquo; without further explanations. Then perhaps this inhibitory force
+      would give way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It did not, however, give way. His mind sat down for two days in a blank
+      amazement at the course before him, and at the end of that time this
+      reasonless and formless institution was as strong as ever. During that
+      time, except for some incidental exchanges at his clubs, he talked to no
+      one. At first he did not want to talk to any one. He remained mentally and
+      practically active, with a still intensely vivid sense that God, the true
+      God, stood watching him and waiting for him to follow. And to follow meant
+      slipping right out of all the world he had ever known. To thrust his foot
+      right over the edge of a cliff would scarcely have demanded more from the
+      bishop's store of resolution. He stood on the very verge. The chief
+      secretion of his mind was a shadowy experiment or so in explanation of why
+      he did not follow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Insensibly the extreme vividness of his sense of God's nearness decreased.
+      But he still retained a persuasion of the reality of an immediate listener
+      waiting, and of the need of satisfying him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the third day he found his mind still further changed. He no longer
+      felt that God was in Pall Mall or St. James's Park, whither he resorted to
+      walk and muse. He felt now that God was somewhere about the horizon....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt too no longer that he thought straight into the mind of God. He
+      thought now of what he would presently say to God. He turned over and
+      rehearsed phrases. With that came a desire to try them first on some other
+      hearer. And from that to the attentive head of Lady Sunderbund, prettily
+      bent towards him, was no great leap. She would understand, if any one
+      could understand, the great change that had happened in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found her address in the telephone book. She could be quite alone to
+      him if he wouldn't mind &ldquo;just me.&rdquo; It was, he said, exactly what he
+      desired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when he got to her great airy flat overlooking Hyde Park, with its
+      Omega Workshop furniture and its arresting decoration, he was not so sure
+      whether this encounter was so exactly the thing he had desired as he had
+      supposed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The world had become opaque and real again as he walked up St. James's
+      Street and past the Ritz. He had a feeling that he was taking an afternoon
+      off from God. The adventurous modernity of the room in which he waited
+      intensified that. One whole white wall was devoted to a small picture by
+      Wyndham Lewis. It was like a picture of an earthquake in a city of aniline
+      pink and grey and keen green cardboard, and he wished it had never
+      existed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned his back upon it and stared out of the window over the trees and
+      greenery. The balcony was decorated with white and pink geraniums in pots
+      painted black and gold, and the railings of the balcony were black and
+      gold with crimson shape like squares wildly out of drawing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Sunderbund kept him waiting perhaps five minutes. Then she came
+      sailing in to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was dressed in a way and moved across the room in a way that was more
+      reminiscent of Botticelli's Spring than ever&mdash;only with a kind of
+      superadded stiffish polonaise of lace&mdash;and he did not want to be
+      reminded of Botticelli's Spring or wonder why she had taken to stiff lace
+      polonaises. He did not enquire whether he had met Lady Sunderbund to
+      better advantage at Mrs. Garstein Fellows' or whether his memory had
+      overrated her or whether anything had happened to his standard of taste,
+      but his feeling now was decidedly one of disappointment, and all the talk
+      and self-examination he had promised himself seemed to wither and hide
+      away within him. For a time he talked of her view, and then admired her
+      room and its arrangement, which he thought really were quite unbecomingly
+      flippant and undignified for a room. Then came the black tea-things on
+      their orange tray, and he searched in his mind for small talk to sustain
+      their interview.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he had already betrayed his disposition to &ldquo;go on with our talk&rdquo; in
+      his telephone enquiry, and Lady Sunderbund, perceiving his shyness, began
+      to make openings for him, at first just little hinting openings, and then
+      larger and larger ones, until at last one got him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm so glad,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;to see you again. I'm so glad to go on with our
+      talk. I've thought about it and thought about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She beamed at him happily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've thought ova ev'y wo'd you said,&rdquo; she went on, when she had finished
+      conveying her pretty bliss to him. &ldquo;I've been so helped by thinking the
+      k'eeds are symbols. And all you said. And I've felt time after time, you
+      couldn't stay whe' you we'. That what you we' saying to me, would have to
+      be said 'ight out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That brought him in. He could not very well evade that opening without
+      incivility. After all he had asked to see her, and it was a foolish thing
+      to let little decorative accidentals put him off his friendly purpose. A
+      woman may have flower-pots painted gold with black checkers and still be
+      deeply understanding. He determined to tell her what was in his mind. But
+      he found something barred him from telling that he had had an actual
+      vision of God. It was as if that had been a private and confidential
+      meeting. It wasn't, he felt, for him either to boast a privilege or tell
+      others of things that God had not chosen to show them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Since I saw you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I have thought a great deal&mdash;of the
+      subject of our conversation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been t'ying to think,&rdquo; she said in a confirmatory tone, as if she
+      had co-operated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My faith in God grows,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She glowed. Her lips fell apart. She flamed attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it grows less like the faith of the church, less and less. I was born
+      and trained in Anglicanism, and it is with a sort of astonishment I find
+      myself passing now out of every sort of Catholicism&mdash;seeing it from
+      the outside....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just as one might see Buddhism,&rdquo; she supplied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet feeling nearer, infinitely nearer to God,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she panted; &ldquo;yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought if one went out, one went out just to doubt and darkness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you don't?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have gone at one step to a new 'iligion!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared for a moment at the phrase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To religion,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is so wondyful,&rdquo; she said, with her hands straight down upon the couch
+      upon which she was sitting, and leaning forward at him, so as to seem
+      almost as much out of drawing as a modern picture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems,&rdquo; he reflected; &ldquo;&mdash;as if it were a natural thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She came back to earth very slowly. She turned to the tea-things with
+      hushed and solemn movements as though she administered a ceremony of
+      peculiar significance. The bishop too rose slowly out of the profundity of
+      his confession. &ldquo;No sugar please,&rdquo; he said, arresting the lump in mid air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only when they were embarked upon cups of tea and had a little
+      refreshed themselves, that she carried the talk further.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does it mean that you must leave the church?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seemed so at first,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But now I do not know. I do not know
+      what I ought to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She awaited his next thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is as if one had lived in a room all one's life and thought it the
+      world&mdash;and then suddenly walked out through a door and discovered the
+      sea and the mountains and stars. So it was with me and the Anglican
+      Church. It seems so extraordinary now&mdash;and it would have seemed the
+      most natural thing a year ago&mdash;to think that I ever believed that the
+      Anglican Compromise was the final truth of religion, that nothing more
+      until the end of the world could ever be known that Cosmo Gordon Lang did
+      not know, that there could be no conception of God and his quality that
+      Randall Davidson did not possess.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did,&rdquo; she responded with round blue eyes of wonder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At the utmost the Church of England is a tabernacle on a road.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A 'oad that goes whe'?&rdquo; she rhetorized.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said the bishop, and put down his cup.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, my dear Lady Sunderbund,&rdquo; he resumed, &ldquo;I am exactly in the same
+      position of that man at the door.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She quoted aptly and softly: &ldquo;The wo'ld was all befo' them whe' to
+      choose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was struck by the aptness of the words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel I have to come right out into the bare truth. What exactly then do
+      I become? Do I lose my priestly function because I discover how great God
+      is? But what am I to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He opened a new layer of his thoughts to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a saying,&rdquo; he remarked, &ldquo;once a priest, always a priest. I
+      cannot imagine myself as other than what I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But o'thodox no maw,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Orthodox&mdash;self-satisfied, no longer. A priest who seeks, an
+      exploring priest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In a Chu'ch of P'og'ess and B'othe'hood,&rdquo; she carried him on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At any rate, in a progressive and learning church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She flashed and glowed assent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been haunted,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;by those words spoken at Athens. 'Whom
+      therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.' That comes to me
+      with an effect of&mdash;guidance is an old-fashioned word&mdash;shall I
+      say suggestion? To stand by the altar bearing strange names and ancient
+      symbols, speaking plainly to all mankind of the one true God&mdash;!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not get much beyond this point at the time, though he remained
+      talking with Lady Sunderbund for nearly an hour longer. The rest was
+      merely a beating out of what had already been said. But insensibly she
+      renewed her original charm, and as he became accustomed to her he forgot a
+      certain artificiality in her manner and the extreme modernity of her
+      costume and furniture. She was a wonderful listener; nobody else could
+      have helped him to expression in quite the same way, and when he left her
+      he felt that now he was capable of stating his case in a coherent and
+      acceptable form to almost any intelligent hearer. He had a point of view
+      now that was no longer embarrassed by the immediate golden presence of
+      God; he was no longer dazzled nor ecstatic; his problem had diminished to
+      the scale of any other great human problem, to the scale of political
+      problems and problems of integrity and moral principle, problems about
+      which there is no such urgency as there is about a house on fire, for
+      example.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now the desire for expression was running strong. He wanted to state
+      his situation; if he did not state he would have to act; and as he walked
+      back to the club dinner he turned over possible interlocutors in his
+      thoughts. Lord Rampound sat with him at dinner, and he came near broaching
+      the subject with him. But Lord Rampound that evening had that morbid
+      running of bluish legal anecdotes which is so common an affliction with
+      lawyers, and theology sinks and dies in that turbid stream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as he lay in bed that night he thought of his old friend and helper
+      Bishop Likeman, and it was borne in upon him that he should consult him.
+      And this he did next day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since the days when the bishop had been only plain Mr. Scrope, the
+      youngest and most helpful of Likeman's historical band of curates, their
+      friendship had continued. Likeman had been a second father to him; in
+      particular his tact and helpfulness had shone during those days of doubt
+      and anxiety when dear old Queen Victoria, God's representative on earth,
+      had obstinately refused, at the eleventh hour, to make him a bishop. She
+      had those pigheaded fits, and she was touchy about the bishops. She had
+      liked Scrope on account of the excellence of his German pronunciation, but
+      she had been irritated by newspaper paragraphs&mdash;nobody could ever
+      find out who wrote them and nobody could ever find out who showed them to
+      the old lady&mdash;anticipating his elevation. She had gone very red in
+      the face and stiffened in the Guelphic manner whenever Scrope was
+      mentioned, and so a rich harvest of spiritual life had remained untilled
+      for some months. Likeman had brought her round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed arguable that Scrope owed some explanation to Likeman before he
+      came to any open breach with the Establishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found Likeman perceptibly older and more shrivelled on account of the
+      war, but still as sweet and lucid and subtle as ever. His voice sounded
+      more than ever like a kind old woman's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat buried in his cushions&mdash;for &ldquo;nowadays I must save every scrap
+      of vitality&rdquo;&mdash;and for a time contented himself with drawing out his
+      visitor's story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, one does not talk to Likeman of visions or intuitions. &ldquo;I am
+      disturbed, I find myself getting out of touch;&rdquo; that was the bishop's
+      tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Occasionally Likeman nodded slowly, as a physician might do at the recital
+      of familiar symptoms. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I have been through most of
+      this.... A little different in the inessentials.... How clear you are!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You leave our stupid old Trinities&mdash;as I left them long ago,&rdquo; said
+      old Likeman, with his lean hand feeling and clawing at the arm of his
+      chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man raised his hand and dropped it. &ldquo;You go away from it all&mdash;straight
+      as a line. I did. You take the wings of the morning and fly to the
+      uttermost parts of the earth. And there you find&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He held up a lean finger, and inclined it to tick off each point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fate&mdash;which is God the Father, the Power of the Heart, which is God
+      the Son, and that Light which comes in upon us from the inaccessible
+      Godhead, which is God the Holy Spirit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I know of no God the Holy Spirit, and Fate is not God at all. I saw
+      in my vision one sole God, uncrucified, militant&mdash;conquering and to
+      conquer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Old Likeman stared. &ldquo;You saw!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Bishop of Princhester had not meant to go so far. But he stuck to his
+      words. &ldquo;As if I saw with my eyes. A God of light and courage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have had visions, Scrope?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I seemed to see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you have just been dreaming dreams.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why should one not see?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See! The things of the spirit. These symbols as realities! These
+      metaphors as men walking!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You talk like an agnostic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are all agnostics. Our creeds are expressions of ourselves and our
+      attitude and relationship to the unknown. The triune God is just the form
+      of our need and disposition. I have always assumed that you took that for
+      granted. Who has ever really seen or heard or felt God? God is neither of
+      the senses nor of the mind; he is of the soul. You are realistic, you are
+      materialistic....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice expostulated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Bishop of Princhester reflected. The vision of God was far off among
+      his memories now, and difficult to recall. But he said at last: &ldquo;I believe
+      there is a God and that he is as real a person as you or I. And he is not
+      the theological God we set out before the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Personification,&rdquo; said Likeman. &ldquo;In the eighteenth century they used to
+      draw beautiful female figures as Science and Mathematics. Young men have
+      loved Science&mdash;and Freedom&mdash;as Pygmalion loved Galatea. Have it
+      so if you will. Have a visible person for your Deity. But let me keep up
+      my&mdash;spirituality.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your spirituality seems as thin as a mist. Do you really believe&mdash;anything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everything!&rdquo; said Likeman emphatically, sitting up with a transitory
+      vigour. &ldquo;Everything we two have ever professed together. I believe that
+      the creeds of my church do express all that can possibly be expressed in
+      the relationship of&mdash;That&rdquo;&mdash;he made a comprehensive gesture with
+      a twist of his hand upon its wrist&mdash;&ldquo;to the human soul. I believe
+      that they express it as well as the human mind can express it. Where they
+      seem to be contradictory or absurd, it is merely that the mystery is
+      paradoxical. I believe that the story of the Fall and of the Redemption is
+      a complete symbol, that to add to it or to subtract from it or to alter it
+      is to diminish its truth; if it seems incredible at this point or that,
+      then simply I admit my own mental defect. And I believe in our Church,
+      Scrope, as the embodied truth of religion, the divine instrument in human
+      affairs. I believe in the security of its tradition, in the complete and
+      entire soundness of its teaching, in its essential authority and
+      divinity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, and put his head a little on one side and smiled sweetly. &ldquo;And
+      now can you say I do not believe?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the historical Christ, the man Jesus?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A life may be a metaphor. Why not? Yes, I believe it all. All.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Bishop of Princhester was staggered by this complete acceptance. &ldquo;I
+      see you believe all you profess,&rdquo; he said, and remained for a moment or so
+      rallying his forces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your vision&mdash;if it was a vision&mdash;I put it to you, was just some
+      single aspect of divinity,&rdquo; said Likeman. &ldquo;We make a mistake in supposing
+      that Heresy has no truth in it. Most heresies are only a disproportionate
+      apprehension of some essential truth. Most heretics are men who have
+      suddenly caught a glimpse through the veil of some particular verity....
+      They are dazzled by that aspect. All the rest has vanished.... They are
+      obsessed. You are obsessed clearly by this discovery of the militancy of
+      God. God the Son&mdash;as Hero. And you want to go out to the simple
+      worship of that one aspect. You want to go out to a Dissenter's tent in
+      the wilderness, instead of staying in the Great Temple of the Ages.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Was that true?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some moments it sounded true.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Bishop of Princhester sat frowning and looking at that. Very far away
+      was the vision now of that golden Captain who bade him come. Then at a
+      thought the bishop smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Great Temple of the Ages,&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;But do you remember the
+      trouble we had when the little old Queen was so pigheaded?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! I remember, I remember,&rdquo; said Likeman, smiling with unshaken
+      confidence. &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For sixty years all we bishops in what you call the Great Temple of the
+      Ages, were appointed and bullied and kept in our places by that pink
+      irascible bit of dignity. I remember how at the time I didn't dare betray
+      my boiling indignation even to you&mdash;I scarcely dared admit it to
+      myself....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It doesn't matter at all,&rdquo; and old Likeman waved it aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; he confirmed, waving again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I spoke of the whole church of Christ on earth,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;These
+      things, these Victorias and Edwards and so on, are temporary accidents&mdash;just
+      as the severance of an Anglican from a Roman communion and a Greek
+      orthodox communion are temporary accidents. You will remark that wise men
+      in all ages have been able to surmount the difficulty of these things.
+      Why? Because they knew that in spite of all these splits and
+      irregularities and defacements&mdash;like the cracks and crannies and
+      lichens on a cathedral wall&mdash;the building held good, that it was
+      shelter and security. There is no other shelter and security. And so I
+      come to your problem. Suppose it is true that you have this incidental
+      vision of the militant aspect of God, and he isn't, as you see him now
+      that is,&mdash;he isn't like the Trinity, he isn't like the Creed, he
+      doesn't seem to be related to the Church, then comes the question, are you
+      going out for that? And whither do you go if you do go out? The Church
+      remains. We alter doctrines not by changing the words but by shifting the
+      accent. We can under-accentuate below the threshold of consciousness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But can we?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We do. Where's Hell now? Eighty years ago it warmed the whole Church. It
+      was&mdash;as some atheist or other put it the other day&mdash;the central
+      heating of the soul. But never mind that point now. Consider the essential
+      question, the question of breaking with the church. Ask yourself, whither
+      would you go? To become an oddity! A Dissenter. A Negative. Self
+      emasculated. The spirit that denies. You would just go out. You would just
+      cease to serve Religion. That would be all. You wouldn't do anything. The
+      Church would go on; everything else would go on. Only you would be lost in
+      the outer wilderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But then&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Old Likeman leant forward and pointed a bony finger. &ldquo;Stay in the Church
+      and modify it. Bring this new light of yours to the altar.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a little pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No man,&rdquo; the bishop thought aloud, &ldquo;putteth new wine into old bottles.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Old Likeman began to speak and had a fit of coughing. &ldquo;Some of these texts&mdash;whuff,
+      whuff&mdash;like a conjuror's hat&mdash;whuff&mdash;make 'em&mdash;fit
+      anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A man-servant appeared and handed a silver box of lozenges into which the
+      old bishop dipped with a trembling hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tricks of that sort,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;won't do, Scrope&mdash;among
+      professionals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And besides,&rdquo; he was inspired; &ldquo;true religion is old wine&mdash;as old as
+      the soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a bishop in the Church of Christ on Earth,&rdquo; he summed it up. &ldquo;And
+      you want to become a detached and wandering Ancient Mariner from your
+      shipwreck of faith with something to explain&mdash;that nobody wants to
+      hear. You are going out I suppose you have means?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man awaited the answer to his abrupt enquiry with a handful of
+      lozenges.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the Bishop of Princhester, &ldquo;practically&mdash;I haven't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear boy!&rdquo; it was as if they were once more rector and curate. &ldquo;My
+      dear brother! do you know what the value of an ex-bishop is in the
+      ordinary labour market?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never thought of that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Evidently. You have a wife and children?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Five daughters.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And your wife married you&mdash;I remember, she married you soon after
+      you got that living in St. John's Wood. I suppose she took it for granted
+      that you were fixed in an ecclesiastical career. That was implicit in the
+      transaction.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't looked very much at that side of the matter yet,&rdquo; said the
+      Bishop of Princhester.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It shouldn't be a decisive factor,&rdquo; said Bishop Likeman, &ldquo;not decisive.
+      But it will weigh. It should weigh....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man opened out fresh aspects of the case. His argument was for
+      delay, for deliberation. He went on to a wider set of considerations. A
+      man who has held the position of a bishop for some years is, he held, no
+      longer a free man in matters of opinion. He has become an official part of
+      a great edifice which supports the faith of multitudes of simple and
+      dependant believers. He has no right to indulge recklessly in intellectual
+      and moral integrities. He may understand, but how is the flock to
+      understand? He may get his own soul clear, but what will happen to them?
+      He will just break away their supports, astonish them, puzzle them,
+      distress them, deprive them of confidence, convince them of nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Intellectual egotism may be as grave a sin,&rdquo; said Bishop Likeman, &ldquo;as
+      physical selfishness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Assuming even that you are absolutely right,&rdquo; said Bishop Likeman,
+      &ldquo;aren't you still rather in the position of a man who insists upon Swedish
+      exercises and a strengthening dietary on a raft?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you have made out a case for delay,&rdquo; said his hearer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three months.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Bishop of Princhester conceded three months.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Including every sort of service. Because, after all, even supposing it is
+      damnable to repeat prayers and creeds you do not believe in, and
+      administer sacraments you think superstition, nobody can be damned but
+      yourself. On the other hand if you express doubts that are not yet
+      perfectly digested&mdash;you experiment with the souls of others....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop found much to ponder in his old friend's counsels. They were
+      discursive and many-fronted, and whenever he seemed to be penetrating or
+      defeating the particular considerations under examination the others in
+      the background had a way of appearing invincible. He had a strong
+      persuasion that Likeman was wrong&mdash;and unanswerable. And the true God
+      now was no more than the memory of a very vividly realized idea. It was
+      clear to the bishop that he was no longer a churchman or in the generally
+      accepted sense of the word a Christian, and that he was bound to come out
+      of the church. But all sense of urgency had gone. It was a matter
+      demanding deliberation and very great consideration for others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took no more of Dale's stuff because he felt bodily sound and slept
+      well. And he was now a little shy of this potent fluid. He went down to
+      Princhester the next day, for his compromise of an interval of three
+      months made it seem possible to face his episcopal routine again. It was
+      only when he was back in his own palace that the full weight of his
+      domestic responsibilities in the discussion of the course he had to take,
+      became apparent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella met him with affection and solicitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was tired and mentally fagged,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;A day or so in London had an
+      effect of change.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She agreed that he looked much better, and remained for a moment or so
+      scrutinizing him with the faint anxiety of one resolved to be completely
+      helpful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He regarded her with a renewed sense of her grace and dignity and
+      kindliness. She was wearing a grey dress of soft silky material, touched
+      with blue and covered with what seemed to him very rich and beautiful
+      lace; her hair flowed back very graciously from her broad brow, and about
+      her wrist and neck were delicate lines of gold. She seemed tremendously at
+      home and right just where she was, in that big hospitable room, cultured
+      but Anglican, without pretensions or novelties, with a glow of bound
+      books, with the grand piano that Miriam, his third daughter, was beginning
+      to play so well, with the tea equipage of shining silver and fine
+      porcelain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down contentedly in the low armchair beside her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It wasn't a setting that one would rashly destroy....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that evening at dinner this sense of his home as a complex of finely
+      adjusted things not to be rashly disturbed was still more in the mind of
+      the bishop. At dinner he had all his domesticities about him. It was the
+      family time, from eight until ten, at which latter hour he would usually
+      go back from the drawing-room to his study. He surveyed the table. Eleanor
+      was at home for a few days, looking a little thin and bright but very keen
+      and happy. She had taken a first in the first part of the Moral Science
+      Tripos, and she was working hard now for part two. Clementina was to go
+      back to Newnham with her next September. She aspired to history. Miriam's
+      bent was musical. She and Phoebe and Daphne and Clementina were under the
+      care of skilful Mademoiselle Lafarge, most tactful of Protestant
+      French-women, Protestant and yet not too Protestant, one of those rare
+      French Protestants in whom a touch of Bergson and the Pasteur Monod
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;scarce suspected, animates the whole.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      And also they had lessons, so high are our modern standards of education,
+      from Mr. Blent, a brilliant young mathematician in orders, who sat now
+      next to Lady Ella. Mr. Whippham, the chaplain, was at the bishop's right
+      hand, ready for any chance of making arrangements to clear off the small
+      arrears of duty the little holiday in London had accumulated. The bishop
+      surveyed all these bright young people between himself and the calm beauty
+      of his wife. He spoke first to one and then another upon the things that
+      interested them. It rejoiced his heart to be able to give them education
+      and opportunity, it pleased him to see them in clothes that he knew were
+      none the less expensive because of their complete simplicity. Miriam and
+      Mr. Blent wrangled pleasantly about Debussy, and old Dunk waited as though
+      in orders of some rare and special sort that qualified him for this
+      service.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these people, the bishop reflected, counted upon him that this would
+      go on....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Eleanor was answering some question of her mother's. They were so oddly
+      alike and so curiously different, and both in their several ways so fine.
+      Eleanor was dark like his own mother. Perhaps she did a little lack Lady
+      Ella's fine reserves; she could express more, she could feel more acutely,
+      she might easily be very unhappy or very happy....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these people counted on him. It was indeed acutely true, as Likeman
+      had said, that any sudden breach with his position would be a breach of
+      faith&mdash;so far as they were concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And just then his eye fell upon the epergne, a very old and beautiful
+      piece of silver, that graced the dinner-table. It had been given him,
+      together with an episcopal ring, by his curates and choristers at the
+      Church of the Holy Innocents, when he became bishop of Pinner. When they
+      gave it him, had any one of them dreamt that some day he might be moved to
+      strike an ungracious blow at the mother church that had reared them all?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was his custom to join the family in the drawing-room after dinner.
+      To-night he was a little delayed by Whippham, with some trivialities about
+      next month's confirmations in Pringle and Princhester. When he came in he
+      found Miriam playing, and playing very beautifully one of those later
+      sonatas of Beethoven, he could never remember whether it was Of. 109 or
+      Of. 111, but he knew that he liked it very much; it was solemn and sombre
+      with phases of indescribable sweetness&mdash;while Clementina, Daphne and
+      Mademoiselle Lafarge went on with their war knitting and Phoebe and Mr.
+      Blent bent their brows over chess. Eleanor was reading the evening paper.
+      Lady Ella sat on a high chair by the coffee things, and he stood in the
+      doorway surveying the peaceful scene for a moment or so, before he went
+      across the room and sat down on the couch close to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You look tired,&rdquo; she whispered softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Worries.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That Chasters case?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Things developing out of that. I must tell you later.&rdquo; It would be, he
+      felt, a good way of breaking the matter to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is the Chasters case coming on again, Daddy?&rdquo; asked Eleanor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a pity,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That he can't be left alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's Sir Reginald Phipps. The Church would be much more tolerant if it
+      wasn't for the House of Laymen. But they&mdash;they feel they must do
+      something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He seized the opportunity of the music ceasing to get away from the
+      subject. &ldquo;Miriam dear,&rdquo; he asked, raising his voice; &ldquo;is that 109 or 111?
+      I can never tell.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is always 111, Daddy,&rdquo; said Miriam. &ldquo;It's the other one is 109.&rdquo; And
+      then evidently feeling that she had been pert: &ldquo;Would you like me to play
+      you 109, Daddy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should love it, my dear.&rdquo; And he leant back and prepared to listen in
+      such a thorough way that Eleanor would have no chance of discussing the
+      Chasters' heresies. But this was interrupted by the consummation of the
+      coffee, and Mr. Blent, breaking a long silence with &ldquo;Mate in three, if I'm
+      not mistaken,&rdquo; leapt to his feet to be of service. Eleanor, with the rough
+      seriousness of youth, would not leave the Chasters case alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But need you take action against Mr. Chasters?&rdquo; she asked at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a very complicated subject, my dear,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His arguments?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The practical considerations.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what are practical considerations in such a case?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's a post-graduate subject, Norah,&rdquo; her father said with a smile and
+      a sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; began Eleanor, gathering fresh forces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Daddy is tired,&rdquo; Lady Ella intervened, patting him on the head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, terribly!&mdash;of that,&rdquo; he said, and so escaped Eleanor for the
+      evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he knew that before very long he would have to tell his wife of the
+      changes that hung over their lives; it would be shabby to let the
+      avalanche fall without giving the longest possible warning; and before
+      they parted that night he took her hands in his and said: &ldquo;There is much I
+      have to tell you, dear. Things change, the whole world changes. The church
+      must not live in a dream....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she whispered. &ldquo;I hope you will sleep to-night,&rdquo; and held up her
+      grave sweet face to be kissed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (6)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he did not sleep perfectly that night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not sleep indeed very badly, but he lay for some time thinking,
+      thinking not onward but as if he pressed his mind against very strong
+      barriers that had closed again. His vision of God which had filled the
+      heavens, had become now gem-like, a minute, hard, clear-cut conviction in
+      his mind that he had to disentangle himself from the enormous
+      complications of symbolism and statement and organization and
+      misunderstanding in the church and achieve again a simple and living
+      worship of a simple and living God. Likeman had puzzled and silenced him,
+      only upon reflection to convince him that amidst such intricacies of
+      explanation the spirit cannot live. Creeds may be symbolical, but symbols
+      must not prevaricate. A church that can symbolize everything and anything
+      means nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It followed from this that he ought to leave the church. But there came
+      the other side of this perplexing situation. His feelings as he lay in his
+      bed were exactly like those one has in a dream when one wishes to run or
+      leap or shout and one can achieve no movement, no sound. He could not
+      conceive how he could possibly leave the church.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife became as it were the representative of all that held him
+      helpless. She and he had never kept secret from one another any plan of
+      action, any motive, that affected the other. It was clear to him that any
+      movement towards the disavowal of doctrinal Christianity and the
+      renunciation of his see must be first discussed with her. He must tell her
+      before he told the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he could not imagine his telling her except as an incredibly
+      shattering act.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he left things from day to day, and went about his episcopal routines.
+      He preached and delivered addresses in such phrases as he knew people
+      expected, and wondered profoundly why it was that it should be impossible
+      for him to discuss theological points with Lady Ella. And one afternoon he
+      went for a walk with Eleanor along the banks of the Prin, and found
+      himself, in response to certain openings of hers, talking to her in almost
+      exactly the same terms as Likeman had used to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly the problem of this theological eclaircissement was
+      complicated in an unexpected fashion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had just been taking his Every Second Thursday Talk with Diocesan Men
+      Helpers. He had been trying to be plain and simple upon the needless
+      narrowness of enthusiastic laymen. He was still in the Bishop Andrews cap
+      and purple cassock he affected on these occasions; the Men Helpers loved
+      purple; and he was disentangling himself from two or three resolute bores&mdash;for
+      our loyal laymen can be at times quite superlative bores&mdash;when Miriam
+      came to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mummy says, 'Come to the drawing-room if you can.' There is a Lady
+      Sunderbund who seems particularly to want to see you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He hesitated for a moment, and then decided that this was a conversation
+      he ought to control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found Lady Sunderbund looking very tall and radiantly beautiful in a
+      sheathlike dress of bright crimson trimmed with snow-white fur and a white
+      fur toque. She held out a long white-gloved hand to him and cried in a
+      tone of comradeship and profound understanding: &ldquo;I've come, Bishop!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've come to see me?&rdquo; he said without any sincerity in his polite
+      pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've come to P'inchesta to stay!&rdquo; she cried with a bright triumphant
+      rising note.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She evidently considered Lady Ella a mere conversational stop-gap, to be
+      dropped now that the real business could be commenced. She turned her
+      pretty profile to that lady, and obliged the bishop with a compact summary
+      of all that had preceded his arrival. &ldquo;I have been telling Lady Ella,&rdquo; she
+      said, &ldquo;I've taken a house, fu'nitua and all! Hea. In P'inchesta! I've made
+      up my mind to sit unda you&mdash;as they say in Clapham. I've come 'ight
+      down he' fo' good. I've taken a little house&mdash;oh! a sweet little
+      house that will be all over 'oses next month. I'm living f'om 'oom to 'oom
+      and having the othas done up. It's in that little quiet st'eet behind you'
+      ga'den wall. And he' I am!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it the old doctor's house?&rdquo; asked Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was it an old docta?&rdquo; cried Lady Sunderbund. &ldquo;How delightful! And now I
+      shall be a patient!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She concentrated upon the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I've been thinking all the time of all the things you told me. Ova
+      and ova. It's all so wondyful and so&mdash;so like a G'ate Daw opening.
+      New light. As if it was all just beginning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She clasped her hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop felt that there were a great number of points to this
+      situation, and that it was extremely difficult to grasp them all at once.
+      But one that seemed of supreme importance to his whirling intelligence was
+      that Lady Ella should not know that he had gone to relieve his soul by
+      talking to Lady Sunderbund in London. It had never occurred to him at the
+      time that there was any shadow of disloyalty to Lady Ella in his going to
+      Lady Sunderbund, but now he realized that this was a thing that would
+      annoy Lady Ella extremely. The conversation had in the first place to be
+      kept away from that. And in the second place it had to be kept away from
+      the abrupt exploitation of the new theological developments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt that something of the general tension would be relieved if they
+      could all three be got to sit down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been talking for just upon two hours,&rdquo; he said to Lady Ella. &ldquo;It's
+      good to see the water boiling for tea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put a chair for Lady Sunderbund to the right of Lady Ella, got her into
+      it by infusing an ecclesiastical insistence into his manner, and then went
+      and sat upon the music-stool on his wife's left, so as to establish a
+      screen of tea-things and cakes and so forth against her more intimate
+      enthusiasm. Meanwhile he began to see his way clearer and to develop his
+      line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Lady Sunderbund,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I can assure you that I think you will
+      be no small addition to the church life of Princhester. But I warn you
+      this is a hard-working and exacting diocese. We shall take your money, all
+      we can get of it, we shall take your time, we shall work you hard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wo'k me hard!&rdquo; cried Lady Sunderbund with passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will, we will,&rdquo; said the bishop in a tone that ignored her passionate
+      note.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure Lady Sunderbund will be a great help to us,&rdquo; said Lady Ella.
+      &ldquo;We want brightening. There's a dinginess....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Sunderbund beamed an acknowledgment. &ldquo;I shall exact a 'eturn,&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;I don't mind wo'king, but I shall wo'k like the poo' students in
+      the Middle Ages did, to get my teaching. I've got my own soul to save as
+      well as help saving othas. Since oua last talk&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She found the bishop handing her bread and butter. For a time the bishop
+      fought a delaying action with the tea-things, while he sought eagerly and
+      vainly in his mind for some good practical topic in which he could
+      entangle and suppress Lady Sunderbund's enthusiasms. From this she broke
+      away by turning suddenly to Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Youa husband's views,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;we'e a 'eal 'evelation to me. It was
+      like not being blind&mdash;all at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella was always pleased to hear her husband praised. Her colour
+      brightened a little. &ldquo;They seem very ordinary views,&rdquo; she said modestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You share them?&rdquo; cried Lady Sunderbund.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But of course,&rdquo; said Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wondyful!&rdquo; cried Lady Sunderbund.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me, Lady Sunderbund,&rdquo; said the bishop, &ldquo;are you going to alter the
+      outer appearance of the old doctor's house?&rdquo; And found that at last he had
+      discovered the saving topic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha'dly at all,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I shall just have it pointed white and do the
+      doa&mdash;I'm not su' how I shall do the doa. Whetha I shall do the doa
+      gold or a vehy, vehy 'itch blue.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time she and Lady Ella, to whom these ideas were novel, discussed
+      the animation of grey and sombre towns by house painting. In such matter
+      Lady Sunderbund had a Russian mind. &ldquo;I can't bea' g'ey,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Not in
+      my su'oundings, not in my k'eed, nowhe'e.&rdquo; She turned to the bishop. &ldquo;If I
+      had my way I would paint you' cathed'al inside and out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They used to be painted,&rdquo; said the bishop. &ldquo;I don't know if you have seen
+      Ely. There the old painting has been largely restored....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From that to the end there was no real danger, and at last the bishop
+      found himself alone with his wife again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Remarkable person,&rdquo; he said tentatively. &ldquo;I never met any one whose
+      faults were more visible. I met her at Wimbush House.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced at his watch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did she mean,&rdquo; asked Lady Ella abruptly, &ldquo;by talking of your new
+      views? And about revelations?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She probably misunderstood something I said at the Garstein Fellows',&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;She has rather a leaping mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to the window, looked at his nails, and appeared to be suddenly
+      reminded of duties elsewhere....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was chiefly manifest to him that the difficulties in explaining the
+      changes of his outlook to Lady Ella had now increased enormously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (7)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A day or so after Lady Sunderbund's arrival in Princhester the bishop had
+      a letter from Likeman. The old man was manifestly in doubt about the
+      effect of their recent conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Scrope,&rdquo; it began. &ldquo;I find myself thinking continually about our
+      interview and the difficulties you laid bare so frankly to me. We touched
+      upon many things in that talk, and I find myself full of afterthoughts,
+      and not perfectly sure either quite of what I said or of what I failed to
+      say. I feel that in many ways I was not perhaps so clear and convincing as
+      the justice of my case should have made me, and you are one of my own
+      particular little company, you were one of the best workers in that band
+      of good workers, your life and your career are very much my concern. I
+      know you will forgive me if I still mingle something of the paternal with
+      my fraternal admonitions. I watched you closely. I have still my old
+      diaries of the St. Matthew's days, and I have been looking at them to
+      remind me of what you once were. It was my custom to note my early
+      impressions of all the men who worked with me, because I have a firm
+      belief in the soundness of first impressions and the considerable risk one
+      runs of having them obscured by the accidents and habituations of constant
+      intercourse. I found that quite early in your days at St. Matthew's I
+      wrote against your name 'enthusiastic, but a saving delicacy.' After all
+      our life-long friendship I would not write anything truer. I would say of
+      you to-day, 'This man might have been a revivalist, if he were not a
+      gentleman.' There is the enthusiast, there is the revivalist, in you. It
+      seems to me that the stresses and questions of this great crisis in the
+      world's history have brought it nearer to the surface than I had ever
+      expected it to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I quite understand and I sympathize with your impatience with the church
+      at the present time; we present a spectacle of pompous insignificance hard
+      to bear with. We are doing very little, and we are giving ourselves
+      preposterous airs. There seems to be an opinion abroad that in some
+      quasi-automatic way the country is going to collapse after the war into
+      the arms of the church and the High Tories; a possibility I don't accept
+      for a moment. Why should it? These forcible-feeble reactionaries are much
+      more likely to explode a revolution that will disestablish us. And I quite
+      understand your theological difficulties&mdash;quite. The creeds, if their
+      entire symbolism is for a moment forgotten, if they are taken as opaque
+      statements of fact, are inconsistent, incredible. So incredible that no
+      one believes them; not even the most devout. The utmost they do is to
+      avert their minds&mdash;reverentially. Credo quia impossibile. That is
+      offensive to a Western mind. I can quite understand the disposition to cry
+      out at such things, 'This is not the Church of God!'&mdash;to run out from
+      it&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have some dream, I suspect, of a dramatic dissidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, my dear Brother and erstwhile pupil, I ask you not to do this thing.
+      Wait, I implore you. Give me&mdash;and some others, a little time. I have
+      your promise for three months, but even after that, I ask you to wait. Let
+      the reform come from within the church. The church is something more than
+      either its creeds, its clergy, or its laymen. Look at your cathedral
+      rising out of and dominating Princhester. It stands not simply for
+      Athanasius; it stands but incidentally for Athanasius; it stands for all
+      religion. Within that fabric&mdash;let me be as frank here as in our
+      private conversation&mdash;doctrine has altered again and again. To-day
+      two distinct religions worship there side by side; one that fades and one
+      that grows brighter. There is the old quasi-materialistic belief of the
+      barbarians, the belief in such things, for example, as that Christ the
+      physical Son of God descended into hell and stayed there, seeing the
+      sights I suppose like any tourist and being treated with diplomatic
+      civilities for three terrestrial days; and on the other hand there is the
+      truly spiritual belief that you and I share, which is absolutely
+      intolerant of such grotesque ideas. My argument to you is that the new
+      faith, the clearer vision, gains ground; that the only thing that can
+      prevent or delay the church from being altogether possessed by what you
+      call and I admit is, the true God, is that such men as yourself, as the
+      light breaks upon you, should be hasty and leave the church. You see my
+      point of view, do you not? It is not one that has been assumed for our
+      discussion; it is one I came to long years ago, that I was already feeling
+      my way to in my St. Matthew's Lenton sermons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A word for your private ear. I am working. I cannot tell you fully
+      because I am not working alone. But there are movements afoot in which I
+      hope very shortly to be able to ask you to share. That much at least I may
+      say at this stage. Obscure but very powerful influences are at work for
+      the liberalizing of the church, for release from many narrow limitations,
+      for the establishment of a modus vivendi with the nonconformist and
+      dissentient bodies in Britain and America, and with the churches of the
+      East. But of that no more now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And in conclusion, my dear Scrope, let me insist again upon the eternal
+      persistence of the essential Religious Fact:&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (Greek Letters Here)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (Rev. i. 18. &ldquo;Fear not. I am the First and Last thing, the Living thing.&rdquo;)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And these promises which, even if we are not to take them as promises in
+      the exact sense in which, let us say, the payment of five sovereigns is
+      promised by a five-pound note, are yet assertions of practically
+      inevitable veracity:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (Greek Letters Here)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (Phil. i. 6. &ldquo;He who began... will perfect.&rdquo; Eph. v. 14. &ldquo;He will
+      illuminate.&rdquo;)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man had written his Greek tags in shakily resolute capitals. It
+      was his custom always to quote the Greek Testament in his letters, never
+      the English version. It is a practice not uncommon with the more scholarly
+      of our bishops. It is as if some eminent scientific man were to insist
+      upon writing H2O instead of &ldquo;water,&rdquo; and &ldquo;sodium chloride&rdquo; instead of
+      &ldquo;table salt&rdquo; in his private correspondence. Or upon hanging up a stuffed
+      crocodile in his hall to give the place tone. The Bishop of Princhester
+      construed these brief dicta without serious exertion, he found them very
+      congenial texts, but there were insuperable difficulties in the problem
+      why Likeman should suppose they had the slightest weight upon his side of
+      their discussion. The more he thought the less they seemed to be on
+      Likeman's side, until at last they began to take on a complexion entirely
+      opposed to the old man's insidious arguments, until indeed they began to
+      bear the extraordinary interpretation of a special message, unwittingly
+      delivered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (8)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop was still thinking over this communication when he was
+      interrupted by Lady Ella. She came with a letter in her hand to ask him
+      whether she might send five-and-twenty pounds to a poor cousin of his, a
+      teacher in a girls' school, who had been incapacitated from work by a
+      dislocation of the cartilage of her knee. If she could go to that
+      unorthodox but successful practitioner, Mr. Barker, the bone-setter, she
+      was convinced she could be restored to efficiency. But she had no ready
+      money. The bishop agreed without hesitation. His only doubt was the
+      certainty of the cure, but upon that point Lady Ella was convinced; there
+      had been a great experience in the Walshingham family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is pleasant to be able to do things like this,&rdquo; said Lady Ella,
+      standing over him when this matter was settled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; the bishop agreed; &ldquo;it is pleasant to be in a position to do things
+      like this....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE SEVENTH - THE SECOND VISION
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      A MONTH later found the bishop's original state of perplexity and insomnia
+      returned and intensified. He had done none of all the things that had
+      seemed so manifestly needing to be done after his vision in the Athenaeum.
+      All the relief and benefit of his experience in London had vanished out of
+      his life. He was afraid of Dr. Dale's drug; he knew certainly that it
+      would precipitate matters; and all his instincts in the state of moral
+      enfeeblement to which he had relapsed, were to temporize.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although he had said nothing further about his changed beliefs to Lady
+      Ella, yet he perceived clearly that a shadow had fallen between them. She
+      had a wife's extreme sensitiveness to fine shades of expression and
+      bearing, and manifestly she knew that something was different. Meanwhile
+      Lady Sunderbund had become a frequent worshipper in the cathedral, she was
+      a figure as conspicuous in sombre Princhester as a bird of paradise would
+      have been; common people stood outside her very very rich blue door on the
+      chance of seeing her; she never missed an opportunity of hearing the
+      bishop preach or speak, she wrote him several long and thoughtful letters
+      with which he did not bother Lady Ella, she communicated persistently, and
+      manifestly intended to become a very active worker in diocesan affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was inevitable that she and the bishop should meet and talk
+      occasionally in the cathedral precincts, and it was inevitable that he
+      should contrast the flexibility of her rapid and very responsive mind with
+      a certain defensiveness, a stoniness, in the intellectual bearing of Lady
+      Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If it had been Lady Sunderbund he had had to explain to, instead of Lady
+      Ella, he could have explained a dozen times a day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And since his mind was rehearsing explanations it was not unnatural they
+      should overflow into this eagerly receptive channel, and that the less he
+      told Lady Ella the fuller became his spiritual confidences to Lady
+      Sunderbund.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was clever in realizing that they were confidences and treating them
+      as such, more particularly when it chanced that she and Lady Ella and the
+      bishop found themselves in the same conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made great friends with Miriam, and initiated her by a whole
+      collection of pretty costume plates into the mysteries of the &ldquo;Ussian
+      Ballet&rdquo; and the works of Mousso'gski and &ldquo;Imsky Ko'zakof.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop liked a certain religiosity in the texture of Moussorgski's
+      music, but failed to see the &ldquo;significance &ldquo;&mdash;of many of the
+      costumes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was on a Sunday night&mdash;the fourth Sunday after Easter&mdash;that
+      the supreme crisis of the bishop's life began. He had had a feeling all
+      day of extreme dulness and stupidity; he felt his ministrations unreal,
+      his ceremonies absurd and undignified. In the night he became bleakly and
+      painfully awake. His mind occupied itself at first chiefly with the
+      tortuousness and weakness of his own character. Every day he perceived
+      that the difficulty of telling Lady Ella of the change in his faith became
+      more mountainous. And every day he procrastinated. If he had told her
+      naturally and simply on the evening of his return from London&mdash;before
+      anything material intervened&mdash;everything would have been different,
+      everything would have been simpler....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He groaned and rolled over in his bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There came upon him the acutest remorse and misery. For he saw that amidst
+      these petty immediacies he had lost touch with God. The last month became
+      incredible. He had seen God. He had touched God's hand. God had been given
+      to him, and he had neglected the gift. He was still lost amidst the
+      darkness and loneliness, the chaotic ends and mean shifts, of an Erastian
+      world. For a month now and more, after a vision of God so vivid and real
+      and reassuring that surely no saint nor prophet had ever had a better, he
+      had made no more than vague responsive movements; he had allowed himself
+      to be persuaded into an unreasonable and cowardly delay, and the fetters
+      of association and usage and minor interests were as unbroken as they had
+      been before ever the vision shone. Was it credible that there had ever
+      been such a vision in a life so entirely dictated by immediacy and
+      instinct as his? We are all creatures of the dark stream, we swim in needs
+      and bodily impulses and small vanities; if ever and again a bubble of
+      spiritual imaginativeness glows out of us, it breaks and leaves us where
+      we were.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Louse that I am!&rdquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He still believed in God, without a shadow of doubt; he believed in the
+      God that he had seen, the high courage, the golden intention, the light
+      that had for a moment touched him. But what had he to do with God, he, the
+      loiterer, the little thing?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was little, he was funny. His prevarications with his wife, for
+      example, were comic. There was no other word for him but &ldquo;funny.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rolled back again and lay staring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who will deliver me from the body of this death?&rdquo; What right has a little
+      bishop in a purple stock and doeskin breeches, who hangs back in his
+      palace from the very call of God, to a phrase so fine and tragic as &ldquo;the
+      body of this death?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was the most unreal thing in the universe. He was a base insect giving
+      himself airs. What advantage has a bishop over the Praying Mantis, that
+      cricket which apes the attitude of piety? Does he matter more&mdash;to
+      God?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the God of the Universe, who can tell? To the God of man,&mdash;yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat up in bed struck by his own answer, and full of an indescribable
+      hunger for God and an indescribable sense of his complete want of courage
+      to make the one simple appeal that would satisfy that hunger. He tried to
+      pray. &ldquo;O God!&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;forgive me! Take me!&rdquo; It seemed to him that he
+      was not really praying but only making believe to pray. It seemed to him
+      that he was not really existing but only seeming to exist. He seemed to
+      himself to be one with figures on a china plate, with figures painted on
+      walls, with the flimsy imagined lives of men in stories of forgotten
+      times. &ldquo;O God!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;O God,&rdquo; acting a gesture, mimicking appeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anaemic,&rdquo; he said, and was given an idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got out of bed, he took his keys from the night-table at the bed head
+      and went to his bureau.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood with Dale's tonic in his hand. He remained for some time holding
+      it, and feeling a curious indisposition to go on with the thing in his
+      mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned at last with an effort. He carried the little phial to his
+      bedside, and into the tumbler of his water-bottle he let the drops fall,
+      drop by drop, until he had counted twenty. Then holding it to the bulb of
+      his reading lamp he added the water and stood watching the slow pearly
+      eddies in the mixture mingle into an opalescent uniformity. He replaced
+      the water-bottle and stood with the glass in his hand. But he did not
+      drink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was afraid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He knew that he had only to drink and this world of confusion would grow
+      transparent, would roll back and reveal the great simplicities behind. And
+      he was afraid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was afraid of that greatness. He was afraid of the great imperatives
+      that he knew would at once take hold of his life. He wanted to muddle on
+      for just a little longer. He wanted to stay just where he was, in his
+      familiar prison-house, with the key of escape in his hand. Before he took
+      the last step into the very presence of truth, he would&mdash;think.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put down the glass and lay down upon his bed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He awoke in a mood of great depression out of a dream of wandering
+      interminably in an endless building of innumerable pillars, pillars so
+      vast and high that the ceiling was lost in darkness. By the scale of these
+      pillars he felt himself scarcely larger than an ant. He was always alone
+      in these wanderings, and always missing something that passed along
+      distant passages, something desirable, something in the nature of a
+      procession or of a ceremony, something of which he was in futile pursuit,
+      of which he heard faint echoes, something luminous of which he seemed at
+      times to see the last fading reflection, across vast halls and
+      wildernesses of shining pavement and through Cyclopaean archways. At last
+      there was neither sound nor gleam, but the utmost solitude, and a darkness
+      and silence and the uttermost profundity of sorrow....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was bright day. Dunk had just come into the room with his tea, and the
+      tumbler of Dr. Dale's tonic stood untouched upon the night-table. The
+      bishop sat up in bed. He had missed his opportunity. To-day was a busy
+      day, he knew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, as Dunk hesitated whether to remove or leave the tumbler.
+      &ldquo;Leave that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dunk found room for it upon the tea-tray, and vanished softly with the
+      bishop's evening clothes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop remained motionless facing the day. There stood the draught of
+      decision that he had lacked the decision even to touch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From his bed he could just read the larger items that figured upon the
+      engagement tablet which it was Whippham's business to fill over-night and
+      place upon his table. He had two confirmation services, first the big one
+      in the cathedral and then a second one in the evening at Pringle, various
+      committees and an interview with Chasters. He had not yet finished his
+      addresses for these confirmation services....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The task seemed mountainous&mdash;overwhelming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a gesture of desperation he seized the tumblerful of tonic and drank
+      it off at a gulp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some moments nothing seemed to happen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he began to feel stronger and less wretched, and then came a
+      throbbing and tingling of artery and nerve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a sense of adventure, a pleasant fear in the thing that he had
+      done. He got out of bed, leaving his cup of tea untasted, and began to
+      dress. He had the sensation of relief a prisoner may feel who suddenly
+      tries his cell door and finds it open upon sunshine, the outside world and
+      freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went on dressing although he was certain that in a few minutes the
+      world of delusion about him would dissolve, and that he would find himself
+      again in the great freedom of the place of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This time the transition came much sooner and much more rapidly. This time
+      the phases and quality of the experience were different. He felt once
+      again that luminous confusion between the world in which a human life is
+      imprisoned and a circumambient and interpenetrating world, but this phase
+      passed very rapidly; it did not spread out over nearly half an hour as it
+      had done before, and almost immediately he seemed to plunge away from
+      everything in this life altogether into that outer freedom he sought. And
+      this time there was not even the elemental scenery of the former vision.
+      He stood on nothing; there was nothing below and nothing above him. There
+      was no sense of falling, no terror, but a feeling as though he floated
+      released. There was no light, but as it were a clear darkness about him.
+      Then it was manifest to him that he was not alone, but that with him was
+      that same being that in his former vision had called himself the Angel of
+      God. He knew this without knowing why he knew this, and either he spoke
+      and was answered, or he thought and his thought answered him back. His
+      state of mind on this occasion was altogether different from the first
+      vision of God; before it had been spectacular, but now his perception was
+      altogether super-sensuous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (And nevertheless and all the time it seemed that very faintly he was
+      still in his room.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was he who was the first to speak. The great Angel whom he felt rather
+      than saw seemed to be waiting for him to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have come,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;because once more I desire to see God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you have seen God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw God. God was light, God was truth. And I went back to my life, and
+      God was hidden. God seemed to call me. He called. I heard him, I sought
+      him and I touched his hand. When I went back to my life I was presently
+      lost in perplexity. I could not tell why God had called me nor what I had
+      to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And why did you not come here before?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doubt and fear. Brother, will you not lay your hand on mine?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The figure in the darkness became distincter. But nothing touched the
+      bishop's seeking hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to see God and to understand him. I want reassurance. I want
+      conviction. I want to understand all that God asks me to do. The world is
+      full of conflict and confusion and the spirit of war. It is dark and
+      dreadful now with suffering and bloodshed. I want to serve God who could
+      save it, and I do not know how.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to the bishop that now he could distinguish dimly but surely the
+      form and features of the great Angel to whom he talked. For a little while
+      there was silence, and then the Angel spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was necessary first,&rdquo; said the Angel, &ldquo;that you should apprehend God
+      and desire him. That was the purport of your first vision. Now, since you
+      require it, I will tell you and show you certain things about him, things
+      that it seems you need to know, things that all men need to know. Know
+      then first that the time is at hand when God will come into the world and
+      rule it, and when men will know what is required of them. This time is
+      close at hand. In a little while God will be made manifest throughout the
+      earth. Men will know him and know that he is King. To you this truth is to
+      be shown&mdash;that you may tell it to others.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is no vision?&rdquo; said the bishop, &ldquo;no dream that will pass away?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I not here beside you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop was anxious to be very clear. Things that had been shapelessly
+      present in his mind now took form and found words for themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The God I saw in my vision&mdash;He is not yet manifest in the world?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He comes. He is in the world, but he is not yet manifested. He whom you
+      saw in your vision will speedily be manifest in the world. To you this
+      vision is given of the things that come. The world is already glowing with
+      God. Mankind is like a smouldering fire that will presently, in quite a
+      little time, burst out into flame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In your former vision I showed you God,&rdquo; said the Angel. &ldquo;This time I
+      will show you certain signs of the coming of God. And then you will
+      understand the place you hold in the world and the task that is required
+      of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (6)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as the Angel spoke he lifted up his hands with the palms upward, and
+      there appeared above them a little round cloud, that grew denser until it
+      had the likeness of a silver sphere. It was a mirror in the form of a
+      ball, but a mirror not shining uniformly; it was discoloured with greyish
+      patches that had a familiar shape. It circled slowly upon the Angel's
+      hands. It seemed no greater than the compass of a human skull, and yet it
+      was as great as the earth. Indeed it showed the whole earth. It was the
+      earth. The hands of the Angel vanished out of sight, dissolved and
+      vanished, and the spinning world hung free. All about the bishop the
+      velvet darkness broke into glittering points that shaped out the
+      constellations, and nearest to them, so near as to seem only a few million
+      miles away in the great emptiness into which everything had resolved
+      itself, shone the sun, a ball of red-tongued fires. The Angel was but a
+      voice now; the bishop and the Angel were somewhere aloof from and yet
+      accessible to the circling silver sphere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the time all that happened seemed to happen quite naturally, as things
+      happen in a dream. It was only later, when all this was a matter of
+      memory, that the bishop realized how strange and incomprehensible his
+      vision had been. The sphere was the earth with all its continents and
+      seas, its ships and cities, its country-sides and mountain ranges. It was
+      so small that he could see it all at once, and so great and full that he
+      could see everything in it. He could see great countries like little
+      patches upon it, and at the same time he could see the faces of the men
+      upon the highways, he could see the feelings in men's hearts and the
+      thoughts in their minds. But it did not seem in any way wonderful to the
+      bishop that so he should see those things, or that it was to him that
+      these things were shown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the whole world,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the vision of the world,&rdquo; the Angel answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very wonderful,&rdquo; said the bishop, and stood for a moment marvelling
+      at the compass of his vision. For here was India, here was Samarkand, in
+      the light of the late afternoon; and China and the swarming cities upon
+      her silvery rivers sinking through twilight to the night and throwing a
+      spray and tracery of lantern spots upon the dark; here was Russia under
+      the noontide, and so great a battle of artillery raging on the Dunajec as
+      no man had ever seen before; whole lines of trenches dissolved into clouds
+      of dust and heaps of blood-streaked earth; here close to the waiting
+      streets of Constantinople were the hills of Gallipoli, the grave of
+      British Imperialism, streaming to heaven with the dust and smoke of
+      bursting shells and rifle fire and the smoke and flame of burning
+      brushwood. In the sea of Marmora a big ship crowded with Turkish troops
+      was sinking; and, purple under the clear water, he could see the shape of
+      the British submarine which had torpedoed her and had submerged and was
+      going away. Berlin prepared its frugal meals, still far from famine. He
+      saw the war in Europe as if he saw it on a map, yet every human detail
+      showed. Over hundreds of miles of trenches east and west of Germany he
+      could see shells bursting and the men below dropping, and the
+      stretcher-bearers going back with the wounded. The roads to every front
+      were crowded with reserves and munitions. For a moment a little group of
+      men indifferent to all this struggle, who were landing amidst the
+      Antarctic wilderness, held his attention; and then his eyes went westward
+      to the dark rolling Atlantic across which, as the edge of the night was
+      drawn like a curtain, more and still more ships became visible beating
+      upon their courses eastward or westward under the overtaking day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wonder increased; the wonder of the single and infinitely
+      multitudinous adventure of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So God perhaps sees it,&rdquo; he whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (7)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look at this man,&rdquo; said the Angel, and the black shadow of a hand seemed
+      to point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a Chinaman sitting with two others in a little low room separated
+      by translucent paper windows from a noisy street of shrill-voiced people.
+      The three had been talking of the ultimatum that Japan had sent that day
+      to China, claiming a priority in many matters over European influences
+      they were by no means sure whether it was a wrong or a benefit that had
+      been done to their country. From that topic they had passed to the
+      discussion of the war, and then of wars and national aggressions and the
+      perpetual thrusting and quarrelling of mankind. The older man had said
+      that so life would always be; it was the will of Heaven. The little, very
+      yellow-faced, emaciated man had agreed with him. But now this younger man,
+      to whose thoughts the Angel had so particularly directed the bishop's
+      attention, was speaking. He did not agree with his companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;War is not the will of Heaven,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;it is the blindness of men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Man changes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;from day to day and from age to age. The science
+      of the West has taught us that. Man changes and war changes and all things
+      change. China has been the land of flowery peace, and she may yet give
+      peace to all the world. She has put aside that puppet Emperor at Peking,
+      she turns her face to the new learning of the West as a man lays aside his
+      heavy robes, in order that her task may be achieved.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The older man spoke, his manner was more than a little incredulous, and
+      yet not altogether contemptuous. &ldquo;You believe that someday there will be
+      no more war in the world, that a time will come when men will no longer
+      plot and plan against the welfare of men?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even that last,&rdquo; said the younger man. &ldquo;Did any of us dream twenty-five
+      years ago that here in China we should live to see a republic? The age of
+      the republics draws near, when men in every country of the world will look
+      straight up to the rule of Right and the empire of Heaven.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (&ldquo;And God will be King of the World,&rdquo; said the Angel. &ldquo;Is not that faith
+      exactly the faith that is coming to you?&rdquo;)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two other Chinamen questioned their companion, but without hostility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This war,&rdquo; said the Chinaman, &ldquo;will end in a great harvesting of kings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Japan&mdash;&rdquo; the older man began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop would have liked to hear more of that conversation, but the
+      dark hand of the Angel motioned him to another part of the world. &ldquo;Listen
+      to this,&rdquo; said the Angel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He pointed the bishop to where the armies of Britain and Turkey lay in the
+      heat of Mesopotamia. Along the sandy bank of a wide, slow-flowing river
+      rode two horsemen, an Englishman and a Turk. They were returning from the
+      Turkish lines, whither the Englishman had been with a flag of truce. When
+      Englishmen and Turks are thrown together they soon become friends, and in
+      this case matters had been facilitated by the Englishman's command of the
+      Turkish language. He was quite an exceptional Englishman. The Turk had
+      just been remarking cheerfully that it wouldn't please the Germans if they
+      were to discover how amiably he and his charge had got on. &ldquo;It's a pity we
+      ever ceased to be friends,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You Englishmen aren't like our Christians,&rdquo; he went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Englishmen wanted to know why.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't priests in robes. You don't chant and worship crosses and
+      pictures, and quarrel among yourselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We worship the same God as you do,&rdquo; said the Englishman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why do we fight?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what we want to know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do you call yourselves Christians? And take part against us? All who
+      worship the One God are brothers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They ought to be,&rdquo; said the Englishman, and thought. He was struck by
+      what seemed to him an amazingly novel idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it weren't for religions all men would serve God together,&rdquo; he said.
+      &ldquo;And then there would be no wars&mdash;only now and then perhaps just a
+      little honest fighting....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And see here,&rdquo; said the Angel. &ldquo;Here close behind this frightful battle,
+      where the German phalanx of guns pounds its way through the Russian hosts.
+      Here is a young German talking to two wounded Russian prisoners, who have
+      stopped to rest by the roadside. He is a German of East Prussia; he knows
+      and thinks a little Russian. And they too are saying, all three of them,
+      that the war is not God's will, but the confusion of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here,&rdquo; he said, and the shadow of his hand hovered over the burning-ghats
+      of Benares, where a Brahmin of the new persuasion watched the straight
+      spires of funereal smoke ascend into the glow of the late afternoon, while
+      he talked to an English painter, his friend, of the blind intolerance of
+      race and caste and custom in India.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Angel pointed to a group of people who had gathered upon a little
+      beach at the head of a Norwegian fiord. There were three lads, an old man
+      and two women, and they stood about the body of a drowned German sailor
+      which had been washed up that day. For a time they had talked in whispers,
+      but now suddenly the old man spoke aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the fourth that has come ashore,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Poor drowned souls!
+      Because men will not serve God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But folks go to church and pray enough,&rdquo; said one of the women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They do not serve God,&rdquo; said the old man. &ldquo;They just pray to him as one
+      nods to a beggar. They do not serve God who is their King. They set up
+      their false kings and emperors, and so all Europe is covered with dead,
+      and the seas wash up these dead to us. Why does the world suffer these
+      things? Why did we Norwegians, who are a free-spirited people, permit the
+      Germans and the Swedes and the English to set up a king over us? Because
+      we lack faith. Kings mean secret counsels, and secret counsels bring war.
+      Sooner or later war will come to us also if we give the soul of our nation
+      in trust to a king.... But things will not always be thus with men. God
+      will not suffer them for ever. A day comes, and it is no distant day, when
+      God himself will rule the earth, and when men will do, not what the king
+      wishes nor what is expedient nor what is customary, but what is manifestly
+      right.&rdquo;....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But men are saying that now in a thousand places,&rdquo; said the Angel. &ldquo;Here
+      is something that goes a little beyond that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His pointing hand went southward until they saw the Africanders riding
+      down to Windhuk. Two men, Boer farmers both, rode side by side and talked
+      of the German officer they brought prisoner with them. He had put
+      sheep-dip in the wells of drinking-water; his life was fairly forfeit, and
+      he was not to be killed. &ldquo;We want no more hate in South Africa,&rdquo; they
+      agreed. &ldquo;Dutch and English and German must live here now side by side. Men
+      cannot always be killing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And see his thoughts,&rdquo; said the Angel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The German's mind was one amazement. He had been sure of being shot, he
+      had meant to make a good end, fierce and scornful, a relentless fighter to
+      the last; and these men who might have shot him like a man were going to
+      spare him like a dog. His mind was a tumbled muddle of old and new ideas.
+      He had been brought up in an atmosphere of the foulest and fiercest
+      militarism; he had been trained to relentlessness, ruthlessness and so
+      forth; war was war and the bitterer the better, frightfulness was your way
+      to victory over every enemy. But these people had found a better way. Here
+      were Dutch and English side by side; sixteen years ago they had been at
+      war together and now they wore the same uniform and rode together, and
+      laughed at him for a queer fellow because he was for spitting at them and
+      defying them, and folding his arms and looking level at the executioners'
+      rifles. There were to be no executioners' rifles.... If it was so with
+      Dutch and English, why shouldn't it be so presently with French and
+      Germans? Why someday shouldn't French, German, Dutch and English, Russian
+      and Pole, ride together under this new star of mankind, the Southern
+      Cross, to catch whatever last mischief-maker was left to poison the wells
+      of goodwill?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mind resisted and struggled against these ideas. &ldquo;Austere,&rdquo; he
+      whispered. &ldquo;The ennobling tests of war.&rdquo; A trooner rode up alongside, and
+      offered him a drink of water
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just a mouthful,&rdquo; he said apologetically. &ldquo;We've had to go rather
+      short.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's another brain busy here with the same idea,&rdquo; the Angel
+      interrupted. And the bishop found himself looking into the bedroom of a
+      young German attache in Washington, sleepless in the small hours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ach!&rdquo; cried the young man, and sat up in bed and ran his hands through
+      his fair hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had been working late upon this detestable business of the Lusitania;
+      the news of her sinking had come to hand two days before, and all America
+      was aflame with it. It might mean war. His task had been to pour out
+      explanations and justifications to the press; to show that it was an act
+      of necessity, to pretend a conviction that the great ship was loaded with
+      munitions, to fight down the hostility and anger that blazed across a
+      continent. He had worked to his limit. He had taken cup after cup of
+      coffee, and had come to bed worked out not two hours ago. Now here he was
+      awake after a nightmare of drowning women and children, trying to comfort
+      his soul by recalling his own arguments. Never once since the war began
+      had he doubted the rightness of the German cause. It seemed only a proof
+      of his nervous exhaustion that he could doubt it now. Germany was the best
+      organized, most cultivated, scientific and liberal nation the earth had
+      ever seen, it was for the good of mankind that she should be the dominant
+      power in the world; his patriotism had had the passion of a mission. The
+      English were indolent, the French decadent, the Russians barbaric, the
+      Americans basely democratic; the rest of the world was the &ldquo;White man's
+      Burthen&rdquo;; the clear destiny of mankind was subservience to the good
+      Prussian eagle. Nevertheless&mdash;those wet draggled bodies that swirled
+      down in the eddies of the sinking Titan&mdash;Ach! He wished it could have
+      been otherwise. He nursed his knees and prayed that there need not be much
+      more of these things before the spirit of the enemy was broken and the
+      great Peace of Germany came upon the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And suddenly he stopped short in his prayer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly out of the nothingness and darkness about him came the conviction
+      that God did not listen to his prayers....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was there any other way?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the most awful doubt he had ever had, for it smote at the training
+      of all his life. &ldquo;Could it be possible that after all our old German God
+      is not the proper style and title of the true God? Is our old German God
+      perhaps only the last of a long succession of bloodstained tribal effigies&mdash;and
+      not God at all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a long time it seemed that the bishop watched the thoughts that
+      gathered in the young attache's mind. Until suddenly he broke into a
+      quotation, into that last cry of the dying Goethe, for &ldquo;Light. More
+      Light!&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave him at that,&rdquo; said the Angel. &ldquo;I want you to hear these two young
+      women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The hand came back to England and pointed to where Southend at the mouth
+      of the Thames was all agog with the excitement of an overnight Zeppelin
+      raid. People had got up hours before their usual time in order to look at
+      the wrecked houses before they went up to their work in town. Everybody
+      seemed abroad. Two nurses, not very well trained as nurses go nor very
+      well-educated women, were snatching a little sea air upon the front after
+      an eventful night. They were too excited still to sleep. They were talking
+      of the horror of the moment when they saw the nasty thing &ldquo;up there,&rdquo; and
+      felt helpless as it dropped its bombs. They had both hated it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There didn't ought to be such things,&rdquo; said one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They don't seem needed,&rdquo; said her companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men won't always go on like this&mdash;making wars and all such
+      wickedness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's 'ow to stop them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Science is going to stop them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Science?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, science. My young brother&mdash;oh, he's a clever one&mdash;he says
+      such things! He says that it's science that they won't always go on like
+      this. There's more sense coming into the world and more&mdash;my young
+      brother says so. Says it stands to reason; it's Evolution. It's science
+      that men are all brothers; you can prove it. It's science that there
+      oughtn't to be war. Science is ending war now by making it horrible like
+      this, and making it so that no one is safe. Showing it up. Only when
+      nobody is safe will everybody want to set up peace, he says. He says it's
+      proved there could easily be peace all over the world now if it wasn't for
+      flags and kings and capitalists and priests. They still manage to keep
+      safe and out of it. He says the world ought to be just one state. The
+      World State, he says it ought to be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (&ldquo;Under God,&rdquo; said the bishop, &ldquo;under God.&rdquo;)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He says science ought to be King of the whole world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Call it Science if you will,&rdquo; said the bishop. &ldquo;God is wisdom.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Out of the mouths of babes and elementary science students,&rdquo; said the
+      Angel. &ldquo;The very children in the board schools are turning against this
+      narrowness and nonsense and mischief of nations and creeds and kings. You
+      see it at a thousand points, at ten thousand points, look, the world is
+      all flashing and flickering; it is like a spinthariscope; it is aquiver
+      with the light that is coming to mankind. It is on the verge of blazing
+      even now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Into a light.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Into the one Kingdom of God. See here! See here! And here! This brave
+      little French priest in a helmet of steel who is daring to think for the
+      first time in his life; this gentle-mannered emir from Morocco looking at
+      the grave-diggers on the battlefield; this mother who has lost her son....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see they all turn in one direction, although none of them seem to
+      dream yet that they are all turning in the same direction. They turn,
+      every one, to the rule of righteousness, which is the rule of God. They
+      turn to that communism of effort in the world which alone permits men to
+      serve God in state and city and their economic lives.... They are all
+      coming to the verge of the same salvation, the salvation of one human
+      brotherhood under the rule of one Righteousness, one Divine will.... Is
+      that the salvation your church offers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (8)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now that we have seen how religion grows and spreads in men's hearts,
+      now that the fields are white with harvest, I want you to look also and
+      see what the teachers of religion are doing,&rdquo; said the Angel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled. His presence became more definite, and the earthly globe about
+      them and the sun and the stars grew less distinct and less immediately
+      there. The silence invited the bishop to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the light of this vision, I see my church plainly for the little thing
+      it is,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wanted to be perfectly clear with the Angel and himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This church of which I am a bishop is just a part of our poor human
+      struggle, small and pitiful as one thinks of it here in the light of the
+      advent of God's Kingdom, but very great, very great indeed, ancient and
+      high and venerable, in comparison with me. But mostly it is human. It is
+      most human. For my story is the church's story, and the church's story is
+      mine. Here I could almost believe myself the church itself. The world saw
+      a light, the nations that were sitting in darkness saw a great light. Even
+      as I saw God. And then the church began to forget and lose itself among
+      secondary things. As I have done.... It tried to express the truth and
+      lost itself in a maze of theology. It tried to bring order into the world
+      and sold its faith to Constantine. These men who had professed the
+      Invisible King of the World, shirked his service. It is a most terrible
+      disaster that Christianity has sold itself to emperors and kings. They
+      forged a saying of the Master's that we should render unto Ceasar the
+      things that are Ceasar's and unto God the things that are God's....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is this Ceasar to set himself up to share mankind with God? Nothing
+      that is Ceasar's can be any the less God's. But Constantine Caesar sat in
+      the midst of the council, his guards were all about it, and the poor
+      fanatics and trimmers and schemers disputed nervously with their eyes on
+      him, disputed about homoousian and homoiousian, and grimaced and pretended
+      to be very very fierce and exact to hide how much they were frightened and
+      how little they knew, and because they did not dare to lay violent hands
+      upon that usurper of the empire of the world....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And from that day forth the Christian churches have been damned and lost.
+      Kept churches. Lackey churches. Roman, Russian, Anglican; it matters not.
+      My church indeed was twice sold, for it doubled the sin of Nicaea and gave
+      itself over to Henry and Elizabeth while it shammed a dispute about the
+      sacraments. No one cared really about transubstantiation any more than the
+      earlier betrayers cared about consubstantiality; that dispute did but
+      serve to mask the betrayal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to the listening Angel. &ldquo;What can you show me of my church that
+      I do not know? Why! we Anglican bishops get our sees as footmen get a job.
+      For months Victoria, that old German Frau, delayed me&mdash;because of
+      some tittle-tattle.... The things we are! Snape, who afterwards became
+      Bishop of Burnham, used to waylay the Prince Consort when he was riding in
+      Hyde Park and give him, he boasts, 'a good loud cheer,' and then he would
+      run very fast across the park so as to catch him as he came round, and do
+      it again.... It is to that sort of thing we bearers of the light have
+      sunken....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have always despised that poor toady,&rdquo; the bishop went on. &ldquo;And yet
+      here am I, and God has called me and shown me the light of his
+      countenance, and for a month I have faltered. That is the mystery of the
+      human heart, that it can and does sin against the light. What right have
+      I, who have seen the light&mdash;and failed, what right have I&mdash;to
+      despise any other human being? I seem to have been held back by a sort of
+      paralysis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men are so small, so small still, that they cannot keep hold of the
+      vision of God. That is why I want to see God again.... But if it were not
+      for this strange drug that seems for a little while to lift my mind above
+      the confusion and personal entanglements of every day, I doubt if even now
+      I could be here. I am here, passionate to hold this moment and keep the
+      light. As this inspiration passes, I shall go back, I know, to my home and
+      my place and my limitations. The littleness of men! The forgetfulness of
+      men! I want to know what my chief duty is, to have it plain, in terms so
+      plain that I can never forget.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See in this world,&rdquo; he said, turning to the globe, &ldquo;while Chinese
+      merchants and Turkish troopers, school-board boys and Norwegian fishermen,
+      half-trained nurses and Boer farmers are full of the spirit of God, see
+      how the priests of the churches of Nicaea spend their time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And now it was the bishop whose dark hands ran over the great silver
+      globe, and it was the Angel who stood over him and listened, as a teacher
+      might stand over a child who is learning a lesson. The bishop's hand
+      rested for a second on a cardinal who was planning a political intrigue to
+      produce a reaction in France, then for a moment on a Pomeranian pastor who
+      was going out to his well-tilled fields with his Sunday sermon, full of
+      fierce hatred of England, still echoing in his head. Then he paused at a
+      Mollah preaching the Jehad, in doubt whether he too wasn't a German
+      pastor, and then at an Anglican clergyman still lying abed and thinking
+      out a great mission of Repentance and Hope that should restore the
+      authority of the established church&mdash;by incoherent missioning&mdash;without
+      any definite sin indicated for repentance nor any clear hope for anything
+      in particular arising out of such activities. The bishop's hand went
+      seeking to and fro, but nowhere could he find any religious teacher, any
+      religious body rousing itself to meet the new dawn of faith in the world.
+      Some few men indeed seemed thoughtful, but within the limitation of their
+      vows. Everywhere it was church and creed and nation and king and property
+      and partisanship, and nowhere was it the True God that the priests and
+      teachers were upholding. It was always the common unhampered man through
+      whom the light of God was breaking; it was always the creed and the
+      organization of the religious professionals that stood in the way to
+      God....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God is putting the priests aside,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;and reaching out to common
+      men. The churches do not serve God. They stand between man and God. They
+      are like great barricades on the way to God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop's hand brushed over Archbishop Pontifex, who was just coming
+      down to breakfast in his palace. This pompous old man was dressed in a
+      purple garment that set off his tall figure very finely, and he was
+      holding out his episcopal ring for his guests to kiss, that being the
+      customary morning greeting of Archbishop Pontifex. The thought of that
+      ring-kissing had made much hard work at lower levels &ldquo;worth while&rdquo; to
+      Archbishop Pontifex. And seventy miles away from him old Likeman
+      breakfasted in bed on Benger's food, and searched his Greek Testament for
+      tags to put to his letters. And here was the familiar palace at
+      Princhester, and in an armchair in his bed-room sat Bishop Scrope
+      insensible and motionless, in a trance in which he was dreaming of the
+      coming of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see my futility. I see my vanity. But what am I to do?&rdquo; he said,
+      turning to the darkness that now wrapped about the Angel again, fold upon
+      fold. &ldquo;The implications of yesterday bind me for the morrow. This is my
+      world. This is what I am and what I am in. How can I save myself? How can
+      I turn from these habits and customs and obligations to the service of the
+      one true God? When I see myself, then I understand how it is with the
+      others. All we priests and teachers are men caught in nets. I would serve
+      God. Easily said! But how am I to serve God? How am I to help and forward
+      His coming, to make myself part of His coming?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He perceived that he was returning into himself, and that the vision of
+      the sphere and of the starry spaces was fading into non-existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He struggled against this return. He felt that his demand was still
+      unanswered. His wife's face had suddenly come very close to him, and he
+      realized she intervened between him and that solution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was she doing here?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (9)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great Angel seemed still to be near at hand, limitless space was all
+      about him, and yet the bishop perceived that he was now sitting in the
+      arm-chair in his bedroom in the palace of Princhester. He was both there
+      and not there. It seemed now as if he had two distinct yet kindred selves,
+      and that the former watched the latter. The latter was now awakening to
+      the things about him; the former marked his gestures and listened with an
+      entire detachment to the words he was saying. These words he was saying to
+      Lady Ella: &ldquo;God is coming to rule the world, I tell you. We must leave the
+      church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Close to him sat Lady Ella, watching him with an expression in which
+      dismay and resolution mingled. Upon the other side of him, upon a little
+      occasional table, was a tray with breakfast things. He was no longer the
+      watcher now, but the watched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella bent towards him as he spoke. She seemed to struggle with and
+      dismiss his astonishing statement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Edward,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;you have been taking a drug.&rdquo; He looked round at his
+      night table to see the little phial. It had gone. Then he saw that Lady
+      Ella held it very firmly in her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dunk came to me in great distress. He said you were insensible and
+      breathing heavily. I came. I realized. I told him to say nothing to any
+      one, but to fetch me a tray with your breakfast. I have kept all the other
+      servants away and I have waited here by you.... Dunk I think is safe....
+      You have been muttering and moving your head from side to side....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop's mind was confused. He felt as though God must be standing
+      just outside the room. &ldquo;I have failed in my duty,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But I am very
+      near to God.&rdquo; He laid his hand on her arm. &ldquo;You know, Ella, He is very
+      close to us....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked perplexed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat up in his chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For some months now,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;there have been new forces at work in my
+      mind. I have been invaded by strange doubts and still stranger
+      realizations. This old church of ours is an empty mask. God is not
+      specially concerned in it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Edward!&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;what are you saying?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been hesitating to tell you. But I see now I must tell you
+      plainly. Our church is a cast hull. It is like the empty skin of a snake.
+      God has gone out of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose to her feet. She was so horrified that she staggered backward,
+      pushing her chair behind her. &ldquo;But you are mad,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was astonished at her distress. He stood up also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I can assure you I am not mad. I should have prepared
+      you, I know....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him wild-eyed. Then she glanced at the phial, gripped in her
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; she exclaimed, and going swiftly to the window emptied out the
+      contents of the little bottle. He realized what she was doing too late to
+      prevent her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't waste that!&rdquo; he cried, and stepping forward caught hold of her
+      wrist. The phial fell from her white fingers, and crashed upon the rough
+      paved garden path below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;my dear. You do not understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood face to face. &ldquo;It was a tonic,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I have been ill. I
+      need it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a drug,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;You have been uttering blasphemies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He dropped her arm and walked half-way across the room. Then he turned and
+      faced her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are not blasphemies,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But I ought not to have surprised
+      you and shocked you as I have done. I want to tell you of changes that
+      have happened to my mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now!&rdquo; she exclaimed, and then: &ldquo;I will not hear them now. Until you are
+      better. Until these fumes&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her manner changed. &ldquo;Oh, Edward!&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;why have you done this? Why
+      have you taken things secretly? I know you have been sleepless, but I have
+      been so ready to help you. I have been willing&mdash;you know I have been
+      willing&mdash;for any help. My life is all to be of use to you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there any reason,&rdquo; she pleaded, &ldquo;why you should have hidden things
+      from me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood remorseful and distressed. &ldquo;I should have talked to you,&rdquo; he said
+      lamely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Edward,&rdquo; she said, laying her hands on his shoulders, &ldquo;will you do one
+      thing for me? Will you try to eat a little breakfast? And stay here? I
+      will go down to Mr. Whippham and arrange whatever is urgent with him.
+      Perhaps if you rest&mdash;There is nothing really imperative until the
+      confirmation in the afternoon.... I do not understand all this. For some
+      time&mdash;I have felt it was going on. But of that we can talk. The thing
+      now is that people should not know, that nothing should be seen....
+      Suppose for instance that horrible White Blackbird were to hear of it....
+      I implore you. If you rest here&mdash;And if I were to send for that young
+      doctor who attended Miriam.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want a doctor,&rdquo; said the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you ought to have a doctor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I won't have a doctor,&rdquo; said the bishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was with a perplexed but powerless dissent that the externalized
+      perceptions of the bishop witnessed his agreement with the rest of Lady
+      Ella's proposals so soon as this point about the doctor was conceded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (10)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the rest of that day until his breakdown in the cathedral the sense of
+      being in two places at the same time haunted the bishop's mind. He stood
+      beside the Angel in the great space amidst the stars, and at the same time
+      he was back in his ordinary life, he was in his palace at Princhester,
+      first resting in his bedroom and talking to his wife and presently taking
+      up the routines of his duties again in his study downstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His chief task was to finish his two addresses for the confirmation
+      services of the day. He read over his notes, and threw them aside and
+      remained for a time thinking deeply. The Greek tags at the end of
+      Likeman's letter came into his thoughts; they assumed a quality of
+      peculiar relevance to this present occasion. He repeated the words:
+      &ldquo;Epitelesei. Epiphausei.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took his little Testament to verify them. After some slight trouble he
+      located the two texts. The first, from Philippians, ran in the old
+      version, &ldquo;He that hath begun a good work in you will perform it&rdquo;; the
+      second was expressed thus: &ldquo;Christ shall give thee light.&rdquo; He was
+      dissatisfied with these renderings and resorted to the revised version,
+      which gave &ldquo;perfect&rdquo; instead of &ldquo;perform,&rdquo; and &ldquo;shall shine upon you&rdquo; for
+      &ldquo;give thee light.&rdquo; He reflected profoundly for a time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly his addresses began to take shape in his mind, and these
+      little points lost any significance. He began to write rapidly, and as he
+      wrote he felt the Angel stood by his right hand and read and approved what
+      he was writing. There were moments when his mind seemed to be working
+      entirely beyond his control. He had a transitory questioning whether this
+      curious intellectual automatism was not perhaps what people meant by
+      &ldquo;inspiration.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (11)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop had always been sensitive to the secret fount of pathos that is
+      hidden in the spectacle of youth. Long years ago when he and Lady Ella had
+      been in Florence he had been moved to tears by the beauty of the
+      fresh-faced eager Tobit who runs beside the great angel in the picture of
+      Botticelli. And suddenly and almost as uncontrollably, that feeling
+      returned at the sight of the young congregation below him, of all these
+      scores of neophytes who were gathered to make a public acknowledgment of
+      God. The war has invested all youth now with the shadow of tragedy; before
+      it came many of us were a little envious of youth and a little too assured
+      of its certainty of happiness. All that has changed. Fear and a certain
+      tender solicitude mingle in our regard for every child; not a lad we pass
+      in the street but may presently be called to face such pain and stress and
+      danger as no ancient hero ever knew. The patronage, the insolent
+      condescension of age, has vanished out of the world. It is dreadful to
+      look upon the young.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood surveying the faces of the young people as the rector read the
+      Preface to the confirmation service. How simple they were, how innocent!
+      Some were a little flushed by the excitement of the occasion; some a
+      little pallid. But they were all such tender faces, so soft in outline, so
+      fresh and delicate in texture and colour. They had soft credulous mouths.
+      Some glanced sideways at one another; some listened with a forced
+      intentness. The expression of one good-looking boy, sitting in a corner
+      scat, struck the bishop as being curiously defiant. He stood very erect,
+      he blinked his eyes as though they smarted, his lips were compressed
+      bitterly. And then it seemed to the bishop that the Angel stood beside him
+      and gave him understanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is here,&rdquo; the bishop knew, &ldquo;because he could not avoid coming. He
+      tried to excuse himself. His mother wept. What could he do? But the
+      church's teaching nowadays fails even to grip the minds of boys.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The rector came to the end of his Preface: &ldquo;They will evermore endeavour
+      themselves faithfully to observe such things as they by their own
+      confession have assented unto.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like a smart solicitor pinning them down,&rdquo; said the bishop to himself,
+      and then roused himself, unrolled the little paper in his hand, leant
+      forward, and straightway began his first address.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nowadays it is possible to say very unorthodox things indeed in an
+      Anglican pulpit unchallenged. There remains no alert doctrinal criticism
+      in the church congregations. It was possible, therefore, for the bishop to
+      say all that follows without either hindrance or disturbance. The only
+      opposition, indeed, came from within, from a sense of dreamlike
+      incongruity between the place and the occasion and the things that he
+      found himself delivering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All ceremonies,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;grow old. All ceremonies are tainted even
+      from the first by things less worthy than their first intention, and you,
+      my dear sons and daughters, who have gathered to-day in this worn and
+      ancient building, beneath these monuments to ancient vanities and these
+      symbols of forgotten or abandoned theories about the mystery of God, will
+      do well to distinguish in your minds between what is essential and what is
+      superfluous and confusing in this dedication you make of yourselves to God
+      our Master and King. For that is the real thing you seek to do today, to
+      give yourselves to God. This is your spiritual coming of age, in which you
+      set aside your childish dependence upon teachers and upon taught phrases,
+      upon rote and direction, and stand up to look your Master in the face. You
+      profess a great brotherhood when you do that, a brotherhood that goes
+      round the earth, that numbers men of every race and nation and country,
+      that aims to bring God into all the affairs of this world and make him not
+      only the king of your individual lives but the king&mdash;in place of all
+      the upstarts, usurpers, accidents, and absurdities who bear crowns and
+      sceptres today&mdash;of an united mankind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, and in the pause he heard a little rustle as though the
+      congregation before him was sitting up in its places, a sound that always
+      nerves and reassures an experienced preacher.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This, my dear children, is the reality of this grave business to-day, as
+      indeed it is the real and practical end of all true religion. This is your
+      sacrament urn, your soldier's oath. You salute and give your fealty to the
+      coming Kingdom of God. And upon that I would have you fix your minds to
+      the exclusion of much that, I know only too well, has been narrow and evil
+      and sectarian in your preparation for this solemn rite. God is like a
+      precious jewel found among much rubble; you must cast the rubble from you.
+      The crowning triumph of the human mind is simplicity; the supreme
+      significance of God lies in his unity and universality. The God you salute
+      to-day is the God of the Jews and Gentiles alike, the God of Islam, the
+      God of the Brahmo Somaj, the unknown God of many a righteous unbeliever.
+      He is not the God of those felted theologies and inexplicable doctrines
+      with which your teachers may have confused your minds. I would have it
+      very clear in your minds that having drunken the draught you should not
+      reverence unduly the cracked old vessel that has brought it to your lips.
+      I should be falling short of my duty if I did not make that and everything
+      I mean by that altogether plain to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw the lad whose face of dull defiance he had marked before, sitting
+      now with a startled interest in his eyes. The bishop leant over the desk
+      before him, and continued in the persuasive tone of a man who speaks of
+      things too manifest for laboured argument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In all ages religion has come from God through broad-minded creative men,
+      and in all ages it has fallen very quickly into the hands of intense and
+      conservative men. These last&mdash;narrow, fearful, and suspicious&mdash;have
+      sought in every age to save the precious gift of religion by putting it
+      into a prison of formulae and asseverations. Bear that in mind when you
+      are pressed to definition. It is as if you made a box hermetically sealed
+      to save the treasure of a fresh breeze from the sea. But they have sought
+      out exact statements and tortuous explanations of the plain truth of God,
+      they have tried to take down God in writing, to commit him to documents,
+      to embalm his living faith as though it would otherwise corrupt. So they
+      have lost God and fallen into endless differences, disputes, violence, and
+      darkness about insignificant things. They have divided religion between
+      this creed and teacher and that. The corruption of the best is the worst,
+      said Aristotle; and the great religions of the world, and especially this
+      Christianity of ours, are the ones most darkened and divided and wasted by
+      the fussings and false exactitudes of the creed-monger and the sectary.
+      There is no lie so bad as a stale disfigured truth. There is no heresy so
+      damnable as a narrow orthodoxy. All religious associations carry this
+      danger of the over-statement that misstates and the over-emphasis that
+      divides and betrays. Beware of that danger. Do not imagine, because you
+      are gathered in this queerly beautiful old building today, because I
+      preside here in this odd raiment of an odder compromise, because you see
+      about you in coloured glass and carven stone the emblems of much vain
+      disputation, that thereby you cut yourselves off and come apart from the
+      great world of faith, Catholic, Islamic, Brahministic, Buddhistic, that
+      grows now to a common consciousness of the near Advent of God our King.
+      You enter that waiting world fraternity now, you do not leave it. This
+      place, this church of ours, should be to you not a seclusion and a
+      fastness but a door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could quote you a score of instances to establish that this simple
+      universalism was also the teaching of Christ. But now I will only remind
+      you that it was Mary who went to her lord simply, who was commended, and
+      not Martha who troubled about many things. Learn from the Mary of Faith
+      and not from these Marthas of the Creeds. Let us abandon the presumptions
+      of an ignorant past. The perfection of doctrine is not for finite men.
+      Give yourselves to God. Give yourselves to God. Not to churches and uses,
+      but to God. To God simply. He is the first word of religion and the last.
+      He is Alpha; he is Omega. Epitelesei; it is He who will finish the good
+      work begun.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop ended his address in a vivid silence. Then he began his
+      interrogation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you here, in the presence of God, and of this congregation, renew the
+      solemn promise and vow that was made in your name at your Baptism;
+      ratifying and confirming the same in your own persons, and acknowledging
+      yourselves&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped short. The next words were: &ldquo;bound to believe and do all those
+      things, which your Godfathers and Godmothers then undertook for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not stand those words. He hesitated, and then substituted:
+      &ldquo;acknowledge yourselves to be the true servants of the one God, who is the
+      Lord of Mankind?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment silence hung in the cathedral. Then one voice, a boy's voice,
+      led a ragged response. &ldquo;I do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the bishop: &ldquo;Our help is in the Name of the Lord.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The congregation answered doubtfully, with a glance at its prayer books:
+      &ldquo;Who hath made heaven and earth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop: &ldquo;Blessed be the name of the Lord.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The congregation said with returning confidence: &ldquo;Henceforth, world
+      without end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (12)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before his second address the bishop had to listen to Veni Creator
+      Spiritus, in its English form, and it seemed to him the worst of all
+      possible hymns. Its defects became monstrously exaggerated to his
+      hypersensitive mind. It impressed him in its Englished travesty as a
+      grotesque, as a veritable Charlie Chaplin among hymns, and in truth it
+      does stick out most awkward feet, it misses its accusatives, it catches
+      absurdly upon points of abstruse doctrine. The great Angel stood
+      motionless and ironical at the bishop's elbow while it was being sung.
+      &ldquo;Your church,&rdquo; he seemed to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must end this sort of thing,&rdquo; whispered the bishop. &ldquo;We must end this
+      sort of thing&mdash;absolutely.&rdquo; He glanced at the faces of the singers,
+      and it became beyond all other things urgent, that he should lift them
+      once for all above the sectarian dogmatism of that hymn to a simple vision
+      of God's light....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He roused himself to the touching business of the laying on of hands.
+      While he did so the prepared substance of his second address was running
+      through his mind. The following prayer and collects he read without
+      difficulty, and so came to his second address. His disposition at first
+      was explanatory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I spoke to you just now,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;I fell unintentionally into the
+      use of a Greek word, epitelesei. It was written to me in a letter from a
+      friend with another word that also I am now going to quote to you. This
+      letter touched very closely upon the things I want to say to you now, and
+      so these two words are very much in my mind. The former one was taken from
+      the Epistle to the Philippians; it signifies, 'He will complete the work
+      begun'; the one I have now in mind comes from the Epistle to the
+      Ephesians; it is Epiphausei&mdash;or, to be fuller, epiphausei soi ho
+      Christos, which signifies that He will shine upon us. And this is very
+      much in my thoughts now because I do believe that this world, which seemed
+      so very far from God a little while ago, draws near now to an unexampled
+      dawn. God is at hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is your privilege, it is your grave and terrible position, that you
+      have been born at the very end and collapse of a negligent age, of an age
+      of sham kingship, sham freedom, relaxation, evasion, greed, waste,
+      falsehood, and sinister preparation. Your lives open out in the midst of
+      the breakdown for which that age prepared. To you negligence is no longer
+      possible. There is cold and darkness, there is the heat of the furnace
+      before you; you will live amidst extremes such as our youth never knew;
+      whatever betide, you of your generation will have small chance of living
+      untempered lives. Our country is at war and half mankind is at war; death
+      and destruction trample through the world; men rot and die by the million,
+      food diminishes and fails, there is a wasting away of all the hoarded
+      resources, of all the accumulated well-being of mankind; and there is no
+      clear prospect yet of any end to this enormous and frightful conflict. Why
+      did it ever arise? What made it possible? It arose because men had
+      forgotten God. It was possible because they worshipped simulacra, were
+      loyal to phantoms of race and empire, permitted themselves to be ruled and
+      misled by idiot princes and usurper kings. Their minds were turned from
+      God, who alone can rule and unite mankind, and so they have passed from
+      the glare and follies of those former years into the darkness and anguish
+      of the present day. And in darkness and anguish they will remain until
+      they turn to that King who comes to rule them, until the sword and
+      indignation of God have overthrown their misleaders and oppressors, and
+      the Justice of God, the Kingdom of God set high over the republics of
+      mankind, has brought peace for ever to the world. It is to this militant
+      and imminent God, to this immortal Captain, this undying Law-giver, that
+      you devote yourselves to-day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For he is imminent now. He comes. I have seen in the east and in the
+      west, the hearts and the minds and the wills of men turning to him as
+      surely as when a needle is magnetized it turns towards the north. Even now
+      as I preach to you here, God stands over us all, ready to receive us....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And as he said these words, the long nave of the cathedral, the shadows of
+      its fretted roof, the brown choir with its golden screen, the rows of
+      seated figures, became like some picture cast upon a flimsy and
+      translucent curtain. Once more it seemed to the bishop that he saw God
+      plain. Once more the glorious effulgence poured about him, and the
+      beautiful and wonderful conquest of men's hearts and lives was manifest to
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted up his hands and cried to God, and with an emotion so profound,
+      an earnestness so commanding, that very many of those who were present
+      turned their faces to see the figure to which he looked and spoke. And
+      some of the children had a strange persuasion of a presence there, as of a
+      divine figure militant, armed, and serene....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh God our Leader and our Master and our Friend,&rdquo; the bishop prayed,
+      &ldquo;forgive our imperfection and our little motives, take us and make us one
+      with thy great purpose, use us and do not reject us, make us all here
+      servants of thy kingdom, weave our lives into thy struggle to conquer and
+      to bring peace and union to the world. We are small and feeble creatures,
+      we are feeble in speech, feebler still in action, nevertheless let but thy
+      light shine upon us and there is not one of us who cannot be lit by thy
+      fire, and who cannot lose himself in thy salvation. Take us into thy
+      purpose, O God. Let thy kingdom come into our hearts and into this world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice ceased, and he stood for a measurable time with his arms
+      extended and his face upturned....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The golden clouds that whirled and eddied so splendidly in his brain
+      thinned out, his sense of God's immediacy faded and passed, and he was
+      left aware of the cathedral pulpit in which he stood so strangely posed,
+      and of the astonished congregation below him. His arms sank to his side.
+      His eyes fell upon the book in front of him and he felt for and gripped
+      the two upper corners of it and, regardless of the common order and
+      practice, read out the Benediction, changing the words involuntarily as he
+      read:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Blessing of God who is the Father, the Son, the Spirit and the King
+      of all Mankind, be upon you and remain with you for ever. Amen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he looked again, as if to look once more upon that radiant vision of
+      God, but now he saw only the clear cool space of the cathedral vault and
+      the coloured glass and tracery of the great rose window. And then, as the
+      first notes of the organ came pealing above the departing stir of the
+      congregation, he turned about and descended slowly, like one who is still
+      half dreaming, from the pulpit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (13)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the vestry he found Canon Bliss. &ldquo;Help me to take off these garments,&rdquo;
+       the bishop said. &ldquo;I shall never wear them again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are ill,&rdquo; said the canon, scrutinizing his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not ill. But the word was taken out of my mouth. I perceive now that I
+      have been in a trance, a trance in which the truth is real. It is a
+      fearful thing to find oneself among realities. It is a dreadful thing when
+      God begins to haunt a priest.... I can never minister in the church
+      again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whippham thrust forward a chair for the bishop to sit down. The bishop
+      felt now extraordinarily fatigued. He sat down heavily, and rested his
+      wrists on the arms of the chair. &ldquo;Already,&rdquo; he resumed presently, &ldquo;I begin
+      to forget what it was I said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You became excited,&rdquo; said Bliss, &ldquo;and spoke very loudly and clearly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did I say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know what you said; I have forgotten. I never want to remember.
+      Things about the Second Advent. Dreadful things. You said God was close at
+      hand. Happily you spoke partly in Greek. I doubt if any of those children
+      understood. And you had a kind of lapse&mdash;an aphasia. You mutilated
+      the interrogation and you did not pronounce the benediction properly. You
+      changed words and you put in words. One sat frozen&mdash;waiting for what
+      would happen next.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must postpone the Pringle confirmation,&rdquo; said Whippham. &ldquo;I wonder to
+      whom I could telephone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella appeared, and came and knelt down by the bishop's chair. &ldquo;I
+      never ought to have let this happen,&rdquo; she said, taking his wrists in her
+      hands. &ldquo;You are in a fever, dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seemed entirely natural to say what I did,&rdquo; the bishop declared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella looked up at Bliss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A doctor has been sent for,&rdquo; said the canon to Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must speak to the doctor,&rdquo; said Lady Ella as if her husband could not
+      hear her. &ldquo;There is something that will make things clearer to the doctor.
+      I must speak to the doctor for a moment before he sees him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Came a gust of pretty sounds and a flash of bright colour that shamed the
+      rich vestments at hand. Over the shoulder of the rector and quite at the
+      back, appeared Lady Sunderbund resolutely invading the vestry. The rector
+      intercepted her, stood broad with extended arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must come in and speak to him. If it is only fo' a moment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop looked up and saw Lady Ella's expression. Lady Ella was sitting
+      up very stiffly, listening but not looking round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A vague horror and a passionate desire to prevent the entry of Lady
+      Sunderbund at any cost, seized upon the bishop. She would, he felt, be the
+      last overwhelming complication. He descended to a base subterfuge. He lay
+      back in his chair slowly as though he unfolded himself, he covered his
+      eyes with his hand and then groaned aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave me alone!&rdquo; he cried in a voice of agony. &ldquo;Leave me alone! I can see
+      no one.... I can&mdash;no more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a momentous silence, and then the tumult of Lady Sunderbund
+      receded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE EIGHTH - THE NEW WORLD
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      THAT night the bishop had a temperature of a hundred and a half. The
+      doctor pronounced him to be in a state of intense mental excitement,
+      aggravated by some drug. He was a doctor modern and clear-minded enough to
+      admit that he could not identify the drug. He overruled, every one
+      overruled, the bishop's declaration that he had done with the church, that
+      he could never mock God with his episcopal ministrations again, that he
+      must proceed at once with his resignation. &ldquo;Don't think of these things,&rdquo;
+       said the doctor. &ldquo;Banish them from your mind until your temperature is
+      down to ninety-eight. Then after a rest you may go into them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella insisted upon his keeping his room. It was with difficulty that
+      he got her to admit Whippham, and Whippham was exasperatingly in order.
+      &ldquo;You need not trouble about anything now, my lord,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Everything
+      will keep until you are ready to attend to it. It's well we're through
+      with Easter. Bishop Buncombe of Eastern Blowdesia was coming here anyhow.
+      And there is Canon Bliss. There's only two ordination candidates because
+      of the war. We'll get on swimmingly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop thought he would like to talk to those two ordination
+      candidates, but they prevailed upon him not to do so. He lay for the best
+      part of one night confiding remarkable things to two imaginary ordination
+      candidates.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He developed a marked liking for Eleanor's company. She was home again now
+      after a visit to some friends. It was decided that the best thing to do
+      with him would be to send him away in her charge. A journey abroad was
+      impossible. France would remind him too dreadfully of the war. His own
+      mind turned suddenly to the sweet air of Hunstanton. He had gone there at
+      times to read, in the old Cambridge days. &ldquo;It is a terribly ugly place,&rdquo;
+       he said, &ldquo;but it is wine in the veins.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella was doubtful about Zeppelins. Thrice they had been right over
+      Hunstanton already. They came in by the easy landmark of the Wash.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will interest him,&rdquo; said Eleanor, who knew her father better.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One warm and still and sunny afternoon the bishop found himself looking
+      out upon the waters of the Wash. He sat where the highest pebble layers of
+      the beach reached up to a little cliff of sandy earth perhaps a foot high,
+      and he looked upon sands and sea and sky and saw that they were beautiful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a little black-gaitered object in a scene of the most exquisite and
+      delicate colour. Right and left of him stretched the low grey salted
+      shore, pale banks of marly earth surmounted by green-grey wiry grass that
+      held and was half buried in fine blown sand. Above, the heavens made a
+      complete hemisphere of blue in which a series of remote cumulus clouds
+      floated and dissolved. Before him spread the long levels of the sands, and
+      far away at its utmost ebb was the sea. Eleanor had gone to explore the
+      black ribs of a wrecked fishing-boat that lay at the edge of a shallow
+      lagoon. She was a little pink-footed figure, very bright and apparently
+      transparent. She had reverted for a time to shameless childishness; she
+      had hidden her stockings among the reeds of the bank, and she was running
+      to and fro, from star-fish to razor shell and from cockle to weed. The
+      shingle was pale drab and purple close at hand, but to the westward,
+      towards Hunstanton, the sands became brown and purple, and were presently
+      broken up into endless skerries of low flat weed-covered boulders and
+      little intensely blue pools. The sea was a band of sapphire that became
+      silver to the west; it met the silver shining sands in one delicate
+      breathing edge of intensely white foam. Remote to the west, very small and
+      black and clear against the afternoon sky, was a cart, and about it was a
+      score or so of mussel-gatherers. A little nearer, on an apparently empty
+      stretch of shining wet sand, a multitude of gulls was mysteriously busy.
+      These two groups of activities and Eleanor's flitting translucent
+      movements did but set off and emphasize the immense and soothing
+      tranquillity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a long time the bishop sat passively receptive to this healing beauty.
+      Then a little flow of thought began and gathered in his mind. He had come
+      out to think over two letters that he had brought with him. He drew these
+      now rather reluctantly from his pocket, and after a long pause over the
+      envelopes began to read them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He reread Likeman's letter first.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Likeman could not forgive him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Scrope,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;your explanation explains nothing. This
+      sensational declaration of infidelity to our mother church, made under the
+      most damning and distressing circumstances in the presence of young and
+      tender minds entrusted to your ministrations, and in defiance of the
+      honourable engagements implied in the confirmation service, confirms my
+      worst apprehensions of the weaknesses of your character. I have always
+      felt the touch of theatricality in your temperament, the peculiar craving
+      to be pseudo-deeper, pseudo-simpler than us all, the need of personal
+      excitement. I know that you were never quite contented to believe in God
+      at second-hand. You wanted to be taken notice of&mdash;personally. Except
+      for some few hints to you, I have never breathed a word of these doubts to
+      any human being; I have always hoped that the ripening that comes with
+      years and experience would give you an increasing strength against the
+      dangers of emotionalism and against your strong, deep, quiet sense of your
+      exceptional personal importance....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop read thus far, and then sat reflecting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was it just?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had many weaknesses, but had he this egotism? No; that wasn't the
+      justice of the case. The old man, bitterly disappointed, was endeavouring
+      to wound. Scrope asked himself whether he was to blame for that
+      disappointment. That was a more difficult question....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He dismissed the charge at last, crumpled up the letter in his hand, and
+      after a moment's hesitation flung it away.... But he remained acutely
+      sorry, not so much for himself as for the revelation of Likeman this
+      letter made. He had had a great affection for Likeman and suddenly it was
+      turned into a wound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second letter was from Lady Sunderbund, and it was an altogether more
+      remarkable document. Lady Sunderbund wrote on a notepaper that was
+      evidently the result of a perverse research, but she wrote a letter far
+      more coherent than her speech, and without that curious falling away of
+      the r's that flavoured even her gravest observations with an unjust faint
+      aroma of absurdity. She wrote with a thin pen in a rounded boyish
+      handwriting. She italicized with slashes of the pen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He held this letter in both hands between his knees, and considered it now
+      with an expression that brought his eyebrows forward until they almost
+      met, and that tucked in the corners of his mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Bishop,&rdquo; it began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I keep thinking and thinking and thinking of that wonderful service, of
+      the wonderful, wonderful things you said, and the wonderful choice you
+      made of the moment to say them&mdash;when all those young lives were
+      coming to the great serious thing in life. It was most beautifully done.
+      At any rate, dear Bishop and Teacher, it was most beautifully begun. And
+      now we all stand to you like creditors because you have given us so much
+      that you owe us ever so much more. You have started us and you have to go
+      on with us. You have broken the shell of the old church, and here we are
+      running about with nowhere to go. You have to make the shelter of a new
+      church now for us, purged of errors, looking straight to God. The King of
+      Mankind!&mdash;what a wonderful, wonderful phrase that is. It says
+      everything. Tell us more of him and more. Count me first&mdash;not
+      foremost, but just the little one that runs in first&mdash;among your
+      disciples. They say you are resigning your position in the church. Of
+      course that must be true. You are coming out of it&mdash;what did you call
+      it?&mdash;coming out of the cracked old vessel from which you have poured
+      the living waters. I called on Lady Ella yesterday. She did not tell me
+      very much; I think she is a very reserved as well as a very dignified
+      woman, but she said that you intended to go to London. In London then I
+      suppose you will set up the first altar to the Divine King. I want to
+      help.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear Bishop and Teacher, I want to help tremendously&mdash;with all my
+      heart and all my soul. I want to be let do things for you.&rdquo; (The &ldquo;you&rdquo; was
+      erased by three or four rapid slashes, and &ldquo;our King&rdquo; substituted.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to be privileged to help build that First Church of the World
+      Unified under God. It is a dreadful thing to says but, you see, I am very
+      rich; this dreadful war has made me ever so much richer&mdash;steel and
+      shipping and things&mdash;it is my trustees have done it. I am ashamed to
+      be so rich. I want to give. I want to give and help this great beginning
+      of yours. I want you to let me help on the temporal side, to make it easy
+      for you to stand forth and deliver your message, amidst suitable
+      surroundings and without any horrid worries on account of the sacrifices
+      you have made. Please do not turn my offering aside. I have never wanted
+      anything so much in all my life as I want to make this gift. Unless I can
+      make it I feel that for me there is no salvation! I shall stick with my
+      loads and loads of stocks and shares and horrid possessions outside the
+      Needle's Eye. But if I could build a temple for God, and just live
+      somewhere near it so as to be the poor woman who sweeps out the chapels,
+      and die perhaps and be buried under its floor! Don't smile at me. I mean
+      every word of it. Years ago I thought of such a thing. After I had visited
+      the Certosa di Pavia&mdash;do you know it? So beautiful, and those two
+      still alabaster figures&mdash;recumbent. But until now I could never see
+      my way to any such service. Now I do. I am all afire to do it. Help me!
+      Tell me! Let me stand behind you and make your mission possible. I feel I
+      have come to the most wonderful phase in my life. I feel my call has
+      come....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have written this letter over three times, and torn each of them up. I
+      do so want to say all this, and it is so desperately hard to say. I am
+      full of fears that you despise me. I know there is a sort of high colour
+      about me. My passion for brightness. I am absurd. But inside of me is a
+      soul, a real, living, breathing soul. Crying out to you: 'Oh, let me help!
+      Let me help!' I will do anything, I will endure anything if only I can
+      keep hold of the vision splendid you gave me in the cathedral. I see it
+      now day and night, the dream of the place I can make for you&mdash;and you
+      preaching! My fingers itch to begin. The day before yesterday I said to
+      myself, 'I am quite unworthy, I am a worldly woman, a rich, smart,
+      decorated woman. He will never accept me as I am.' I took off all my
+      jewels, every one, I looked through all my clothes, and at last I decided
+      I would have made for me a very simple straight grey dress, just simple
+      and straight and grey. Perhaps you will think that too is absurd of me,
+      too self-conscious. I would not tell of it to you if I did not want you to
+      understand how alive I am to my utter impossibilities, how resolved I am
+      to do anything so that I may be able to serve. But never mind about silly
+      me; let me tell you how I see the new church.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you ought to have some place near the centre of London; not too
+      west, for you might easily become fashionable, not too east because you
+      might easily be swallowed up in merely philanthropic work, but somewhere
+      between the two. There must be vacant sites still to be got round about
+      Kingsway. And there we must set up your tabernacle, a very plain, very
+      simple, very beautifully proportioned building in which you can give your
+      message. I know a young man, just the very young man to do something of
+      the sort, something quite new, quite modern, and yet solemn and serious.
+      Lady Ella seemed to think you wanted to live somewhere in the north-west
+      of London&mdash;but she would tell me very little. I seem to see you not
+      there at all, not in anything between west-end and suburb, but yourself as
+      central as your mind, in a kind of clergy house that will be part of the
+      building. That is how it is in my dream anyhow. All that though can be
+      settled afterwards. My imagination and my desire is running away with me.
+      It is no time yet for premature plans. Not that I am not planning day and
+      night. This letter is simply to offer. I just want to offer. Here I am and
+      all my worldly goods. Take me, I pray you. And not only pray you. Take me,
+      I demand of you, in the name of God our king. I have a right to be used.
+      And you have no right to refuse me. You have to go on with your message,
+      and it is your duty to take me&mdash;just as you are obliged to step on
+      any steppingstone that lies on your way to do God service.... And so I am
+      waiting. I shall be waiting&mdash;on thorns. I know you will take your
+      time and think. But do not take too much time. Think of me waiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your servant, your most humble helper in God (your God),
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;AGATHA SUNDERBUND.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then scrawled along the margin of the last sheet:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If, when you know&mdash;a telegram. Even if you cannot say so much as
+      'Agreed,' still such a word as 'Favourable.' I just hang over the Void
+      until I hear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;AGATHA S.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A letter demanding enormous deliberation. She argued closely in spite of
+      her italics. It had never dawned upon the bishop before how light is the
+      servitude of the disciple in comparison with the servitude of the master.
+      In many ways this proposal repelled and troubled him, in many ways it
+      attracted him. And the argument of his clear obligation to accept her
+      co-operation gripped him; it was a good argument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And besides it worked in very conveniently with certain other difficulties
+      that perplexed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop became aware that Eleanor was returning to him across the
+      sands. She had made an end to her paddling, she had put on her shoes and
+      stockings and become once more the grave and responsible young woman who
+      had been taking care of him since his flight from Princhester. He replaced
+      the two letters in his pocket, and sat ready to smile as she drew near; he
+      admired her open brow, the toss of her hair, and the poise of her head
+      upon her neck. It was good to note that her hard reading at Cambridge
+      hadn't bent her shoulders in the least....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, old Dad!&rdquo; she said as she drew near. &ldquo;You've got back a colour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got back everything. It's time I returned to Princhester.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not in this weather. Not for a day or so.&rdquo; She flung herself at his feet.
+      &ldquo;Consider your overworked little daughter. Oh,how good this is!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the bishop in a grave tone that made her look up into his face.
+      &ldquo;I must go hack.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He met her clear gaze. &ldquo;What do you think of all this business, Eleanor?&rdquo;
+       he asked abruptly. &ldquo;Do you think I had a sort of fit in the cathedral?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He winced as he asked the question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Daddy,&rdquo; she said, after a little pause; &ldquo;the things you said and did that
+      afternoon were the noblest you ever did in your life. I wish I had been
+      there. It must have been splendid to be there. I've not told you before&mdash;I've
+      been dying to.... I'd promised not to say a word&mdash;not to remind you.
+      I promised the doctor. But now you ask me, now you are well again, I can
+      tell you. Kitty Kingdom has told me all about it, how it felt. It was like
+      light and order coming into a hopeless dark muddle. What you said was like
+      what we have all been trying to think&mdash;I mean all of us young people.
+      Suddenly it was all clear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped short. She was breathless with the excitement of her
+      confession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her father too remained silent for a little while. He was reminded of his
+      weakness; he was, he perceived, still a little hysterical. He felt that he
+      might weep at her youthful enthusiasm if he did not restrain himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm glad,&rdquo; he said, and patted her shoulder. &ldquo;I'm glad, Norah.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked away from him out across the lank brown sands and water pools
+      to the sea. &ldquo;It was what we have all been feeling our way towards, the
+      absolute simplification of religion, the absolute simplification of
+      politics and social duty; just God, just God the King.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But should I have said that&mdash;in the cathedral?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt no scruples. &ldquo;You had to,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But now think what it means,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I must leave the church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As a man strips off his coat for a fight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That doesn't dismay you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head, and smiled confidently to sea and sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm glad if you're with me,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Sometimes&mdash;I think&mdash;I'm
+      not a very self-reliant man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll have all the world with you,&rdquo; she was convinced, &ldquo;in a little
+      time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps rather a longer time than you think, Norah. In the meantime&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned to him once more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the meantime there are a great many things to consider. Young people,
+      they say, never think of the transport that is needed to win a battle. I
+      have it in my mind that I should leave the church. But I can't just walk
+      out into the marketplace and begin preaching there. I see the family
+      furniture being carried out of the palace and put into vans. It has to go
+      somewhere....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you will go to London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Possibly. In fact certainly. I have a plan. Or at least an
+      opportunity.... But that isn't what I have most in mind. These things are
+      not done without emotion and a considerable strain upon one's personal
+      relationships. I do not think this&mdash;I do not think your mother sees
+      things as we do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will,&rdquo; said young enthusiasm, &ldquo;when she understands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish she did. But I have been unlucky in the circumstances of my
+      explanations to her. And of course you understand all this means risks&mdash;poverty
+      perhaps&mdash;going without things&mdash;travel, opportunity, nice
+      possessions&mdash;for all of us. A loss of position too. All this sort of
+      thing,&rdquo; he stuck out a gaitered calf and smiled, &ldquo;will have to go. People,
+      some of them, may be disasagreeable to us....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After all, Daddy,&rdquo; she said, smiling, &ldquo;it isn't so bad as the cross and
+      the lions and burning pitch. And you have the Truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do believe&mdash;?&rdquo; He left his sentence unfinished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded, her face aglow. &ldquo;We know you have the Truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course in my own mind now it is very clear. I had a kind of
+      illumination....&rdquo; He would have tried to tell her of his vision, and he
+      was too shy. &ldquo;It came to me suddenly that the whole world was in confusion
+      because men followed after a thousand different immediate aims, when
+      really it was quite easy, if only one could be simple it was quite easy,
+      to show that nearly all men could only be fully satisfied and made happy
+      in themselves by one single aim, which was also the aim that would make
+      the whole world one great order, and that aim was to make God King of
+      one's heart and the whole world. I saw that all this world, except for a
+      few base monstrous spirits, was suffering hideous things because of this
+      war, and before the war it was full of folly, waste, social injustice and
+      suspicion for the same reason, because it had not realized the kingship of
+      God. And that is so simple; the essence of God is simplicity. The sin of
+      this war lies with men like myself, men who set up to tell people about
+      God, more than it lies with any other class&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kings?&rdquo; she interjected. &ldquo;Diplomatists? Finance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Those men could only work mischief in the world because the priests
+      and teachers let them. All things human lie at last at the door of the
+      priest and teacher. Who differentiate, who qualify and complicate, who
+      make mean unnecessary elaborations, and so divide mankind. If it were not
+      for the weakness and wickedness of the priests, every one would know and
+      understand God. Every one who was modest enough not to set up for
+      particular knowledge. Men disputed whether God is Finite or Infinite,
+      whether he has a triple or a single aspect. How should they know? All we
+      need to know is the face he turns to us. They impose their horrible creeds
+      and distinctions. None of those things matter. Call him Christ the God or
+      call him simply God, Allah, Heaven; it does not matter. He comes to us, we
+      know, like a Helper and Friend; that is all we want to know. You may
+      speculate further if you like, but it is not religion. They dispute
+      whether he can set aside nature. But that is superstition. He is either
+      master of nature and he knows that it is good, or he is part of nature and
+      must obey. That is an argument for hair-splitting metaphysicians. Either
+      answer means the same for us. It does not matter which way we come to
+      believe that he does not idly set the course of things aside. Obviously he
+      does not set the course of things aside. What he does do for certain is to
+      give us courage and save us from our selfishness and the bitter hell it
+      makes for us. And every one knows too what sort of things we want, and for
+      what end we want to escape from ourselves. We want to do right. And right,
+      if you think clearly, is just truth within and service without, the
+      service of God's kingdom, which is mankind, the service of human needs and
+      the increase of human power and experience. It is all perfectly plain, it
+      is all quite easy for any one to understand, who isn't misled and
+      chattered at and threatened and poisoned by evil priests and teachers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you are going to preach that, Daddy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I can. When I am free&mdash;you know I have still to resign and give
+      up&mdash;I shall make that my message.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so God comes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God comes as men perceive him in his simplicity.... Let men but see God
+      simply, and forthwith God and his kingdom possess the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked out to sea in silence for awhile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she turned to her father. &ldquo;And you think that His Kingdom will come&mdash;perhaps
+      in quite a little time&mdash;perhaps in our lifetimes? And that all these
+      ridiculous or wicked little kings and emperors, and these political
+      parties, and these policies and conspiracies, and this nationalist
+      nonsense and all the patriotism and rowdyism, all the private
+      profit-seeking and every baseness in life, all the things that it is so
+      horrible and disgusting to be young among and powerless among, you think
+      they will fade before him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop pulled his faith together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They will fade before him&mdash;but whether it will take a lifetime or a
+      hundred lifetimes or a thousand lifetimes, my Norah&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled and left his sentence unfinished, and she smiled back at him to
+      show she understood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then he confessed further, because he did not want to seem merely
+      sentimentally hopeful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I was in the cathedral, Norah&mdash;and just before that service, it
+      seemed to me&mdash;it was very real.... It seemed that perhaps the Kingdom
+      of God is nearer than we suppose, that it needs but the faith and courage
+      of a few, and it may be that we may even live to see the dawning of his
+      kingdom, even&mdash;who knows?&mdash;the sunrise. I am so full of faith
+      and hope that I fear to be hopeful with you. But whether it is near or far&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We work for it,&rdquo; said Eleanor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Eleanor thought, eyes downcast for a little while, and then looked up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is so wonderful to talk to you like this, Daddy. In the old days, I
+      didn't dream&mdash;Before I went to Newnham. I misjudged you. I thought
+      Never mind what I thought. It was silly. But now I am so proud of you. And
+      so happy to be back with you, Daddy, and find that your religion is after
+      all just the same religion that I have been wanting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE NINTH - THE THIRD VISION
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (1)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      ONE afternoon in October, four months and more after that previous
+      conversation, the card of Mr. Edward Scrope was brought up to Dr.
+      Brighton-Pomfrey. The name awakened no memories. The doctor descended to
+      discover a man so obviously in unaccustomed plain clothes that he had a
+      momentary disagreeable idea that he was facing a detective. Then he saw
+      that this secular disguise draped the familiar form of his old friend, the
+      former Bishop of Princhester. Scrope was pale and a little untidy; he had
+      already acquired something of the peculiar, slightly faded quality one
+      finds in a don who has gone to Hampstead and fallen amongst advanced
+      thinkers and got mixed up with the Fabian Society. His anxious eyes and
+      faintly propitiatory manner suggested an impending appeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey had the savoir-faire of a successful consultant; he
+      prided himself on being all things to all men; but just for an instant he
+      was at a loss what sort of thing he had to be here. Then he adopted the
+      genial, kindly, but by no means lavishly generous tone advisable in the
+      case of a man who has suffered considerable social deterioration without
+      being very seriously to blame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was a little round-faced man with defective eyesight
+      and an unsuitable nose for the glasses he wore, and he flaunted&mdash;God
+      knows why&mdash;enormous side-whiskers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, balancing the glasses skilfully by throwing back his
+      head, &ldquo;and how are you? And what can I do for you? There's no external
+      evidence of trouble. You're looking lean and a little pale, but thoroughly
+      fit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the late bishop, &ldquo;I'm fairly fit&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only&mdash;?&rdquo; said the doctor, smiling his teeth, with something of the
+      manner of an old bathing woman who tells a child to jump.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I'm run down and&mdash;worried.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'd better sit down,&rdquo; said the great doctor professionally, and looked
+      hard at him. Then he pulled at the arm of a chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ex-bishop sat down, and the doctor placed himself between his patient
+      and the light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This business of resigning my bishopric and so forth has involved very
+      considerable strains,&rdquo; Scrope began. &ldquo;That I think is the essence of the
+      trouble. One cuts so many associations.... I did not realize how much
+      feeling there would be.... Difficulties too of readjusting one's
+      position.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Zactly. Zactly. Zactly,&rdquo; said the doctor, snapping his face and making
+      his glasses vibrate. &ldquo;Run down. Want a tonic or a change?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. In fact&mdash;I want a particular tonic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey made his eyes and mouth round and interrogative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;While you were away last spring&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Had to go,&rdquo; said the doctor, &ldquo;unavoidable. Gas gangrene. Certain
+      enquiries. These young investigators all very well in their way. But we
+      older reputations&mdash;Experience. Maturity of judgment. Can't do without
+      us. Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I came here last spring and saw, an assistant I suppose he was, or
+      a supply,&mdash;do you call them supplies in your profession?&mdash;named,
+      I think&mdash;Let me see&mdash;D&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dale!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor as he uttered this word set his face to the unaccustomed
+      exercise of expressing malignity. His round blue eyes sought to blaze,
+      small cherubic muscles exerted themselves to pucker his brows. His colour
+      became a violent pink. &ldquo;Lunatic!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Dangerous Lunatic! He didn't
+      do anything&mdash;anything bad in your case, did he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was evidently highly charged with grievance in this matter. &ldquo;That man
+      was sent to me from Cambridge with the highest testimonials. The very
+      highest. I had to go at twenty-four hours' notice. Enquiry&mdash;gas
+      gangrene. There was nothing for it but to leave things in his hands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey disavowed responsibility with an open,
+      stumpy-fingered hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He did me no particular harm,&rdquo; said Scrope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are the first he spared,&rdquo; said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did he&mdash;? Was he unskilful?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unskilful is hardly the word.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were his methods peculiar?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little doctor sprang to his feet and began to pace about the room.
+      &ldquo;Peculiar!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It was abominable that they should send him to me.
+      Abominable!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned, with all the round knobs that constituted his face, aglow. His
+      side-whiskers waved apart like wings about to flap. He protruded his face
+      towards his seated patient. &ldquo;I am glad that he has been killed,&rdquo; he said.
+      &ldquo;Glad! There!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His glasses fell off&mdash;shocked beyond measure. He did not heed them.
+      They swung about in front of him as if they sought to escape while he
+      poured out his feelings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fool!&rdquo; he spluttered with demonstrative gestures. &ldquo;Dangerous fool! His
+      one idea&mdash;to upset everybody. Drugs, Sir! The most terrible drugs! I
+      come back. Find ladies. High social position. Morphine-maniacs. Others.
+      Reckless use of the most dangerous expedients.... Cocaine not in it.
+      Stimulants&mdash;violent stimulants. In the highest quarters. Terrible.
+      Exalted persons. Royalty! Anxious to be given war work and become
+      anonymous.... Horrible! He's been a terrible influence. One idea&mdash;to
+      disturb soul and body. Minds unhinged. Personal relations deranged.
+      Shattered the practice of years. The harm he has done! The harm!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked as though he was trying to burst&mdash;as a final expression of
+      wrath. He failed. His hands felt trembling to recover his pince-nez. Then
+      from his tail pocket he produced a large silk handkerchief and wiped the
+      glasses. Replaced them. Wriggled his head in his collar, running his
+      fingers round his neck. Patted his tie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excuse this outbreak!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But Dr. Dale has inflicted injuries!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope got up, walked slowly to the window, clasping his hands behind his
+      back, and turned. His manner still retained much of his episcopal dignity.
+      &ldquo;I am sorry. But still you can no doubt tell from your books what it was
+      he gave me. It was a tonic that had a very great effect on me. And I need
+      it badly now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was quietly malignant. &ldquo;He kept no diary at all,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;No diary at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If he did,&rdquo; said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey, holding up a flat hand and wagging
+      it from side to side, &ldquo;I wouldn't follow his treatment.&rdquo; He intensified
+      with the hand going faster. &ldquo;I wouldn't follow his treatment. Not under
+      any circumstances.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naturally,&rdquo; said Scrope, &ldquo;if the results are what you say. But in my case
+      it wasn't a treatment. I was sleepless, confused in my mind, wretched and
+      demoralized; I came here, and he just produced the stuff&mdash;It clears
+      the head, it clears the mind. One seems to get away from the cloud of
+      things, to get through to essentials and fundamentals. It straightened me
+      out.... You must know such a stuff. Just now, confronted with all sorts of
+      problems arising out of my resignation, I want that tonic effect again. I
+      must have it. I have matters to decide&mdash;and I can't decide. I find
+      myself uncertain, changeable from hour to hour. I don't ask you to take up
+      anything of this man Dale's. This is a new occasion. But I want that
+      drug.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the beginning of this speech Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's hands had fallen to
+      his hips. As Scrope went on the doctor's pose had stiffened. His head had
+      gone a little on one side; he had begun to play with his glasses. At the
+      end he gave vent to one or two short coughs, and then pointed his words
+      with his glasses held out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;tell me.&rdquo; (Cough.) &ldquo;Had this drug that cleared your
+      head&mdash;anything to do with your resignation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he put on his glasses disconcertingly, and threw his head back to
+      watch the reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It did help to clear up the situation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey in a tone that defined his own
+      position with remorseless clearness. &ldquo;Exactly.&rdquo; And he held up a flat,
+      arresting hand. .
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Sir,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;How can you expect me to help you to a drug so
+      disastrous?&mdash;even if I could tell you what it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it was not disastrous to me,&rdquo; said Scrope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your extraordinary resignation&mdash;your still more extraordinary way of
+      proclaiming it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think those were disasters.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But my dear Sir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't want to discuss theology with me, I know. So let me tell you
+      simply that from my point of view the illumination that came to me&mdash;this
+      drug of Dr. Dale's helping&mdash;has been the great release of my life. It
+      crystallized my mind. It swept aside the confusing commonplace things
+      about me. Just for a time I saw truth clearly.... I want to do so again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a crisis in my affairs&mdash;never mind what. But I cannot see
+      my way clear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was meditating now with his eyes on his carpet and
+      the corners of his mouth tucked in. He was swinging his glasses
+      pendulum-wise. &ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; he said, looking sideways at Scrope, &ldquo;what were
+      the effects of this drug? It may have been anything. How did it give you
+      this&mdash;this vision of the truth&mdash;that led to your resignation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope felt a sudden shyness. But he wanted Dale's drug again so badly
+      that he obliged himself to describe his previous experiences to the best
+      of his ability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was,&rdquo; he said in a matter-of-fact tone, &ldquo;a golden, transparent liquid.
+      Very golden, like a warm-tinted Chablis. When water was added it became
+      streaked and opalescent, with a kind of living quiver in it. I held it up
+      to the light.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes? And when you took it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I felt suddenly clearer. My mind&mdash;I had a kind of exaltation and
+      assurance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your mind,&rdquo; Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey assisted, &ldquo;began to go twenty-nine to
+      the dozen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It felt stronger and clearer,&rdquo; said Scrope, sticking to his quest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And did things look as usual?&rdquo; asked the doctor, protruding his knobby
+      little face like a clenched fist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Scrope and regarded him. How much was it possible to tell a man
+      of this type?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They differed?&rdquo; said the doctor, relaxing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.... Well, to be plain.... I had an immediate sense of God. I saw the
+      world&mdash;as if it were a transparent curtain, and then God became&mdash;evident....
+      Is it possible for that to determine the drug?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God became&mdash;evident,&rdquo; the doctor said with some distaste, and shook
+      his head slowly. Then in a sudden sharp cross-examining tone: &ldquo;You mean
+      you had a vision? Actually saw 'um?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was in the form of a vision.&rdquo; Scrope was now mentally very
+      uncomfortable indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor's lips repeated these words noiselessly, with an effect of
+      contempt. &ldquo;He must have given you something&mdash;It's a little like
+      morphia. But golden&mdash;opalescent? And it was this vision made you
+      astonish us all with your resignation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was part of a larger process,&rdquo; said Scrope patiently. &ldquo;I had been
+      drifting into a complete repudiation of the Anglican positions long before
+      that. All that this drug did was to make clear what was already in my
+      mind. And give it value. Act as a developer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor suddenly gave way to a botryoidal hilarity. &ldquo;To think that one
+      should be consulted about visions of God&mdash;in Mount Street!&rdquo; he said.
+      &ldquo;And you know, you know you half want to believe that vision was real. You
+      know you do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So far Scrope had been resisting his realization of failure. Now he gave
+      way to an exasperation that made him reckless of Brighton-Pomfrey's
+      opinion. &ldquo;I do think,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that that drug did in some way make God
+      real to me. I think I saw God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey shook his head in a way that made Scrope want to hit
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I saw God,&rdquo; he repeated more firmly. &ldquo;I had a sudden realization
+      of how great he was and how great life was, and how timid and mean and
+      sordid were all our genteel, professional lives. I was seized upon, for a
+      time I was altogether possessed by a passion to serve him fitly and
+      recklessly, to make an end to compromises with comfort and self-love and
+      secondary things. And I want to hold to that. I want to get back to that.
+      I am given to lassitudes. I relax. I am by temperament an easy-going man.
+      I want to buck myself up, I want to get on with my larger purposes, and I
+      find myself tired, muddled, entangled.... The drug was a good thing. For
+      me it was a good thing. I want its help again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know no more than you do what it was.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are there no other drugs that you do know, that have a kindred effect? If
+      for example I tried morphia in some form?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd get visions. They wouldn't be divine visions. If you took small
+      quantities very discreetly you might get a temporary quickening. But the
+      swift result of all repeated drug-taking is, I can assure you, moral decay&mdash;rapid
+      moral decay. To touch drugs habitually is to become hopelessly unpunctual,
+      untruthful, callously selfish and insincere. I am talking mere textbook,
+      mere everyday common-places, to you when I tell you that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had an idea. I had a hope....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've a stiff enough fight before you,&rdquo; said the doctor, &ldquo;without such a
+      handicap as that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You won't help me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor walked up and down his hearthrug, and then delivered himself
+      with an extended hand and waggling fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wouldn't if I could. For your good I wouldn't. And even if I would I
+      couldn't, for I don't know the drug. One of his infernal brews, no doubt.
+      Something&mdash;accidental. It's lost&mdash;for good&mdash;for your good,
+      anyhow....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (2)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope halted outside the stucco portals of the doctor's house. He
+      hesitated whether he should turn to the east or the west.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That door closes,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;There's no getting back that way.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood for a time on the kerb. He turned at last towards Park Lane and
+      Hyde Park. He walked along thoughtfully, inattentively steering a course
+      for his new home in Pembury Road, Notting Hill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the outset of this new phase in Scrope's life that had followed the
+      crisis of the confirmation service, everything had seemed very clear
+      before him. He believed firmly that he had been shown God, that he had
+      himself stood in the presence of God, and that there had been a plain call
+      to him to proclaim God to the world. He had realized God, and it was the
+      task of every one who had realized God to help all mankind to the same
+      realization. The proposal of Lady Sunderbund had fallen in with that idea.
+      He had been steeling himself to a prospect of struggle and dire poverty,
+      but her prompt loyalty had come as an immense relief to his anxiety for
+      his wife and family. When he had talked to Eleanor upon the beach at
+      Hunstanton it had seemed to him that his course was manifest, perhaps a
+      little severe but by no means impossible. They had sat together in the
+      sunshine, exalted by a sense of fine adventure and confident of success,
+      they had looked out upon the future, upon the great near future in which
+      the idea of God was to inspire and reconstruct the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only very slowly that this pristine clearness became clouded and
+      confused. It had not been so easy as Eleanor had supposed to win over the
+      sympathy of Lady Ella with his resignation. Indeed it had not been won
+      over. She had become a stern and chilling companion, mute now upon the
+      issue of his resignation, but manifestly resentful. He was secretly
+      disappointed and disconcerted by her tone. And the same hesitation of the
+      mind, instinctive rather than reasoned, that had prevented a frank
+      explanation of his earlier doubts to her, now restrained him from telling
+      her naturally and at once of the part that Lady Sunderbund was to play in
+      his future ministry. In his own mind he felt assured about that part, but
+      in order to excuse his delay in being frank with his wife, he told himself
+      that he was not as yet definitely committed to Lady Sunderbund's project.
+      And in accordance with that idea he set up housekeeping in London upon a
+      scale that implied a very complete cessation of income. &ldquo;As yet,&rdquo; he told
+      Lady Ella, &ldquo;we do not know where we stand. For a time we must not so much
+      house ourselves as camp. We must take some quite small and modest house in
+      some less expensive district. If possible I would like to take it for a
+      year, until we know better how things are with us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He reviewed a choice of London districts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella said her bitterest thing. &ldquo;Does it matter where we hide our
+      heads?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That wrung him to: &ldquo;We are not hiding our heads.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She repented at once. &ldquo;I am sorry, Ted,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It slipped from
+      me.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He called it camping, but the house they had found in Pembury Road,
+      Notting Hill, was more darkened and less airy than any camp. Neither he
+      nor his wife had ever had any experience of middle-class house-hunting or
+      middle-class housekeeping before, and they spent three of the most
+      desolating days of their lives in looking for this cheap and modest
+      shelter for their household possessions. Hitherto life had moved them from
+      one established and comfortable home to another; their worst affliction
+      had been the modern decorations of the Palace at Princhester, and it was
+      altogether a revelation to them to visit house after house, ill-lit,
+      ill-planned, with dingy paint and peeling wallpaper, kitchens for the most
+      part underground, and either without bathrooms or with built-out bathrooms
+      that were manifestly grudging afterthoughts, such as harbour the
+      respectable middle classes of London. The house agents perceived
+      intimations of helplessness in their manner, adopted a &ldquo;rushing&rdquo; method
+      with them strange to people who had hitherto lived in a glowing halo of
+      episcopal dignity. &ldquo;Take it or leave it,&rdquo; was the note of those gentlemen;
+      &ldquo;there are always people ready for houses.&rdquo; The line that property in land
+      and houses takes in England, the ex-bishop realized, is always to hold up
+      and look scornful. The position of the land-owning, house-owning class in
+      a crowded country like England is ultra-regal. It is under no obligation
+      to be of use, and people are obliged to get down to the land somewhere.
+      They cannot conduct business and rear families in the air. England's
+      necessity is the landlord's opportunity....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope began to generalize about this, and develop a new and sincerer
+      streak of socialism in his ideas. &ldquo;The church has been very remiss,&rdquo; he
+      said, as he and Lady Ella stared at the basement &ldquo;breakfast room&rdquo; of their
+      twenty-seventh dismal possibility. &ldquo;It should have insisted far more than
+      it has done upon the landlord's responsibility. No one should tolerate the
+      offer of such a house as this&mdash;at such a rent&mdash;to decent people.
+      It is unrighteous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the house agent's he asked in a cold, intelligent ruling-class voice,
+      the name of the offending landlord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all the property of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners that side of
+      the railway,&rdquo; said the agent, picking his teeth with a pin. &ldquo;Lazy lot.
+      Dreadfully hard to get 'em to do anything. Own some of the worst
+      properties in London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella saw things differently again. &ldquo;If you had stayed in the church,&rdquo;
+       she said afterwards, &ldquo;you might have helped to alter such things as that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the time he had no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; he said presently as they went back in the tube to their modest
+      Bloomsbury hotel, &ldquo;if I had stayed in the church I should never have
+      realized things like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (4)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it does no justice to Lady Ella to record these two unavoidable
+      expressions of regret without telling also of the rallying courage with
+      which she presently took over the task of resettling herself and her
+      stricken family. Her husband's change of opinion had fallen upon her out
+      of a clear sky, without any premonition, in one tremendous day. In one day
+      there had come clamouring upon her, with an effect of revelation after
+      revelation, the ideas of drugs, of heresy and blasphemy, of an alien
+      feminine influence, of the entire moral and material breakdown of the man
+      who had been the centre of her life. Never was the whole world of a woman
+      so swiftly and comprehensively smashed. All the previous troubles of her
+      life seemed infinitesimal in comparison with any single item in this
+      dismaying debacle. She tried to consolidate it in the idea that he was
+      ill, &ldquo;disordered.&rdquo; She assured herself that he would return from
+      Hunstanton restored to health and orthodoxy, with all his threatenings of
+      a resignation recalled; the man she had loved and trusted to succeed in
+      the world and to do right always according to her ideas. It was only with
+      extreme reluctance that she faced the fact that with the fumes of the drug
+      dispelled and all signs of nervous exhaustion gone, he still pressed
+      quietly but resolutely toward a severance from the church. She tried to
+      argue with him and she found she could not argue. The church was a crystal
+      sphere in which her life was wholly contained, her mind could not go
+      outside it even to consider a dissentient proposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While he was at Hunstanton, every day she had prayed for an hour, some
+      days she had prayed for several hours, in the cathedral, kneeling upon a
+      harsh hassock that hurt her knees. Even in her prayers she could not argue
+      nor vary. She prayed over and over again many hundreds of times: &ldquo;Bring
+      him back, dear Lord. Bring him back again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the past he had always been a very kind and friendly mate to her, but
+      sometimes he had been irritable about small things, especially during his
+      seasons of insomnia; now he came back changed, a much graver man, rather
+      older in his manner, carefully attentive to her, kinder and more watchful,
+      at times astonishingly apologetic, but rigidly set upon his purpose of
+      leaving the church. &ldquo;I know you do not think with me in this,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I
+      have to pray you to be patient with me. I have struggled with my
+      conscience.... For a time it means hardship, I know. Poverty. But if you
+      will trust me I think I shall be able to pull through. There are ways of
+      doing my work. Perhaps we shall not have to undergo this cramping in this
+      house for very long....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not the poverty I fear,&rdquo; said Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she did face the worldly situation, if a little sadly, at any rate
+      with the courage of practical energy. It was she who stood in one ungainly
+      house after another and schemed how to make discomforts tolerable, while
+      Scrope raged unhelpfully at landlordism and the responsibility of the
+      church for economic disorder. It was she who at last took decisions into
+      her hands when he was too jaded to do anything but generalize weakly, and
+      settled upon the house in Pembury Road which became their London home. She
+      got him to visit Hunstanton again for half a week while she and Miriam,
+      who was the practical genius of the family, moved in and made the new home
+      presentable. At the best it was barely presentable. There were many plain
+      hardships. The girls had to share one of the chief bedrooms in common
+      instead of their jolly little individual dens at Princhester.... One
+      little room was all that could be squeezed out as a study for &ldquo;father&rdquo;; it
+      was not really a separate room, it was merely cut off by closed folding
+      doors from the dining-room, folding doors that slowly transmitted the
+      dinner flavours to a sensitive worker, and its window looked out upon a
+      blackened and uneventful yard and the skylights of a populous,
+      conversational, and high-spirited millinery establishment that had been
+      built over the corresponding garden of the house in Restharrow Street.
+      Lady Ella had this room lined with open shelves, and Clementina (in the
+      absence of Eleanor at Newuham) arranged the pick of her father's books. It
+      is to be noted as a fact of psychological interest that this cramped,
+      ill-lit little room distressed Lady Ella more than any other of the
+      discomforts of their new quarters. The bishop's writing-desk filled a
+      whole side of it. Parsimony ruled her mind, but she could not resist the
+      impulse to get him at least a seemly reading-lamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came back from Hunstanton full of ideas for work in London. He was, he
+      thought, going to &ldquo;write something&rdquo; about his views. He was very grateful
+      and much surprised at what she had done to that forbidding house, and full
+      of hints and intimations that it would not be long before they moved to
+      something roomier. She was disposed to seek some sort of salaried
+      employment for Clementina and Miriam at least, but he would not hear of
+      that. &ldquo;They must go on and get educated,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;if I have to give up
+      smoking to do it. Perhaps I may manage even without that.&rdquo; Eleanor, it
+      seemed, had a good prospect of a scholarship at the London School of
+      Economics that would practically keep her. There would be no Cambridge for
+      Clementina, but London University might still be possible with a little
+      pinching, and the move to London had really improved the prospects of a
+      good musical training for Miriam. Phoebe and Daphne, Lady Ella believed,
+      might get in on special terms at the Notting Hill High School.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope found it difficult to guess at what was going on in the heads of
+      his younger daughters. None displayed such sympathy as Eleanor had
+      confessed. He had a feeling that his wife had schooled them to say nothing
+      about the change in their fortunes to him. But they quarrelled a good
+      deal, he could hear, about the use of the one bathroom&mdash;there was
+      never enough hot water after the second bath. And Miriam did not seem to
+      enjoy playing the new upright piano in the drawing-room as much as she had
+      done the Princhester grand it replaced. Though she was always willing to
+      play that thing he liked; he knew now that it was the Adagio of Of. 111;
+      whenever he asked for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      London servants, Lady Ella found, were now much more difficult to get than
+      they had been in the Holy Innocents' days in St. John's Wood. And more
+      difficult to manage when they were got. The households of the more
+      prosperous clergy are much sought after by domestics of a serious and
+      excellent type; an unfrocked clergyman's household is by no means so
+      attractive. The first comers were young women of unfortunate dispositions;
+      the first cook was reluctant and insolent, she went before her month was
+      up; the second careless; she made burnt potatoes and cindered chops,
+      underboiled and overboiled eggs; a &ldquo;dropped&rdquo; look about everything, harsh
+      coffee and bitter tea seemed to be a natural aspect of the state of being
+      no longer a bishop. He would often after a struggle with his nerves in the
+      bedroom come humming cheerfully to breakfast, to find that Phoebe, who was
+      a delicate eater, had pushed her plate away scarcely touched, while Lady
+      Ella sat at the end of the table in a state of dangerous calm, framing
+      comments for delivering downstairs that would be sure to sting and yet
+      leave no opening for repartee, and trying at the same time to believe that
+      a third cook, if the chances were risked again, would certainly be &ldquo;all
+      right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The drawing-room was papered with a morose wallpaper that the landlord, in
+      view of the fact that Scrope in his optimism would only take the house on
+      a yearly agreement, had refused to replace; it was a design of very dark
+      green leaves and grey gothic arches; and the apartment was lit by a
+      chandelier, which spilt a pool of light in the centre of the room and
+      splashed useless weak patches elsewhere. Lady Ella had to interfere to
+      prevent the monopolization of this centre by Phoebe and Daphne for their
+      home work. This light trouble was difficult to arrange; the plain truth
+      was that there was not enough illumination to go round. In the Princhester
+      drawing-room there had been a number of obliging little electric pushes.
+      The size of the dining-room, now that the study was cut off from it,
+      forbade hospitality. As it was, with only the family at home, the
+      housemaid made it a grievance that she could scarcely squeeze by on the
+      sideboard side to wait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The house vibrated to the trains in the adjacent underground railway.
+      There was a lady next door but one who was very pluckily training a
+      contralto voice that most people would have gladly thrown away. At the end
+      of Restharrow Street was a garage, and a yard where chauffeurs were
+      accustomed to &ldquo;tune up&rdquo; their engines. All these facts were persistently
+      audible to any one sitting down in the little back study to think out this
+      project of &ldquo;writing something,&rdquo; about a change in the government of the
+      whole world. Petty inconveniences no doubt all these inconveniences were,
+      but they distressed a rather oversensitive mind which was also acutely
+      aware that even upon this scale living would cost certainly two hundred
+      and fifty pounds if not more in excess of the little private income
+      available.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These domestic details, irrelevant as they may seem in a spiritual
+      history, need to be given because they added an intimate keenness to
+      Scrope's readiness for this private chapel enterprise that he was
+      discussing with Lady Sunderbund. Along that line and along that line
+      alone, he saw the way of escape from the great sea of London dinginess
+      that threatened to submerge his family. And it was also, he felt, the line
+      of his duty; it was his &ldquo;call.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At least that was how he felt at first. And then matters began to grow
+      complicated again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Things had gone far between himself and Lady Sunderbund since that letter
+      he had read upon the beach at Old Hunstanton. The blinds of the house with
+      the very very blue door in Princhester had been drawn from the day when
+      the first vanload of the renegade bishop's private possessions had
+      departed from the palace. The lady had returned to the brightly decorated
+      flat overlooking Hyde Park. He had seen her repeatedly since then, and
+      always with a fairly clear understanding that she was to provide the
+      chapel and pulpit in which he was to proclaim to London the gospel of the
+      Simplicity and Universality of God. He was to be the prophet of a
+      reconsidered faith, calling the whole world from creeds and sects, from
+      egotisms and vain loyalties, from prejudices of race and custom, to the
+      worship and service of the Divine King of all mankind. That in fact had
+      been the ruling resolve in his mind, the resolve determining his relations
+      not only with Lady Sunderbund but with Lady Ella and his family, his
+      friends, enemies and associates. He had set out upon this course unchecked
+      by any doubt, and overriding the manifest disapproval of his wife and his
+      younger daughters. Lady Sunderbund's enthusiasm had been enormous and
+      sustaining....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost imperceptibly that resolve had weakened. Imperceptibly at first.
+      Then the decline had been perceived as one sometimes perceives a thing in
+      the background out of the corner of one's eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all his early anticipations of the chapel enterprise, he had imagined
+      himself in the likeness of a small but eloquent figure standing in a large
+      exposed place and calling this lost misled world back to God. Lady
+      Sunderbund, he assumed, was to provide the large exposed place (which was
+      dimly paved with pews) and guarantee that little matter which was to
+      relieve him of sordid anxieties for his family, the stipend. He had agreed
+      in an inattentive way that this was to be eight hundred a year, with a
+      certain proportion of the subscriptions. &ldquo;At first, I shall be the chief
+      subscriber,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Before the rush comes.&rdquo; He had been so content to
+      take all this for granted and think no more about it&mdash;more
+      particularly to think no more about it&mdash;that for a time he entirely
+      disregarded the intense decorative activities into which Lady Sunderbund
+      incontinently plunged. Had he been inclined to remark them he certainly
+      might have done so, even though a considerable proportion was being
+      thoughtfully veiled for a time from his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For example, there was the young architect with the wonderful tie whom he
+      met once or twice at lunch in the Hyde Park flat. This young man pulled
+      the conversation again and again, Lady Sunderbund aiding and abetting, in
+      the direction of the &ldquo;ideal church.&rdquo; It was his ambition, he said,
+      someday, to build an ideal church, &ldquo;divorced from tradition.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope had been drawn at last into a dissertation. He said that hitherto
+      all temples and places of worship had been conditioned by orientation due
+      to the seasonal aspects of religion, they pointed to the west or&mdash;as
+      in the case of the Egyptian temples&mdash;to some particular star, and by
+      sacramentalism, which centred everything on a highly lit sacrificial
+      altar. It was almost impossible to think of a church built upon other
+      lines than that. The architect would be so free that&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Absolutely free,&rdquo; interrupted the young architect. &ldquo;He might, for
+      example, build a temple like a star.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or like some wondyful casket,&rdquo; said Lady Sunderbund....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And also there was a musician with fuzzy hair and an impulsive way of
+      taking the salted almonds, who wanted to know about religious music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope hazarded the idea that a chanting people was a religious people. He
+      said, moreover, that there was a fine religiosity about Moussorgski, but
+      that the most beautiful single piece of music in the world was Beethoven's
+      sonata, Opus 111,&mdash;he was thinking, he said, more particularly of the
+      Adagio at the end, molto semplice e cantabile. It had a real quality of
+      divinity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The musician betrayed impatience at the name of Beethoven, and thought,
+      with his mouth appreciatively full of salted almonds, that nowadays we had
+      got a little beyond that anyhow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall be superhuman before we get beyond either Purcell or Beethoven,&rdquo;
+       said Scrope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor did he attach sufficient importance to Lady Sunderbund's disposition
+      to invite Positivists, members of the Brotherhood Church, leaders among
+      the Christian Scientists, old followers of the Rev. Charles Voysey,
+      Swedenborgians, Moslem converts, Indian Theosophists, psychic phenomena
+      and so forth, to meet him. Nevertheless it began to drift into his mind
+      that he was by no means so completely in control of the new departure as
+      he had supposed at first. Both he and Lady Sunderbund professed
+      universalism; but while his was the universalism of one who would simplify
+      to the bare fundamentals of a common faith, hers was the universalism of
+      the collector. Religion to him was something that illuminated the soul, to
+      her it was something that illuminated prayer-books. For a considerable
+      time they followed their divergent inclinations without any realization of
+      their divergence. None the less a vague doubt and dissatisfaction with the
+      prospect before him arose to cloud his confidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first there was little or no doubt of his own faith. He was still
+      altogether convinced that he had to confess and proclaim God in his life.
+      He was as sure that God was the necessary king and saviour of mankind and
+      of a man's life, as he was of the truth of the Binomial Theorem. But what
+      began first to fade was the idea that he had been specially called to
+      proclaim the True God to all the world. He would have the most amiable
+      conference with Lady Sunderbund, and then as he walked back to Notting
+      Hill he would suddenly find stuck into his mind like a challenge, Heaven
+      knows how: &ldquo;Another prophet?&rdquo; Even if he succeeded in this mission
+      enterprise, he found himself asking, what would he be but just a little
+      West-end Mahomet? He would have founded another sect, and we have to make
+      an end to all sects. How is there to be an end to sects, if there are
+      still to be chapels&mdash;richly decorated chapels&mdash;and
+      congregations, and salaried specialists in God?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was a very disconcerting idea. It was particularly active at night.
+      He did his best to consider it with a cool detachment, regardless of the
+      facts that his private income was just under three hundred pounds a year,
+      and that his experiments in cultured journalism made it extremely
+      improbable that the most sedulous literary work would do more than double
+      this scanty sum. Yet for all that these nasty, ugly, sordid facts were
+      entirely disregarded, they did somehow persist in coming in and squatting
+      down, shapeless in a black corner of his mind&mdash;from which their eyes
+      shone out, so to speak&mdash;whenever his doubt whether he ought to set up
+      as a prophet at all was under consideration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (6)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then very suddenly on this October afternoon the situation had come to a
+      crisis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had gone to Lady Sunderbund's flat to see the plans and drawings for
+      the new church in which he was to give his message to the world. They had
+      brought home to him the complete realization of Lady Sunderbund's
+      impossibility. He had attempted upon the spur of the moment an explanation
+      of just how much they differed, and he had precipitated a storm of
+      extravagantly perplexing emotions....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She kept him waiting for perhaps ten minutes before she brought the plans
+      to him. He waited in the little room with the Wyndham Lewis picture that
+      opened upon the balcony painted with crazy squares of livid pink. On a
+      golden table by the window a number of recently bought books were lying,
+      and he went and stood over these, taking them up one after another. The
+      first was &ldquo;The Countess of Huntingdon and Her Circle,&rdquo; that bearder of
+      lightminded archbishops, that formidable harbourer of Wesleyan chaplains.
+      For some minutes he studied the grim portrait of this inspired lady
+      standing with one foot ostentatiously on her coronet and then turned to
+      the next volume. This was a life of Saint Teresa, that energetic organizer
+      of Spanish nunneries. The third dealt with Madame Guyon. It was difficult
+      not to feel that Lady Sunderbund was reading for a part.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was wearing a long simple dress of spangled white with a very high
+      waist; she had a bracelet of green jade, a waistband of green silk, and
+      her hair was held by a wreath of artificial laurel, very stiff and green.
+      Her arms were full of big rolls of cartridge paper and tracing paper. &ldquo;I'm
+      so pleased,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It's 'eady at last and I can show you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She banged the whole armful down upon a vivid little table of inlaid black
+      and white wood. He rescued one or two rolls and a sheet of tracing paper
+      from the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's the Temple,&rdquo; she panted in a significant whisper. &ldquo;It's the Temple
+      of the One T'ue God!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She scrabbled among the papers, and held up the elevation of a strange
+      square building to his startled eyes. &ldquo;Iszi't it just pe'fect?&rdquo; she
+      demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took the drawing from her. It represented a building, manifestly an
+      enormous building, consisting largely of two great, deeply fluted towers
+      flanking a vast archway approached by a long flight of steps. Between the
+      towers appeared a dome. It was as if the Mosque of Saint Sophia had
+      produced this offspring in a mesalliance with the cathedral of Wells. Its
+      enormity was made manifest by the minuteness of the large automobiles that
+      were driving away in the foreground after &ldquo;setting down.&rdquo; &ldquo;Here is the
+      plan,&rdquo; she said, thrusting another sheet upon him before he could fully
+      take in the quality of the design. &ldquo;The g'eat Hall is to be pe'fectly
+      'ound, no aisle, no altar, and in lettas of sapphiah, 'God is ev'ywhe'.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She added with a note of solemnity, &ldquo;It will hold th'ee thousand people
+      sitting down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;!&rdquo; said Scrope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The'e's a sort of g'andeur,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It's young Venable's wo'k. It's
+      his fl'st g'ate oppo'tunity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;is this to go on that little site in Aldwych?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He says the' isn't 'oom the'!&rdquo; she explained. &ldquo;He wants to put it out at
+      Golda's G'een.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;if it is to be this little simple chapel we proposed, then
+      wasn't our idea to be central?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if the' isn't 'oem!&rdquo; she said&mdash;conclusively. &ldquo;And isn't this&mdash;isn't
+      it rather a costly undertaking, rather more costly&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That doesn't matta. I'm making heaps and heaps of money. Half my p'ope'ty
+      is in shipping and a lot of the 'eat in munitions. I'm 'icher than eva.
+      Isn't the' a sort of g'andeur?&rdquo; she pressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put the elevation down. He took the plan from her hands and seemed to
+      study it. But he was really staring blankly at the whole situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lady Sunderbund,&rdquo; he said at last, with an effort, &ldquo;I am afraid all this
+      won't do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't do!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. It isn't in the spirit of my intention. It isn't in a great building
+      of this sort&mdash;so&mdash;so ornate and imposing, that the simple gospel
+      of God's Universal Kingdom can be preached.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But oughtn't so gate a message to have as g'ate a pulpit?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then as if she would seize him before he could go on to further
+      repudiations, she sought hastily among the drawings again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But look,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It has ev'ything! It's not only a p'eaching place;
+      it's a headquarters for ev'ything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With the rapid movements of an excited child she began to thrust the
+      remarkable features and merits of the great project upon him. The
+      preaching dome was only the heart of it. There were to be a library,
+      &ldquo;'efecto'ies,&rdquo; consultation rooms, classrooms, a publication department, a
+      big underground printing establishment. &ldquo;Nowadays,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;ev'y gate
+      movement must p'int.&rdquo; There was to be music, she said, &ldquo;a gate invisible
+      o'gan,&rdquo; hidden amidst the architectural details, and pouring out its
+      sounds into the dome, and then she glanced in passing at possible
+      &ldquo;p'ocessions&rdquo; round the preaching dome. This preaching dome was not a mere
+      shut-in drum for spiritual reverberations, around it ran great open
+      corridors, and in these corridors there were to be &ldquo;chapels.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what for?&rdquo; he asked, stemming the torrent. &ldquo;What need is there for
+      chapels? There are to be no altars, no masses, no sacraments?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;but they are to be chapels for special int'ests; a chapel
+      for science, a chapel for healing, a chapel for gov'ment. Places for
+      peoples to sit and think about those things&mdash;with paintings and
+      symbols.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see your intention,&rdquo; he admitted. &ldquo;I see your intention.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The' is to be a gate da'k blue 'ound chapel for sta's and atoms and the
+      myst'ry of matta.&rdquo; Her voice grew solemn. &ldquo;All still and deep and high.
+      Like a k'ystal in a da'k place. You will go down steps to it. Th'ough a
+      da'k 'ounded a'ch ma'ked with mathematical symbols and balances and
+      scientific app'atus.... And the ve'y next to it, the ve'y next, is to be a
+      little b'ight chapel for bi'ds and flowas!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;it is all very fine and expressive. It is, I see, a
+      symbolical building, a great artistic possibility. But is it the place for
+      me? What I have to say is something very simple, that God is the king of
+      the whole world, king of the ha'penny newspaper and the omnibus and the
+      vulgar everyday things, and that they have to worship him and serve him as
+      their leader in every moment of their lives. This isn't that. This is the
+      old religions over again. This is taking God apart. This is putting him
+      into a fresh casket instead of the old one. And.... I don't like it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't like it,&rdquo; she cried, and stood apart from him with her chin in the
+      air, a tall astonishment and dismay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't do the work I want to do with this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;Isn't it you' idea?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. It is not in the least my idea. I want to tell the whole world of the
+      one God that can alone unite it and save it&mdash;and you make this
+      extravagant toy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt as if he had struck her directly he uttered that last word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Toy!&rdquo; she echoed, taking it in, &ldquo;you call it a Toy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A note in her voice reminded him that there were two people who might feel
+      strongly in this affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Lady Sunderbund,&rdquo; he said with a sudden change of manner, &ldquo;I must
+      needs follow the light of my own mind. I have had a vision of God, I have
+      seen him as a great leader towering over the little lives of men,
+      demanding the little lives of men, prepared to take them and guide them to
+      the salvation of mankind and the conquest of pain and death. I have seen
+      him as the God of the human affair, a God of politics, a God of such muddy
+      and bloody wars as this war, a God of economics, a God of railway
+      junctions and clinics and factories and evening schools, a God in fact of
+      men. This God&mdash;this God here, that you want to worship, is a God of
+      artists and poets&mdash;of elegant poets, a God of bric-a-brac, a God of
+      choice allusions. Oh, it has its grandeur! I don't want you to think that
+      what you are doing may not be altogether fine and right for you to do. But
+      it is not what I have to do.... I cannot&mdash;indeed I cannot&mdash;go on
+      with this project&mdash;upon these lines.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, flushed and breathless. Lady Sunderbund had heard him to the
+      end. Her bright face was brightly flushed, and there were tears in her
+      eyes. It was like her that they should seem tears of the largest, most
+      expensive sort, tears of the first water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; she cried, and her red delicate mouth went awry with dismay and
+      disappointment, and her expression was the half incredulous expression of
+      a child suddenly and cruelly disappointed: &ldquo;You won't go on with all
+      this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;My dear Lady Sunderbund&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! don't Lady Sunderbund me!&rdquo; she cried with a novel rudeness. &ldquo;Don't
+      you see I've done it all for you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He winced and felt boorish. He had never liked and disapproved of Lady
+      Sunderbund so much as he did at that moment. And he had no words for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I stop it all at once like this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And still he had no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She pursued her advantage. &ldquo;What am I to do?&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned upon him passionately. &ldquo;Look what you've done!&rdquo; She marked her
+      points with finger upheld, and gave odd suggestions in her face of an
+      angry coster girl. &ldquo;Eva' since I met you, I've wo'shipped you. I've been
+      'eady to follow you anywhe'&mdash;to do anything. Eva' since that night
+      when you sat so calm and dignified, and they baited you and wo'id you.
+      When they we' all vain and cleva, and you&mdash;you thought only of God
+      and 'iligion and didn't mind fo' you'self.... Up to then&mdash;I'd been
+      living&mdash;oh! the emptiest life...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The tears ran. &ldquo;Pe'haps I shall live it again....&rdquo; She dashed her grief
+      away with a hand beringed with stones as big as beetles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said to myself, this man knows something I don't know. He's got the
+      seeds of ete'nal life su'ely. I made up my mind then and the' I'd follow
+      you and back you and do all I could fo' you. I've lived fo' you. Eve'
+      since. Lived fo' you. And now when all my little plans are 'ipe, you&mdash;!
+      Oh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made a quaint little gesture with pink fists upraised, and then stood
+      with her hand held up, staring at the plans and drawings that were
+      littered over the inlaid table. &ldquo;I've planned and planned. I said, I will
+      build him a temple. I will be his temple se'vant.... Just a me'
+      se'vant....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She could not go on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it is just these temples that have confused mankind,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not my temple,&rdquo; she said presently, now openly weeping over the gay
+      rejected drawings. &ldquo;You could have explained....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; she said petulantly, and thrust them away from her so that they went
+      sliding one after the other on to the floor. For some long-drawn moments
+      there was no sound in the room but the slowly accelerated slide and flop
+      of one sheet of cartridge paper after another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We could have been so happy,&rdquo; she wailed, &ldquo;se'ving oua God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then this disconcerting lady did a still more disconcerting thing. She
+      staggered a step towards Scrape, seized the lapels of his coat, bowed her
+      head upon his shoulder, put her black hair against his cheek, and began
+      sobbing and weeping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear lady!&rdquo; he expostulated, trying weakly to disengage her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me k'y,&rdquo; she insisted, gripping more resolutely, and following his
+      backward pace. &ldquo;You must let me k'y. You must let me k'y.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His resistance ceased. One hand supported her, the other patted her
+      shining hair. &ldquo;My dear child!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;My dear child! I had no idea.
+      That you would take it like this....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (7)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was but the opening of an enormous interview. Presently he had
+      contrived in a helpful and sympathetic manner to seat the unhappy lady on
+      a sofa, and when after some cramped discourse she stood up before him,
+      wiping her eyes with a wet wonder of lace, to deliver herself the better,
+      a newborn appreciation of the tactics of the situation made him walk to
+      the other side of the table under colour of picking up a drawing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the retrospect he tried to disentangle the threads of a discussion that
+      went to and fro and contradicted itself and began again far back among
+      things that had seemed forgotten and disposed of. Lady Sunderbund's mind
+      was extravagantly untrained, a wild-grown mental thicket. At times she
+      reproached him as if he were a heartless God; at times she talked as if he
+      were a recalcitrant servant. Her mingling of utter devotion and the
+      completest disregard for his thoughts and wishes dazzled and distressed
+      his mind. It was clear that for half a year her clear, bold, absurd will
+      had been crystallized upon the idea of giving him exactly what she wanted
+      him to want. The crystal sphere of those ambitions lay now shattered
+      between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was trying to reconstruct it before his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was, she declared, prepared to alter her plans in any way that would
+      meet his wishes. She had not understood. &ldquo;If it is a Toy,&rdquo; she cried,
+      &ldquo;show me how to make it not a Toy! Make it 'eal!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He said it was the bare idea of a temple that made it impossible. And
+      there was this drawing here; what did it mean? He held it out to her. It
+      represented a figure, distressingly like himself, robed as a priest in
+      vestments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She snatched the offending drawing from him and tore it to shreds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you don't want a Temple, have a meeting-house. You wanted a
+      meeting-house anyhow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just any old meeting-house,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Not that special one. A place
+      without choirs and clergy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you won't have music,&rdquo; she responded, &ldquo;don't have music. If God
+      doesn't want music it can go. I can't think God does not app'ove of music,
+      but&mdash;that is for you to settle. If you don't like the' being
+      o'naments, we'll make it all plain. Some g'ate g'ey Dome&mdash;all g'ey
+      and black. If it isn't to be beautiful, it can be ugly. Yes, ugly. It can
+      be as ugly&rdquo;&mdash;she sobbed&mdash;&ldquo;as the City Temple. We will get some
+      otha a'chitect&mdash;some City a'chitect. Some man who has built B'anch
+      Banks or 'ailway stations. That's if you think it pleases God.... B'eak
+      young Venable's hea't.... Only why should you not let me make a place fo'
+      you' message? Why shouldn't it be me? You must have a place. You've got
+      'to p'each somewhe'.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As a man, not as a priest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then p'each as a man. You must still wea' something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just ordinary clothes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O'dina'y clothes a' clothes in the fashion,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You would have to
+      go to you' taila for a new p'eaching coat with b'aid put on dif'ently, or
+      two buttons instead of th'ee....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One needn't be fashionable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ev'ybody is fash'nable. How can you help it? Some people wea' old
+      fashions; that's all.... A cassock's an old fashion. There's nothing so
+      plain as a cassock.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Except that it's a clerical fashion. I want to be just as I am now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you think that&mdash;that owoble suit is o'dina'y clothes!&rdquo; she said,
+      and stared at him and gave way to tears of real tenderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A cassock,&rdquo; she cried with passion. &ldquo;Just a pe'fectly plain cassock. Fo'
+      deecency!... Oh, if you won't&mdash;not even that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (8)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he walked now after his unsuccessful quest of Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey
+      towards the Serpentine he acted that stormy interview with Lady Sunderbund
+      over again. At the end, as a condition indeed of his departure, he had
+      left things open. He had assented to certain promises. He was to make her
+      understand better what it was he needed. He was not to let anything that
+      had happened affect that &ldquo;spi'tual f'enship.&rdquo; She was to abandon all her
+      plans, she was to begin again &ldquo;at the ve'y beginning.&rdquo; But he knew that
+      indeed there should be no more beginning again with her. He knew that
+      quite beyond these questions of the organization of a purified religion,
+      it was time their association ended. She had wept upon him; she had
+      clasped both his hands at parting and prayed to be forgiven. She was
+      drawing him closer to her by their very dissension. She had infected him
+      with the softness of remorse; from being a bright and spirited person, she
+      had converted herself into a warm and touching person. Her fine, bright
+      black hair against his cheek and the clasp of her hand on his shoulder was
+      now inextricably in the business. The perplexing, the astonishing thing in
+      his situation was that there was still a reluctance to make a conclusive
+      breach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was not the first of men who have tried to find in vain how and when a
+      relationship becomes an entanglement. He ought to break off now, and the
+      riddle was just why he should feel this compunction in breaking off now.
+      He had disappointed her, and he ought not to have disappointed her; that
+      was the essential feeling. He had never realized before as he realized now
+      this peculiar quality of his own mind and the gulf into which it was
+      leading him. It came as an illuminating discovery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a social animal. He had an instinctive disposition to act according
+      to the expectations of the people about him, whether they were reasonable
+      or congenial expectations or whether they were not. That, he saw for the
+      first time, had been the ruling motive of his life; it was the clue to
+      him. Man is not a reasonable creature; he is a socially responsive
+      creature trying to be reasonable in spite of that fact. From the days in
+      the rectory nursery when Scrope had tried to be a good boy on the whole
+      and just a little naughty sometimes until they stopped smiling, through
+      all his life of school, university, curacy, vicarage and episcopacy up to
+      this present moment, he perceived now that he had acted upon no authentic
+      and independent impulse. His impulse had always been to fall in with
+      people and satisfy them. And all the painful conflicts of those last few
+      years had been due to a growing realization of jarring criticisms, of
+      antagonized forces that required from him incompatible things. From which
+      he had now taken refuge&mdash;or at any rate sought refuge&mdash;in God.
+      It was paradoxical, but manifestly in God he not only sank his
+      individuality but discovered it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was wonderful how much he had thought and still thought of the feelings
+      and desires of Lady Sunderbund, and how little he thought of God. Her he
+      had been assiduously propitiating, managing, accepting, for three months
+      now. Why? Partly because she demanded it, and there was a quality in her
+      demand that had touched some hidden spring&mdash;of vanity perhaps it was&mdash;in
+      him, that made him respond. But partly also it was because after the
+      evacuation of the palace at Princhester he had felt more and more, felt
+      but never dared to look squarely in the face, the catastrophic change in
+      the worldly circumstances of his family. Only this chapel adventure seemed
+      likely to restore those fallen and bedraggled fortunes. He had not
+      anticipated a tithe of the dire quality of that change. They were not
+      simply uncomfortable in the Notting Hill home. They were miserable. He
+      fancied they looked to him with something between reproach and urgency.
+      Why had he brought them here? What next did he propose to do? He wished at
+      times they would say it out instead of merely looking it. Phoebe's failing
+      appetite chilled his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That concern for his family, he believed, had been his chief motive in
+      clinging to Lady Sunderbund's projects long after he had realized how
+      little they would forward the true service of God. No doubt there had been
+      moments of flattery, moments of something, something rather in the nature
+      of an excited affection; some touch of the magnificent in her, some touch
+      of the infantile,&mdash;both appealed magnetically to his imagination; but
+      the real effective cause was his habitual solicitude for his wife and
+      children and his consequent desire to prosper materially. As his first
+      dream of being something between Mohammed and Peter the Hermit in a new
+      proclamation of God to the world lost colour and life in his mind, he
+      realized more and more clearly that there was no way of living in a state
+      of material prosperity and at the same time in a state of active service
+      to God. The Church of the One True God (by favour of Lady Sunderbund) was
+      a gaily-coloured lure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet he wanted to go on with it. All his imagination and intelligence
+      was busy now with the possibility of in some way subjugating Lady
+      Sunderbund, and modifying her and qualifying her to an endurable
+      proposition. Why?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There could be but one answer, he thought. Brought to the test of action,
+      he did not really believe in God! He did not believe in God as he believed
+      in his family. He did not believe in the reality of either his first or
+      his second vision; they had been dreams, autogenous revelations,
+      exaltations of his own imaginations. These beliefs were upon different
+      grades of reality. Put to the test, his faith in God gave way; a sword of
+      plaster against a reality of steel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet he did believe in God. He was as persuaded that there was a God as
+      he was that there was another side to the moon. His intellectual
+      conviction was complete. Only, beside the living, breathing&mdash;occasionally
+      coughing&mdash;reality of Phoebe, God was something as unsubstantial as
+      the Binomial Theorem....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very like the Binomial Theorem as one thought over that comparison.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time he had reached the banks of the Serpentine and was
+      approaching the grey stone bridge that crosses just where Hyde Park ends
+      and Kensington Gardens begins. Following upon his doubts of his religious
+      faith had come another still more extraordinary question: &ldquo;Although there
+      is a God, does he indeed matter more in our ordinary lives than that same
+      demonstrable Binomial Theorem? Isn't one's duty to Phoebe plain and
+      clear?&rdquo; Old Likeman's argument came back to him with novel and enhanced
+      powers. Wasn't he after all selfishly putting his own salvation in front
+      of his plain duty to those about him? What did it matter if he told lies,
+      taught a false faith, perjured and damned himself, if after all those
+      others were thereby saved and comforted?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that is just where the whole of this state of mind is false and
+      wrong,&rdquo; he told himself. &ldquo;God is something more than a priggish devotion,
+      an intellectual formula. He has a hold and a claim&mdash;he should have a
+      hold and a claim&mdash;exceeding all the claims of Phoebe, Miriam, Daphne,
+      Clementina&mdash;all of them.... But he hasn't'!...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was to that he had got after he had left Lady Sunderbund, and to that
+      he now returned. It was the thinness and unreality of his thought of God
+      that had driven him post-haste to Brighton-Pomfrey in search for that drug
+      that had touched his soul to belief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was God so insignificant in comparison with his family that after all with
+      a good conscience he might preach him every Sunday in Lady Sunderbund's
+      church, wearing Lady Sunderbund's vestments?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before him he saw an empty seat. The question was so immense and
+      conclusive, it was so clearly a choice for all the rest of his life
+      between God and the dear things of this world, that he felt he could not
+      decide it upon his legs. He sat down, threw an arm along the back of the
+      seat and drummed with his fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the answer was &ldquo;yes&rdquo; then it was decidedly a pity that he had not
+      stayed in the church. It was ridiculous to strain at the cathedral gnat
+      and then swallow Lady Sunderbund's decorative Pantechnicon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the first time, Scrope definitely regretted his apostasy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A trivial matter, as it may seem to the reader, intensified that regret.
+      Three weeks ago Borrowdale, the bishop of Howeaster, had died, and Scrope
+      would have been the next in rotation to succeed him on the bench of
+      bishops. He had always looked forward to the House of Lords, intending to
+      take rather a new line, to speak more, and to speak more plainly and fully
+      upon social questions than had hitherto been the practice of his brethren.
+      Well, that had gone....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (9)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Regrets were plain now. The question before his mind was growing clear;
+      whether he was to persist in this self-imposed martyrdom of himself and
+      his family or whether he was to go back upon his outbreak of visionary
+      fanaticism and close with this last opportunity that Lady Sunderbund
+      offered of saving at least the substance of the comfort and social status
+      of his wife and daughters. In which case it was clear to him he would have
+      to go to great lengths and exercise very considerable subtlety&mdash;and
+      magnetism&mdash;in the management of Lady Sunderbund....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found himself composing a peculiar speech to her, very frank and
+      revealing, and one that he felt would dominate her thoughts.... She
+      attracted him oddly.... At least this afternoon she had attracted him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And repelled him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A wholesome gust of moral impatience stirred him. He smacked the back of
+      the seat hard, as though he smacked himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No. He did not like it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A torn sunset of purple and crimson streamed raggedly up above and through
+      the half stripped trecs of Kensington Gardens, and he found himself
+      wishing that Heaven would give us fewer sublimities in sky and mountain
+      and more in our hearts. Against the background of darkling trees and
+      stormily flaming sky a girl was approaching him. There was little to be
+      seen of her but her outline. Something in her movement caught his eye and
+      carried his memory back to a sundown at Hunstanton. Then as she came
+      nearer he saw that it was Eleanor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was odd to see her here. He had thought she was at Newnham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But anyhow it was very pleasant to see her. And there was something in
+      Eleanor that promised an answer to his necessity. The girl had a kind of
+      instinctive wisdom. She would understand the quality of his situation
+      better perhaps than any one. He would put the essentials of that situation
+      as fully and plainly as he could to her. Perhaps she, with that clear
+      young idealism of hers, would give him just the lift and the light of
+      which he stood in need. She would comprehend both sides of it, the points
+      about Phoebe as well as the points about God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When first he saw her she seemed to be hurrying, but now she had fallen to
+      a loitering pace. She looked once or twice behind her and then ahead,
+      almost as though she expected some one and was not sure whether this
+      person would approach from east or west. She did not observe her father
+      until she was close upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she was so astonished that for a moment she stood motionless,
+      regarding him. She made an odd movement, almost as if she would have
+      walked on, that she checked in its inception. Then she came up to him and
+      stood before him. &ldquo;It's Dad,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know you were in London, Norah,&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came up suddenly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you been home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I wasn't going home. At least&mdash;not until afterwards.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she looked away from him, east and then west, and then met his eye
+      again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't you sit down, Norah?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know whether I can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She consulted the view again and seemed to come to a decision. &ldquo;At least,
+      I will for a minute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down. For a moment neither of them spoke....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you doing here, little Norah?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She gathered her wits. Then she spoke rather volubly. &ldquo;I know it looks
+      bad, Daddy. I came up to meet a boy I know, who is going to France
+      to-morrow. I had to make excuses&mdash;up there. I hardly remember what
+      excuses I made.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A boy you know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do we know him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time Scrope forgot the Church of the One True God altogether. &ldquo;Who
+      is this boy?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a perceptible effort Eleanor assumed a tone of commonsense
+      conventionality. &ldquo;He's a boy I met first when we were skating last year.
+      His sister has the study next to mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Father looked at daughter, and she met his eyes. &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all happened so quickly, Daddy,&rdquo; she said, answering all that was
+      implicit in that &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; She went on, &ldquo;I would have told you about him if
+      he had seemed to matter. But it was just a friendship. It didn't seem to
+      matter in any serious way. Of course we'd been good friends&mdash;and
+      talked about all sorts of things. And then suddenly you see,&rdquo;&mdash;her
+      tone was offhand and matter-of-fact&mdash;&ldquo;he has to go to France.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stared at her father with the expression of a hostess who talks about
+      the weather. And then the tears gathered and ran down her cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned her face to the Serpentine and clenched her fist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But she was now fairly weeping. &ldquo;I didn't know he cared. I didn't know I
+      cared.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His next question took a little time in coming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it's love, little Norah?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was comfortably crying now, the defensive altogether abandoned. &ldquo;It's
+      love, Daddy.... Oh! love!.... He's going tomorrow.&rdquo; For a minute or so
+      neither spoke. Scrope's mind was entirely made up in the matter. He
+      approved altogether of his daughter. But the traditions of parentage, his
+      habit of restrained decision, made him act a judicial part. &ldquo;I'd like just
+      to see this boy,&rdquo; he said, and added: &ldquo;If it isn't rather interfering....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear Daddy!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Dear Daddy!&rdquo; and touched his hand. &ldquo;He'll be
+      coming here....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you could tell me a few things about him,&rdquo; said Scrope. &ldquo;Is he an
+      undergraduate?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; began Eleanor and paused to marshal her facts. &ldquo;He graduated
+      this year. Then he's been in training at Cambridge. Properly he'd have a
+      fellowship. He took the Natural Science tripos, zoology chiefly. He's good
+      at philosophy, but of course our Cambridge philosophy is so silly&mdash;McTaggart
+      blowing bubbles.... His father's a doctor, Sir Hedley Riverton.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As she spoke her eyes had been roving up the path and down. &ldquo;He's coming,&rdquo;
+       she interrupted. She hesitated. &ldquo;Would you mind if I went and spoke to him
+      first, Daddy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course go to him. Go and warn him I'm here,&rdquo; said Scrope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Eleanor got up, and was immediately greeted with joyful gestures by an
+      approaching figure in khaki. The two young people quickened their paces as
+      they drew nearer one another. There was a rapid greeting; they stood close
+      together and spoke eagerly. Scrope could tell by their movements when he
+      became the subject of their talk. He saw the young man start and look over
+      Eleanor's shoulder, and he assumed an attitude of philosophical
+      contemplation of the water, so as to give the young man the liberty of his
+      profile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not look up until they were quite close to him, and when he did he
+      saw a pleasant, slightly freckled fair face a little agitated, and very
+      honest blue eyes. &ldquo;I hope you don't think, Sir, that it's bad form of me
+      to ask Eleanor to come up and see me as I've done. I telegraphed to her on
+      an impulse, and it's been very kind of her to come up to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down,&rdquo; said Scrope, &ldquo;sit down. You're Mr. Riverton?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Sir,&rdquo; said the young man. He had the frequent &ldquo;Sir&rdquo; of the
+      subaltern. Scrope was in the centre of the seat, and the young officer sat
+      down on one side of him while Eleanor took up a watching position on her
+      father's other hand. &ldquo;You see, Sir, we've hardly known each other&mdash;I
+      mean we've been associated over a philosophical society and all that sort
+      of thing, but in a more familiar way, I mean....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He hung for a moment, just a little short of breath. Scrope helped him
+      with a grave but sympathetic movement of the head. &ldquo;It's a little
+      difficult to explain,&rdquo; the young man apologized.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We hadn't understood, I think, either of us very much. We'd just been
+      friendly&mdash;and liked each other. And so it went on even when I was
+      training. And then when I found I had to go out&mdash;I'm going out a
+      little earlier than I expected&mdash;I thought suddenly I wouldn't ever go
+      to Cambridge again at all perhaps&mdash;and there was something in one of
+      her letters.... I thought of it a lot, Sir, I thought it all over, and I
+      thought it wasn't right for me to do anything and I didn't do anything
+      until this morning. And then I sort of had to telegraph. I know it was
+      frightful cheek and bad form and all that, Sir. It is. It would be worse
+      if she wasn't different&mdash;I mean, Sir, if she was just an ordinary
+      girl.... But I had a sort of feeling&mdash;just wanting to see her. I
+      don't suppose you've ever felt anything, Sir, as I felt I wanted to see
+      her&mdash;and just hear her speak to me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced across Scrope at Eleanor. It was as if he justified himself to
+      them both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope glanced furtively at his daughter who was leaning forward with
+      tender eyes on her lover, and his heart went out to her. But his manner
+      remained judicial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this is very sudden,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or you would have heard all about it, Sir,&rdquo; said young Riverton. &ldquo;It's
+      just the hurry that has made this seem furtive. All that there is between
+      us, Sir, is just the two telegrams we've sent, hers and mine. I hope you
+      won't mind our having a little time together. We won't do anything very
+      committal. It's as much friendship as anything. I go by the evening train
+      to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mm,&rdquo; said Serope with his eye on Eleanor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In these uncertain times,&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why shouldn't I take a risk too, Daddy?&rdquo; said Eleanor sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know there's that side of it,&rdquo; said the young man. &ldquo;I oughtn't to have
+      telegraphed,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't I take a risk?&rdquo; exclaimed Eleanor. &ldquo;I'm not a doll. I don't want to
+      live in wadding until all the world is safe for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope looked at the glowing face of the young man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is this taking care of her?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you hadn't telegraphed&mdash;!&rdquo; she cried with a threat in her voice,
+      and left it at that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps I feel about her&mdash;rather as if she was as strong as I am&mdash;in
+      those ways. Perhaps I shouldn't. I could hardly endure myself, Sir&mdash;cut
+      off from her. And a sort of blank. Nothing said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You want to work out your own salvation,&rdquo; said Scrope to his daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one else can,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;I'm&mdash;I'm grown up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even if it hurts?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To live is to be hurt somehow,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;This&mdash;This&mdash;&rdquo; She
+      flashed her love. She intimated by a gesture that it is better to be
+      stabbed with a clean knife than to be suffocated or poisoned or to
+      decay....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope turned his eyes to the young man again. He liked him. He liked the
+      modelling of his mouth and chin and the line of his brows. He liked him
+      altogether. He pronounced his verdict slowly. &ldquo;I suppose, after all,&rdquo; he
+      said, &ldquo;that this is better than the tender solicitude of a safe and
+      prosperous middleaged man. Eleanor, my dear, I've been thinking to-day
+      that a father who stands between his children and hardship, by doing
+      wrong, may really be doing them a wrong. You are a dear girl to me. I
+      won't stand between you two. Find your own salvation.&rdquo; He got up. &ldquo;I go
+      west,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;presently. You, I think, go east.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can assure you, Sir,&rdquo; the young man began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope held his hand out. &ldquo;Take your life in your own way,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to Eleanor. &ldquo;Talk as you will,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She clasped his hand with emotion. Then she turned to the waiting young
+      man, who saluted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll come back to supper?&rdquo; Scrope said, without thinking out the
+      implications of that invitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She assented as carelessly. The fact that she and her lover were to go,
+      with their meeting legalized and blessed, excluded all other
+      considerations. The two young people turned to each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope stood for a moment or so and then sat down again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time he could think only of Eleanor.... He watched the two young
+      people as they went eastward. As they walked their shoulders and elbows
+      bumped amicably together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (10)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently he sought to resume the interrupted thread of his thoughts. He
+      knew that he had been dealing with some very tremendous and urgent problem
+      when Eleanor had appeared. Then he remembered that Eleanor at the time of
+      her approach had seemed to be a solution rather than an interruption.
+      Well, she had her own life. She was making her own life. Instead of
+      solving his problems she was solving her own. God bless those dear grave
+      children! They were nearer the elemental things than he was. That eastward
+      path led to Victoria&mdash;and thence to a very probable death. The lad
+      was in the infantry and going straight into the trenches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Love, death, God; this war was bringing the whole world back to elemental
+      things, to heroic things. The years of comedy and comfort were at an end
+      in Europe; the age of steel and want was here. And he had been thinking&mdash;What
+      had he been thinking?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He mused, and the scheme of his perplexities reshaped itself in his mind.
+      But at that time he did not realize that a powerful new light was falling
+      upon it now, cast by the tragic illumination of these young lovers whose
+      love began with a parting. He did not see how reality had come to all
+      things through that one intense reality. He reverted to the question as he
+      had put it to himself, before first he recognized Eleanor. Did he believe
+      in God? Should he go on with this Sunderbund adventure in which he no
+      longer believed? Should he play for safety and comfort, trusting to God's
+      toleration? Or go back to his family and warn them of the years of
+      struggle and poverty his renunciation cast upon them?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Somehow Lady Sunderbund's chapel was very remote and flimsy now, and the
+      hardships of poverty seemed less black than the hardship of a youthful
+      death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Did he believe in God? Again he put that fundamental question to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat very still in the sunset peace, with his eyes upon the steel mirror
+      of the waters. The question seemed to fill the whole scene, to wait, even
+      as the water and sky and the windless trees were waiting....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then by imperceptible degrees there grew in Scrope's mind the
+      persuasion that he was in the presence of the living God. This time there
+      was no vision of angels nor stars, no snapping of bow-strings, no
+      throbbing of the heart nor change of scene, no magic and melodramatic
+      drawing back of the curtain from the mysteries; the water and the bridge,
+      the ragged black trees, and a distant boat that broke the silvery calm
+      with an arrow of black ripples, all these things were still before him.
+      But God was there too. God was everywhere about him. This persuasion was
+      over him and about him; a dome of protection, a power in his nerves, a
+      peace in his heart. It was an exalting beauty; it was a perfected
+      conviction.... This indeed was the coming of God, the real coming of God.
+      For the first time Scrope was absolutely sure that for the rest of his
+      life he would possess God. Everything that had so perplexed him seemed to
+      be clear now, and his troubles lay at the foot of this last complete
+      realization like a litter of dust and leaves in the foreground of a
+      sunlit, snowy mountain range.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a little incredible that he could ever have doubted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (11)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a phase of extreme intellectual clairvoyance. A multitude of things
+      that hitherto had been higgledy-piggledy, contradictory and incongruous in
+      his mind became lucid, serene, full and assured. He seemed to see all
+      things plainly as one sees things plainly through perfectly clear still
+      water in the shadows of a summer noon. His doubts about God, his periods
+      of complete forgetfulness and disregard of God, this conflict of his
+      instincts and the habits and affections of his daily life with the service
+      of God, ceased to be perplexing incompatibilities and were manifest as
+      necessary, understandable aspects of the business of living.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was no longer a riddle that little immediate things should seem of more
+      importance than great and final things. For man is a creature thrusting
+      his way up from the beast to divinity, from the blindness of individuality
+      to the knowledge of a common end. We stand deep in the engagements of our
+      individual lives looking up to God, and only realizing in our moments of
+      exaltation that through God we can escape from and rule and alter the
+      whole world-wide scheme of individual lives. Only in phases of
+      illumination do we realize the creative powers that lie ready to man's
+      hand. Personal affections, immediate obligations, ambitions, self-seeking,
+      these are among the natural and essential things of our individual lives,
+      as intimate almost as our primordial lusts and needs; God, the true God,
+      is a later revelation, a newer, less natural thing in us; a knowledge
+      still remote, uncertain, and confused with superstition; an apprehension
+      as yet entangled with barbaric traditions of fear and with ceremonial
+      surgeries, blood sacrifices, and the maddest barbarities of thought. We
+      are only beginning to realize that God is here; so far as our minds go he
+      is still not here continually; we perceive him and then again we are blind
+      to him. God is the last thing added to the completeness of human life. To
+      most His presence is imperceptible throughout their lives; they know as
+      little of him as a savage knows of the electric waves that beat through us
+      for ever from the sun. All this appeared now so clear and necessary to
+      Scrope that he was astonished he had ever found the quality of
+      contradiction in these manifest facts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this unprecedented lucidity that had now come to him, Scrope saw as a
+      clear and simple necessity that there can be no such thing as a continuous
+      living presence of God in our lives. That is an unreasonable desire. There
+      is no permanent exaltation of belief. It is contrary to the nature of
+      life. One cannot keep actively believing in and realizing God round all
+      the twenty-four hours any more than one can keep awake through the whole
+      cycle of night and day, day after day. If it were possible so to apprehend
+      God without cessation, life would dissolve in religious ecstasy. But
+      nothing human has ever had the power to hold the curtain of sense
+      continually aside and retain the light of God always. We must get along by
+      remembering our moments of assurance. Even Jesus himself, leader of all
+      those who have hailed the coming kingdom of God, had cried upon the cross,
+      &ldquo;My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?&rdquo; The business of life on
+      earth, life itself, is a thing curtained off, as it were, from such
+      immediate convictions. That is in the constitution of life. Our ordinary
+      state of belief, even when we are free from doubt, is necessarily far
+      removed from the intuitive certainty of sight and hearing. It is a
+      persuasion, it falls far short of perception....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We don't know directly,&rdquo; Scrope said to himself with a checking gesture
+      of the hand, &ldquo;we don't see. We can't. We hold on to the remembered
+      glimpse, we go over our reasons.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it was clear too just because God is thus manifest like the momentary
+      drawing of a curtain, sometimes to this man for a time and sometimes to
+      that, but never continuously to any, and because the perception of him
+      depends upon the ability and quality of the perceiver, because to the
+      intellectual man God is necessarily a formula, to the active man a will
+      and a commandment, and to the emotional man love, there can be no creed
+      defining him for all men, and no ritual and special forms of service to
+      justify a priesthood. &ldquo;God is God,&rdquo; he whispered to himself, and the
+      phrase seemed to him the discovery of a sufficient creed. God is his own
+      definition; there is no other definition of God. Scrope had troubled
+      himself with endless arguments whether God was a person, whether he was
+      concerned with personal troubles, whether he loved, whether he was finite.
+      It were as reasonable to argue whether God was a frog or a rock or a tree.
+      He had imagined God as a figure of youth and courage, had perceived him as
+      an effulgence of leadership, a captain like the sun. The vision of his
+      drug-quickened mind had but symbolized what was otherwise inexpressible.
+      Of that he was now sure. He had not seen the invisible but only its sign
+      and visible likeness. He knew now that all such presentations were true
+      and that all such presentations were false. Just as much and just as
+      little was God the darkness and the brightness of the ripples under the
+      bows of the distant boat, the black beauty of the leaves and twigs of
+      those trees now acid-clear against the flushed and deepening sky. These
+      riddles of the profundities were beyond the compass of common living. They
+      were beyond the needs of common living. He was but a little earth
+      parasite, sitting idle in the darkling day, trying to understand his
+      infinitesimal functions on a minor planet. Within the compass of
+      terrestrial living God showed himself in its own terms. The life of man on
+      earth was a struggle for unity of spirit and for unity with his kind, and
+      the aspect of God that alone mattered to man was a unifying kingship
+      without and within. So long as men were men, so would they see God. Only
+      when they reached the crest could they begin to look beyond. So we knew
+      God, so God was to us; since we struggled, he led our struggle, since we
+      were finite and mortal he defined an aim, his personality was the answer
+      to our personality; but God, except in so far as he was to us, remained
+      inaccessible, inexplicable, wonderful, shining through beauty, shining
+      beyond research, greater than time or space, above good and evil and pain
+      and pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (12)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Serope's mind was saturated as it had never been before by his sense of
+      the immediate presence of God. He floated in that realization. He was not
+      so much thinking now as conversing starkly with the divine interlocutor,
+      who penetrated all things and saw into and illuminated every recess of his
+      mind. He spread out his ideas to the test of this presence; he brought out
+      his hazards and interpretations that this light might judge them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There came back to his mind the substance of his two former visions; they
+      assumed now a reciprocal quality, they explained one another and the
+      riddle before him. The first had shown him the personal human aspect of
+      God, he had seen God as the unifying captain calling for his personal
+      service, the second had set the stage for that service in the spectacle of
+      mankind's adventure. He had been shown a great multitude of human spirits
+      reaching up at countless points towards the conception of the racial unity
+      under a divine leadership, he had seen mankind on the verge of awakening
+      to the kingdom of God. &ldquo;That solves no mystery,&rdquo; he whispered, gripping
+      the seat and frowning at the water; &ldquo;mysteries remain mysteries; but that
+      is the reality of religion. And now, now, what is my place? What have I to
+      do? That is the question I have been asking always; the question that this
+      moment now will answer; what have I to do?...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      God was coming into the life of all mankind in the likeness of a captain
+      and a king; all the governments of men, all the leagues of men, their
+      debts and claims and possessions, must give way to the world republic
+      under God the king. For five troubled years he had been staring religion
+      in the face, and now he saw that it must mean this&mdash;or be no more
+      than fetishism, Obi, Orphic mysteries or ceremonies of Demeter, a legacy
+      of mental dirtiness, a residue of self-mutilation and superstitious
+      sacrifices from the cunning, fear-haunted, ape-dog phase of human
+      development. But it did mean this. And every one who apprehended as much
+      was called by that very apprehension to the service of God's kingdom. To
+      live and serve God's kingdom on earth, to help to bring it about, to
+      propagate the idea of it, to establish the method of it, to incorporate
+      all that one made and all that one did into its growing reality, was the
+      only possible life that could be lived, once that God was known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat with his hands gripping his knees, as if he were holding on to his
+      idea. &ldquo;And now for my part,&rdquo; he whispered, brows knit, &ldquo;now for my part.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ever since he had given his confirmation addresses he had been clear that
+      his task, or at least a considerable portion of his task, was to tell of
+      this faith in God and of this conception of service in his kingdom as the
+      form and rule of human life and human society. But up to now he had been
+      floundering hopelessly in his search for a method and means of telling.
+      That, he saw, still needed to be thought out. For example, one cannot run
+      through the world crying, &ldquo;The Kingdom of God is at hand.&rdquo; Men's minds
+      were still so filled with old theological ideas that for the most part
+      they would understand by that only a fantasy of some great coming of
+      angels and fiery chariots and judgments, and hardly a soul but would doubt
+      one's sanity and turn scornfully away. But one must proclaim God not to
+      confuse but to convince men's minds. It was that and the habit of his
+      priestly calling that had disposed him towards a pulpit. There he could
+      reason and explain. The decorative genius of Lady Sunderbund had turned
+      that intention into a vast iridescent absurdity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This sense he had of thinking openly in the sight of God, enabled him to
+      see the adventure of Lady Sunderbund without illusion and without shame.
+      He saw himself at once honest and disingenuous, divided between two aims.
+      He had no doubt now of the path he had to pursue. A stronger man of
+      permanently clear aims might possibly turn Lady Sunderbund into a useful
+      opportunity, oblige her to provide the rostrum he needed; but for himself,
+      he knew he had neither the needed strength nor clearness; she would
+      smother him in decoration, overcome him by her picturesque persistence. It
+      might be ridiculous to run away from her, but it was necessary. And he was
+      equally clear now that for him there must be no idea of any pulpit, of any
+      sustained mission. He was a man of intellectual moods; only at times, he
+      realized, had he the inspiration of truth; upon such uncertain snatches
+      and glimpses he must live; to make his life a ministry would be to face
+      phases when he would simply be &ldquo;carrying on,&rdquo; with his mind blank and his
+      faith asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His thought spread out from this perennial decision to more general things
+      again. Had God any need of organized priests at all? Wasn't that just what
+      had been the matter with religion for the last three thousand years?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His vision and his sense of access to God had given a new courage to his
+      mind; in these moods of enlightenment he could see the world as a
+      comprehensible ball, he could see history as an understandable drama. He
+      had always been on the verge of realizing before, he realized now, the two
+      entirely different and antagonistic strands that interweave in the twisted
+      rope of contemporary religion; the old strand of the priest, the
+      fetishistic element of the blood sacrifice and the obscene rite, the
+      element of ritual and tradition, of the cult, the caste, the consecrated
+      tribe; and interwoven with this so closely as to be scarcely separable in
+      any existing religion was the new strand, the religion of the prophets,
+      the unidolatrous universal worship of the one true God. Priest religion is
+      the antithesis to prophet religion. He saw that the founders of all the
+      great existing religions of the world had been like himself&mdash;only
+      that he was a weak and commonplace man with no creative force, and they
+      had been great men of enormous initiative&mdash;men reaching out, and
+      never with a complete definition, from the old kind of religion to the
+      new. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus, whom the priests killed when Pilate would
+      have spared him, Mohammed, Buddha, had this much in common that they had
+      sought to lead men from temple worship, idol worship, from rites and
+      ceremonies and the rule of priests, from anniversaryism and
+      sacramentalism, into a direct and simple relation to the simplicity of
+      God. Religious progress had always been liberation and simplification. But
+      none of these efforts had got altogether clear. The organizing temper in
+      men, the disposition to dogmatic theorizing, the distrust of the
+      discretion of the young by the wisdom of age, the fear of indiscipline
+      which is so just in warfare and so foolish in education, the tremendous
+      power of the propitiatory tradition, had always caught and crippled every
+      new gospel before it had run a score of years. Jesus for example gave man
+      neither a theology nor a church organization; His sacrament was an
+      innocent feast of memorial; but the fearful, limited, imitative men he
+      left to carry on his work speedily restored all these three abominations
+      of the antiquated religion, theology, priest, and sacrifice. Jesus indeed,
+      caught into identification with the ancient victim of the harvest
+      sacrifice and turned from a plain teacher into a horrible blood bath and a
+      mock cannibal meal, was surely the supreme feat of the ironies of
+      chance....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is curious how I drift back to Jesus,&rdquo; said Scrope. &ldquo;I have never seen
+      how much truth and good there was in his teaching until I broke away from
+      Christianity and began to see him plain. If I go on as I am going, I shall
+      end a Nazarene....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought on. He had a feeling of temerity, but then it seemed as if God
+      within him bade him be of good courage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Already in a glow of inspiration he had said practically as much as he was
+      now thinking in his confirmation address, but now he realized completely
+      what it was he had then said. There could be no priests, no specialized
+      ministers of the one true God, because every man to the utmost measure of
+      his capacity was bound to be God's priest and minister. Many things one
+      may leave to specialists: surgery, detailed administration, chemistry, for
+      example; but it is for every man to think his own philosophy and think out
+      his own religion. One man may tell another, but no man may take charge of
+      another. A man may avail himself of electrician or gardener or what not,
+      but he must stand directly before God; he may suffer neither priest nor
+      king. These other things are incidental, but God, the kingdom of God, is
+      what he is for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good,&rdquo; he said, checking his reasoning. &ldquo;So I must bear witness to God&mdash;but
+      neither as priest nor pastor. I must write and talk about him as I can. No
+      reason why I should not live by such writing and talking if it does not
+      hamper my message to do so. But there must be no high place, no ordered
+      congregation. I begin to see my way....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The evening was growing dark and chill about him now, the sky was barred
+      with deep bluish purple bands drawn across a chilly brightness that had
+      already forgotten the sun, the trees were black and dim, but his
+      understanding of his place and duty was growing very definite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And this duty to bear witness to God's kingdom and serve it is so plain
+      that I must not deflect my witness even by a little, though to do so means
+      comfort and security for my wife and children. God comes first....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They must not come between God and me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there is more in it than that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had come round at last through the long clearing-up of his mind, to his
+      fundamental problem again. He sat darkly reluctant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must not play priest or providence to them,&rdquo; he admitted at last. &ldquo;I
+      must not even stand between God and them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw now what he had been doing; it had been the flaw in his faith that
+      he would not trust his family to God. And he saw too that this distrust
+      has been the flaw in the faith of all religious systems hitherto....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (13)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this strange voyage of the spirit which was now drawing to its end, in
+      which Scrope had travelled from the confused, unanalyzed formulas and
+      assumptions and implications of his rectory upbringing to his present
+      stark and simple realization of God, he had at times made some remarkable
+      self-identifications. He was naturally much given to analogy; every train
+      of thought in his mind set up induced parallel currents. He had likened
+      himself to the Anglican church, to the whole Christian body, as, for
+      example, in his imagined second conversation with the angel of God. But
+      now he found himself associating himself with a still more far-reaching
+      section of mankind. This excess of solicitude was traceable perhaps in
+      nearly every one in all the past of mankind who had ever had the vision of
+      God. An excessive solicitude to shield those others from one's own trials
+      and hardships, to preserve the exact quality of the revelation, for
+      example, had been the fruitful cause of crippling errors, spiritual
+      tyrannies, dogmatisms, dissensions, and futilities. &ldquo;Suffer little
+      children to come unto me&rdquo;; the text came into his head with an effect of
+      contribution. The parent in us all flares out at the thought of the
+      younger and weaker minds; we hide difficulties, seek to spare them from
+      the fires that temper the spirit, the sharp edge of the truth that shapes
+      the soul. Christian is always trying to have a carriage sent back from the
+      Celestial City for his family. Why, we ask, should they flounder
+      dangerously in the morasses that we escaped, or wander in the forest in
+      which we lost ourselves? Catch these souls young, therefore, save them
+      before they know they exist, kidnap them to heaven; vaccinate them with a
+      catechism they may never understand, lull them into comfort and routine.
+      Instinct plays us false here as it plays the savage mother false when she
+      snatches her fevered child from the doctor's hands. The last act of faith
+      is to trust those we love to God....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hitherto he had seen the great nets of theological overstatement and dogma
+      that kept mankind from God as if they were the work of purely evil things
+      in man, of pride, of self-assertion, of a desire to possess and dominate
+      the minds and souls of others. It was only now that he saw how large a
+      share in the obstruction of God's Kingdom had been played by the love of
+      the elder and the parent, by the carefulness, the fussy care, of good men
+      and women. He had wandered in wildernesses of unbelief, in dangerous
+      places of doubt and questioning, but he had left his wife and children
+      safe and secure in the self-satisfaction of orthodoxy. To none of them
+      except to Eleanor had he ever talked with any freedom of his new
+      apprehensions of religious reality. And that had been at Eleanor's
+      initiative. There was, he saw now, something of insolence and something of
+      treachery in this concealment. His ruling disposition throughout the
+      crisis had been to force comfort and worldly well-being upon all those
+      dependants even at the price of his own spiritual integrity. In no way had
+      he consulted them upon the bargain.... While we have pottered, each for
+      the little good of his own family, each for the lessons and clothes and
+      leisure of his own children, assenting to this injustice, conforming to
+      that dishonest custom, being myopically benevolent and fundamentally
+      treacherous, our accumulated folly has achieved this catastrophe. It is
+      not so much human wickedness as human weakness that has permitted the
+      youth of the world to go through this hell of blood and mud and fire. The
+      way to the kingdom of God is the only way to the true safety, the true
+      wellbeing of the children of men....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It wasn't fair to them. But now he saw how unfair it was to them in a
+      light that has only shone plainly upon European life since the great
+      interlude of the armed peace came to an end in August, 1914. Until that
+      time it had been the fashion to ignore death and evade poverty and
+      necessity for the young. We can shield our young no longer, death has
+      broken through our precautions and tender evasions&mdash;and his eyes went
+      eastward into the twilight that had swallowed up his daughter and her
+      lover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tumbled darkling sky, monstrous masses of frowning blue, with icy gaps
+      of cold light, was like the great confusions of the war. All our youth has
+      had to go into that terrible and destructive chaos&mdash;because of the
+      kings and churches and nationalities sturdier-souled men would have set
+      aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everything was sharp and clear in his mind now. Eleanor after all had
+      brought him his solution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat quite still for a little while, and then stood up and turned
+      northward towards Notting Hill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The keepers were closing Kensington Gardens, and he would have to skirt
+      the Park to Victoria Gate and go home by the Bayswater Road....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (14)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he walked he rearranged in his mind this long-overdue apology for his
+      faith that he was presently to make to his family. There was no one to
+      interrupt him and nothing to embarrass him, and so he was able to set out
+      everything very clearly and convincingly. There was perhaps a disposition
+      to digress into rather voluminous subordinate explanations, on such
+      themes, for instance, as sacramentalism, whereon he found himself
+      summarizing Frazer's Golden Bough, which the Chasters' controversy had
+      first obliged him to read, and upon the irrelevance of the question of
+      immortality to the process of salvation. But the reality of his
+      eclaircissement was very different from anything he prepared in these
+      anticipations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tea had been finished and put away, and the family was disposed about the
+      dining-room engaged in various evening occupations; Phoebe sat at the
+      table working at some mathematical problem, Clementina was reading with
+      her chin on her fist and a frown on her brow; Lady Ella, Miriam and Daphne
+      were busy making soft washing cloths for the wounded; Lady Ella had
+      brought home the demand for them from the Red Cross centre in Burlington
+      House. The family was all downstairs in the dining-room because the
+      evening was chilly, and there were no fires upstairs yet in the
+      drawing-room. He came into the room and exchanged greetings with Lady
+      Ella. Then he stood for a time surveying his children. Phoebe, he noted,
+      was a little flushed; she put passion into her work; on the whole she was
+      more like Eleanor than any other of them. Miriam knitted with a steady
+      skill. Clementina's face too expressed a tussle. He took up one of the
+      rough-knit washing-cloths upon the side-table, and asked how many could be
+      made in an hour. Then he asked some idle obvious question about the fire
+      upstairs. Clementina made an involuntary movement; he was disturbing her.
+      He hovered for a moment longer. He wanted to catch his wife's eye and
+      speak to her first. She looked up, but before he could convey his wish for
+      a private conference with her, she smiled at him and then bent over her
+      work again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went into the back study and lit his gas fire. Hitherto he had always
+      made a considerable explosion when he did so, but this time by taking
+      thought and lighting his match before he turned on the gas he did it with
+      only a gentle thud. Then he lit his reading-lamp and pulled down the blind&mdash;pausing
+      for a time to look at the lit dressmaker's opposite. Then he sat down
+      thoughtfully before the fire. Presently Ella would come in and he would
+      talk to her. He waited a long time, thinking only weakly and
+      inconsecutively, and then he became restless. Should he call her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he wanted their talk to begin in a natural-seeming way. He did not
+      want the portentousness of &ldquo;wanting to speak&rdquo; to her and calling her out
+      to him. He got up at last and went back into the other room. Clementina
+      had gone upstairs, and the book she had been reading was lying closed on
+      the sideboard. He saw it was one of Chasters' books, he took it up, it was
+      &ldquo;The Core of Truth in Christianity,&rdquo; and he felt an irrational shock at
+      the idea of Clementina reading it. In spite of his own immense changes of
+      opinion he had still to revise his conception of the polemical Chasters as
+      an evil influence in religion. He fidgeted past his wife to the mantel in
+      search of an imaginary mislaid pencil. Clementina came down with some
+      bandage linen she was cutting out. He hung over his wife in a way that he
+      felt must convey his desire for a conversation. Then he picked up
+      Chasters' book again. &ldquo;Does any one want this?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not if I may have it again,&rdquo; consented Clementina.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took it back with him and began to read again those familiar
+      controversial pages. He read for the best part of an hour with his knees
+      drying until they smoked over the gas. What curious stuff it was! How it
+      wrangled! Was Chasters a religious man? Why did he write these books? Had
+      he really a passion for truth or only a Swift-like hatred of
+      weakly-thinking people? None of this stuff in his books was really wrong,
+      provided it was religious-spirited. Much of it had been indeed
+      destructively illuminating to its reader. It let daylight through all
+      sorts of walls. Indeed, the more one read the more vividly true its
+      acid-bit lines became.... And yet, and yet, there was something hateful in
+      the man's tone. Scrope held the book and thought. He had seen Chasters
+      once or twice. Chasters had the sort of face, the sort of voice, the sort
+      of bearing that made one think of his possibly saying upon occasion,
+      rudely and rejoicing, &ldquo;More fool you!&rdquo; Nevertheless Scrope perceived now
+      with an effort of discovery that it was from Chasters that he had taken
+      all the leading ideas of the new faith that was in him. Here was the stuff
+      of it. He had forgotten how much of it was here. During those months of
+      worried study while the threat of a Chasters prosecution hung over him his
+      mind had assimilated almost unknowingly every assimilable element of the
+      Chasters doctrine; he had either assimilated and transmuted it by the
+      alchemy of his own temperament, or he had reacted obviously and filled in
+      Chasters' gaps and pauses. Chasters could beat a road to the Holy of
+      Holies, and shy at entering it. But in spite of all the man's roughness,
+      in spite of a curious flavour of baseness and malice about him, the spirit
+      of truth had spoken through him. God has a use for harsh ministers. In one
+      man God lights the heart, in another the reason becomes a consuming fire.
+      God takes his own where he finds it. He does not limit himself to nice
+      people. In these matters of evidence and argument, in his contempt for
+      amiable, demoralizing compromise, Chasters served God as Scrope could
+      never hope to serve him. Scrope's new faith had perhaps been altogether
+      impossible if the Chasters controversy had not ploughed his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time Scrope dwelt upon this remarkable realization. Then as he
+      turned over the pages his eyes rested on a passage of uncivil and
+      ungenerous sarcasm. Against old Likeman of all people!...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What did a girl like Clementina make of all this? How had she got the
+      book? From Eleanor? The stuff had not hurt Eleanor. Eleanor had been able
+      to take the good that Chasters taught, and reject the evil of his
+      spirit....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of Eleanor, gallantly working out her own salvation. The world
+      was moving fast to a phase of great freedom&mdash;for the young and the
+      bold.... He liked that boy....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His thoughts came back with a start to his wife. The evening was slipping
+      by and he had momentous things to say to her. He went and just opened the
+      door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ella!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you want me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Presently.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She put a liberal interpretation upon that &ldquo;presently,&rdquo; so that after what
+      seemed to him a long interval he had to call again, &ldquo;Ella!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just a minute,&rdquo; she answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (15)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella was still, so to speak, a little in the other room when she came
+      to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shut that door, please,&rdquo; he said, and felt the request had just that
+      flavour of portentousness he wished to avoid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to talk to you&mdash;about some things. I've done something
+      rather serious to-day. I've made an important decision.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her face became anxious. &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; he said, leaning upon the mantelshelf and looking down at the
+      gas flames, &ldquo;I've never thought that we should all have to live in this
+      crowded house for long.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All!&rdquo; she interrupted in a voice that made him look up sharply. &ldquo;You're
+      not going away, Ted?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no. But I hoped we should all be going away in a little time. It
+      isn't so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never quite understood why you hoped that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was plain enough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I should have found something to do that would have enabled us
+      to live in better style. I'd had a plan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What plan?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's fallen through.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what plan was it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I should be able to set up a sort of broad church chapel. I had
+      a promise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice was rich with indignation. &ldquo;And she has betrayed you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I have betrayed her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella's face showed them still at cross purposes. He looked down again
+      and frowned. &ldquo;I can't do that chapel business,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I've had to let
+      her down. I've got to let you all down. There's no help for it. It isn't
+      the way. I can't have anything to do with Lady Sunderbund and her chapel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; Lady Ella was still perplexed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's too great a sacrifice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of us?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, of myself. I can't get into her pulpit and do as she wants and keep
+      my conscience. It's been a horrible riddle for me. It means plunging into
+      all this poverty for good. But I can't work with her, Ella. She's
+      impossible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean&mdash;you're going to break with Lady Sunderbund?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, Teddy!&rdquo;&mdash;she was a woman groping for flight amidst intolerable
+      perplexities&mdash;&ldquo;why did you ever leave the church?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I have ceased to believe&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But had it nothing to do with Lady Sunderbund?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared at her in astonishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it means breaking with that woman,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean,&rdquo; he said, beginning for the first time to comprehend her, &ldquo;that
+      you don't mind the poverty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poverty!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;I cared for nothing but the disgrace.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Disgrace?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, never mind, Ted! If it isn't true, if I've been dreaming....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Instead of a woman stunned by a life sentence of poverty, he saw his wife
+      rejoicing as if she had heard good news.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their minds were held for a minute by the sound of some one knocking at
+      the house door; one of the girls opened the door, there was a brief hubbub
+      in the passage and then they heard a cry of &ldquo;Eleanor!&rdquo; through the folding
+      doors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's Eleanor,&rdquo; he said, realizing he had told his wife nothing of the
+      encounter in Hyde Park.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They heard Eleanor's clear voice: &ldquo;Where's Mummy? Or Daddy?&rdquo; and then:
+      &ldquo;Can't stay now, dears. Where's Mummy or Daddy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought to have told you,&rdquo; said Scrope quickly. &ldquo;I met Eleanor in the
+      Park. By accident. She's come up unexpectedly. To meet a boy going to the
+      front. Quite a nice boy. Son of Riverton the doctor. The parting had made
+      them understand one another. It's all right, Ella. It's a little
+      irregular, but I'd stake my life on the boy. She's very lucky.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Eleanor appeared through the folding doors. She came to business at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I promised you I'd come back to supper here, Daddy,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;But I
+      don't want to have supper here. I want to stay out late.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She saw her mother look perplexed. &ldquo;Hasn't Daddy told you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But where is young Riverton?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's outside.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Eleanor became aware of a broad chink in the folding doors that was making
+      the dining-room an auditorium for their dialogue. She shut them deftly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have told Mummy,&rdquo; Scrope explained. &ldquo;Bring him in to supper. We ought
+      to see him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Eleanor hesitated. She indicated her sisters beyond the folding doors.
+      &ldquo;They'll all be watching us, Mummy,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;We'd be uncomfortable. And
+      besides&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you can't go out and dine with him alone!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Mummy! It's our only chance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Customs are changing,&rdquo; said Scrope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But can they?&rdquo; asked Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see why not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mother was still doubtful, but she was in no mood to cross her husband
+      that night. &ldquo;It's an exceptional occasion,&rdquo; said Scrope, and Eleanor knew
+      her point was won. She became radiant. &ldquo;I can be late?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope handed her his latch-key without a word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You dear kind things,&rdquo; she said, and went to the door. Then turned and
+      came back and kissed her father. Then she kissed her mother. &ldquo;It is so
+      kind of you,&rdquo; she said, and was gone. They listened to her passage through
+      a storm of questions in the dining-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three months ago that would have shocked me,&rdquo; said Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't seen the boy,&rdquo; said Scrope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the appearances!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren't we rather breaking with appearances?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he goes to-morrow&mdash;perhaps to get killed,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;A lad like
+      a schoolboy. A young thing. Because of the political foolery that we
+      priests and teachers have suffered in the place of the Kingdom of God,
+      because we have allowed the religion of Europe to become a lie; because no
+      man spoke the word of God. You see&mdash;when I see that&mdash;see those
+      two, those children of one-and-twenty, wrenched by tragedy, beginning with
+      a parting.... It's like a knife slashing at all our appearances and
+      discretions.... Think of our lovemaking....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The front door banged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had some idea of resuming their talk. But his was a scattered mind now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a quarter to eight,&rdquo; he said as if in explanation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must see to the supper,&rdquo; said Lady Ella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (16)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an air of tension at supper as though the whole family felt that
+      momentous words impended. But Phoebe had emerged victorious from her
+      mathematical struggle, and she seemed to eat with better appetite than she
+      had shown for some time. It was a cold meat supper; Lady Ella had found it
+      impossible to keep up the regular practice of a cooked dinner in the
+      evening, and now it was only on Thursdays that the Scropes, to preserve
+      their social tradition, dressed and dined; the rest of the week they
+      supped. Lady Ella never talked very much at supper; this evening was no
+      exception. Clementina talked of London University and Bedford College; she
+      had been making enquiries; Daphne described some of the mistresses at her
+      new school. The feeling that something was expected had got upon Scrope's
+      nerves. He talked a little in a flat and obvious way, and lapsed into
+      thoughtful silences. While supper was being cleared away he went back into
+      his study.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thence he returned to the dining-room hearthrug as his family resumed
+      their various occupations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to speak in a casual conversational tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to tell you all,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;of something that has happened
+      to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He waited. Phoebe had begun to figure at a fresh sheet of computations.
+      Miriam bent her head closer over her work, as though she winced at what
+      was coming. Daphne and Clementina looked at one another. Their eyes said
+      &ldquo;Eleanor!&rdquo; But he was too full of his own intention to read that glance.
+      Only his wife regarded him attentively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It concerns you all,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at Phoebe. He saw Lady Ella's hand go out and touch the girl's
+      hand gently to make her desist. Phoebe obeyed, with a little sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to tell you that to-day I refused an income that would certainly
+      have exceeded fifteen hundred pounds a year.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Clementina looked up now. This was not what she expected. Her expression
+      conveyed protesting enquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want you all to understand why I did that and why we are in the
+      position we are in, and what lies before us. I want you to know what has
+      been going on in my mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked down at the hearthrug, and tried to throw off a memory of his
+      Princhester classes for young women, that oppressed him. His manner he
+      forced to a more familiar note. He stuck his hands into his trouser
+      pockets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know, my dears, I had to give up the church. I just simply didn't
+      believe any more in orthodox Church teaching. And I feel I've never
+      explained that properly to you. Not at all clearly. I want to explain that
+      now. It's a queer thing, I know, for me to say to you, but I want you to
+      understand that I am a religious man. I believe that God matters more than
+      wealth or comfort or position or the respect of men, that he also matters
+      more than your comfort and prosperity. God knows I have cared for your
+      comfort and prosperity. I don't want you to think that in all these
+      changes we have been through lately, I haven't been aware of all the
+      discomfort into which you have come&mdash;the relative discomfort.
+      Compared with Princhester this is dark and crowded and poverty-stricken. I
+      have never felt crowded before, but in this house I know you are horribly
+      crowded. It is a house that seems almost contrived for small discomforts.
+      This narrow passage outside; the incessant going up and down stairs. And
+      there are other things. There is the blankness of our London Sundays. What
+      is the good of pretending? They are desolating. There's the impossibility
+      too of getting good servants to come into our dug-out kitchen. I'm not
+      blind to all these sordid consequences. But all the same, God has to be
+      served first. I had to come to this. I felt I could not serve God any
+      longer as a bishop in the established church, because I did not believe
+      that the established church was serving God. I struggled against that
+      conviction&mdash;and I struggled against it largely for your sakes. But I
+      had to obey my conviction.... I haven't talked to you about these things
+      as much as I should have done, but partly at least that is due to the fact
+      that my own mind has been changing and reconsidering, going forward and
+      going back, and in that fluid state it didn't seem fair to tell you things
+      that I might presently find mistaken. But now I begin to feel that I have
+      really thought out things, and that they are definite enough to tell
+      you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused and resumed. &ldquo;A number of things have helped to change the
+      opinions in which I grew up and in which you have grown up. There were
+      worries at Princhester; I didn't let you know much about them, but there
+      were. There was something harsh and cruel in that atmosphere. I saw for
+      the first time&mdash;it's a lesson I'm still only learning&mdash;how harsh
+      and greedy rich people and employing people are to poor people and working
+      people, and how ineffective our church was to make things better. That
+      struck me. There were religious disputes in the diocese too, and they
+      shook me. I thought my faith was built on a rock, and I found it was built
+      on sand. It was slipping and sliding long before the war. But the war
+      brought it down. Before the war such a lot of things in England and Europe
+      seemed like a comedy or a farce, a bad joke that one tolerated. One tried
+      half consciously, half avoiding the knowledge of what one was doing, to
+      keep one's own little circle and life civilized. The war shook all those
+      ideas of isolation, all that sort of evasion, down. The world is the
+      rightful kingdom of God; we had left its affairs to kings and emperors and
+      suchlike impostors, to priests and profit-seekers and greedy men. We were
+      genteel condoners. The war has ended that. It thrusts into all our lives.
+      It brings death so close&mdash;A fortnight ago twenty-seven people were
+      killed and injured within a mile of this by Zeppelin bombs.... Every one
+      loses some one.... Because through all that time men like myself were
+      going through our priestly mummeries, abasing ourselves to kings and
+      politicians, when we ought to have been crying out: 'No! No! There is no
+      righteousness in the world, there is no right government, except it be the
+      kingdom of God.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused and looked at them. They were all listening to him now. But he
+      was still haunted by a dread of preaching in his own family. He dropped to
+      the conversational note again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see what I had in mind. I saw I must come out of this, and preach the
+      kingdom of God. That was my idea. I don't want to force it upon you, but I
+      want you to understand why I acted as I did. But let me come to the
+      particular thing that has happened to-day. I did not think when I made my
+      final decision to leave the church that it meant such poverty as this we
+      are living in&mdash;permanently. That is what I want to make clear to you.
+      I thought there would be a temporary dip into dinginess, but that was all.
+      There was a plan; at the time it seemed a right and reasonable plan; for
+      setting up a chapel in London, a very plain and simple undenominational
+      chapel, for the simple preaching of the world kingdom of God. There was
+      some one who seemed prepared to meet all the immediate demands for such a
+      chapel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was it Lady Sunderbund?&rdquo; asked Clementina.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope was pulled up abruptly. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It seemed at first a quite
+      hopeful project.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'd have hated that,&rdquo; said Clementina, with a glance as if for assent,
+      at her mother. &ldquo;We should all have hated that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anyhow it has fallen through.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We don't mind that,&rdquo; said Clementina, and Daphne echoed her words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see that there is any necessity to import this note of&mdash;hostility
+      to Lady Sunderbund into this matter.&rdquo; He addressed himself rather more
+      definitely to Lady Ella. &ldquo;She's a woman of a very extraordinary character,
+      highly emotional, energetic, generous to an extraordinary extent....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Daphne made a little noise like a comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A faint acerbity in her father's voice responded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anyhow you make a mistake if you think that the personality of Lady
+      Sunderbund has very much to do with this thing now. Her quality may have
+      brought out certain aspects of the situation rather more sharply than they
+      might have been brought out under other circumstances, but if this chapel
+      enterprise had been suggested by quite a different sort of person, by a
+      man, or by a committee, in the end I think I should have come to the same
+      conclusion. Leave Lady Sunderbund out. Any chapel was impossible. It is
+      just this specialization that has been the trouble with religion. It is
+      just this tendency to make it the business of a special sort of man, in a
+      special sort of building, on a special day&mdash;Every man, every
+      building, every day belongs equally to God. That is my conviction. I think
+      that the only possible existing sort of religions meeting is something
+      after the fashion of the Quaker meeting. In that there is no professional
+      religious man at all; not a trace of the sacrifices to the ancient
+      gods.... And no room for a professional religions man....&rdquo; He felt his
+      argument did a little escape him. He snatched, &ldquo;That is what I want to
+      make clear to you. God is not a speciality; he is a universal interest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped. Both Daphne and Clementina seemed disposed to say something
+      and did not say anything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miriam was the first to speak. &ldquo;Daddy,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I know I'm stupid. But
+      are we still Christians?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want you to think for yourselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I mean,&rdquo; said Miriam, &ldquo;are we&mdash;something like Quakers&mdash;a
+      sort of very broad Christians?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are what you choose to be. If you want to keep in the church, then
+      you must keep in the church. If you feel that the Christian doctrine is
+      alive, then it is alive so far as you are concerned.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the creeds?&rdquo; asked Clementina.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook his head. &ldquo;So far as Christianity is defined by its creeds, I am
+      not a Christian. If we are going to call any sort of religious feeling
+      that has a respect for Jesus, Christianity, then no doubt I am a
+      Christian. But so was Mohammed at that rate. Let me tell you what I
+      believe. I believe in God, I believe in the immediate presence of God in
+      every human life, I believe that our lives have to serve the Kingdom of
+      God....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That practically is what Mr. Chasters calls 'The Core of Truth in
+      Christianity.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been reading him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eleanor lent me the book. But Mr. Chasters keeps his living.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not Chasters,&rdquo; said Scrope stiffly, and then relenting: &ldquo;What he
+      does may be right for him. But I could not do as he does.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Ella had said no word for some time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would be ashamed,&rdquo; she said quietly, &ldquo;if you had not done as you have
+      done. I don't mind&mdash;The girls don't mind&mdash;all this.... Not when
+      we understand&mdash;as we do now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the limit of her eloquence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not now that we understand, Daddy,&rdquo; said Clementina, and a faint flavour
+      of Lady Sunderbund seemed to pass and vanish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a queer little pause. He stood rather distressed and perplexed,
+      because the talk had not gone quite as he had intended it to go. It had
+      deteriorated towards personal issues. Phoebe broke the awkwardness by
+      jumping up and coming to her father. &ldquo;Dear Daddy,&rdquo; she said, and kissed
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We didn't understand properly,&rdquo; said Clementina, in the tone of one who
+      explains away much&mdash;that had never been spoken....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Daddy,&rdquo; said Miriam with an inspiration, &ldquo;may I play something to you
+      presently?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the fire!&rdquo; interjected Lady Ella, disposing of that idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want you to know, all of you, the faith I have,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Daphne had remained seated at the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are we never to go to church again?&rdquo; she asked, as if at a loss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (17)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scrope went back into his little study. He felt shy and awkward with his
+      daughters now. He felt it would be difficult to get back to usualness with
+      them. To-night it would be impossible. To-morrow he must come down to
+      breakfast as though their talk had never occurred.... In his rehearsal of
+      this deliverance during his walk home he had spoken much more plainly of
+      his sense of the coming of God to rule the world and end the long age of
+      the warring nations and competing traders, and he had intended to speak
+      with equal plainness of the passionate subordination of the individual
+      life to this great common purpose of God and man, an aspect he had
+      scarcely mentioned at all. But in that little room, in the presence of
+      those dear familiar people, those great horizons of life had vanished. The
+      room with its folding doors had fixed the scale. The wallpaper had
+      smothered the Kingdom of God; he had been, he felt, domestic; it had been
+      an after-supper talk. He had been put out, too, by the mention of Lady
+      Sunderbund and the case of Chasters....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his study he consoled himself for this diminution of his intention. It
+      had taken him five years, he reflected, to get to his present real sense
+      of God's presence and to his personal subordination to God's purpose. It
+      had been a little absurd, he perceived, to expect these girls to leap at
+      once to a complete understanding of the halting hints, the allusive
+      indications of the thoughts that now possessed his soul. He tried like
+      some maiden speaker to recall exactly what it was he had said and what it
+      was he had forgotten to say.... This was merely a beginning, merely a
+      beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the girls had gone to bed, Lady Ella came to him and she was glowing
+      and tender; she was in love again as she had not been since the shadow had
+      first fallen between them. &ldquo;I was so glad you spoke to them,&rdquo; she said.
+      &ldquo;They had been puzzled. But they are dear loyal girls.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to tell her rather more plainly what he felt about the whole
+      question of religion in their lives, but eloquence had departed from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, Ella, life cannot get out of tragedy&mdash;and sordid tragedy&mdash;until
+      we bring about the Kingdom of God. It's no unreality that has made me come
+      out of the church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, dear. No,&rdquo; she said soothingly and reassuringly. &ldquo;With all these mere
+      boys going to the most dreadful deaths in the trenches, with death,
+      hardship and separation running amok in the world&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One has to do something,&rdquo; she agreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know, dear,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that all this year of doubt and change has been
+      a dreadful year for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was stupid of me,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;but I have been so unhappy. It's over
+      now&mdash;but I was wretched. And there was nothing I could say.... I
+      prayed.... It isn't the poverty I feared ever, but the disgrace. Now&mdash;I'm
+      happy. I'm happy again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how far do you come with me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you are still a churchwoman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I don't mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I thought always that was what hurt you most, my breach with the
+      church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Things are so different now,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her heart dissolved within her into tender possessiveness. There came
+      flooding into her mind the old phrases of an ancient story: &ldquo;Whither thou
+      goest I will go... thy people shall be my people and thy God my God....
+      The Lord do so to me and more also if aught but death part thee and me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Just those words would Lady Ella have said to her husband now, but she was
+      capable of no such rhetoric.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whither thou goest,&rdquo; she whispered almost inaudibly, and she could get no
+      further. &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (18)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At two o'clock the next morning Scrope was still up. He was sitting over
+      the snoring gas fire in his study. He did not want to go to bed. His mind
+      was too excited, he knew, for any hope of sleep. In the last twelve hours,
+      since he had gone out across the park to his momentous talk with Lady
+      Sunderbund, it seemed to him that his life had passed through its cardinal
+      crisis and come to its crown and decision. The spiritual voyage that had
+      begun five years ago amidst a stormy succession of theological nightmares
+      had reached harbour at last. He was established now in the sure conviction
+      of God's reality, and of his advent to unify the lives of men and to save
+      mankind. Some unobserved process in his mind had perfected that
+      conviction, behind the cloudy veil of his vacillations and moods. Surely
+      that work was finished now, and the day's experience had drawn the veil
+      and discovered God established for ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He contrasted this simple and overruling knowledge of God as the supreme
+      fact in a practical world with that vague and ineffective subject for
+      sentiment who had been the &ldquo;God&rdquo; of his Anglican days. Some theologian
+      once spoke of God as &ldquo;the friend behind phenomena&rdquo;; that Anglican deity
+      had been rather a vague flummery behind court and society, wealth,
+      &ldquo;respectability,&rdquo; and the comfortable life. And even while he had lived in
+      lipservice to that complaisant compromise, this true God had been here,
+      this God he now certainly professed, waiting for his allegiance, waiting
+      to take up the kingship of this distraught and bloodstained earth. The
+      finding of God is but the stripping of bandages from the eyes. Seek and ye
+      shall find....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He whispered four words very softly: &ldquo;The Kingdom of God!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was quite sure he had that now, quite sure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Kingdom of God!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That now was the form into which all his life must fall. He recalled his
+      vision of the silver sphere and of ten thousand diverse minds about the
+      world all making their ways to the same one conclusion. Here at last was a
+      king and emperor for mankind for whom one need have neither contempt nor
+      resentment; here was an aim for which man might forge the steel and wield
+      the scalpel, write and paint and till and teach. Upon this conception he
+      must model all his life. Upon this basis he must found friendships and
+      co-operations. All the great religions, Christianity, Islam, in the days
+      of their power and honesty, had proclaimed the advent of this kingdom of
+      God. It had been their common inspiration. A religion surrenders when it
+      abandons the promise of its Millennium. He had recovered that ancient and
+      immortal hope. All men must achieve it, and with their achievement the
+      rule of God begins. He muttered his faith. It made it more definite to put
+      it into words and utter it. &ldquo;It comes. It surely comes. To-morrow I begin.
+      I will do no work that goes not Godward. Always now it shall be the truth
+      as near as I can put it. Always now it shall be the service of the
+      commonweal as well as I can do it. I will live for the ending of all false
+      kingship and priestcraft, for the eternal growth of the spirit of man....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was, he knew clearly, only one common soldier in a great army that was
+      finding its way to enlistment round and about the earth. He was not alone.
+      While the kings of this world fought for dominion these others gathered
+      and found themselves and one another, these others of the faith that grows
+      plain, these men who have resolved to end the bloodstained chronicles of
+      the Dynasts and the miseries of a world that trades in life, for ever.
+      They were many men, speaking divers tongues. He was but one who obeyed the
+      worldwide impulse. He could smile at the artless vanity that had blinded
+      him to the import of his earlier visions, that had made him imagine
+      himself a sole discoverer, a new Prophet, that had brought him so near to
+      founding a new sect. Every soldier in the new host was a recruiting
+      sergeant according to his opportunity.... And none was leader. Only God
+      was leader....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The achievement of the Kingdom of God;&rdquo; this was his calling. Henceforth
+      this was his business in life....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time he indulged in vague dreams of that kingdom of God on earth of
+      which he would be one of the makers; it was a dream of a shadowy splendour
+      of cities, of great scientific achievements, of a universal beauty, of
+      beautiful people living in the light of God, of a splendid adventure,
+      thrusting out at last among the stars. But neither his natural bent nor
+      his mental training inclined him to mechanical or administrative
+      explicitness. Much more was his dream a vision of men inwardly ennobled
+      and united in spirit. He saw history growing reasonable and life visibly
+      noble as mankind realized the divine aim. All the outward peace and order,
+      the joy of physical existence finely conceived, the mounting power and
+      widening aim were but the expression and verification of the growth of God
+      within. Then we would bear children for finer ends than the blood and mud
+      of battlefields. Life would tower up like a great flame. By faith we
+      reached forward to that. The vision grew more splendid as it grew more
+      metaphorical. And the price one paid for that; one gave sham dignities,
+      false honour, a Levitical righteousness, immediate peace, one bartered
+      kings and churches for God.... He looked at the mean, poverty-struck room,
+      he marked the dinginess and tawdriness of its detail and all the sordid
+      evidences of ungracious bargaining and grudging service in its
+      appointments. For all his life now he would have to live in such rooms. He
+      who had been one of the lucky ones.... Well, men were living in dug-outs
+      and dying gaily in muddy trenches, they had given limbs and lives, eyes
+      and the joy of movement, prosperity and pride, for a smaller cause and a
+      feebler assurance than this that he had found....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (19)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently his thoughts were brought back to his family by the sounds of
+      Eleanor's return. He heard her key in the outer door; he heard her move
+      about in the hall and then slip lightly up to bed. He did not go out to
+      speak to her, and she did not note the light under his door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would talk to her later when this discovery of her own emotions no
+      longer dominated her mind. He recalled her departing figure and how she
+      had walked, touching and looking up to her young mate, and he a little
+      leaning to her....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God bless them and save them,&rdquo; he said....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought of her sisters. They had said but little to his clumsy
+      explanations. He thought of the years and experience that they must needs
+      pass through before they could think the fulness of his present thoughts,
+      and so he tempered his disappointment. They were a gallant group, he felt.
+      He had to thank Ella and good fortune that so they were. There was
+      Clementina with her odd quick combatant sharpness, a harder being than
+      Eleanor, but nevertheless a fine-spirited and even more independent. There
+      was Miriam, indefatigably kind. Phoebe too had a real passion of the
+      intellect and Daphne an innate disposition to service. But it was strange
+      how they had taken his proclamation of a conclusive breach with the church
+      as though it was a command they must, at least outwardly, obey. He had
+      expected them to be more deeply shocked; he had thought he would have to
+      argue against objections and convert them to his views. Their acquiescence
+      was strange. They were content he should think all this great issue out
+      and give his results to them. And his wife, well as he knew her, had
+      surprised him. He thought of her words: &ldquo;Whither thou goest&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was dissatisfied with this unconditional agreement. Why could not his
+      wife meet God as he had met God? Why must Miriam put the fantastic
+      question&mdash;as though it was not for her to decide: &ldquo;Are we still
+      Christians?&rdquo; And pursuing this thought, why couldn't Lady Sunderbund set
+      up in religion for herself without going about the world seeking for a
+      priest and prophet. Were women Undines who must get their souls from
+      mortal men? And who was it tempted men to set themselves up as priests? It
+      was the wife, the disciple, the lover, who was the last, the most fatal
+      pitfall on the way to God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to pray, still sitting as he prayed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh God!&rdquo; he prayed. &ldquo;Thou who has shown thyself to me, let me never
+      forget thee again. Save me from forgetfulness. And show thyself to those I
+      love; show thyself to all mankind. Use me, O God, use me; but keep my soul
+      alive. Save me from the presumption of the trusted servant; save me from
+      the vanity of authority....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And let thy light shine upon all those who are so dear to me.... Save
+      them from me. Take their dear loyalty....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused. A flushed, childishly miserable face that stared indignantly
+      through glittering tears, rose before his eyes. He forgot that he had been
+      addressing God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I help you, you silly thing?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I would give my own soul
+      to know that God had given his peace to you. I could not do as you wished.
+      And I have hurt you!... You hurt yourself.... But all the time you would
+      have hampered me and tempted me&mdash;and wasted yourself. It was
+      impossible.... And yet you are so fine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was struck by another aspect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ella was happy&mdash;partly because Lady Sunderbund was hurt and left
+      desolated....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Both of them are still living upon nothings. Living for nothings. A
+      phantom way of living....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared blankly at the humming blue gas jets amidst the incandescent
+      asbestos for a space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make them understand,&rdquo; he pleaded, as though he spoke confidentially of
+      some desirable and reasonable thing to a friend who sat beside him. &ldquo;You
+      see it is so hard for them until they understand. It is easy enough when
+      one understands. Easy&mdash;&rdquo; He reflected for some moments&mdash;&ldquo;It is
+      as if they could not exist&mdash;except in relationship to other definite
+      people. I want them to exist&mdash;as now I exist&mdash;in relationship to
+      God. Knowing God....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But now he was talking to himself again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So far as one can know God,&rdquo; he said presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a while he remained frowning at the fire. Then he bent forward, turned
+      out the gas, arose with the air of a man who relinquishes a difficult
+      task. &ldquo;One is limited,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;All one's ideas must fall within one's
+      limitations. Faith is a sort of tour de force. A feat of the imagination.
+      For such things as we are. Naturally&mdash;naturally.... One perceives it
+      clearly only in rare moments.... That alters nothing....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h4>
+      Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:
+    </h4>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
+     KIPPS
+     MR. POLLY
+     THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
+     THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
+     ANN VERONICA
+     TONO BUNGAY
+     MARRIAGE
+     BEALBY
+     THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
+     THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
+     THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+     MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
+
+     The following fantastic and imaginative romances:
+     THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
+     THE TIME MACHINE
+     THE WONDERFUL VISIT
+     THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
+     THE SEA LADY
+     THE SLEEPER AWAKES
+     THE FOOD OF THE GODS
+     THE WAR IN THE AIR
+     THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
+     IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
+     THE WORLD SET FREE
+
+     And numerous Short Stories now collected in
+     One Volume under the title of
+     THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
+
+     A Series of books upon Social, Religious and
+     Political questions:
+     ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
+     MANKIND IN THE MAKING
+     FIRST AND LAST THINGS (RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY)
+     NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
+     A MODERN UTOPIA
+     THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
+     AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
+     WHAT IS COMING?
+     WAR AND THE FUTURE
+     GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
+
+     And two little books about children's play, called:
+     FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Soul of a Bishop, by H. G. Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Soul of a Bishop
+
+Author: H. G. Wells
+
+Release Date: February 18, 2006 [EBook #1269]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOUL OF A BISHOP ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
+
+By H. G. Wells
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+     CHAPTER THE FIRST   -  THE DREAM
+     CHAPTER THE SECOND  -  THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY
+     CHAPTER THE THIRD   -  INSOMNIA
+     CHAPTER THE FOURTH  -  THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND
+     CHAPTER THE FIFTH   -  THE FIRST VISION
+     CHAPTER THE SIXTH   -  EXEGETICAL
+     CHAPTER THE SEVENTH -  THE SECOND VISION
+     CHAPTER THE EIGHTH  -  THE NEW WORLD
+     CHAPTER THE NINTH   -  THE THIRD VISION
+
+
+"Man's true Environment is God"
+
+J. H. OLDHAM in "The Christian Gospel" (Tract of the N. M. R. and H.)
+
+
+
+
+THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST - THE DREAM
+
+(1)
+
+
+IT was a scene of bitter disputation. A hawk-nosed young man with a
+pointing finger was prominent. His face worked violently, his lips moved
+very rapidly, but what he said was inaudible.
+
+Behind him the little rufous man with the big eyes twitched at his robe
+and offered suggestions.
+
+And behind these two clustered a great multitude of heated, excited,
+swarthy faces....
+
+The emperor sat on his golden throne in the midst of the gathering,
+commanding silence by gestures, speaking inaudibly to them in a tongue
+the majority did not use, and then prevailing. They ceased their
+interruptions, and the old man, Arius, took up the debate. For a time
+all those impassioned faces were intent upon him; they listened as
+though they sought occasion, and suddenly as if by a preconcerted
+arrangement they were all thrusting their fingers into their ears and
+knitting their brows in assumed horror; some were crying aloud and
+making as if to fly. Some indeed tucked up their garments and fled. They
+spread out into a pattern. They were like the little monks who run from
+St. Jerome's lion in the picture by Carpaccio. Then one zealot rushed
+forward and smote the old man heavily upon the mouth....
+
+The hall seemed to grow vaster and vaster, the disputing, infuriated
+figures multiplied to an innumerable assembly, they drove about like
+snowflakes in a gale, they whirled in argumentative couples, they spun
+in eddies of contradiction, they made extraordinary patterns, and then
+amidst the cloudy darkness of the unfathomable dome above them there
+appeared and increased a radiant triangle in which shone an eye. The eye
+and the triangle filled the heavens, sent out flickering rays, glowed
+to a blinding incandescence, seemed to be speaking words of thunder
+that were nevertheless inaudible. It was as if that thunder filled the
+heavens, it was as if it were nothing but the beating artery in the
+sleeper's ear. The attention strained to hear and comprehend, and on the
+very verge of comprehension snapped like a fiddle-string.
+
+"Nicoea!"
+
+The word remained like a little ash after a flare.
+
+The sleeper had awakened and lay very still, oppressed by a sense of
+intellectual effort that had survived the dream in which it had arisen.
+Was it so that things had happened? The slumber-shadowed mind, moving
+obscurely, could not determine whether it was so or not. Had they indeed
+behaved in this manner when the great mystery was established? Who
+said they stopped their ears with their fingers and fled, shouting with
+horror? Shouting? Was it Eusebius or Athanasius? Or Sozomen.... Some
+letter or apology by Athanasius?... And surely it was impossible that
+the Trinity could have appeared visibly as a triangle and an eye. Above
+such an assembly.
+
+That was mere dreaming, of course. Was it dreaming after Raphael? After
+Raphael? The drowsy mind wandered into a side issue. Was the picture
+that had suggested this dream the one in the Vatican where all the
+Fathers of the Church are shown disputing together? But there surely God
+and the Son themselves were painted with a symbol--some symbol--also?
+But was that disputation about the Trinity at all? Wasn't it rather
+about a chalice and a dove? Of course it was a chalice and a dove! Then
+where did one see the triangle and the eye? And men disputing? Some such
+picture there was....
+
+What a lot of disputing there had been! What endless disputing! Which
+had gone on. Until last night. When this very disagreeable young man
+with the hawk nose and the pointing finger had tackled one when one was
+sorely fagged, and disputed; disputed. Rebuked and disputed. "Answer me
+this," he had said.... And still one's poor brains disputed and would
+not rest.... About the Trinity....
+
+The brain upon the pillow was now wearily awake. It was at once
+hopelessly awake and active and hopelessly unprogressive. It was like
+some floating stick that had got caught in an eddy in a river, going
+round and round and round. And round. Eternally--eternally--eternally
+begotten.
+
+"But what possible meaning do you attach then to such a phrase as
+eternally begotten?"
+
+The brain upon the pillow stared hopelessly at this question, without an
+answer, without an escape. The three repetitions spun round and round,
+became a swiftly revolving triangle, like some electric sign that
+had got beyond control, in the midst of which stared an unwinking and
+resentful eye.
+
+(2)
+
+
+Every one knows that expedient of the sleepless, the counting of sheep.
+
+You lie quite still, you breathe regularly, you imagine sheep jumping
+over a gate, one after another, you count them quietly and slowly until
+you count yourself off through a fading string of phantom numbers to
+number Nod....
+
+But sheep, alas! suggest an episcopal crook.
+
+And presently a black sheep had got into the succession and was
+struggling violently with the crook about its leg, a hawk-nosed black
+sheep full of reproof, with disordered hair and a pointing finger. A
+young man with a most disagreeable voice.
+
+At which the other sheep took heart and, deserting the numbered
+succession, came and sat about the fire in a big drawing-room and argued
+also. In particular there was Lady Sunderbund, a pretty fragile tall
+woman in the corner, richly jewelled, who sat with her pretty eyes
+watching and her lips compressed. What had she thought of it? She had
+said very little.
+
+It is an unusual thing for a mixed gathering of this sort to argue about
+the Trinity. Simply because a tired bishop had fallen into their party.
+It was not fair to him to pretend that the atmosphere was a liberal and
+inquiring one, when the young man who had sat still and dormant by the
+table was in reality a keen and bitter Irish Roman Catholic. Then the
+question, a question-begging question, was put quite suddenly, without
+preparation or prelude, by surprise. "Why, Bishop, was the Spermaticos
+Logos identified with the Second and not the Third Person of the
+Trinity?"
+
+It was indiscreet, it was silly, to turn upon the speaker and affect an
+air of disengagement and modernity and to say: "Ah, that indeed is the
+unfortunate aspect of the whole affair."
+
+Whereupon the fierce young man had exploded with: "To that, is it, that
+you Anglicans have come?"
+
+The whole gathering had given itself up to the disputation, Lady
+Sunderbund, an actress, a dancer--though she, it is true, did not say
+very much--a novelist, a mechanical expert of some sort, a railway peer,
+geniuses, hairy and Celtic, people of no clearly definable position,
+but all quite unequal to the task of maintaining that air of reverent
+vagueness, that tenderness of touch, which is by all Anglican standards
+imperative in so deep, so mysterious, and, nowadays, in mixed society at
+least, so infrequent a discussion.
+
+It was like animals breaking down a fence about some sacred spot. Within
+a couple of minutes the affair had become highly improper. They had
+raised their voices, they had spoken with the utmost familiarity of
+almost unspeakable things. There had been even attempts at epigram.
+Athanasian epigrams. Bent the novelist had doubted if originally there
+had been a Third Person in the Trinity at all. He suggested a reaction
+from a too-Manichaean dualism at some date after the time of St. John's
+Gospel. He maintained obstinately that that Gospel was dualistic.
+
+The unpleasant quality of the talk was far more manifest in the
+retrospect than it had been at the time. It had seemed then bold
+and strange, but not impossible; now in the cold darkness it seemed
+sacrilegious. And the bishop's share, which was indeed only the weak
+yielding of a tired man to an atmosphere he had misjudged, became a
+disgraceful display of levity and bad faith. They had baited him.
+Some one had said that nowadays every one was an Arian, knowingly or
+unknowingly. They had not concealed their conviction that the bishop did
+not really believe in the Creeds he uttered.
+
+And that unfortunate first admission stuck terribly in his throat.
+
+Oh! Why had he made it?
+
+(3)
+
+
+Sleep had gone.
+
+The awakened sleeper groaned, sat up in the darkness, and felt gropingly
+in this unaccustomed bed and bedroom first for the edge of the bed and
+then for the electric light that was possibly on the little bedside
+table.
+
+The searching hand touched something. A water-bottle. The hand resumed
+its exploration. Here was something metallic and smooth, a stem. Either
+above or below there must be a switch....
+
+The switch was found, grasped, and turned.
+
+The darkness fled.
+
+In a mirror the sleeper saw the reflection of his face and a corner
+of the bed in which he lay. The lamp had a tilted shade that threw
+a slanting bar of shadow across the field of reflection, lighting a
+right-angled triangle very brightly and leaving the rest obscure. The
+bed was a very great one, a bed for the Anakim. It had a canopy with
+yellow silk curtains, surmounted by a gilded crown of carved wood.
+Between the curtains was a man's face, clean-shaven, pale, with
+disordered brown hair and weary, pale-blue eyes. He was clad in purple
+pyjamas, and the hand that now ran its fingers through the brown hair
+was long and lean and shapely.
+
+Beside the bed was a convenient little table bearing the light, a
+water-bottle and glass, a bunch of keys, a congested pocket-book, a
+gold-banded fountain pen, and a gold watch that indicated a quarter past
+three. On the lower edge of the picture in the mirror appeared the back
+of a gilt chair, over which a garment of peculiar construction had been
+carelessly thrown. It was in the form of that sleeveless cassock of
+purple, opening at the side, whose lower flap is called a bishop's
+apron; the corner of the frogged coat showed behind the chair-back, and
+the sash lay crumpled on the floor. Black doeskin breeches, still warmly
+lined with their pants, lay where they had been thrust off at the corner
+of the bed, partly covering black hose and silver-buckled shoes.
+
+For a moment the tired gaze of the man in the bed rested upon these
+evidences of his episcopal dignity. Then he turned from them to the
+watch at the bedside.
+
+He groaned helplessly.
+
+(4)
+
+
+These country doctors were no good. There wasn't a physician in the
+diocese. He must go to London.
+
+He looked into the weary eyes of his reflection and said, as one makes a
+reassuring promise, "London."
+
+He was being worried. He was being intolerably worried, and he was ill
+and unable to sustain his positions. This doubt, this sudden discovery
+of controversial unsoundness, was only one aspect of his general
+neurasthenia. It had been creeping into his mind since the "Light Unden
+the Altar" controversy. Now suddenly it had leapt upon him from his own
+unwary lips.
+
+The immediate trouble arose from his loyalty. He had followed the King's
+example; he had become a total abstainer and, in addition, on his own
+account he had ceased to smoke. And his digestion, which Princhester
+had first made sensitive, was deranged. He was suffering chemically,
+suffering one of those nameless sequences of maladjustments that still
+defy our ordinary medical science. It was afflicting him with a general
+malaise, it was affecting his energy, his temper, all the balance and
+comfort of his nerves. All day he was weary; all night he was wakeful.
+He was estranged from his body. He was distressed by a sense of
+detachment from the things about him, by a curious intimation of
+unreality in everything he experienced. And with that went this levity
+of conscience, a heaviness of soul and a levity of conscience, that
+could make him talk as though the Creeds did not matter--as though
+nothing mattered....
+
+If only he could smoke!
+
+He was persuaded that a couple of Egyptian cigarettes, or three at the
+outside, a day, would do wonders in restoring his nervous calm. That,
+and just a weak whisky and soda at lunch and dinner. Suppose now--!
+
+His conscience, his sense of honour, deserted him. Latterly he had had
+several of these conscience-blanks; it was only when they were over that
+he realized that they had occurred.
+
+One might smoke up the chimney, he reflected. But he had no cigarettes!
+Perhaps if he were to slip downstairs....
+
+Why had he given up smoking?
+
+He groaned aloud. He and his reflection eyed one another in mutual
+despair.
+
+There came before his memory the image of a boy's face, a swarthy little
+boy, grinning, grinning with a horrible knowingness and pointing
+his finger--an accusing finger. It had been the most exasperating,
+humiliating, and shameful incident in the bishop's career. It was
+the afternoon for his fortnightly address to the Shop-girls' Church
+Association, and he had been seized with a panic fear, entirely
+irrational and unjustifiable, that he would not be able to deliver the
+address. The fear had arisen after lunch, had gripped his mind, and then
+as now had come the thought, "If only I could smoke!" And he had smoked.
+It seemed better to break a vow than fail the Association. He had fallen
+to the temptation with a completeness that now filled him with shame and
+horror. He had stalked Dunk, his valet-butler, out of the dining-room,
+had affected to need a book from the book-case beyond the sideboard,
+had gone insincerely to the sideboard humming "From Greenland's icy
+mountains," and then, glancing over his shoulder, had stolen one of
+his own cigarettes, one of the fatter sort. With this and his bedroom
+matches he had gone off to the bottom of the garden among the laurels,
+looked everywhere except above the wall to be sure that he was alone,
+and at last lit up, only as he raised his eyes in gratitude for the
+first blissful inhalation to discover that dreadful little boy peeping
+at him from the crotch in the yew-tree in the next garden. As though God
+had sent him to be a witness!
+
+Their eyes had met. The bishop recalled with an agonized distinctness
+every moment, every error, of that shameful encounter. He had been too
+surprised to conceal the state of affairs from the pitiless scrutiny of
+those youthful eyes. He had instantly made as if to put the cigarette
+behind his back, and then as frankly dropped it....
+
+His soul would not be more naked at the resurrection. The little boy
+had stared, realized the state of affairs slowly but surely, pointed his
+finger....
+
+Never had two human beings understood each other more completely.
+
+A dirty little boy! Capable no doubt of a thousand kindred
+scoundrelisms.
+
+It seemed ages before the conscience-stricken bishop could tear himself
+from the spot and walk back, with such a pretence of dignity as he could
+muster, to the house.
+
+And instead of the discourse he had prepared for the Shop-girls' Church
+Association, he had preached on temptation and falling, and how he knew
+they had all fallen, and how he understood and could sympathize with the
+bitterness of a secret shame, a moving but unsuitable discourse that
+had already been subjected to misconstruction and severe reproof in the
+local press of Princhester.
+
+But the haunting thing in the bishop's memory was the face and gesture
+of the little boy. That grubby little finger stabbed him to the heart.
+
+"Oh, God!" he groaned. "The meanness of it! How did I bring myself--?"
+
+He turned out the light convulsively, and rolled over in the bed, making
+a sort of cocoon of himself. He bored his head into the pillow and
+groaned, and then struggled impatiently to throw the bed-clothes off
+himself. Then he sat up and talked aloud.
+
+"I must go to Brighton-Pomfrey," he said. "And get a medical
+dispensation. If I do not smoke--"
+
+He paused for a long time.
+
+Then his voice sounded again in the darkness, speaking quietly, speaking
+with a note almost of satisfaction.
+
+"I shall go mad. I must smoke or I shall go mad."
+
+For a long time he sat up in the great bed with his arms about his
+knees.
+
+(5)
+
+
+Fearful things came to him; things at once dreadfully blasphemous and
+entirely weak-minded.
+
+The triangle and the eye became almost visible upon the black background
+of night. They were very angry. They were spinning round and round
+faster and faster. Because he was a bishop and because really he did not
+believe fully and completely in the Trinity. At one and the same time
+he did not believe in the Trinity and was terrified by the anger of the
+Trinity at his unbelief.... He was afraid. He was aghast.... And oh! he
+was weary....
+
+He rubbed his eyes.
+
+"If I could have a cup of tea!" he said.
+
+Then he perceived with surprise that he had not thought of praying. What
+should he say? To what could he pray?
+
+He tried not to think of that whizzing Triangle, that seemed now to be
+nailed like a Catherine wheel to the very centre of his forehead,
+and yet at the same time to be at the apex of the universe. Against
+that--for protection against that--he was praying. It was by a great
+effort that at last he pronounced the words:
+
+"Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord ...."
+
+Presently he had turned up his light, and was prowling about the room.
+The clear inky dinginess that comes before the raw dawn of a spring
+morning, found his white face at the window, looking out upon the great
+terrace and the park.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND - THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY
+
+(1)
+
+
+IT was only in the last few years that the bishop had experienced
+these nervous and mental crises. He was a belated doubter. Whatever
+questionings had marked his intellectual adolescence had either been
+very slight or had been too adequately answered to leave any serious
+scars upon his convictions.
+
+And even now he felt that he was afflicted physically rather than
+mentally, that some protective padding of nerve-sheath or brain-case had
+worn thin and weak, and left him a prey to strange disturbances, rather
+than that any new process of thought was eating into his mind. These
+doubts in his mind were still not really doubts; they were rather alien
+and, for the first time, uncontrolled movements of his intelligence.
+He had had a sheltered upbringing; he was the well-connected son of
+a comfortable rectory, the only son and sole survivor of a family
+of three; he had been carefully instructed and he had been a willing
+learner; it had been easy and natural to take many things for granted.
+It had been very easy and pleasant for him to take the world as he found
+it and God as he found Him. Indeed for all his years up to manhood
+he had been able to take life exactly as in his infancy he took his
+carefully warmed and prepared bottle--unquestioningly and beneficially.
+
+And indeed that has been the way with most bishops since bishops began.
+
+It is a busy continuous process that turns boys into bishops, and it
+will stand few jars or discords. The student of ecclesiastical biography
+will find that an early vocation has in every age been almost universal
+among them; few are there among these lives that do not display the
+incipient bishop from the tenderest years. Bishop How of Wakefield
+composed hymns before he was eleven, and Archbishop Benson when scarcely
+older possessed a little oratory in which he conducted services and--a
+pleasant touch of the more secular boy--which he protected from a too
+inquisitive sister by means of a booby trap. It is rare that those
+marked for episcopal dignities go so far into the outer world
+as Archbishop Lang of York, who began as a barrister. This early
+predestination has always been the common episcopal experience.
+Archbishop Benson's early attempts at religious services remind one both
+of St. Thomas a Becket, the "boy bishop," and those early ceremonies of
+St. Athanasius which were observed and inquired upon by the good bishop
+Alexander. (For though still a tender infant, St. Athanasius with
+perfect correctness and validity was baptizing a number of his innocent
+playmates, and the bishop who "had paused to contemplate the sports of
+the child remained to confirm the zeal of the missionary.") And as with
+the bishop of the past, so with the bishop of the future; the Rev. H. J.
+Campbell, in his story of his soul's pilgrimage, has given us a pleasant
+picture of himself as a child stealing out into the woods to build
+himself a little altar.
+
+Such minds as these, settled as it were from the outset, are either
+incapable of real scepticism or become sceptical only after catastrophic
+changes. They understand the sceptical mind with difficulty, and their
+beliefs are regarded by the sceptical mind with incredulity. They have
+determined their forms of belief before their years of discretion, and
+once those forms are determined they are not very easily changed. Within
+the shell it has adopted the intelligence may be active and lively
+enough, may indeed be extraordinarily active and lively, but only within
+the shell.
+
+There is an entire difference in the mental quality of those who are
+converts to a faith and those who are brought up in it. The former know
+it from outside as well as from within. They know not only that it is,
+but also that it is not. The latter have a confidence in their creed
+that is one with their apprehension of sky or air or gravitation. It
+is a primary mental structure, and they not only do not doubt but they
+doubt the good faith of those who do. They think that the Atheist and
+Agnostic really believe but are impelled by a mysterious obstinacy to
+deny. So it had been with the Bishop of Princhester; not of cunning
+or design but in simple good faith he had accepted all the inherited
+assurances of his native rectory, and held by Church, Crown, Empire,
+decorum, respectability, solvency--and compulsory Greek at the Little
+Go--as his father had done before him. If in his undergraduate days he
+had said a thing or two in the modern vein, affected the socialism
+of William Morris and learnt some Swinburne by heart, it was out of a
+conscious wildness. He did not wish to be a prig. He had taken a far
+more genuine interest in the artistry of ritual.
+
+Through all the time of his incumbency of the church of the Holy
+Innocents, St. John's Wood, and of his career as the bishop suffragan
+of Pinner, he had never faltered from his profound confidence in those
+standards of his home. He had been kind, popular, and endlessly active.
+His undergraduate socialism had expanded simply and sincerely into a
+theory of administrative philanthropy. He knew the Webbs. He was
+as successful with working-class audiences as with fashionable
+congregations. His home life with Lady Ella (she was the daughter of
+the fifth Earl of Birkenholme) and his five little girls was simple,
+beautiful, and happy as few homes are in these days of confusion. Until
+he became Bishop of Princhester--he followed Hood, the first bishop,
+as the reign of his Majesty King Edward the Peacemaker drew to its
+close--no anticipation of his coming distress fell across his path.
+
+(2)
+
+
+He came to Princhester an innocent and trustful man. The home life
+at the old rectory of Otteringham was still his standard of truth and
+reality. London had not disillusioned him. It was a strange waste of
+people, it made him feel like a missionary in infidel parts, but it was
+a kindly waste. It was neither antagonistic nor malicious. He had always
+felt there that if he searched his Londoner to the bottom, he would
+find the completest recognition of the old rectory and all its data and
+implications.
+
+But Princhester was different.
+
+Princhester made one think that recently there had been a second and
+much more serious Fall.
+
+Princhester was industrial and unashamed. It was a countryside savagely
+invaded by forges and mine shafts and gaunt black things. It was scarred
+and impeded and discoloured. Even before that invasion, when the heather
+was not in flower it must have been a black country. Its people were
+dour uncandid individuals, who slanted their heads and knitted their
+brows to look at you. Occasionally one saw woods brown and blistered by
+the gases from chemical works. Here and there remained old rectories,
+closely reminiscent of the dear old home at Otteringham, jostled and
+elbowed and overshadowed by horrible iron cylinders belching smoke and
+flame. The fine old abbey church of Princhester, which was the cathedral
+of the new diocese, looked when first he saw it like a lady Abbess who
+had taken to drink and slept in a coal truck. She minced apologetically
+upon the market-place; the parvenu Town Hall patronized and protected
+her as if she were a poor relation....
+
+The old aristocracy of the countryside was unpicturesquely decayed. The
+branch of the Walshinghams, Lady Ella's cousins, who lived near Pringle,
+was poor, proud and ignoble. And extremely unpopular. The rich people
+of the country were self-made and inclined to nonconformity, the
+working-people were not strictly speaking a "poor," they were highly
+paid, badly housed, and deeply resentful. They went in vast droves to
+football matches, and did not care a rap if it rained. The prevailing
+wind was sarcastic. To come here from London was to come from
+atmospheric blue-greys to ashen-greys, from smoke and soft smut to grime
+and black grimness.
+
+The bishop had been charmed by the historical associations of
+Princhester when first the see was put before his mind. His realization
+of his diocese was a profound shock.
+
+Only one hint had he had of what was coming. He had met during
+his season of congratulations Lord Gatling dining unusually at the
+Athenaeum. Lord Gatling and he did not talk frequently, but on this
+occasion the great racing peer came over to him. "You will feel like a
+cherub in a stokehole," Lord Gatling had said....
+
+"They used to heave lumps of slag at old Hood's gaiters," said Lord
+Gatling.
+
+"In London a bishop's a lord and a lark and nobody minds him," said Lord
+Gatling, "but Princhester is different. It isn't used to bishops....
+Well,--I hope you'll get to like 'em."
+
+(3)
+
+
+Trouble began with a fearful row about the position of the bishop's
+palace. Hood had always evaded this question, and a number of
+strong-willed self-made men of wealth and influence, full of local
+patriotism and that competitive spirit which has made England what it
+is, already intensely irritated by Hood's prevarications, were resolved
+to pin his successor to an immediate decision. Of this the new bishop
+was unaware. Mindful of a bishop's constant need to travel, he was
+disposed to seek a home within easy reach of Pringle Junction, from
+which nearly every point in the diocese could be simply and easily
+reached. This fell in with Lady Ella's liking for the rare rural
+quiet of the Kibe valley and the neighbourhood of her cousins the
+Walshinghams. Unhappily it did not fall in with the inflexible
+resolution of each and every one of the six leading towns of the see to
+put up, own, obtrude, boast, and swagger about the biggest and showiest
+thing in episcopal palaces in all industrial England, and the new
+bishop had already taken a short lease and gone some way towards the
+acquisition of Ganford House, two miles from Pringle, before he realized
+the strength and fury of these local ambitions.
+
+At first the magnates and influences seemed to be fighting only among
+themselves, and he was so ill-advised as to broach the Ganford House
+project as a compromise that would glorify no one unfairly, and leave
+the erection of an episcopal palace for some future date when he perhaps
+would have the good fortune to have passed to "where beyond these
+voices there is peace," forgetting altogether among other oversights
+the importance of architects and builders in local affairs. His
+proposal seemed for a time to concentrate the rich passions of the whole
+countryside upon himself and his wife.
+
+Because they did not leave Lady Ella alone. The Walshinghams were
+already unpopular in their county on account of a poverty and shyness
+that made them seem "stuck up" to successful captains of industry
+only too ready with the hand of friendship, the iron grip indeed
+of friendship, consciously hospitable and eager for admission and
+endorsements. And Princhester in particular was under the sway of that
+enterprising weekly, The White Blackbird, which was illustrated by,
+which indeed monopolized the gifts of, that brilliant young caricaturist
+"The Snicker."
+
+It had seemed natural for Lady Ella to acquiesce in the proposals of the
+leading Princhester photographer. She had always helped where she could
+in her husband's public work, and she had been popular upon her own
+merits in Wealdstone. The portrait was abominable enough in itself; it
+dwelt on her chin, doubled her age, and denied her gentleness, but it
+was a mere starting-point for the subtle extravagance of The Snicker's
+poisonous gift.... The thing came upon the bishop suddenly from the
+book-stall at Pringle Junction.
+
+He kept it carefully from Lady Ella.... It was only later that he found
+that a copy of The White Blackbird had been sent to her, and that she
+was keeping the horror from him. It was in her vein that she should
+reproach herself for being a vulnerable side to him.
+
+Even when the bishop capitulated in favour of Princhester, that decision
+only opened a fresh trouble for him. Princhester wanted the palace to be
+a palace; it wanted to combine all the best points of Lambeth and
+Fulham with the marble splendours of a good modern bank. The bishop's
+architectural tastes, on the other hand, were rationalistic. He was all
+for building a useful palace in undertones, with a green slate roof
+and long horizontal lines. What he wanted more than anything else was
+a quite remote wing with a lot of bright little bedrooms and a
+sitting-room and so on, complete in itself, examination hall and
+everything, with a long intricate connecting passage and several doors,
+to prevent the ordination candidates straying all over the place and
+getting into the talk and the tea. But the diocese wanted a proud
+archway--and turrets, and did not care a rap if the ordination
+candidates slept about on the carpets in the bishop's bedroom.
+Ordination candidates were quite outside the sphere of its imagination.
+
+And he disappointed Princhester with his equipage. Princhester had
+a feeling that it deserved more for coming over to the church from
+nonconformity as it was doing. It wanted a bishop in a mitre and a gilt
+coach. It wanted a pastoral crook. It wanted something to go with its
+mace and its mayor. And (obsessed by The Snicker) it wanted less of Lady
+Ella. The cruelty and unreason of these attacks upon his wife distressed
+the bishop beyond measure, and baffled him hopelessly. He could not see
+any means of checking them nor of defending or justifying her against
+them.
+
+The palace was awaiting its tenant, but the controversies and
+bitternesses were still swinging and swaying and developing when King
+George was being crowned. Close upon that event came a wave of social
+discontent, the great railway strike, a curious sense of social and
+political instability, and the first beginnings of the bishop's ill
+health.
+
+(4)
+
+
+There came a day of exceptional fatigue and significance.
+
+The industrial trouble was a very real distress to the bishop. He had
+a firm belief that it is a function of the church to act as mediator
+between employer and employed. It was a common saying of his that the
+aim of socialism--the right sort of socialism--was to Christianize
+employment. Regardless of suspicion on either hand, regardless of
+very distinct hints that he should "mind his own business," he exerted
+himself in a search for methods of reconciliation. He sought out every
+one who seemed likely to be influential on either side, and did his
+utmost to discover the conditions of a settlement. As far as possible
+and with the help of a not very efficient chaplain he tried to combine
+such interviews with his more normal visiting.
+
+At times, and this was particularly the case on this day, he seemed to
+be discovering nothing but the incurable perversity and militancy of
+human nature. It was a day under an east wind, when a steely-blue sky
+full of colourless light filled a stiff-necked world with whitish high
+lights and inky shadows. These bright harsh days of barometric high
+pressure in England rouse and thwart every expectation of the happiness
+of spring. And as the bishop drove through the afternoon in a hired
+fly along a rutted road of slag between fields that were bitterly wired
+against the Sunday trespasser, he fell into a despondent meditation upon
+the political and social outlook.
+
+His thoughts were of a sort not uncommon in those days. The world was
+strangely restless. Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had
+been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some
+compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people's ideas,
+and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow. Not that Queen
+Victoria had really been a paper-weight or any weight at all, but
+it happened that she died as an epoch closed, an epoch of tremendous
+stabilities. Her son, already elderly, had followed as the selvedge
+follows the piece, he had passed and left the new age stripped bare.
+In nearly every department of economic and social life now there was
+upheaval, and it was an upheaval very different in character from the
+radicalism and liberalism of the Victorian days. There were not only
+doubt and denial, but now there were also impatience and unreason.
+People argued less and acted quicker. There was a pride in rebellion for
+its own sake, an indiscipline and disposition to sporadic violence that
+made it extremely hard to negotiate any reconciliations or compromises.
+Behind every extremist it seemed stood a further extremist prepared to
+go one better....
+
+The bishop had spent most of the morning with one of the big employers,
+a tall dark man, lean and nervous, and obviously tired and worried
+by the struggle. He did not conceal his opinion that the church was
+meddling with matters quite outside its sphere. Never had it been
+conveyed to the bishop before how remote a rich and established
+Englishman could consider the church from reality.
+
+"You've got no hold on them," he said. "It isn't your sphere."
+
+And again: "They'll listen to you--if you speak well. But they don't
+believe you know anything about it, and they don't trust your good
+intentions. They won't mind a bit what you say unless you drop something
+they can use against us."
+
+The bishop tried a few phrases. He thought there might be something in
+co-operation, in profit-sharing, in some more permanent relationship
+between the business and the employee.
+
+"There isn't," said the employer compactly. "It's just the malice of
+being inferior against the man in control. It's just the spirit of
+insubordination and boredom with duty. This trouble's as old as the
+Devil."
+
+"But that is exactly the business of the church," said the bishop
+brightly, "to reconcile men to their duty."
+
+"By chanting the Athanasian creed at 'em, I suppose," said the big
+employer, betraying the sneer he had been hiding hitherto.
+
+"This thing is a fight," said the big employer, carrying on before the
+bishop could reply. "Religion had better get out of the streets until
+this thing is over. The men won't listen to reason. They don't mean
+to. They're bit by Syndicalism. They're setting out, I tell you, to be
+unreasonable and impossible. It isn't an argument; it's a fight. They
+don't want to make friends with the employer. They want to make an end
+to the employer. Whatever we give them they'll take and press us for
+more. Directly we make terms with the leaders the men go behind
+it.... It's a raid on the whole system. They don't mean to work the
+system--anyhow. I'm the capitalist, and the capitalist has to go. I'm to
+be bundled out of my works, and some--some "--he seemed to be rejecting
+unsuitable words--"confounded politician put in. Much good it would do
+them. But before that happens I'm going to fight. You would."
+
+The bishop walked to the window and stood staring at the brilliant
+spring bulbs in the big employer's garden, and at a long vista of
+newly-mown lawn under great shapely trees just budding into green.
+
+"I can't admit," he said, "that these troubles lie outside the sphere of
+the church."
+
+The employer came and stood beside him. He felt he was being a little
+hard on the bishop, but he could not see any way of making things
+easier.
+
+"One doesn't want Sacred Things," he tried, "in a scrap like this.
+
+"We've got to mend things or end things," continued the big employer.
+"Nothing goes on for ever. Things can't last as they are going on
+now...."
+
+Then he went on abruptly to something that for a time he had been
+keeping back.
+
+"Of course just at present the church may do a confounded lot of harm.
+Some of you clerical gentlemen are rather too fond of talking socialism
+and even preaching socialism. Don't think I want to be overcritical.
+I admit there's no end of things to be said for a proper sort of
+socialism, Ruskin, and all that. We're all Socialists nowadays.
+Ideals--excellent. But--it gets misunderstood. It gives the men a sense
+of moral support. It makes them fancy that they are It. Encourages them
+to forget duties and set up preposterous claims. Class war and all that
+sort of thing. You gentlemen of the clergy don't quite realize that
+socialism may begin with Ruskin and end with Karl Marx. And that from
+the Class War to the Commune is just one step."
+
+(5)
+
+
+From this conversation the bishop had made his way to the vicarage of
+Mogham Banks. The vicar of Mogham Banks was a sacerdotal socialist of
+the most advanced type, with the reputation of being closely in touch
+with the labour extremists. He was a man addicted to banners, prohibited
+ornaments, special services at unusual hours, and processions in the
+streets. His taste in chasubles was loud, he gardened in a cassock
+and, it was said, he slept in his biretta; he certainly slept in a hair
+shirt, and he littered his church with flowers, candles, side altars,
+confessional boxes, requests for prayers for the departed, and the like.
+There had already been two Kensitite demonstrations at his services, and
+altogether he was a source of considerable anxiety to the bishop. The
+bishop did his best not to know too exactly what was going on at Mogham
+Banks. Sooner or later he felt he would be forced to do something--and
+the longer he could put that off the better. But the Rev. Morrice Deans
+had promised to get together three or four prominent labour leaders for
+tea and a frank talk, and the opportunity was one not to be missed.
+So the bishop, after a hasty and not too digestible lunch in the
+refreshment room at Pringle, was now in a fly that smelt of straw
+and suggested infectious hospital patients, on his way through the
+industry-scarred countryside to this second conversation.
+
+The countryside had never seemed so scarred to him as it did that day.
+
+It was probably the bright hard spring sunshine that emphasized
+the contrast between that dear England of hedges and homes and the
+south-west wind in which his imagination lived, and the crude presences
+of a mechanical age. Never before had the cuttings and heapings, the
+smashing down of trees, the obtrusion of corrugated iron and tar, the
+belchings of smoke and the haste, seemed so harsh and disregardful
+of all the bishop's world. Across the fields a line of gaunt iron
+standards, abominably designed, carried an electric cable to some
+unknown end. The curve of the hill made them seem a little out of the
+straight, as if they hurried and bent forward furtively.
+
+"Where are they going?" asked the bishop, leaning forward to look out of
+the window of the fly, and then: "Where is it all going?"
+
+And presently the road was under repair, and was being done at a great
+pace with a huge steam-roller, mechanically smashed granite, and kettles
+of stinking stuff, asphalt or something of that sort, that looked
+and smelt like Milton's hell. Beyond, a gaunt hoarding advertised
+extensively the Princhester Music Hall, a mean beastly place that
+corrupted boys and girls; and also it clamoured of tyres and potted
+meats....
+
+The afternoon's conference gave him no reassuring answer to his
+question, "Where is it all going?"
+
+The afternoon's conference did no more than intensify the new and
+strange sense of alienation from the world that the morning's talk had
+evoked.
+
+The three labour extremists that Morrice Deans had assembled obviously
+liked the bishop and found him picturesque, and were not above a certain
+snobbish gratification at the purple-trimmed company they were in, but
+it was clear that they regarded his intervention in the great dispute
+as if it were a feeble waving from the bank across the waters of a great
+river.
+
+"There's an incurable misunderstanding between the modern employer and
+the modern employed," the chief labour spokesman said, speaking in a
+broad accent that completely hid from him and the bishop and every one
+the fact that he was by far the best-read man of the party. "Disraeli
+called them the Two Nations, but that was long ago. Now it's a case
+of two species. Machinery has made them into different species. The
+employer lives away from his work-people, marries a wife foreign, out of
+a county family or suchlike, trains his children from their very birth
+in a different manner. Why, the growth curve is different for the two
+species. They haven't even a common speech between them. One looks east
+and the other looks west. How can you expect them to agree? Of course
+they won't agree. We've got to fight it out. They say we're their
+slaves for ever. Have you ever read Lady Bell's 'At the Works'? A
+well-intentioned woman, but she gives the whole thing away. We say,
+No! It's our sort and not your sort. We'll do without you. We'll get a
+little more education and then we'll do without you. We're pressing for
+all we can get, and when we've got that we'll take breath and press
+for more. We're the Morlocks. Coming up. It isn't our fault that we've
+differentiated."
+
+"But you haven't understood the drift of Christianity," said the bishop.
+"It's just to assert that men are One community and not two."
+
+"There's not much of that in the Creeds," said a second labour leader
+who was a rationalist. "There's not much of that in the services of the
+church."
+
+The vicar spoke before his bishop, and indeed he had plenty of time
+to speak before his bishop. "Because you will not set yourselves to
+understand the symbolism of her ritual," he said.
+
+"If the church chooses to speak in riddles," said the rationalist.
+
+"Symbols," said Morrice Deans, "need not be riddles," and for a time the
+talk eddied about this minor issue and the chief labour spokesman and
+the bishop looked at one another. The vicar instanced and explained
+certain apparently insignificant observances, his antagonist was
+contemptuously polite to these explanations. "That's all very pratty,"
+he said....
+
+The bishop wished that fine points of ceremonial might have been left
+out of the discussion.
+
+Something much bigger than that was laying hold of his intelligence, the
+realization of a world extravagantly out of hand. The sky, the wind,
+the telegraph poles, had been jabbing in the harsh lesson of these men's
+voices, that the church, as people say, "wasn't in it." And that at
+the same time the church held the one remedy for all this ugliness and
+contention in its teaching of the universal fatherhood of God and the
+universal brotherhood of men. Only for some reason he hadn't the phrases
+and he hadn't the voice to assert this over their wrangling and their
+stiff resolution. He wanted to think the whole business out thoroughly,
+for the moment he had nothing to say, and there was the labour leader
+opposite waiting smilingly to hear what he had to say so soon as the
+bout between the vicar and the rationalist was over.
+
+(6)
+
+
+That morning in the long galleries of the bishop's imagination a fresh
+painting had been added. It was a big wall painting rather in the manner
+of Puvis de Chavannes. And the central figure had been the bishop of
+Princhester himself. He had been standing upon the steps of the
+great door of the cathedral that looks upon the marketplace where the
+tram-lines meet, and he had been dressed very magnificently and rather
+after the older use. He had been wearing a tunicle and dalmatic under a
+chasuble, a pectoral cross, purple gloves, sandals and buskins, a mitre
+and his presentation ring. In his hand he had borne his pastoral staff.
+And the clustering pillars and arches of the great doorway were painted
+with a loving flat particularity that omitted nothing but the sooty
+tinge of the later discolourations.
+
+On his right hand had stood a group of employers very richly dressed
+in the fashion of the fifteenth century, and on the left a rather more
+numerous group of less decorative artisans. With them their wives and
+children had been shown, all greatly impressed by the canonicals. Every
+one had been extremely respectful.
+
+He had been reconciling the people and blessing them and calling them
+his "sheep" and his "little children."
+
+But all this was so different.
+
+Neither party resembled sheep or little children in the least degree. .
+
+The labour leader became impatient with the ritualistic controversy; he
+set his tea-cup aside out of danger and leant across the corner of the
+table to the bishop and spoke in a sawing undertone. "You see," he said,
+"the church does not talk our language. I doubt if it understands our
+language. I doubt if we understand clearly where we are ourselves. These
+things have to be fought out and hammered out. It's a big dusty dirty
+noisy job. It may be a bloody job before it's through. You can't
+suddenly call a halt in the middle of the scrap and have a sort of
+millennium just because you want it....
+
+"Of course if the church had a plan," he said, "if it had a proposal to
+make, if it had anything more than a few pious palliatives to suggest,
+that might be different. But has it?"
+
+The bishop had a bankrupt feeling. On the spur of the moment he could
+say no more than: "It offers its mediation."
+
+(7)
+
+
+Full as he was with the preoccupation of these things and so a little
+slow and inattentive in his movements, the bishop had his usual luck
+at Pringle Junction and just missed the 7.27 for Princhester. He might
+perhaps have got it by running through the subway and pushing past
+people, but bishops must not run through subways and push past people.
+His mind swore at the mischance, even if his lips refrained.
+
+He was hungry and, tired; he would not get to the palace now until long
+after nine; dinner would be over and Lady Ella would naturally suppose
+he had dined early with the Rev. Morrice Deans. Very probably there
+would be nothing ready for him at all.
+
+He tried to think he was exercising self-control, but indeed all his
+sub-conscious self was busy in a manner that would not have disgraced
+Tertullian with the eternal welfare of those city fathers whose
+obstinacy had fixed the palace at Princhester. He walked up and down the
+platform, gripping his hands very tightly behind him, and maintaining
+a serene upcast countenance by a steadfast effort. It seemed a small
+matter to him that the placards of the local evening papers should
+proclaim "Lloyd George's Reconciliation Meeting at Wombash Broken up
+by Suffragettes." For a year now he had observed a strict rule against
+buying the products of the local press, and he saw no reason for varying
+this protective regulation.
+
+His mind was full of angry helplessness.
+
+Was he to blame, was the church to blame, for its powerlessness in these
+social disputes? Could an abler man with a readier eloquence have done
+more?
+
+He envied the cleverness of Cardinal Manning. Manning would have got
+right into the front of this affair. He would have accumulated credit
+for his church and himself....
+
+But would he have done much?...
+
+The bishop wandered along the platform to its end, and stood
+contemplating the convergent ways that gather together beyond the
+station and plunge into the hillside and the wilderness of sidings and
+trucks, signal-boxes, huts, coal-pits, electric standards, goods sheds,
+turntables, and engine-houses, that ends in a bluish bricked-up cliff
+against the hill. A train rushed with a roar and clatter into the
+throat of the great tunnel and was immediately silenced; its rear lights
+twinkled and vanished, and then out of that huge black throat came wisps
+of white steam and curled slowly upward like lazy snakes until they
+caught the slanting sunshine. For the first time the day betrayed
+a softness and touched this scene of black energy to gold. All late
+afternoons are beautiful, whatever the day has been--if only there is a
+gleam of sun. And now a kind of mechanical greatness took the place of
+mere black disorder in the bishop's perception of his see. It was harsh,
+it was vast and strong, it was no lamb he had to rule but a dragon.
+Would it ever be given to him to overcome his dragon, to lead it home,
+and bless it?
+
+He stood at the very end of the platform, with his gaitered legs wide
+apart and his hands folded behind him, staring beyond all visible
+things.
+
+Should he do something very bold and striking? Should he invite both men
+and masters to the cathedral, and preach tremendous sermons to them upon
+these living issues?
+
+Short sermons, of course.
+
+But stating the church's attitude with a new and convincing vigour.
+
+He had a vision of the great aisle strangely full and alive and astir.
+The organ notes still echoed in the fretted vaulting, as the preacher
+made his way from the chancel to the pulpit. The congregation was tense
+with expectation, and for some reason his mind dwelt for a long time
+upon the figure of the preacher ascending the steps of the pulpit.
+Outside the day was dark and stormy, so that the stained-glass windows
+looked absolutely dead. For a little while the preacher prayed. Then in
+the attentive silence the tenor of the preacher would begin, a thin jet
+of sound, a ray of light in the darkness, speaking to all these men as
+they had never been spoken to before....
+
+Surely so one might call a halt to all these harsh conflicts. So one
+might lay hands afresh upon these stubborn minds, one might win them
+round to look at Christ the Master and Servant....
+
+That, he thought, would be a good phrase: "Christ the Master and
+Servant."....
+
+"Members of one Body," that should be his text.... At last it was
+finished. The big congregation, which had kept so still, sighed and
+stirred. The task of reconciliation was as good as done. "And now to God
+the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost...."
+
+Outside the day had become suddenly bright, the threatening storm had
+drifted away, and great shafts of coloured light from the pictured
+windows were smiting like arrows amidst his hearers....
+
+This idea of a great sermon upon capital and labour did so powerfully
+grip the bishop's imagination that he came near to losing the 8.27 train
+also.
+
+He discovered it when it was already in the station. He had to walk down
+the platform very quickly. He did not run, but his gaiters, he felt,
+twinkled more than a bishop's should.
+
+(8)
+
+
+Directly he met his wife he realized that he had to hear something
+important and unpleasant.
+
+She stood waiting for him in the inner hall, looking very grave and
+still. The light fell upon her pale face and her dark hair and her long
+white silken dress, making her seem more delicate and unworldly than
+usual and making the bishop feel grimy and sordid.
+
+"I must have a wash," he said, though before he had thought of nothing
+but food. "I have had nothing to eat since tea-time--and that was mostly
+talk."
+
+Lady Ella considered. "There are cold things.... You shall have a tray
+in the study. Not in the dining-room. Eleanor is there. I want to tell
+you something. But go upstairs first and wash your poor tired face."
+
+"Nothing serious, I hope?" he asked, struck by an unusual quality in her
+voice.
+
+"I will tell you," she evaded, and after a moment of mutual scrutiny he
+went past her upstairs.
+
+Since they had come to Princhester Lady Ella had changed very markedly.
+She seemed to her husband to have gained in dignity; she was stiller
+and more restrained; a certain faint arrogance, a touch of the "ruling
+class" manner had dwindled almost to the vanishing point. There had been
+a time when she had inclined to an authoritative hauteur, when she had
+seemed likely to develop into one of those aggressive and interfering
+old ladies who play so overwhelming a part in British public affairs.
+She had been known to initiate adverse judgments, to exercise the snub,
+to cut and humiliate. Princhester had done much to purge her of such
+tendencies. Princhester had made her think abundantly, and had put a new
+and subtler quality into her beauty. It had taken away the least little
+disposition to rustle as she moved, and it had softened her voice.
+
+Now, when presently she stood in the study, she showed a new
+circumspection in her treatment of her husband. She surveyed the tray
+before him.
+
+"You ought not to drink that Burgundy," she said. "I can see you
+are dog-tired. It was uncorked yesterday, and anyhow it is not very
+digestible. This cold meat is bad enough. You ought to have one of those
+quarter bottles of champagne you got for my last convalescence. There's
+more than a dozen left over."
+
+The bishop felt that this was a pretty return of his own kindly thoughts
+"after many days," and soon Dunk, his valet-butler, was pouring out the
+precious and refreshing glassful....
+
+"And now, dear?" said the bishop, feeling already much better.
+
+Lady Ella had come round to the marble fireplace. The mantel-piece was
+a handsome work by a Princhester artist in the Gill style--with
+contemplative ascetics as supporters.
+
+"I am worried about Eleanor," said Lady Ella.
+
+"She is in the dining-room now," she said, "having some dinner. She came
+in about a quarter past eight, half way through dinner."
+
+"Where had she been?" asked the bishop.
+
+"Her dress was torn--in two places. Her wrist had been twisted and a
+little sprained."
+
+"My dear!"
+
+"Her face--Grubby! And she had been crying."
+
+"But, my dear, what had happened to her? You don't mean--?"
+
+Husband and wife stared at one another aghast. Neither of them said the
+horrid word that flamed between them.
+
+"Merciful heaven!" said the bishop, and assumed an attitude of despair.
+
+"I didn't know she knew any of them. But it seems it is the second
+Walshingham girl--Phoebe. It's impossible to trace a girl's thoughts and
+friends. She persuaded her to go."
+
+"But did she understand?"
+
+"That's the serious thing," said Lady Ella.
+
+She seemed to consider whether he could bear the blow.
+
+"She understands all sorts of things. She argues.... I am quite unable
+to argue with her."
+
+"About this vote business?"
+
+"About all sorts of things. Things I didn't imagine she had heard of.
+I knew she had been reading books. But I never imagined that she could
+have understood...."
+
+The bishop laid down his knife and fork.
+
+"One may read in books, one may even talk of things, without fully
+understanding," he said.
+
+Lady Ella tried to entertain this comforting thought. "It isn't like
+that," she said at last. "She talks like a grown-up person. This--this
+escapade is just an accident. But things have gone further than that.
+She seems to think--that she is not being educated properly here, that
+she ought to go to a College. As if we were keeping things from her...."
+
+The bishop reconsidered his plate.
+
+"But what things?" he said.
+
+"She says we get all round her," said Lady Ella, and left the
+implications of that phrase to unfold.
+
+(9)
+
+
+For a time the bishop said very little.
+
+Lady Ella had found it necessary to make her first announcement standing
+behind him upon the hearthrug, but now she sat upon the arm of the great
+armchair as close to him as possible, and spoke in a more familiar tone.
+
+The thing, she said, had come to her as a complete surprise. Everything
+had seemed so safe. Eleanor had been thoughtful, it was true, but it had
+never occurred to her mother that she had really been thinking--about
+such things as she had been thinking about. She had ranged in the
+library, and displayed a disposition to read the weekly papers and the
+monthly reviews. But never a sign of discontent.
+
+"But I don't understand," said the bishop. "Why is she discontented?
+What is there that she wants different?"
+
+"Exactly," said Lady Ella.
+
+"She has got this idea that life here is secluded in some way," she
+expanded. "She used words like 'secluded' and 'artificial' and--what was
+it?--'cloistered.' And she said--"
+
+Lady Ella paused with an effect of exact retrospection.
+
+"'Out there,' she said, 'things are alive. Real things are happening.'
+It is almost as if she did not fully believe--"
+
+Lady Ella paused again.
+
+The bishop sat with his arm over the back of his chair, and his face
+downcast.
+
+"The ferment of youth," he said at last. "The ferment of youth. Who has
+given her these ideas?"
+
+Lady Ella did not know. She could have thought a school like St. Aubyns
+would have been safe, but nowadays nothing was safe. It was clear the
+girls who went there talked as girls a generation ago did not talk.
+Their people at home encouraged them to talk and profess opinions about
+everything. It seemed that Phoebe Walshingham and Lady Kitty Kingdom
+were the leaders in these premature mental excursions. Phoebe aired
+religious doubts.
+
+"But little Phoebe!" said the bishop.
+
+"Kitty," said Lady Ella, "has written a novel."
+
+"Already!"
+
+"With elopements in it--and all sorts of things. She's had it typed.
+You'd think Mary Crosshampton would know better than to let her daughter
+go flourishing the family imagination about in that way."
+
+"Eleanor told you?"
+
+"By way of showing that they think of--things in general."
+
+The bishop reflected. "She wants to go to College."
+
+"They want to go in a set."
+
+"I wonder if college can be much worse than school.... She's eighteen--?
+But I will talk to her...."
+
+(10)
+
+
+All our children are changelings. They are perpetually fresh strangers.
+Every day they vanish and a new person masquerades as yesterday's child
+until some unexpected development betrays the cheat.
+
+The bishop had still to learn this perennial newness of the young. He
+learnt it in half an hour at the end of a fatiguing day.
+
+He went into the dining-room. He went in as carelessly as possible and
+smoking a cigarette. He had an honourable dread of being portentous in
+his family; almost ostentatiously he laid the bishop aside. Eleanor had
+finished her meal, and was sitting in the arm-chair by the fire with one
+hand holding her sprained wrist.
+
+"Well," he said, and strolled to the hearthrug. He had had an odd idea
+that he would find her still dirty, torn, and tearful, as her mother had
+described her, a little girl in a scrape. But she had changed into
+her best white evening frock and put up her hair, and became in the
+firelight more of a lady, a very young lady but still a lady, than she
+had ever been to him before. She was dark like her mother, but not of
+the same willowy type; she had more of her father's sturdy build, and
+she had developed her shoulders at hockey and tennis. The firelight
+brought out the gracious reposeful lines of a body that ripened in
+adolescence. And though there was a vibration of resolution in her voice
+she spoke like one who is under her own control.
+
+"Mother has told you that I have disgraced myself," she began.
+
+"No," said the bishop, weighing it. "No. But you seem to have been
+indiscreet, little Norah."
+
+"I got excited," she said. "They began turning out the other
+women--roughly. I was indignant."
+
+"You didn't go to interrupt?" he asked.
+
+She considered. "No," she said. "But I went."
+
+He liked her disposition to get it right. "On that side," he assisted.
+
+"It isn't the same thing as really meaning, Daddy," she said.
+
+"And then things happened?"
+
+"Yes," she said to the fire.
+
+A pause followed. If they had been in a law-court, her barrister would
+have said, "That is my case, my lord." The bishop prepared to open the
+next stage in the proceedings.
+
+"I think, Norah, you shouldn't have been there at all," he said.
+
+"Mother says that."
+
+"A man in my position is apt to be judged by his family. You commit
+more than yourself when you commit an indiscretion. Apart from that, it
+wasn't the place for a girl to be at. You are not a child now. We give
+you freedom--more freedom than most girls get--because we think you
+will use it wisely. You knew--enough to know that there was likely to be
+trouble."
+
+The girl looked into the fire and spoke very carefully. "I don't think
+that I oughtn't to know the things that are going on."
+
+The bishop studied her face for an instant. It struck him that they
+had reached something very fundamental as between parent and child. His
+modernity showed itself in the temperance of his reply.
+
+"Don't you think, my dear, that on the whole your mother and I, who have
+lived longer and know more, are more likely to know when it is best that
+you should begin to know--this or that?"
+
+The girl knitted her brows and seemed to be reading her answer out of
+the depths of the coals. She was on the verge of speaking, altered her
+mind and tried a different beginning.
+
+"I think that every one must do their thinking--his
+thinking--for--oneself," she said awkwardly.
+
+"You mean you can't trust--?"
+
+"It isn't trusting. But one knows best for oneself when one is hungry."
+
+"And you find yourself hungry?"
+
+"I want to find out for myself what all this trouble about votes and
+things means."
+
+"And we starve you--intellectually?"
+
+"You know I don't think that. But you are busy...."
+
+"Aren't you being perhaps a little impatient, Eleanor? After all--you
+are barely eighteen.... We have given you all sorts of liberties."
+
+Her silence admitted it. "But still," she said after a long pause,
+"there are other girls, younger than I am, in these things. They talk
+about--oh, all sorts of things. Freely...."
+
+"You've been awfully good to me," she said irrelevantly. "And of course
+this meeting was all pure accident."
+
+Father and daughter remained silent for awhile, seeking a better grip.
+
+"What exactly do you want, Eleanor?" he asked.
+
+She looked up at him. "Generally?" she asked.
+
+"Your mother has the impression that you are discontented."
+
+"Discontented is a horrid word."
+
+"Well--unsatisfied."
+
+She remained still for a time. She felt the moment had come to make her
+demand.
+
+"I would like to go to Newnham or Somerville--and work. I feel--so
+horribly ignorant. Of all sorts of things. If I were a son I should
+go--"
+
+"Ye--es," said the bishop and reflected.
+
+He had gone rather far in the direction of the Woman Suffrage people;
+he had advocated equality of standard in all sorts of matters, and the
+memory of these utterances hampered him.
+
+"You could read here," he tried.
+
+"If I were a son, you wouldn't say that."
+
+His reply was vague. "But in this home," he said, "we have a certain
+atmosphere."
+
+He left her to imply her differences in sensibility and response from
+the hardier male.
+
+Her hesitation marked the full gravity of her reply. "It's just that,"
+she said. "One feels--" She considered it further. "As if we were living
+in a kind of magic world--not really real. Out there--" she glanced
+over her shoulder at the drawn blind that hid the night. "One meets with
+different sorts of minds and different--atmospheres. All this is very
+beautiful. I've had the most wonderful home. But there's a sort of
+feeling as though it couldn't really go on, as though all these strikes
+and doubts and questionings--"
+
+She stopped short at questionings, for the thing was said.
+
+The bishop took her meaning gallantly and honestly.
+
+"The church of Christ, little Norah, is built upon a rock."
+
+She made no answer. She moved her head very slightly so that he could
+not see her face, and remained sitting rather stiffly and awkwardly with
+her eyes upon the fire.
+
+Her silence was the third and greatest blow the bishop received that
+day....
+
+It seemed very long indeed before either of them spoke. At last he said:
+"We must talk about these things again, Norah, when we are less tired
+and have more time.... You have been reading books.... When Caxton set
+up his printing-press he thrust a new power between church and disciple
+and father and child.... And I am tired. We must talk it over a little
+later."
+
+The girl stood up. She took her father's hands. "Dear, dear Daddy,"
+she said, "I am so sorry to be a bother. I am so sorry I went to that
+meeting.... You look tired out."
+
+"We must talk--properly," said the bishop, patting one hand, then
+discovering from her wincing face that it was the sprained one. "Your
+poor wrist," he said.
+
+"It's so hard to talk, but I want to talk to you, Daddy. It isn't that I
+have hidden things...."
+
+She kissed him, and the bishop had the odd fancy that she kissed him as
+though she was sorry for him....
+
+It occurred to him that really there could be no time like the present
+for discussing these "questionings" of hers, and then his fatigue and
+shyness had the better of him again.
+
+(11)
+
+
+The papers got hold of Eleanor's share in the suffragette disturbance.
+The White Blackbird said things about her.
+
+It did not attack her. It did worse. It admired her ...impudently.
+
+It spoke of her once as "Norah," and once as "the Scrope Flapper."
+
+Its headline proclaimed: "Plucky Flappers Hold Up L. G."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD - INSOMNIA
+
+(1)
+
+
+THE night after his conversation with Eleanor was the first night of the
+bishop's insomnia. It was the definite beginning of a new phase in his
+life.
+
+Doctors explain to us that the immediate cause of insomnia is always
+some poisoned or depleted state of the body, and no doubt the
+fatigues and hasty meals of the day had left the bishop in a state of
+unprecedented chemical disorder, with his nerves irritated by strange
+compounds and unsoothed by familiar lubricants. But chemical disorders
+follow mental disturbances, and the core and essence of his trouble was
+an intellectual distress. For the first time in his life he was
+really in doubt, about himself, about his way of living, about all his
+persuasions. It was a general doubt. It was not a specific suspicion
+upon this point or that. It was a feeling of detachment and unreality at
+once extraordinarily vague and extraordinarily oppressive. It was as
+if he discovered himself flimsy and transparent in a world of minatory
+solidity and opacity. It was as if he found himself made not of flesh
+and blood but of tissue paper.
+
+But this intellectual insecurity extended into his physical sensations.
+It affected his feeling in his skin, as if it were not absolutely his
+own skin.
+
+And as he lay there, a weak phantom mentally and bodily, an endless
+succession and recurrence of anxieties for which he could find no
+reassurance besieged him.
+
+Chief of this was his distress for Eleanor.
+
+She was the central figure in this new sense of illusion in familiar and
+trusted things. It was not only that the world of his existence which
+had seemed to be the whole universe had become diaphanous and betrayed
+vast and uncontrollable realities beyond it, but his daughter had as it
+were suddenly opened a door in this glassy sphere of insecurity that had
+been his abiding refuge, a door upon the stormy rebel outer world, and
+she stood there, young, ignorant, confident, adventurous, ready to step
+out.
+
+"Could it be possible that she did not believe?"
+
+He saw her very vividly as he had seen her in the dining-room, slender
+and upright, half child, half woman, so fragile and so fearless. And the
+door she opened thus carelessly gave upon a stormy background like one
+of the stormy backgrounds that were popular behind portrait Dianas in
+eighteenth century paintings. Did she believe that all he had taught
+her, all the life he led was--what was her phrase?--a kind of magic
+world, not really real?
+
+He groaned and turned over and repeated the words: "A kind of magic
+world--not really real!"
+
+The wind blew through the door she opened, and scattered everything in
+the room. And still she held the door open.
+
+He was astonished at himself. He started up in swift indignation. Had
+he not taught the child? Had he not brought her up in an atmosphere
+of faith? What right had she to turn upon him in this matter? It
+was--indeed it was--a sort of insolence, a lack of reverence....
+
+It was strange he had not perceived this at the time.
+
+But indeed at the first mention of "questionings" he ought to have
+thundered. He saw that quite clearly now. He ought to have cried out and
+said, "On your knees, my Norah, and ask pardon of God!"
+
+Because after all faith is an emotional thing....
+
+He began to think very rapidly and copiously of things he ought to have
+said to Eleanor. And now the eloquence of reverie was upon him. In a
+little time he was also addressing the tea-party at Morrice Deans'. Upon
+them too he ought to have thundered. And he knew now also all that he
+should have said to the recalcitrant employer. Thunder also. Thunder is
+surely the privilege of the higher clergy--under Jove.
+
+But why hadn't he thundered?
+
+He gesticulated in the darkness, thrust out a clutching hand.
+
+There are situations that must be gripped--gripped firmly. And without
+delay. In the middle ages there had been grip enough in a purple glove.
+
+(2)
+
+
+From these belated seizures of the day's lost opportunities the bishop
+passed to such a pessimistic estimate of the church as had never entered
+his mind before.
+
+It was as if he had fallen suddenly out of a spiritual balloon into
+a world of bleak realism. He found himself asking unprecedented and
+devastating questions, questions that implied the most fundamental
+shiftings of opinion. Why was the church such a failure? Why had it
+no grip upon either masters or men amidst this vigorous life of modern
+industrialism, and why had it no grip upon the questioning young? It was
+a tolerated thing, he felt, just as sometimes he had felt that the
+Crown was a tolerated thing. He too was a tolerated thing; a curious
+survival....
+
+This was not as things should be. He struggled to recover a proper
+attitude. But he remained enormously dissatisfied....
+
+The church was no Levite to pass by on the other side away from the
+struggles and wrongs of the social conflict. It had no right when the
+children asked for the bread of life to offer them Gothic stone....
+
+He began to make interminable weak plans for fulfilling his duty to his
+diocese and his daughter.
+
+What could he do to revivify his clergy? He wished he had more personal
+magnetism, he wished he had a darker and a larger presence. He wished he
+had not been saddled with Whippham's rather futile son as his chaplain.
+He wished he had a dean instead of being his own dean. With an
+unsympathetic rector. He wished he had it in him to make some resounding
+appeal. He might of course preach a series of thumping addresses and
+sermons, rather on the lines of "Fors Clavigera," to masters and men,
+in the Cathedral. Only it was so difficult to get either masters or men
+into the Cathedral.
+
+Well, if the people will not come to the bishop the bishop must go out
+to the people. Should he go outside the Cathedral--to the place where
+the trains met?
+
+Interweaving with such thoughts the problem of Eleanor rose again into
+his consciousness.
+
+Weren't there books she ought to read? Weren't there books she ought to
+be made to read? And books--and friends--that ought to be imperatively
+forbidden? Imperatively!
+
+But how to define the forbidden?
+
+He began to compose an address on Modern Literature (so-called).
+
+It became acrimonious.
+
+Before dawn the birds began to sing.
+
+His mind had seemed to be a little tranquillized, there had been a
+distinct feeling of subsidence sleepwards, when first one and then
+another little creature roused itself and the bishop to greet the
+gathering daylight.
+
+It became a little clamour, a misty sea of sound in which individuality
+appeared and disappeared. For a time a distant cuckoo was very
+perceptible, like a landmark looming up over a fog, like the cuckoo in
+the Pastoral Symphony.
+
+The bishop tried not to heed these sounds, but they were by their very
+nature insistent sounds. He lay disregarding them acutely.
+
+Presently he pulled the coverlet over his ears.
+
+A little later he sat up in bed.
+
+Again in a slight detail he marked his strange and novel detachment from
+the world of his upbringing. His hallucination of disillusionment had
+spread from himself and his church and his faith to the whole animate
+creation. He knew that these were the voices of "our feathered
+songsters," that this was "a joyous chorus" greeting the day. He knew
+that a wakeful bishop ought to bless these happy creatures, and join
+with them by reciting Ken's morning hymn. He made an effort that was
+more than half habit, to repeat and he repeated with a scowling face and
+the voice of a schoolmaster:
+
+
+"Awake my soul, and with the sun
+Thy daily stage of duty run...."
+
+
+He got no further. He stopped short, sat still, thinking what utterly
+detestable things singing birds were. A. blackbird had gripped his
+attention. Never had he heard such vain repetitions. He struggled
+against the dark mood of criticism. "He prayeth best who loveth best--"
+
+No, he did not love the birds. It was useless to pretend. Whatever one
+may say about other birds a cuckoo is a low detestable cad of a bird.
+
+Then the bishop began to be particularly tormented by a bird that made a
+short, insistent, wheezing sound at regular intervals of perhaps twenty
+seconds. If a bird could have whooping-cough, that, he thought, was the
+sort of whoop it would have. But even if it had whooping-cough he could
+not pity it. He hung in its intervals waiting for the return of the
+wheeze.
+
+And then that blackbird reasserted itself. It had a rich boastful note;
+it seemed proud of its noisy reiteration of simple self-assertion. For
+some obscure reason the phrase "oleographic sounds" drifted into the
+bishop's thoughts. This bird produced the peculiar and irrational
+impression that it had recently made a considerable sum of money by
+shrewd industrialism. It was, he thought grimly, a genuine Princhester
+blackbird.
+
+This wickedly uncharitable reference to his diocese ran all unchallenged
+through the bishop's mind. And others no less wicked followed it.
+
+Once during his summer holidays in Florence he and Lady Ella had
+subscribed to an association for the protection of song-birds. He
+recalled this now with a mild wonder. It seemed to him that perhaps
+after all it was as well to let fruit-growers and Italians deal with
+singing-birds in their own way. Perhaps after all they had a wisdom....
+
+He passed his hands over his face. The world after all is not made
+entirely for singing-birds; there is such a thing as proportion.
+Singing-birds may become a luxury, an indulgence, an excess.
+
+Did the birds eat the fruit in Paradise?
+
+Perhaps there they worked for some collective musical effect, had some
+sort of conductor in the place of this--hullabaloo....
+
+He decided to walk about the room for a time and then remake his bed....
+
+The sunrise found the bishop with his head and shoulders out of the
+window trying to see that blackbird. He just wanted to look at it. He
+was persuaded it was a quite exceptional blackbird.
+
+Again came that oppressive sense of the futility of the contemporary
+church, but this time it came in the most grotesque form. For hanging
+half out of the casement he was suddenly reminded of St. Francis of
+Assisi, and how at his rebuke the wheeling swallow stilled their cries.
+
+But it was all so different then.
+
+(3)
+
+
+It was only after he had passed four similar nights, with intervening
+days of lassitude and afternoon siestas, that the bishop realized that
+he was in the grip of insomnia.
+
+He did not go at once to a doctor, but he told his trouble to every one
+he met and received much tentative advice. He had meant to have his
+talk with Eleanor on the morning next after their conversation in the
+dining-room, but his bodily and spiritual anaemia prevented him.
+
+The fifth night was the beginning of the Whitsuntide Ember week, and
+he wore a red cassock and had a distracting and rather interesting day
+welcoming his ordination candidates. They had a good effect upon him; we
+spiritualize ourselves when we seek to spiritualize others, and he went
+to bed in a happier frame of mind than he had done since the day of the
+shock. He woke in the night, but he woke much more himself than he had
+been since the trouble began. He repeated that verse of Ken's:
+
+"When in the night I sleepless lie, My soul with heavenly thoughts
+supply; Let no ill dreams disturb my rest, No powers of darkness me
+molest."
+
+
+Almost immediately after these there floated into his mind, as if it
+were a message, the dear familiar words:
+
+"He giveth his Beloved sleep."
+
+
+These words irradiated and soothed him quite miraculously, the clouds of
+doubt seemed to dissolve and vanish and leave him safe and calm under a
+clear sky; he knew those words were a promise, and very speedily he fell
+asleep and slept until he was called.
+
+But the next day was a troubled one. Whippham had muddled his timetable
+and crowded his afternoon; the strike of the transport workers had
+begun, and the ugly noises they made at the tramway depot, where they
+were booing some one, penetrated into the palace. He had to snatch a
+meal between services, and the sense of hurry invaded his afternoon
+lectures to the candidates. He hated hurry in Ember week. His ideal was
+one of quiet serenity, of grave things said slowly, of still, kneeling
+figures, of a sort of dark cool spiritual germination. But what sort of
+dark cool spiritual germination is possible with an ass like Whippham
+about?
+
+In the fresh courage of the morning the bishop had arranged for that
+talk with Eleanor he had already deferred too long, and this had proved
+less satisfactory than he had intended it to be.
+
+The bishop's experience with the ordination candidates was following
+the usual course. Before they came there was something bordering upon
+distaste for the coming invasion; then always there was an effect of
+surprise at the youth and faith of the neophytes and a real response of
+the spirit to the occasion. Throughout the first twenty-four hours
+they were all simply neophytes, without individuality to break up their
+uniformity of self-devotion. Then afterwards they began to develop
+little personal traits, and scarcely ever were these pleasing traits.
+Always one or two of them would begin haunting the bishop, giving way
+to an appetite for special words, special recognitions. He knew the
+expression of that craving on their faces. He knew the way-laying
+movements in room and passage that presently began.
+
+This time in particular there was a freckled underbred young man who
+handed in what was evidently a carefully prepared memorandum upon what
+he called "my positions." Apparently he had a muddle of doubts about
+the early fathers and the dates of the earlier authentic copies of the
+gospels, things of no conceivable significance.
+
+The bishop glanced through this bale of papers--it had of course no
+index and no synopsis, and some of the pages were not numbered--handed
+it over to Whippham, and when he proved, as usual, a broken reed, the
+bishop had the brilliant idea of referring the young man to Canon Bliss
+(of Pringle), "who has a special knowledge quite beyond my own in this
+field."
+
+But he knew from the young man's eye even as he said this that it was
+not going to put him off for more than a day or so.
+
+The immediate result of glancing over these papers was, however, to
+enhance in the bishop's mind a growing disposition to minimize the
+importance of all dated and explicit evidences and arguments for
+orthodox beliefs, and to resort to vague symbolic and liberal
+interpretations, and it was in this state that he came to his talk with
+Eleanor.
+
+He did not give her much time to develop her objections. He met her
+half way and stated them for her, and overwhelmed her with sympathy
+and understanding. She had been "too literal." "Too literal" was his
+keynote. He was a little astonished at the liberality of his own views.
+He had been getting along now for some years without looking into his
+own opinions too closely and he was by no means prepared to discover
+how far he had come to meet his daughter's scepticisms. But he did meet
+them. He met them so thoroughly that he almost conveyed that hers was a
+needlessly conservative and oldfashioned attitude.
+
+Occasionally he felt he was being a little evasive, but she did not
+seem to notice it. As she took his drift, her relief and happiness were
+manifest. And he had never noticed before how clear and pretty her eyes
+were; they were the most honest eyes he had ever seen. She looked at him
+very steadily as he explained, and lit up at his points. She brightened
+wonderfully as she realized that after all they were not apart, they had
+not differed; simply they had misunderstood....
+
+And before he knew where he was, and in a mere parenthetical declaration
+of liberality, he surprised himself by conceding her demand for Newnham
+even before she had repeated it. It helped his case wonderfully.
+
+"Call in every exterior witness you can. The church will welcome
+them.... No, I want you to go, my dear...."
+
+But his mind was stirred again to its depths by this discussion. And
+in particular he was surprised and a little puzzled by this Newnham
+concession and the necessity of making his new attitude clear to Lady
+Ella....
+
+It was with a sense of fatality that he found himself awake again that
+night, like some one lying drowned and still and yet perfectly conscious
+at the bottom of deep cold water.
+
+He repeated, "He giveth his Beloved sleep," but all the conviction had
+gone out of the words.
+
+(4)
+
+
+Neither the bishop's insomnia nor his incertitudes about himself and his
+faith developed in a simple and orderly manner. There were periods of
+sustained suffering and periods of recovery; it was not for a year or
+so that he regarded these troubles as more than acute incidental
+interruptions of his general tranquillity or realized that he was
+passing into a new phase of life and into a new quality of thought.
+He told every one of the insomnia and no one of his doubts; these he
+betrayed only by an increasing tendency towards vagueness, symbolism,
+poetry and toleration. Eleanor seemed satisfied with his exposition; she
+did not press for further enlightenment. She continued all her outward
+conformities except that after a time she ceased to communicate; and in
+September she went away to Newnham. Her doubts had not visibly affected
+Clementina or her other sisters, and the bishop made no further attempts
+to explore the spiritual life of his family below the surface of its
+formal acquiescence.
+
+As a matter of fact his own spiritual wrestlings were almost exclusively
+nocturnal. During his spells of insomnia he led a curiously double
+existence. In the daytime he was largely the self he had always been,
+able, assured, ecclesiastical, except that he was a little jaded and
+irritable or sleepy instead of being quick and bright; he believed in
+God and the church and the Royal Family and himself securely; in
+the wakeful night time he experienced a different and novel self, a
+bare-minded self, bleakly fearless at its best, shamelessly weak at its
+worst, critical, sceptical, joyless, anxious. The anxiety was quite the
+worst element of all. Something sat by his pillow asking grey questions:
+"What are you doing? Where are you going? Is it really well with the
+children? Is it really well with the church? Is it really well with the
+country? Are you indeed doing anything at all? Are you anything more
+than an actor wearing a costume in an archaic play? The people turn
+their backs on you."
+
+He would twist over on his pillow. He would whisper hymns and prayers
+that had the quality of charms.
+
+"He giveth his Beloved sleep"; that answered many times, and many times
+it failed.
+
+The labour troubles of 1912 eased off as the year wore on, and the
+bitterness of the local press over the palace abated very considerably.
+Indeed there was something like a watery gleam of popularity when he
+brought down his consistent friend, the dear old Princess Christiana of
+Hoch and Unter, black bonnet, deafness, and all, to open a new wing of
+the children's hospital. The Princhester conservative paper took the
+occasion to inform the diocese that he was a fluent German scholar and
+consequently a persona grata with the royal aunts, and that the Princess
+Christiana was merely just one of a number of royalties now practically
+at the beck and call of Princhester. It was not true, but it was very
+effective locally, and seemed to justify a little the hauteur of which
+Lady Ella was so unjustly suspected. Yet it involved a possibility of
+disappointments in the future.
+
+He went to Brighton-Pomfrey too upon the score of his general health,
+and Brighton-Pomfrey revised his general regimen, discouraged indiscreet
+fasting, and suggested a complete abstinence from red wine except white
+port, if indeed that can be called a red wine, and a moderate use of
+Egyptian cigarettes.
+
+But 1913 was a strenuous year. The labour troubles revived, the
+suffragette movement increased greatly in violence and aggressiveness,
+and there sprang up no less than three ecclesiastical scandals in
+the diocese. First, the Kensitites set themselves firmly to make
+presentations and prosecutions against Morrice Deans, who was reserving
+the sacrament, wearing, they said, "Babylonish garments," going beyond
+all reason in the matter of infant confession, and generally brightening
+up Mogham Banks; next, a popular preacher in Wombash, published a book
+under the exasperating title, "The Light Under the Altar," in which
+he showed himself as something between an Arian and a Pantheist, and
+treated the dogma of the Trinity with as little respect as one would
+show to an intrusive cat; while thirdly, an obscure but overworked
+missioner of a tin mission church in the new working-class district at
+Pringle, being discovered in some sort of polygamous relationship, had
+seen fit to publish in pamphlet form a scandalous admission and defence,
+a pamphlet entitled "Marriage True and False," taking the public
+needlessly into his completest confidence and quoting the affairs of
+Abraham and Hosea, reviving many points that are better forgotten about
+Luther, and appealing also to such uncanonical authorities as
+Milton, Plato, and John Humphrey Noyes. This abnormal concurrence of
+indiscipline was extremely unlucky for the bishop. It plunged him into
+strenuous controversy upon three fronts, so to speak, and involved
+a great number of personal encounters far too vivid for his mental
+serenity.
+
+The Pringle polygamist was the most moving as Morrice Deans was the most
+exacting and troublesome and the Wombash Pantheist the most insidiously
+destructive figure in these three toilsome disputes. The Pringle man's
+soul had apparently missed the normal distribution of fig-leaves; he
+was an illiterate, open-eyed, hard-voiced, freckled, rational-minded
+creature, with large expository hands, who had come by a side way into
+the church because he was an indefatigable worker, and he insisted upon
+telling the bishop with an irrepressible candour and completeness just
+exactly what was the matter with his intimate life. The bishop very
+earnestly did not want these details, and did his utmost to avoid the
+controversial questions that the honest man pressed respectfully but
+obstinately upon him.
+
+"Even St. Paul, my lord, admitted that it is better to marry than burn,"
+said the Pringle misdemeanant, "and here was I, my lord, married and
+still burning!" and, "I think you would find, my lord, considering
+all Charlotte's peculiarities, that the situation was really much more
+trying than the absolute celibacy St. Paul had in view."...
+
+The bishop listened to these arguments as little as possible, and did
+not answer them at all. But afterwards the offender came and wept and
+said he was ruined and heartbroken and unfairly treated because
+he wasn't a gentleman, and that was distressing. It was so exactly
+true--and so inevitable. He had been deprived, rather on account of
+his voice and apologetics than of his offence, and public opinion was
+solidly with the sentence. He made a gallant effort to found what
+he called a Labour Church in Pringle, and after some financial
+misunderstandings departed with his unambiguous menage to join the
+advanced movement on the Clyde.
+
+The Morrice Deans enquiry however demanded an amount of erudition that
+greatly fatigued the bishop. He had a very fair general knowledge of
+vestments, but he had never really cared for anything but the poetry of
+ornaments, and he had to work strenuously to master the legal side
+of the question. Whippham, his chaplain, was worse than useless as a
+helper. The bishop wanted to end the matter as quickly, quietly, and
+favourably to Morrice Deans as possible; he thought Morrice Deans a
+thoroughly good man in his parish, and he believed that the substitution
+of a low churchman would mean a very complete collapse of church
+influence in Mogham Banks, where people were now thoroughly accustomed
+to a highly ornate service. But Morrice Deans was intractable and his
+pursuers indefatigable, and on several occasions the bishop sat far into
+the night devising compromises and equivocations that should make the
+Kensitites think that Morrice Deans wasn't wearing vestments when he
+was, and that should make Morrice Deans think he was wearing vestments
+when he wasn't. And it was Whippham who first suggested green tea as
+a substitute for coffee, which gave the bishop indigestion, as his
+stimulant for these nocturnal bouts.
+
+Now green tea is the most lucid of poisons.
+
+And while all this extra activity about Morrice Deans, these vigils and
+crammings and writings down, were using all and more energy than the
+bishop could well spare, he was also doing his quiet utmost to keep "The
+Light under the Altar" ease from coming to a head.
+
+This man he hated.
+
+And he dreaded him as well as hated him. Chasters, the author of "The
+Light under the Altar," was a man who not only reasoned closely
+but indelicately. There was a demonstrating, jeering, air about his
+preaching and writing, and everything he said and did was saturated by
+the spirit of challenge. He did not so much imitate as exaggerate the
+style of Matthew Arnold. And whatever was done publicly against him
+would have to be done very publicly because his book had got him a
+London reputation.
+
+From the bishop's point of view Chasters was one of nature's ignoblemen.
+He seemed to have subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles and passed all
+the tests and taken all the pledges that stand on the way to ordination,
+chiefly for the pleasure of attacking them more successfully from the
+rear; he had been given the living of Wombash by a cousin, and filled it
+very largely because it was not only more piquant but more remunerative
+and respectable to be a rationalist lecturer in a surplice. And in a
+hard kind of ultra-Protestant way his social and parochial work was not
+badly done. But his sermons were terrible. "He takes a text," said one
+informant, "and he goes on firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly, like
+somebody tearing the petals from a flower. 'Finally,' he says, and
+throws the bare stalk into the dustbin."
+
+The bishop avoided "The Light under the Altar" for nearly a year. It
+was only when a second book was announced with the winning title of "The
+Core of Truth in Christianity" that he perceived he must take action.
+He sat up late one night with a marked copy, a very indignantly marked
+copy, of the former work that an elderly colonel, a Wombash parishioner,
+an orthodox Layman of the most virulent type, had sent him. He perceived
+that he had to deal with a dialectician of exceptional ability, who had
+concentrated a quite considerable weight of scholarship upon the task of
+explaining away every scrap of spiritual significance in the Eucharist.
+From Chasters the bishop was driven by reference to the works of Legge
+and Frazer, and for the first time he began to measure the dimensions
+and power of the modern criticism of church doctrine and observance.
+Green tea should have lit his way to refutation; instead it lit up the
+whole inquiry with a light of melancholy confirmation. Neither by night
+nor by day could the bishop find a proper method of opening a counter
+attack upon Chasters, who was indisputably an intellectually abler man
+and a very ruthless beast indeed to assail, and meanwhile the demand
+that action should be taken increased.
+
+The literature of church history and the controversies arising out of
+doctrinal development became the employment of the bishop's leisure and
+a commanding preoccupation. He would have liked to discuss with some one
+else the network of perplexities in which he was entangling himself, and
+more particularly with Canon Bliss, but his own positions were becoming
+so insecure that he feared to betray them by argument. He had grown up
+with a kind of intellectual modesty. Some things he had never yet talked
+about; it made his mind blench to think of talking about them. And his
+great aching gaps of wakefulness began now, thanks to the green tea, to
+be interspersed with theological dreams and visions of an extravagant
+vividness. He would see Frazer's sacrificial kings butchered
+picturesquely and terribly amidst strange and grotesque rituals; he
+would survey long and elaborate processions and ceremonials in which
+the most remarkable symbols were borne high in the sight of all men; he
+would cower before a gigantic and threatening Heaven. These
+green-tea dreams and visions were not so much phases of sleep as an
+intensification and vivid furnishing forth of insomnia. It added
+greatly to his disturbance that--exceeding the instructions of
+Brighton-Pomfrey--he had now experimented ignorantly and planlessly
+with one or two narcotics and sleeping mixtures that friends and
+acquaintances had mentioned in his hearing. For the first time in his
+life he became secretive from his wife. He knew he ought not to take
+these things, he knew they were physically and morally evil, but
+a tormenting craving drove him to them. Subtly and insensibly his
+character was being undermined by the growing nervous trouble.
+
+He astonished himself by the cunning and the hypocritical dignity he
+could display in procuring these drugs. He arranged to have a tea-making
+set in his bedroom, and secretly substituted green tea, for which he
+developed a powerful craving, in the place of the delicate China tea
+Lady Ella procured him.
+
+(5)
+
+
+These doctrinal and physical anxieties and distresses were at their
+worst in the spring and early summer of 1914. That was a time of great
+mental and moral disturbance. There was premonition in the air of those
+days. It was like the uneasiness sensitive people experience before a
+thunderstorm. The moral atmosphere was sullen and close. The whole
+world seemed irritable and mischievous. The suffragettes became
+extraordinarily malignant; the democratic movement went rotten with
+sabotage and with a cant of being "rebels"; the reactionary Tories and a
+crew of noisy old peeresses set themselves to create incurable confusion
+again in the healing wounds of Ireland, and feuds and frantic folly
+broke out at every point of the social and political edifice. And then
+a bomb burst at Sarajevo that silenced all this tumult. The unstable
+polity of Europe heeled over like a ship that founders.
+
+Through the swiftest, tensest week in history Europe capsized into war.
+
+(6)
+
+
+The first effect of the war upon the mind of the bishop, as upon
+most imaginative minds, was to steady and exalt it. Trivialities and
+exasperations seemed swept out of existence. Men lifted up their eyes
+from disputes that had seemed incurable and wrangling that promised to
+be interminable, and discovered a plain and tragic issue that involved
+every one in a common call for devotion. For a great number of men and
+women who had been born and bred in security, the August and September
+of 1914 were the supremely heroic period of their lives. Myriads
+of souls were born again to ideas of service and sacrifice in those
+tremendous days.
+
+Black and evil thing as the war was, it was at any rate a great thing;
+it did this much for countless minds that for the first time they
+realized the epic quality of history and their own relationship to the
+destinies of the race. The flimsy roof under which we had been living
+our lives of comedy fell and shattered the floor under our feet; we saw
+the stars above and the abyss below. We perceived that life was insecure
+and adventurous, part of one vast adventure in space and time....
+
+Presently the smoke and dust of battle hid the great distances again,
+but they could not altogether destroy the memories of this revelation.
+
+For the first two months the bishop's attention was so detached from
+his immediate surroundings and employments, so absorbed by great events,
+that his history if it were told in detail would differ scarcely at all
+from the histories of most comparatively unemployed minds during those
+first dramatic days, the days when the Germans made their great rush
+upon Paris and it seemed that France was down, France and the whole
+fabric of liberal civilization. He emerged from these stunning
+apprehensions after the Battle of the Marne, to find himself busy upon a
+score of dispersed and disconnected war jobs, and trying to get all the
+new appearances and forces and urgencies of the war into relations with
+himself. One thing became very vivid indeed, that he wasn't being used
+in any real and effective way in the war. There was a mighty going
+to and fro upon Red Cross work and various war committees, a vast
+preparation for wounded men and for the succour of dislocated
+families; a preparation, that proved to be needless, for catastrophic
+unemployment. The war problem and the puzzle of German psychology ousted
+for a time all other intellectual interests; like every one else the
+bishop swam deep in Nietzsche, Bernhardi, Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
+and the like; he preached several sermons upon German materialism
+and the astonishing decay of the German character. He also read every
+newspaper he could lay his hands on--like any secular man. He signed
+an address to the Russian Orthodox church, beginning "Brethren," and
+he revised his impressions of the Filioque controversy. The idea of a
+reunion of the two great state churches of Russia and England had always
+attracted him. But hitherto it had been a thing quite out of scale,
+visionary, utopian. Now in this strange time of altered perspectives it
+seemed the most practicable of suggestions. The mayor and corporation
+and a detachment of the special reserve in uniform came to a great
+intercession service, and in the palace there were two conferences of
+local influential people, people of the most various types, people
+who had never met tolerantly before, expressing now opinions of
+unprecedented breadth and liberality.
+
+All this sort of thing was fresh and exciting at first, and then it
+began to fall into a routine and became habitual, and as it became
+habitual he found that old sense of detachment and futility was creeping
+back again. One day he realized that indeed the whole flood and tumult
+of the war would be going on almost exactly as it was going on now if
+there had been neither cathedral nor bishop in Princhester. It came to
+him that if archbishops were rolled into patriarchs and patriarchs into
+archbishops, it would matter scarcely more in the world process that was
+afoot than if two men shook hands while their house was afire. At times
+all of us have inappropriate thoughts. The unfortunate thought that
+struck the bishop as a bullet might strike a man in an exposed trench,
+as he was hurrying through the cloisters to a special service and
+address upon that doubly glorious day in our English history, the day of
+St. Crispin, was of Diogenes rolling his tub.
+
+It was a poisonous thought.
+
+It arose perhaps out of an article in a weekly paper at which he had
+glanced after lunch, an article written by one of those sceptical
+spirits who find all too abundant expression in our periodical
+literature. The writer boldly charged the "Christian churches" with
+absolute ineffectiveness. This war, he declared, was above all other
+wars a war of ideas, of material organization against rational freedom,
+of violence against law; it was a war more copiously discussed than any
+war had ever been before, the air was thick with apologetics. And what
+was the voice of the church amidst these elemental issues? Bishops and
+divines who were patriots one heard discordantly enough, but where were
+the bishops and divines who spoke for the Prince of Peace? Where was the
+blessing of the church, where was the veto of the church? When it
+came to that one discovered only a broad preoccupied back busied in
+supplementing the Army Medical Corps with Red Cross activities, good
+work in its way--except that the canonicals seemed superfluous. Who
+indeed looked to the church for any voice at all? And so to Diogenes.
+
+The bishop's mind went hunting for an answer to that indictment. And
+came back and came back to the image of Diogenes.
+
+It was with that image dangling like a barbed arrow from his mind that
+the bishop went into the pulpit to preach upon St. Crispin's day, and
+looked down upon a thin and scattered congregation in which the elderly,
+the childless, and the unoccupied predominated.
+
+That night insomnia resumed its sway.
+
+Of course the church ought to be controlling this great storm, the
+greatest storm of war that had ever stirred mankind. It ought to be
+standing fearlessly between the combatants like a figure in a wall
+painting, with the cross of Christ uplifted and the restored memory of
+Christendom softening the eyes of the armed nations. "Put down those
+weapons and listen to me," so the church should speak in irresistible
+tones, in a voice of silver trumpets.
+
+Instead it kept a long way from the fighting, tucked up its vestments,
+and was rolling its local tubs quite briskly.
+
+(7)
+
+
+And then came the aggravation of all these distresses by an abrupt
+abandonment of smoking and alcohol. Alcoholic relaxation, a necessary
+mitigation of the unreality of peacetime politics, becomes a grave
+danger in war, and it was with an understandable desire to forward the
+interests of his realm that the King decided to set his statesmen an
+example--which unhappily was not very widely followed--by abstaining
+from alcohol during the continuance of the struggle. It did however
+swing over the Bishop of Princhester to an immediate and complete
+abandonment of both drink and tobacco. At that time he was finding
+comfort for his nerves in Manila cheroots, and a particularly big and
+heavy type of Egyptian cigarette with a considerable amount of opium,
+and his disorganized system seized upon this sudden change as a
+grievance, and set all his jangling being crying aloud for one
+cigarette--just one cigarette.
+
+The cheroots, it seemed, he could better spare, but a cigarette became
+his symbol for his lost steadiness and ease.
+
+It brought him low.
+
+The reader has already been told the lamentable incident of the stolen
+cigarette and the small boy, and how the bishop, tormented by that
+shameful memory, cried aloud in the night.
+
+The bishop rolled his tub, and is there any tub-rolling in the world
+more busy and exacting than a bishop's? He rolled in it spite of
+ill-health and insomnia, and all the while he was tormented by the
+enormous background of the world war, by his ineffective realization
+of vast national needs, by his passionate desire, for himself and his
+church, not to be ineffective.
+
+The distressful alternation between nights of lucid doubt and days of
+dull acquiescence was resumed with an intensification of its contrasts.
+The brief phase of hope that followed the turn of the fighting upon the
+Maine, the hope that after all the war would end swiftly, dramatically,
+and justly, and everything be as it had been before--but pleasanter,
+gave place to a phase that bordered upon despair. The fall of Antwerp
+and the doubts and uncertainties of the Flanders situation weighed
+terribly upon the bishop. He was haunted for a time by nightmares of
+Zeppelins presently raining fire upon London. These visions became
+Apocalyptic. The Zeppelins came to England with the new year, and with
+the close of the year came the struggle for Ypres that was so near
+to being a collapse of the allied defensive. The events of the early
+spring, the bloody failure of British generalship at Neuve Chapelle,
+the naval disaster in the Dardanelles, the sinking of the Falaba,
+the Russian defeat in the Masurian Lakes, all deepened the bishop's
+impression of the immensity of the nation's difficulties and of his
+own unhelpfulness. He was ashamed that the church should hold back its
+curates from enlistment while the French priests were wearing their
+uniforms in the trenches; the expedition of the Bishop of London to
+hold open-air services at the front seemed merely to accentuate the
+tub-rolling. It was rolling the tub just where it was most in the way.
+
+What was wrong? What was wanting?
+
+The Westminster Gazette, The Spectator, and several other of the most
+trusted organs of public opinion were intermittently discussing the same
+question. Their discussions implied at once the extreme need that
+was felt for religion by all sorts of representative people, and the
+universal conviction that the church was in some way muddling and
+masking her revelation. "What is wrong with the Churches?" was,
+for example, the general heading of The Westminster Gazette's
+correspondence.
+
+One day the bishop skimmed a brief incisive utterance by Sir Harry
+Johnston that pierced to the marrow of his own shrinking convictions.
+Sir Harry is one of those people who seem to write as well as speak in
+a quick tenor. "Instead of propounding plainly and without the acereted
+mythology of Asia Minor, Greece and Rome, the pure Gospel of Christ....
+they present it overloaded with unbelievable myths (such as, among
+a thousand others, that Massacre of the Innocents which never took
+place).... bore their listeners by a Tibetan repetition of creeds that
+have ceased to be credible.... Mutually contradictory propositions....
+Prayers and litanies composed in Byzantine and mediaeval times....
+the want of actuality, the curious silliness which has, ever since the
+destruction of Jerusalem, hung about the exposition of Christianity....
+But if the Bishops continue to fuss about the trappings of religion....
+the maintenance of codes compiled by people who lived sixteen hundred
+or two thousand five hundred years ago.... the increasingly educated
+and practical-minded working classes will not come to church, weekday or
+Sunday."
+
+The bishop held the paper in his hand, and with a mind that he felt to
+be terribly open, asked himself how true that sharp indictment might be,
+and, granting its general truth, what was the duty of the church, that
+is to say of the bishops, for as Cyprian says, ecelesia est in episcopo.
+We say the creeds; how far may we unsay them?
+
+So far he had taken no open action against Chasters. Suppose now he
+were to side with Chasters and let the whole diocese, the church of
+Princhester, drift as far as it chose under his inaction towards an
+extreme modernism, risking a conflict with, and if necessary fighting,
+the archbishop.... It was but for a moment that his mind swung to this
+possibility and then recoiled. The Laymen, that band of bigots, would
+fight. He could not contemplate litigation and wrangling about the
+teaching of the church. Besides, what were the "trappings of religion"
+and what the essentials? What after all was "the pure gospel of Christ"
+of which this writer wrote so glibly? He put the paper down and took a
+New Testament from his desk and opened it haphazard. He felt a curious
+wish that he could read it for the first time. It was over-familiar.
+Everything latterly in his theology and beliefs had become
+over-familiar. It had all become mechanical and dead and unmeaning to
+his tired mind....
+
+Whippham came with a reminder of more tub-rolling, and the bishop's
+speculations were broken off.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH - THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND
+
+(1)
+
+
+THAT night when he cried aloud at the memory of his furtive cigarette,
+the bishop was staying with a rich man named Garstein Fellows. These
+Garstein Fellows people were steel people with a financial side to them;
+young Garstein Fellows had his fingers in various chemical businesses,
+and the real life of the firm was in various minor partners called
+Hartstein and Blumenhart and so forth, who had acquired a considerable
+amount of ungentlemanly science and energy in Germany and German
+Switzerland. But the Fellows element was good old Princhester stuff.
+There had been a Fellows firm in Princhester in 1819. They were not
+people the bishop liked and it was not a house the bishop liked staying
+at, but it had become part of his policy to visit and keep in touch with
+as many of the local plutocracy as he could, to give and take with them,
+in order to make the presence of the church a reality to them. It had
+been not least among the negligences and evasions of the sainted but
+indolent Hood that he had invariably refused overnight hospitality
+whenever it was possible for him to get back to his home. The morning
+was his working time. His books and hymns had profited at the cost of
+missing many a generous after-dinner subscription, and at the expense
+of social unity. From the outset Scrope had set himself to alter this.
+A certain lack of enthusiasm on Lady Ella's part had merely provoked
+him to greater effort on his own. His ideal of what was needed with the
+people was something rather jolly and familiar, something like a very
+good and successful French or Irish priest, something that came
+easily and readily into their homes and laid a friendly hand on their
+shoulders. The less he liked these rich people naturally the more
+familiar his resolution to be successfully intimate made him. He put
+down the names and brief characteristics of their sons and daughters in
+a little note-book and consulted it before every visit so as to get
+his most casual enquiries right. And he invited himself to the Garstein
+Fellows house on this occasion by telegram.
+
+
+"A special mission and some business in Wombash may I have a scrap of
+supper and a bed?"
+
+
+Now Mrs. Garstein Fellows was a thoroughly London woman; she was one of
+the banking Grunenbaums, the fair tall sort, and she had a very decided
+tendency to smartness. She had a little party in the house, a sort of
+long week-end party, that made her hesitate for a minute or so before
+she framed a reply to the bishop's request.
+
+
+It was the intention of Mrs. Garstein Fellows to succeed very
+conspicuously in the British world, and the British world she felt was
+a complicated one; it is really not one world but several, and if you
+would surely succeed you must keep your peace with all the systems and
+be a source of satisfaction to all of them. So at least Mrs. Garstein
+Fellows saw it, and her method was to classify her acquaintances
+according to their systems, to keep them in their proper bundles, and
+to give every one the treatment he or she was accustomed to receive. And
+since all things British are now changing and passing away, it may not
+be uninteresting to record the classification Mrs. Garstein Fellows
+adopted. First she set apart as most precious and desirable, and
+requiring the most careful treatment, the "court dowdies "--for so it
+was that the dignity and quiet good taste that radiated from Buckingham
+Palace impressed her restless, shallow mind--the sort of people who
+prefer pair horse carriages to automobiles, have quiet friendships in
+the highest quarters, quietly do not know any one else, busy themselves
+with charities, dress richly rather than impressively, and have either
+little water-colour accomplishments or none at all, and no other
+relations with "art." At the skirts of this crowning British world Mrs.
+Garstein Fellows tugged industriously and expensively. She did not keep
+a carriage and pair and an old family coachman because that, she felt,
+would be considered pushing and presumptuous; she had the sense to stick
+to her common unpretending 80 h.p. Daimler; but she wore a special sort
+of blackish hat-bonnet for such occasions as brought her near the centre
+of honour, which she got from a little good shop known only to very few
+outside the inner ring, which hat-bonnet she was always careful to
+sit on for a few minutes before wearing. And it was to this first and
+highest and best section of her social scheme that she considered that
+bishops properly belonged. But some bishops, and in particular such
+a comparatively bright bishop as the Bishop of Princhester, she also
+thought of as being just as comfortably accommodated in her second
+system, the "serious liberal lot," which was more fatiguing and less
+boring, which talked of books and things, visited the Bells, went to all
+first-nights when Granville Barker was the producer, and knew and valued
+people in the grey and earnest plains between the Cecils and the Sidney
+Webbs. And thirdly there were the smart intellectual lot, again not very
+well marked off, and on the whole practicable to bishops, of whom fewer
+particulars are needed because theirs is a perennial species, and then
+finally there was that fourth world which was paradoxically at once very
+brilliant and a little shady, which had its Night Club side, and seemed
+to set no limit to its eccentricities. It seemed at times to be aiming
+to shock and yet it had its standards, but here it was that the dancers
+and actresses and forgiven divorcees came in--and the bishops as a rule,
+a rule hitherto always respected, didn't. This was the ultimate world of
+Mrs. Garstein Fellows; she had no use for merely sporting people and
+the merely correct smart and the duller county families, sets that led
+nowhere, and it was from her fourth system of the Glittering Doubtfuls
+that this party which made her hesitate over the bishop's telegram, was
+derived.
+
+She ran over their names as she sat considering her reply.
+
+What was there for a bishop to object to? There was that admirable
+American widow, Lady Sunderbund. She was enormously rich, she was
+enthusiastic. She was really on probation for higher levels; it was her
+decolletage delayed her. If only she kept off theosophy and the Keltic
+renascence and her disposition to profess wild intellectual passions,
+there would be no harm in her. Provided she didn't come down to dinner
+in anything too fantastically scanty--but a word in season was possible.
+No! there was no harm in Lady Sunderbund. Then there were Ridgeway Kelso
+and this dark excitable Catholic friend of his, Paidraig O'Gorman. Mrs.
+Garstein Fellows saw no harm in them. Then one had to consider Lord
+Gatling and Lizzie Barusetter. But nothing showed, nothing was likely to
+show even if there was anything. And besides, wasn't there a Church and
+Stage Guild?
+
+Except for those people there seemed little reason for alarm. Mrs.
+Garstein Fellows did not know that Professor Hoppart, who so amusingly
+combined a professorship of political economy with the writing of
+music-hall lyrics, was a keen amateur theologian, nor that Bent, the
+sentimental novelist, had a similar passion. She did not know that her
+own eldest son, a dark, romantic-looking youngster from Eton, had also
+come to the theological stage of development. She did however weigh
+the possibilities of too liberal opinions on what are called social
+questions on the part of Miss Sharsper, the novelist, and decided that
+if that lady was watched nothing so terrible could be said even in an
+undertone; and as for the Mariposa, the dancer, she had nothing but
+Spanish and bad French, she looked all right, and it wasn't very likely
+she would go out of her way to startle an Anglican bishop. Simply she
+needn't dance. Besides which even if a man does get a glimpse of a
+little something--it isn't as if it was a woman.
+
+But of course if the party mustn't annoy the bishop, the bishop must
+do his duty by the party. There must be the usual purple and the silver
+buckles.
+
+She wired back:
+
+
+"A little party but it won't put you out send your man with your
+change."
+
+(2)
+
+
+In making that promise Mrs. Garstein Fellows reckoned without the
+morbid sensibility of the bishop's disorganized nervous system and the
+unsuspected theological stirrings beneath the apparent worldliness of
+Hoppart and Bent.
+
+The trouble began in the drawing-room after dinner. Out of deference to
+the bishop's abstinence the men did not remain to smoke, but came in to
+find the Mariposa and Lady Sunderbund smoking cigarettes, which these
+ladies continued to do a little defiantly. They had hoped to finish them
+before the bishop came up. The night was chilly, and a cheerful wood
+fire cracking and banging on the fireplace emphasized the ordinary
+heating. Mrs. Garstein Fellows, who had not expected so prompt an
+appearance of the men, had arranged her chairs in a semicircle for a
+little womanly gossip, and before she could intervene she found her
+party, with the exception of Lord Gatling, who had drifted just a little
+too noticeably with Miss Barnsetter into a window, sitting round with
+a conscious air, that was perhaps just a trifle too apparent, of being
+"good."
+
+And Mr. Bent plunged boldly into general conversation.
+
+"Are you reading anything now, Mrs. Garstein Fellows?" he asked. "I'm an
+interested party."
+
+She was standing at the side of the fireplace. She bit her lip and
+looked at the cornice and meditated with a girlish expression. "Yes,"
+she said. "I am reading again. I didn't think I should but I am."
+
+"For a time," said Hoppart, "I read nothing but the papers. I bought
+from a dozen to twenty a day."
+
+"That is wearing off," said the bishop.
+
+"The first thing I began to read again," said Mrs. Garstein Fellows,
+"--I'm not saying it for your sake, Bishop--was the Bible."
+
+"I went to the Bible," said Bent as if he was surprised.
+
+"I've heard that before," said Ridgeway Kelso, in that slightly
+explosive manner of his. "All sorts of people who don't usually read the
+Bible--"
+
+"But Mr. Kelso!" protested their hostess with raised eyebrows.
+
+"I was thinking of Bent. But anyhow there's been a great wave of
+seriousness, a sudden turning to religion and religious things. I don't
+know if it comes your way, Bishop...."
+
+"I've had no rows of penitents yet."
+
+"We may be coming," said Hoppart.
+
+He turned sideways to face the bishop. "I think we should be coming
+if--if it wasn't for old entangled difficulties. I don't know if you
+will mind my saying it to you, but...."
+
+The bishop returned his frank glance. "I'd like to know above all
+things," he said. "If Mrs. Garstein Fellow will permit us. It's my
+business to know."
+
+"We all want to know," said Lady Sunderbund, speaking from the low chair
+on the other side of the fireplace. There was a vibration in her voice
+and a sudden gleam of enthusiasm in her face. "Why shouldn't people talk
+se'iously sometimes?"
+
+"Well, take my own case," said Hoppart. "In the last few weeks, I've
+been reading not only in the Bible but in the Fathers. I've read most of
+Athanasius, most of Eusebius, and--I'll confess it--Gibbon. I find all
+my old wonder come back. Why are we pinned to--to the amount of creed we
+are pinned to? Why for instance must you insist on the Trinity?"
+
+"Yes," said the Eton boy explosively, and flushed darkly to find he had
+spoken.
+
+"Here is a time when men ask for God," said Hoppart. "And you give them
+three!" cried Bent rather cheaply. "I confess I find the way encumbered
+by these Alexandrian elaborations," Hoppart completed.
+
+"Need it be?" whispered Lady Sunderbund very softly.
+
+"Well," said the bishop, and leant back in his armchair and knitted his
+brow at the fire. "I do not think," he said, "that men coming to God
+think very much of the nature of God. Nevertheless," he spoke slowly
+and patted the arm of his chair, "nevertheless the church insists that
+certain vitally important truths have to be conveyed, certain mortal
+errors are best guarded against, by these symbols."
+
+"You admit they are symbols."
+
+"So the church has always called them."
+
+Hoppart showed by a little movement and grimace that he thought the
+bishop quibbled.
+
+"In every sense of the word," the bishop hastened to explain, "the
+creeds are symbolical. It is clear they seek to express ineffable things
+by at least an extended use of familiar words. I suppose we are all
+agreed nowadays that when we speak of the Father and of the Son we mean
+something only in a very remote and exalted way parallel with--with
+biological fatherhood and sonship."
+
+Lady Sunderbund nodded eagerly. "Yes," she said, "oh, yes," and held up
+an expectant face for more.
+
+"Our utmost words, our most elaborately phrased creeds, can at the best
+be no better than the shadow of something unseen thrown upon the screen
+of experience."
+
+He raised his rather weary eyes to Hoppart as if he would know what else
+needed explanation. He was gratified by Lady Sunderbund's approval, but
+he affected not to see or hear it. But it was Bent who spoke.
+
+He spoke in the most casual way. He made the thing seem the most
+incidental of observations.
+
+"What puzzles me," he said, "is why the early Christians identified the
+Spermaticos Logos of the Stoics with the second and not with the third
+person of the Trinity."
+
+To which the bishop, rising artlessly to the bait, replied, "Ah! that
+indeed is the unfortunate aspect of the whole affair."
+
+And then the Irish Catholic came down on him....
+
+(3)
+
+
+How the bishop awakened in the night after this dispute has been
+told already in the opening section of this story. To that night of
+discomfort we now return after this comprehensive digression. He
+awoke from nightmares of eyes and triangles to bottomless remorse and
+perplexity. For the first time he fully measured the vast distances
+he had travelled from the beliefs and attitudes of his early training,
+since his coming to Princhester. Travelled--or rather slipped and fallen
+down the long slopes of doubt.
+
+That clear inky dimness that comes before dawn found his white face at
+the window looking out upon the great terrace and the park.
+
+(4)
+
+
+After a bout of mental distress and sleeplessness the bishop would
+sometimes wake in the morning not so much exhausted as in a state of
+thin mental and bodily activity. This was more particularly so if the
+night had produced anything in the nature of a purpose. So it was
+on this occasion. The day was clear before him; at least it could be
+cleared by sending three telegrams; his man could go back to Princhester
+and so leave him perfectly free to go to Brighton-Pomfrey in London and
+secure that friendly dispensation to smoke again which seemed the only
+alternative to a serious mental breakdown. He would take his bag, stay
+the night in London, smoke, sleep well, and return the next morning.
+Dunk, his valet-butler, found him already bathed and ready for a cup of
+tea and a Bradshaw at half-past seven. He went on dressing although the
+good train for London did not start until 10.45.
+
+Mrs. Garstein Fellows was by nature and principle a late riser; the
+breakfast-room showed small promise yet of the repast, though the table
+was set and bright with silver and fresh flowers, and a wood fire popped
+and spurted to greet and encourage the March sunshine. But standing in
+the doorway that led to the promise and daffodils and crocuses of Mrs.
+Garstein Fellows' garden stood Lady Sunderbund, almost with an effect
+of waiting, and she greeted the bishop very cheerfully, doubted the
+immediate appearance of any one else, and led him in the most natural
+manner into the new but already very pleasant shrubbery.
+
+In some indefinable special way the bishop had been aware of Lady
+Sunderbund's presence since first he had met her, but it was only now
+that he could observe her with any particularity. She was tall like his
+own Lady Ella but not calm and quiet; she was electric, her eyes, her
+smiles, her complexion had as it were an established brightness that
+exceeded the common lustre of things. This morning she was dressed in
+grey that was nevertheless not grey but had an effect of colour, and
+there was a thread of black along the lines of her body and a gleam of
+gold. She carried her head back with less dignity than pride; there was
+a little frozen movement in her dark hair as if it flamed up out of her
+head. There were silver ornaments in her hair. She spoke with a pretty
+little weakness of the r's that had probably been acquired abroad. And
+she lost no time in telling him, she was eager to tell him, that she had
+been waylaying him. "I did so want to talk to you some maw," she said.
+"I was shy last night and they we' all so noisy and eaga'. I p'ayed that
+you might come down early.
+
+"It's an oppo'tunity I've longed for," she said.
+
+She did her very pretty best to convey what it was had been troubling
+her. 'iligion bad been worrying her for years. Life was--oh--just
+ornaments and games and so wea'isome, so wea'isome, unless it was
+'iligious. And she couldn't get it 'iligious.
+
+The bishop nodded his head gravely.
+
+"You unde'stand?" she pressed.
+
+"I understand too well--the attempt to get hold--and keep hold."
+
+"I knew you would!" she cried.
+
+She went on with an impulsive rapidity. O'thodoxy had always 'ipelled
+her,--always. She had felt herself confronted by the most insurmountable
+difficulties, and yet whenever she had gone away from Christianity--she
+had gone away from Christianity, to the Theosophists and the Christian
+Scientists--she had felt she was only "st'aying fu'tha." And then
+suddenly when he was speaking last night, she had felt he knew. It was
+so wonderful to hear the "k'eed was only a symbol."
+
+"Symbol is the proper name for it," said the bishop. "It wasn't for
+centuries it was called the Creed."
+
+Yes, and so what it really meant was something quite different from what
+it did mean.
+
+The bishop felt that this sentence also was only a symbol, and nodded
+encouragingly--but gravely, warily.
+
+And there she was, and the point was there were thousands and thousands
+and thousands of educated people like her who were dying to get through
+these old-fashioned symbols to the true faith that lay behind them. That
+they knew lay behind them. She didn't know if he had read "The Light
+under the Altar"?
+
+"He's vicar of Wombash--in my diocese," said the bishop with restraint.
+
+"It's wonde'ful stuff," said Lady Sunderbund. "It's spi'tually cold,
+but it's intellectually wonde'ful. But we want that with spi'tuality. We
+want it so badly. If some one--"
+
+She became daring. She bit her under lip and flashed her spirit at him.
+
+"If you--" she said and paused.
+
+"Could think aloud," said the bishop.
+
+"Yes," she said, nodding rapidly, and became breathless to hear.
+
+It would certainly be an astonishing end to the Chasters difficulty if
+the bishop went over to the heretic, the bishop reflected.
+
+"My dear lady, I won't disguise," he began; "in fact I don't see how
+I could, that for some years I have been growing more and more
+discontented with some of our most fundamental formulae. But it's been
+very largely a shapeless discontent--hitherto. I don't think I've said a
+word to a single soul. No, not a word. You are the first person to
+whom I've ever made the admission that even my feelings are at times
+unorthodox."
+
+She lit up marvellously at his words. "Go on," she whispered.
+
+But she did not need to tell him to go on. Now that he had once broached
+the casket of his reserves he was only too glad of a listener. He talked
+as if they were intimate and loving friends, and so it seemed to both
+of them they were. It was a wonderful release from a long and painful
+solitude.
+
+To certain types it is never quite clear what has happened to them until
+they tell it. So that now the bishop, punctuated very prettily by
+Lady Sunderbund, began to measure for the first time the extent of his
+departure from the old innate convictions of Otteringham Rectory. He
+said that it was strange to find doubt coming so late in life, but
+perhaps it was only in recent years that his faith had been put to any
+really severe tests. It had been sheltered and unchallenged.
+
+"This fearful wa'," Lady Sunderbund interjected.
+
+But Princhester had been a critical and trying change, and "The Light
+under the Altar" case had ploughed him deeply. It was curious that
+his doubts always seemed to have a double strand; there was a moral
+objection based on the church's practical futility and an intellectual
+strand subordinated to this which traced that futility largely to its
+unconvincing formulae.
+
+"And yet you know," said the bishop, "I find I can't go with Chasters.
+He beats at the church; he treats her as though she were wrong. I feel
+like a son, growing up, who finds his mother isn't quite so clear-spoken
+nor quite so energetic as she seemed to be once. She's right, I feel
+sure. I've never doubted her fundamental goodness."
+
+"Yes," said Lady Sunderbund, very eagerly, "yes."
+
+"And yet there's this futility.... You know, my dear lady, I don't
+know what to do. One feels on the one hand, that here is a cloud of
+witnesses, great men, sainted men, subtle men, figures permanently
+historical, before whom one can do nothing but bow down in the utmost
+humility, here is a great instrument and organization--what would the
+world be without the witness of the church?--and on the other hand here
+are our masses out of hand and hostile, our industrial leaders equally
+hostile; there is a failure to grip, and that failure to grip is so
+clearly traceable to the fact that our ideas are not modern ideas, that
+when we come to profess our faith we find nothing in our mouths but
+antiquated Alexandrian subtleties and phrases and ideas that may have
+been quite alive, quite significant, quite adequate in Asia Minor or
+Egypt, among men essentially orientals, fifteen hundred years ago, but
+which now--"
+
+He expressed just what they came to now by a gesture.
+
+She echoed his gesture.
+
+"Probably I'm not alone among my brethren," he went on, and then: "But
+what is one to do?"
+
+With her hands she acted her sense of his difficulty.
+
+"One may be precipitate," he said. "There's a kind of loyalty and
+discipline that requires one to keep the ranks until one's course of
+action is perfectly clear. One owes so much to so many. One has to
+consider how one may affect--oh! people one has never seen."
+
+He was lugging things now into speech that so far had been scarcely
+above the threshold of his conscious thought. He went on to discuss the
+entire position of the disbelieving cleric. He discovered a fine point.
+
+"If there was something else, an alternative, another religion, another
+Church, to which one could go, the whole case would be different. But to
+go from the church to nothingness isn't to go from falsehood to truth.
+It's to go from truth, rather badly expressed, rather conservatively
+hidden by its protections, truth in an antiquated costume, to the
+blackest lie--in the world."
+
+She took that point very brightly.
+
+"One must hold fast to 'iligion," she said, and looked earnestly at him
+and gripped fiercely, pink thumbs out, with her beautiful hands held up.
+
+That was it, exactly. He too was gripping. But while on the outside the
+Midianites of denial were prowling for these clinging souls, within
+the camp they were assailed by a meticulous orthodoxy that was only too
+eager to cast them forth. The bishop dwelt for a time upon the curious
+fierceness orthodoxy would sometimes display. Nowadays atheism can be
+civil, can be generous; it is orthodoxy that trails a scurrilous fringe.
+
+"Who was that young man with a strong Irish accent--who contradicted me
+so suddenly?" he asked.
+
+"The dark young man?"
+
+"The noisy young man."
+
+"That was Mist' Pat'ick O'Go'man. He is a Kelt and all that. Spells
+Pat'ick with eva so many letters. You know. They say he spends ouas and
+ouas lea'ning E'se. He wo'ies about it. They all t'y to lea'n E'se, and
+it wo'ies them and makes them hate England moa and moa."
+
+"He is orthodox. He--is what I call orthodox to the ridiculous extent."
+
+"'idiculous."
+
+A deep-toned gong proclaimed breakfast over a square mile or so of
+territory, and Lady Sunderbund turned about mechanically towards the
+house. But they continued their discussion.
+
+She started indeed a new topic. "Shall we eva, do 'ou think, have a new
+'iligion--t'ua and betta?"
+
+That was a revolutionary idea to him.
+
+He was still fending it off from him when a gap in the shrubs brought
+them within sight of the house and of Mrs. Garstein Fellows on the
+portico waving a handkerchief and crying "Break-fast."
+
+"I wish we could talk for houas," said Lady Sunderbund.
+
+"I've been glad of this talk," said the bishop. "Very glad."
+
+She lifted her soft abundant skirts and trotted briskly across the still
+dewy lawn towards the house door. The bishop followed gravely and slowly
+with his hands behind his back and an unusually peaceful expression upon
+his face. He was thinking how rare and precious a thing it is to find
+intelligent friendship in women. More particularly when they were
+dazzlingly charming and pretty. It was strange, but this was really his
+first woman friend. If, as he hoped, she became his friend.
+
+Lady Sunderbund entered the breakfast room in a gusty abundance like
+Botticelli's Primavera, and kissed Mrs. Garstein Fellows good-morning.
+She exhaled a glowing happiness. "He is wondyful," she panted. "He is
+most wondyful."
+
+"Mr. Hidgeway Kelso?"
+
+"No, the dee' bishop! I love him. Are those the little sausages I like?
+May I take th'ee? I've been up houas."
+
+The dee' bishop appeared in the sunlit doorway.
+
+(5)
+
+
+The bishop felt more contentment in the London train than he had felt
+for many weeks. He had taken two decisive and relieving steps. One was
+that he had stated his case to another human being, and that a very
+charming and sympathetic human being, he was no longer a prey to a
+current of secret and concealed thoughts running counter to all the
+appearances of his outward life; and the other was that he was now
+within an hour or so of Brighton-Pomfrey and a cigarette. He would lunch
+on the train, get to London about two, take a taxi at once to the wise
+old doctor, catch him over his coffee in a charitable and understanding
+mood, and perhaps be smoking a cigarette publicly and honourably and
+altogether satisfyingly before three.
+
+So far as Brighton-Pomfrey's door this program was fulfilled without
+a hitch. The day was fine and he had his taxi opened, and noted with a
+patriotic satisfaction as he rattled through the streets, the glare of
+the recruiting posters on every vacant piece of wall and the increasing
+number of men in khaki in the streets. But at the door he had a
+disappointment. Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was away at the front--of all
+places; he had gone for some weeks; would the bishop like to see Dr.
+Dale?
+
+The bishop hesitated. He had never set eyes on this Dr. Dale.
+
+Indeed, he had never heard of Dr. Dale.
+
+Seeing his old friend Brighton-Pomfrey and being gently and tactfully
+told to do exactly what he was longing to do was one thing; facing some
+strange doctor and going slowly and elaborately through the whole
+story of his illness, his vow and his breakdown, and perhaps having his
+reaction time tested and all sorts of stripping and soundings done, was
+quite another. He was within an ace of turning away.
+
+If he had turned away his whole subsequent life would have been
+different. It was the very slightest thing in the world tipped the
+beam. It was the thought that, after all, whatever inconvenience and
+unpleasantness there might be in this interview, there was at the end of
+it a very reasonable prospect of a restored and legitimate cigarette.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIFTH - THE FIRST VISION
+
+(1)
+
+
+Dr. DALE exceeded the bishop's worst apprehensions. He was a lean, lank,
+dark young man with long black hair and irregular, rather prolonged
+features; his chin was right over to the left; he looked constantly at
+the bishop's face with a distinctly sceptical grey eye; he could not
+have looked harder if he had been a photographer or a portrait painter.
+And his voice was harsh, and the bishop was particularly sensitive to
+voices.
+
+He began by understanding far too much of the bishop's illness, and he
+insisted on various familiarities with the bishop's heart and tongue and
+eye and knee that ruffled the bishop's soul.
+
+"Brighton-Pomfrey talked of neurasthenia?" he asked. "That was his
+diagnosis," said the bishop. "Neurasthenia," said the young man as
+though he despised the word.
+
+The bishop went on buttoning up his coat.
+
+"You don't of course want to break your vows about drinking and
+smoking," said the young man with the very faintest suggestion of
+derision in his voice.
+
+"Not if it can possibly be avoided," the bishop asserted. "Without a
+loss, that is, of practical efficiency," he added. "For I have much to
+do."
+
+"I think that it is possible to keep your vow," said the young man,
+and the bishop could have sworn at him. "I think we can manage that all
+right."
+
+(2)
+
+
+The bishop sat at the table resting his arm upon it and awaiting the
+next development of this unsatisfactory interview. He was on the verge
+of asking as unpleasantly as possible when Brighton-Pomfrey would
+return.
+
+The young man stood upon Brighton-Pomfrey's hearth-rug and was evidently
+contemplating dissertations.
+
+"Of course," he said, as though he discussed a problem with himself,
+"you must have some sort of comfort. You must get out of this state, one
+way or another."
+
+The bishop nodded assent. He had faint hopes of this young man's ideas
+of comfort.
+
+Dr. Dale reflected. Then he went off away from the question of comfort
+altogether. "You see, the trouble in such a case as this is peculiarly
+difficult to trace to its sources because it comes just upon the
+border-line of bodily and mental things. You may take a drug or alter
+your regimen and it disturbs your thoughts, you may take an idea and
+it disturbs your health. It is easy enough to say, as some do, that all
+ideas have a physical substratum; it is almost as easy to say with the
+Christian Scientist that all bodily states are amenable to our ideas.
+The truth doesn't, I think, follow the border between those opposite
+opinions very exactly on either side. I can't, for instance, tell you to
+go home and pray against these uncertainties and despairs, because it
+is just these uncertainties and despairs that rob you of the power of
+efficient prayer."
+
+He did not seem to expect anything from the bishop.
+
+"I don't see that because a case brings one suddenly right up against
+the frontier of metaphysics, why a doctor should necessarily pull
+up short at that, why one shouldn't go on into either metaphysics or
+psychology if such an extension is necessary for the understanding of
+the case. At any rate if you'll permit it in this consultation...."
+
+"Go on," said the bishop, holding on to that promise of comfort. "The
+best thing is to thrash out the case in your own way. And then come to
+what is practical."
+
+"What is really the matter here--the matter with you that is--is a
+disorganization of your tests of reality. It's one of a group of states
+hitherto confused. Neurasthenia, that comprehensive phrase--well, it is
+one of the neurasthenias. Here, I confess, I begin to talk of work I am
+doing, work still to be published, finished first and then published....
+But I go off from the idea that every living being lives in a state
+not differing essentially from a state of hallucination concerning the
+things about it. Truth, essential truth, is hidden. Always. Of course
+there must be a measure of truth in our working illusions, a working
+measure of truth, or the creature would smash itself up and end itself,
+but beyond that discretion of the fire and the pitfall lies a wide
+margin of error about which we may be deceived for years. So long as it
+doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. I don't know if I make myself clear."
+
+"I follow you," said the bishop a little wearily, "I follow you.
+Phenomena and noumena and so on and so on. Kant and so forth.
+Pragmatism. Yes."
+
+With a sigh.
+
+"And all that," completed Dr. Dale in a voice that suggested mockery.
+"But you see we grow into a way of life, we settle down among habits and
+conventions, we say 'This is all right' and 'That is always so.' We
+get more and more settled into our life as a whole and more and more
+confident. Unless something happens to shake us out of our sphere of
+illusion. That may be some violent contradictory fact, some accident,
+or it may be some subtle change in one's health and nerves that makes
+us feel doubtful. Or a change of habits. Or, as I believe, some subtle
+quickening of the critical faculty. Then suddenly comes the feeling as
+though we were lost in a strange world, as though we had never really
+seen the world before."
+
+He paused.
+
+The bishop was reluctantly interested. "That does describe something--of
+the mental side," he admitted. "I never believe in concealing my own
+thoughts from an intelligent patient," said Dr. Dale, with a quiet
+offensiveness. "That sort of thing belongs to the dark ages of the
+'pothecary's art. I will tell you exactly my guesses and suppositions
+about you. At the base of it all is a slight and subtle kidney trouble,
+due I suggest to your going to Princhester and drinking the local
+water--"
+
+"But it's excellent water. They boast of it."
+
+"By all the established tests. As a matter of fact many of our best
+drinking waters have all sorts of unspecified qualities. Burton water,
+for example, is radioactive by Beetham's standards up to the ninth
+degree. But that is by the way. My theory about your case is that this
+produced a change in your blood, that quickened your sensibilities and
+your critical faculties just at a time when a good many bothers--I don't
+of course know what they were, but I can, so to speak, see the marks all
+over you--came into your life."
+
+The bishop nodded.
+
+"You were uprooted. You moved from house to house, and failed to get
+that curled up safe feeling one has in a real home in any of them."
+
+"If you saw the fireplaces and the general decoration of the new
+palace!" admitted the bishop. "I had practically no control."
+
+"That confirms me," said Dr. Dale. "Insomnia followed, and increased the
+feeling of physical strangeness by increasing the bodily disturbance. I
+suspect an intellectual disturbance."
+
+He paused.
+
+"There was," said the bishop.
+
+"You were no longer at home anywhere. You were no longer at home in your
+diocese, in your palace, in your body, in your convictions. And then
+came the war. Quite apart from everything else the mind of the whole
+world is suffering profoundly from the shock of this war--much more
+than is generally admitted. One thing you did that you probably did not
+observe yourself doing, you drank rather more at your meals, you smoked
+a lot more. That was your natural and proper response to the shock."
+
+"Ah!" said the bishop, and brightened up.
+
+"It was remarked by Tolstoy, I think, that few intellectual men would
+really tolerate the world as it is if it were not for smoking and
+drinking. Even novelists have their moments of lucidity. Certainly these
+things soothe the restlessness in men's minds, deaden their sceptical
+sensibilities. And just at the time when you were getting most
+dislodged--you gave them up."
+
+"And the sooner I go back to them the better," said the bishop brightly.
+"I quite see that."
+
+"I wouldn't say that," said Dr. Dale....
+
+(3)
+
+
+"That," said Dr. Dale, "is just where my treatment of this case differs
+from the treatment of "--he spoke the name reluctantly as if he disliked
+the mere sound of it--"Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey."
+
+"Hitherto, of course," said the bishop, "I've been in his hands."
+
+"He," said Dr. Dale, "would certainly set about trying to restore your
+old sphere of illusion, your old familiar sensations and ideas and
+confidences. He would in fact turn you back. He would restore all your
+habits. He would order you a rest. He would send you off to some holiday
+resort, fresh in fact but familiar in character, the High lands, North
+Italy, or Switzerland for example. He would forbid you newspapers and
+order you to botanize and prescribe tranquillizing reading; Trollope's
+novels, the Life of Gladstone, the works of Mr. A. C. Benson, memoirs
+and so on. You'd go somewhere where there was a good Anglican chaplain,
+and you'd take some of the services yourself. And we'd wash out the
+effects of the Princhester water with Contrexeville, and afterwards
+put you on Salutaris or Perrier. I don't know whether I shouldn't have
+inclined to some such treatment before the war began. Only--"
+
+He paused.
+
+"You think--?"
+
+Dr. Dale's face betrayed a sudden sombre passion. "It won't do now," he
+said in a voice of quiet intensity. "It won't do now."
+
+He remained darkly silent for so long that at last the bishop spoke.
+"Then what," he asked, "do you suggest?
+
+"Suppose we don't try to go back," said Dr. Dale. "Suppose we go on and
+go through."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"To reality.
+
+"I know it's doubtful, I know it's dangerous," he went on, "but I am
+convinced that now we can no longer keep men's minds and souls in these
+feathered nests, these spheres of illusion. Behind these veils there is
+either God or the Darkness.... Why should we not go on?"
+
+The bishop was profoundly perplexed. He heard himself speaking. "It
+would be unworthy of my cloth," he was saying.
+
+Dr. Dale completed the sentence: "to go back."
+
+"Let me explain a little more," he said, "what I mean by 'going on.' I
+think that this loosening of the ties of association that bind a man to
+his everyday life and his everyday self is in nine cases out of ten a
+loosening of the ties that bind him to everyday sanity. One common form
+of this detachment is the form you have in those cases of people who
+are found wandering unaware of their names, unaware of their places
+of residence, lost altogether from themselves. They have not only lost
+their sense of identity with themselves, but all the circumstances of
+their lives have faded out of their minds like an idle story in a book
+that has been read and put aside. I have looked into hundreds of such
+cases. I don't think that loss of identity is a necessary thing; it's
+just another side of the general weakening of the grip upon reality, a
+kind of anaemia of the brain so that interest fades and fails. There
+is no reason why you should forget a story because you do not believe
+it--if your brain is strong enough to hold it. But if your brain is
+tired and weak, then so soon as you lose faith in your records, your
+mind is glad to let them go. When you see these lost identity people
+that is always your first impression, a tired brain that has let go."
+
+The bishop felt extremely like letting go.
+
+"But how does this apply to my case?"
+
+"I come to that," said Dr. Dale, holding up a long large hand. "What
+if we treat this case of yours in a new way? What if we give you not
+narcotics but stimulants and tonics? What if we so touch the blood that
+we increase your sense of physical detachment while at the same time
+feeding up your senses to a new and more vivid apprehension of things
+about you?" He looked at his patient's hesitation and added: "You'd lose
+all that craving feeling, that you fancy at present is just the need
+of a smoke. The world might grow a trifle--transparent, but you'd keep
+real. Instead of drugging oneself back to the old contentment--"
+
+"You'd drug me on to the new," said the bishop.
+
+"But just one word more!" said Dr. Dale. "Hear why I would do this! It
+was easy and successful to rest and drug people back to their old states
+of mind when the world wasn't changing, wasn't spinning round in the
+wildest tornado of change that it has ever been in. But now--Where can
+I send you for a rest? Where can I send you to get you out of sight and
+hearing of the Catastrophe? Of course old Brighton-Pomfrey would go on
+sending people away for rest and a nice little soothing change if the
+Day of Judgment was coming in the sky and the earth was opening and the
+sea was giving up its dead. He'd send 'em to the seaside. Such things as
+that wouldn't shake his faith in the Channel crossing. My idea is that
+it's not only right for you to go through with this, but that it's the
+only thing to do. If you go right on and right through with these doubts
+and intimations--"
+
+He paused.
+
+"You may die like a madman," he said, "but you won't die like a tame
+rabbit."
+
+(4)
+
+
+The bishop sat reflecting. What fascinated and attracted him was the
+ending of all the cravings and uneasinesses and restlessness that had
+distressed his life for over four years; what deterred him was the
+personality of this gaunt young man with his long grey face, his excited
+manner, his shock of black hair. He wanted that tonic--with grave
+misgivings. "If you think this tonic is the wiser course," he began.
+"I'd give it you if you were my father," said Dr. Dale. "I've got
+everything for it," he added.
+
+"You mean you can make it up--without a prescription."
+
+"I can't give you a prescription. The essence of it--It's a distillate I
+have been trying. It isn't in the Pharmacopeia."
+
+Again the bishop had a twinge of misgiving.
+
+But in the end he succumbed. He didn't want to take the stuff, but also
+he did not want to go without his promised comfort.
+
+Presently Dale had given him a little phial--and was holding up to the
+window a small medicine glass into which he was pouring very carefully
+twenty drops of the precious fluid. "Take it only," he said, "when you
+feel you must."
+
+"It is the most golden of liquids," said the bishop, peering at it.
+
+"When you want more I will make you more. Later of course, it will be
+possible to write a prescription. Now add the water--so.
+
+"It becomes opalescent. How beautifully the light plays in it!
+
+"Take it."
+
+The bishop dismissed his last discretion and drank.
+
+"Well?" said Dr. Dale.
+
+"I am still here," said the bishop, smiling, and feeling a joyous
+tingling throughout his body. "It stirs me."
+
+(5)
+
+
+The bishop stood on the pavement outside Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's house.
+The massive door had closed behind him.
+
+It had been an act of courage, of rashness if you will, to take this
+draught. He was acutely introspective, ready for anything, for the most
+disagreeable or the most bizarre sensations. He was asking himself, Were
+his feet steady? Was his head swimming?
+
+His doubts glowed into assurance.
+
+Suddenly he perceived that he was sure of God.
+
+Not perhaps of the God of Nicaea, but what did these poor little
+quibblings and definitions of the theologians matter? He had been
+worrying about these definitions and quibblings for four long restless
+years. Now they were just failures to express--what surely every one
+knew--and no one would ever express exactly. Because here was God, and
+the kingdom of God was manifestly at hand. The visible world hung before
+him as a mist might hang before the rising sun. He stood proudly and
+masterfully facing a universe that had heretofore bullied him into doubt
+and apologetics, a universe that had hitherto been opaque and was now
+betrayed translucent.
+
+That was the first effect of the new tonic, complete reassurance,
+complete courage. He turned to walk towards Mount Street and Berkeley
+Square as a sultan might turn to walk among his slaves.
+
+But the tonic was only beginning.
+
+Before he had gone a dozen steps he was aware that he seemed more solid
+and larger than the people about him. They had all a curious miniature
+effect, as though he was looking at them through the wrong end of an
+opera glass. The houses on either side of the street and the traffic
+shared this quality in an equal measure. It was as if he was looking at
+the world through apertures in a miniature cinematograph peep-show. This
+surprised him and a little dashed his first glow of satisfaction.
+
+He passed a man in khaki who, he fancied, looked at him with an odd
+expression. He observed the next passers-by narrowly and suspiciously, a
+couple of smartish young men, a lady with a poodle, a grocer's boy with
+a basket, but none seemed to observe anything remarkable about him. Then
+he caught the eye of a taxi-driver and became doubtful again.
+
+He had a feeling that this tonic was still coming in like a tide. It
+seemed to be filling him and distending him, in spite of the fact that
+he was already full. After four years of flaccidity it was pleasant to
+be distended again, but already he felt more filled than he had ever
+been before. At present nothing was showing, but all his body seemed
+braced and uplifted. He must be careful not to become inflated in his
+bearing.
+
+And yet it was difficult not to betray a little inflation. He was so
+filled with assurance that things were right with him and that God was
+there with him. After all it was not mere fancy; he was looking through
+the peepholes of his eyes at the world of illusion and appearance. The
+world that was so intent upon its immediate business, so regardless of
+eternal things, that had so dominated him but a little while ago, was
+after all a thing more mortal than himself.
+
+Another man in khaki passed him.
+
+For the first time he saw the war as something measurable, as something
+with a beginning and an end, as something less than the immortal spirit
+in man. He had been too much oppressed by it. He perceived all these
+people in the street were too much oppressed by it. He wanted to tell
+them as much, tell them that all was well with them, bid them be of good
+cheer. He wanted to bless them. He found his arm floating up towards
+gestures of benediction. Self-control became increasingly difficult.
+
+All the way down Berkeley Square the bishop was in full-bodied struggle
+with himself. He was trying to control himself, trying to keep within
+bounds. He felt that he was stepping too high, that his feet were not
+properly reaching the ground, that he was walking upon cushions of air.
+
+The feeling of largeness increased, and the feeling of transparency in
+things about him. He avoided collision with passers-by--excessively. And
+he felt his attention was being drawn more and more to something that
+was going on beyond the veil of visible things. He was in Piccadilly
+now, but at the same time Piccadilly was very small and he was walking
+in the presence of God.
+
+He had a feeling that God was there though he could not see him. And at
+the same time he was in this transitory world, with people going to and
+fro, men with umbrellas tucked dangerously under their arms, men in a
+hurry, policemen, young women rattling Red Cross collecting boxes, smart
+people, loafers. They distracted one from God.
+
+He set out to cross the road just opposite Prince's, and jumping
+needlessly to give way to an omnibus had the narrowest escape from a
+taxicab.
+
+He paused on the pavement edge to recover himself. The shock of his near
+escape had, as people say, pulled him together.
+
+What was he to do? Manifestly this opalescent draught was overpowering
+him. He ought never to have taken it. He ought to have listened to the
+voice of his misgivings. It was clear that he was not in a fit state to
+walk about the streets. He was--what had been Dr. Dale's term?--losing
+his sense of reality. What was he to do? He was alarmed but not
+dismayed. His thoughts were as full-bodied as the rest of his being,
+they came throbbing and bumping into his mind. What was he to do?
+
+Brighton-Pomfrey ought never to have left his practice in the hands of
+this wild-eyed experimenter.
+
+Strange that after a lifetime of discretion and men's respect one should
+be standing on the Piccadilly pavement--intoxicated!
+
+It came into his head that he was not so very far from the Athenaeum,
+and surely there if anywhere a bishop may recover his sense of
+being--ordinary.
+
+And behind everything, behind the tall buildings and the swarming people
+there was still the sense of a wide illuminated space, of a light of
+wonder and a Presence. But he must not give way to that again! He had
+already given way altogether too much. He repeated to himself in a
+whisper, "I am in Piccadilly."
+
+If he kept tight hold upon himself he felt he might get to the Athenaeum
+before--before anything more happened.
+
+He murmured directions to himself. "Keep along the pavement. Turn to
+the right at the Circus. Now down the hill. Easily down the hill. Don't
+float! Junior Army and Navy Stores. And the bookseller."
+
+And presently he had a doubt of his name and began to repeat it.
+
+"Edward Princhester. Edward Scrope, Lord Bishop of Princhester."
+
+And all the while voices within him were asserting, "You are in the
+kingdom of Heaven. You are in the presence of God. Place and time are a
+texture of illusion and dreamland. Even now, you are with God."
+
+(6)
+
+
+The porter of the Athenaeum saw him come in, looking well--flushed
+indeed--but queer in expression; his blue eyes were wide open and
+unusually vague and blue.
+
+He wandered across towards the dining-room, hesitated, went to look at
+the news, seemed in doubt whether he would not go into the smoking-room,
+and then went very slowly upstairs, past the golden angel up to the
+great drawing-room.
+
+In the drawing-room he found only Sir James Mounce, the man who knew
+the novels of Sir Walter Scott by heart and had the minutest and most
+unsparing knowledge of every detail in the life of that supreme giant of
+English literature. He had even, it was said, acquired a Scotch burr in
+the enthusiasm of his hero-worship. It was usually sufficient only to
+turn an ear towards him for him to talk for an hour or so. He was now
+studying Bradshaw.
+
+The bishop snatched at him desperately. He felt that if he went away
+there would be no hold left upon the ordinary things of life.
+
+"Sir James," he said, "I was wondering the other day when was the exact
+date of the earliest public ascription of Waverley to Scott."
+
+"Eh!" said Sir James, "but I'd like to talk that over with ye. Indeed
+I would. It would be depending very largely on what ye called 'public.'
+But--"
+
+He explained something about an engagement in Birmingham that night, a
+train to catch. Reluctantly but relentlessly he abandoned the proffered
+ear. But he promised that the next time they met in the club he would go
+into the matter "exhausteevely."
+
+The door closed upon him. The bishop was alone. He was flooded with
+the light of the world that is beyond this world. The things about him
+became very small and indistinct.
+
+He would take himself into a quiet corner in the library of this doll's
+house, and sit his little body down in one of the miniature armchairs.
+Then if he was going to faint or if the trancelike feeling was to become
+altogether a trance--well, a bishop asleep in an armchair in the library
+of the Athenaeum is nothing to startle any one.
+
+He thought of that convenient hidden room, the North Library, in which
+is the bust of Croker. There often one can be quite alone.... It was
+empty, and he went across to the window that looks out upon Pall Mall
+and sat down in the little uncomfortable easy chair by the desk with its
+back to the Benvenuto Cellini.
+
+And as he sat down, something snapped--like the snapping of a lute
+string--in his brain.
+
+(7)
+
+
+With a sigh of deep relief the bishop realized that this world had
+vanished.
+
+He was in a golden light.
+
+He perceived it as a place, but it was a place without buildings or
+trees or any very definite features. There was a cloudy suggestion of
+distant hills, and beneath his feet were little gem-like flowers, and
+a feeling of divinity and infinite friendliness pervaded his being. His
+impressions grew more definite. His feet seemed to be bare. He was no
+longer a bishop nor clad as a bishop. That had gone with the rest of the
+world. He was seated on a slab of starry rock.
+
+This he knew quite clearly was the place of God.
+
+He was unable to disentangle thoughts from words. He seemed to be
+speaking in his mind.
+
+"I have been very foolish and confused and perplexed. I have been like a
+creature caught among thorns."
+
+"You served the purpose of God among those thorns." It seemed to him at
+first that the answer also was among his thoughts.
+
+"I seemed so silly and so little. My wits were clay."
+
+"Clay full of desires."
+
+"Such desires!"
+
+"Blind desires. That will presently come to the light."
+
+"Shall we come to the light?"
+
+"But here it is, and you see it!"
+
+(8)
+
+
+It became clearer in the mind of the bishop that a figure sat beside
+him, a figure of great strength and beauty, with a smiling face and
+kindly eyes. A strange thought and a strange courage came to the bishop.
+
+"Tell me," he whispered, "are you God?"
+
+"I am the Angel of God."
+
+The bishop thought over that for some moments.
+
+"I want," he said, "to know about God.
+
+"I want," he said, with a deepening passion of the soul, "to know about
+God. Slowly through four long years I have been awakening to the need
+of God. Body and soul I am sick for the want of God and the knowledge of
+God. I did not know what was the matter with me, why my life had become
+so disordered and confused that my very appetites and habits are all
+astray. But I am perishing for God as a waterless man upon a raft
+perishes for drink, and there is nothing but madness if I touch the seas
+about me. Not only in my thoughts but in my under thoughts and in my
+nerves and bones and arteries I have need of God. You see I grew up in
+the delusion that I knew God, I did not know that I was unprovisioned
+and unprovided against the tests and strains and hardships of life. I
+thought that I was secure and safe. I was told that we men--who were
+apes not a quarter of a million years ago, who still have hair upon
+our arms and ape's teeth in our jaws--had come to the full and perfect
+knowledge of God. It was all put into a creed. Not a word of it was to
+be altered, not a sentence was to be doubted any more. They made me a
+teacher of this creed. They seemed to explain it to me. And when I came
+to look into it, when my need came and I turned to my creed, it was old
+and shrivelled up, it was the patched-up speculations of vanished Greeks
+and Egyptians, it was a mummy of ancient disputes, old and dry, that
+fell to dust as I unwrapped it. And I was dressed up in the dress of old
+dead times and put before an altar of forgotten sacrifices, and I went
+through ceremonies as old as the first seedtime; and suddenly I knew
+clearly that God was not there, God was not in my Creed, not in my
+cathedral, not in my ceremonies, nowhere in my life. And at the same
+time I knew, I knew as I had never known before, that certainly there
+was God."
+
+He paused. "Tell me," said the friend at his side; "tell me."
+
+"It was as if a child running beside its mother, looked up and saw that
+he had never seen her face before, that she was not his mother, and that
+the words he had seemed to understand were--now that he listened--words
+in an unknown tongue.
+
+"You see, I am but a common sort of man, dear God; I have neither lived
+nor thought in any way greatly, I have gone from one day to the next day
+without looking very much farther than the end of the day, I have gone
+on as life has befallen; if no great trouble had come into my life, so
+I should have lived to the end of my days. But life which began for me
+easily and safely has become constantly more difficult and strange.
+I could have held my services and given my benedictions, I could have
+believed I believed in what I thought I believed.... But now I am lost
+and astray--crying out for God...."
+
+(9)
+
+
+"Let us talk a little about your troubles," said the Angel. "Let us talk
+about God and this creed that worries you and this church of yours."
+
+"I feel as though I had been struggling to this talk through all the
+years--since my doubts began."
+
+"The story your Creed is trying to tell is much the same story that
+all religions try to tell. In your heart there is God, beyond the stars
+there is God. Is it the same God?"
+
+"I don't know," said the bishop.
+
+"Does any one know?"
+
+"I thought I knew."
+
+"Your creed is full of Levantine phrases and images, full of the patched
+contradictions of the human intelligence utterly puzzled. It is about
+those two Gods, the God beyond the stars and the God in your heart. It
+says that they are the same God, but different. It says that they have
+existed together for all time, and that one is the Son of the other. It
+has added a third Person--but we won't go into that."
+
+The bishop was reminded suddenly of the dispute at Mrs. Garstein
+Fellows'. "We won't go into that," he agreed. "No!"
+
+"Other religions have told the story in a different way. The Cathars and
+Gnostics did. They said that the God in your heart is a rebel against
+the God beyond the stars, that the Christ in your heart is like
+Prometheus--or Hiawatha--or any other of the sacrificial gods, a rebel.
+He arises out of man. He rebels against that high God of the stars and
+crystals and poisons and monsters and of the dead emptiness of space....
+The Manicheans and the Persians made out our God to be fighting
+eternally against that Being of silence and darkness beyond the stars.
+The Buddhists made the Lord Buddha the leader of men out of the futility
+and confusion of material existence to the great peace beyond. But it is
+all one story really, the story of the two essential Beings, always the
+same story and the same perplexity cropping up under different names,
+the story of one being who stirs us, calls to us, and leads us, and
+of another who is above and outside and in and beneath all things,
+inaccessible and incomprehensible. All these religions are trying to
+tell something they do not clearly know--of a relationship between these
+two, that eludes them, that eludes the human mind, as water escapes from
+the hand. It is unity and opposition they have to declare at the same
+time; it is agreement and propitiation, it is infinity and effort."
+
+"And the truth?" said the bishop in an eager whisper. "You can tell me
+the truth."
+
+The Angel's answer was a gross familiarity. He thrust his hand through
+the bishop's hair and ruffled it affectionately, and rested for a moment
+holding the bishop's cranium in his great palm.
+
+"But can this hold it?" he said....
+
+"Not with this little box of brains," said the Angel. "You could as soon
+make a meal of the stars and pack them into your belly. You haven't the
+things to do it with inside this."
+
+He gave the bishop's head a little shake and relinquished it.
+
+He began to argue as an elder brother might.
+
+"Isn't it enough for you to know something of the God that comes down to
+the human scale, who has been born on your planet and arisen out of Man,
+who is Man and God, your leader? He's more than enough to fill your mind
+and use up every faculty of your being. He is courage, he is adventure,
+he is the King, he fights for you and with you against death...."
+
+"And he is not infinite? He is not the Creator?" asked the bishop.
+
+"So far as you are concerned, no," said the Angel.
+
+"So far as I am concerned?"
+
+"What have you to do with creation?"
+
+And at that question it seemed that a great hand swept carelessly across
+the blackness of the farther sky, and smeared it with stars and suns and
+shining nebulas as a brush might smear dry paint across a canvas.
+
+The bishop stared in front of him. Then slowly he bowed his head, and
+covered his face with his hands.
+
+"And I have been in orders," he murmured; "I have been teaching people
+the only orthodox and perfect truth about these things for seven and
+twenty years."
+
+And suddenly he was back in his gaiters and his apron and his shovel
+hat, a little black figure exceedingly small in a very great space....
+
+(10)
+
+
+It was a very great space indeed because it was all space, and the roof
+was the ebony of limitless space from which the stars swung flaming,
+held by invisible ties, and the soil beneath his feet was a dust of
+atoms and the little beginnings of life. And long before the bishop
+bared his face again, he knew that he was to see his God.
+
+He looked up slowly, fearing to be dazzled.
+
+But he was not dazzled. He knew that he saw only the likeness and
+bodying forth of a being inconceivable, of One who is greater than the
+earth and stars and yet no greater than a man. He saw a being for ever
+young, for ever beginning, for ever triumphant. The quality and texture
+of this being was a warm and living light like the effulgence at
+sunrise; He was hope and courage like a sunlit morning in spring. He
+was adventure for ever, and His courage and adventure flowed into and
+submerged and possessed the being of the man who beheld him. And this
+presence of God stood over the bishop, and seemed to speak to him in a
+wordless speech.
+
+He bade him surrender himself. He bade him come out upon the Adventure
+of Life, the great Adventure of the earth that will make the atoms our
+bond-slaves and subdue the stars, that will build up the white fires of
+ecstasy to submerge pain for ever, that will overcome death. In Him
+the spirit of creation had become incarnate, had joined itself to men,
+summoning men to Him, having need of them, having need of them, having
+need of their service, even as great kings and generals and leaders need
+and use men. For a moment, for an endless age, the bishop bowed himself
+in the being and glory of God, felt the glow of the divine courage and
+confidence in his marrow, felt himself one with God.
+
+For a timeless interval....
+
+Never had the bishop had so intense a sense of reality. It seemed that
+never before had he known anything real. He knew certainly that God was
+his King and master, and that his unworthy service could be acceptable
+to God. His mind embraced that idea with an absolute conviction that was
+also absolute happiness.
+
+(11)
+
+
+The thoughts and sensations of the bishop seemed to have lifted for
+a time clean away from the condition of time, and then through a vast
+orbit to be returning to that limitation.
+
+He was aware presently that things were changing, that the light was
+losing its diviner rays, that in some indescribable manner the glory and
+the assurance diminished.
+
+The onset of the new phase was by imperceptible degrees. From a glowing,
+serene, and static realization of God, everything relapsed towards
+change and activity. He was in time again and things were happening, it
+was as if the quicksands of time poured by him, and it was as if God
+was passing away from him. He fell swiftly down from the heaven
+of self-forgetfulness to a grotesque, pathetic and earthly
+self-consciousness.
+
+He became acutely aware of his episcopal livery. And that God was
+passing away from him.
+
+It was as if God was passing, and as if the bishop was unable to rise up
+and follow him.
+
+Then it was as if God had passed, and as if the bishop was in headlong
+pursuit of him and in a great terror lest he should be left behind. And
+he was surely being left behind.
+
+He discovered that in some unaccountable way his gaiters were loose;
+most of their buttons seemed to have flown off, and his episcopal
+sash had slipped down about his feet. He was sorely impeded. He kept
+snatching at these things as he ran, in clumsy attempts to get them off.
+
+At last he had to stop altogether and kneel down and fumble with the
+last obstinate button.
+
+"Oh God!" he cried, "God my captain! Wait for me! Be patient with me!"
+
+And as he did so God turned back and reached out his hand. It was indeed
+as if he stood and smiled. He stood and smiled as a kind man might do;
+he dazzled and blinded his worshipper, and yet it was manifest that he
+had a hand a man might clasp.
+
+Unspeakable love and joy irradiated the whole being of the bishop as he
+seized God's hand and clasped it desperately with both his own. It was
+as if his nerves and arteries and all his substance were inundated with
+golden light....
+
+It was again as if he merged with God and became God....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SIXTH - EXEGETICAL
+
+(1)
+
+
+WITHOUT any sense of transition the bishop found himself seated in the
+little North Library of the Athenaeum club and staring at the bust of
+John Wilson Croker. He was sitting motionless and musing deeply. He was
+questioning with a cool and steady mind whether he had seen a vision
+or whether he had had a dream. If it had been a dream it had been an
+extraordinarily vivid and convincing dream. He still seemed to be in the
+presence of God, and it perplexed him not at all that he should also
+be in the presence of Croker. The feeling of mental rottenness and
+insecurity that had weakened his thought through the period of his
+illness, had gone. He was secure again within himself.
+
+It did not seem to matter fundamentally whether it was an experience of
+things without or of things within him that had happened to him. It was
+clear to him that much that he had seen was at most expressive, that
+some was altogether symbolical. For example, there was that sudden
+absurd realization of his sash and gaiters, and his perception of them
+as encumbrances in his pursuit of God. But the setting and essential of
+the whole thing remained in his mind neither expressive nor symbolical,
+but as real and immediately perceived, and that was the presence and
+kingship of God. God was still with him and about him and over him and
+sustaining him. He was back again in his world and his ordinary life,
+in his clothing and his body and his club, but God had been made and
+remained altogether plain and manifest.
+
+Whether an actual vision had made his conviction, or whether the
+conviction of his own subconscious mind had made the dream, seemed but
+a small matter beside the conviction that this was indeed the God he had
+desired and the God who must rule his life.
+
+"The stuff? The stuff had little to do with it. It just cleared my
+head.... I have seen. I have seen really. I know."
+
+(2)
+
+
+For a long time as it seemed the bishop remained wrapped in clouds of
+luminous meditation. Dream or vision it did not matter; the essential
+thing was that he had made up his mind about God, he had found God.
+Moreover, he perceived that his theological perplexities had gone. God
+was higher and simpler and nearer than any theological God, than the
+God of the Three Creeds. Those creeds lay about in his mind now like
+garments flung aside, no trace nor suspicion of divinity sustained them
+any longer. And now--Now he would go out into the world.
+
+The little Library of the Athenaeum has no visible door. He went to the
+book-masked entrance in the corner, and felt among the bookshelves
+for the hidden latch. Then he paused, held by a curious thought. What
+exactly was the intention of that symbolical struggle with his sash and
+gaiters, and why had they impeded his pursuit of God?
+
+To what particularly significant action was he going out?
+
+The Three Creeds were like garments flung aside. But he was still
+wearing the uniform of a priest in the service of those three creeds.
+
+After a long interval he walked into the big reading-room. He ordered
+some tea and dry toast and butter, and sat down very thoughtfully in a
+corner. He was still sitting and thinking at half-past eight.
+
+It may seem strange to the reader that this bishop who had been doubting
+and criticizing the church and his system of beliefs for four long
+years had never before faced the possibility of a severance from his
+ecclesiastical dignity. But he had grown up in the church, his life had
+been so entirely clerical and Anglican, that the widest separation he
+had hitherto been able to imagine from this past had left him still a
+bishop, heretical perhaps, innovating in the broadening of beliefs and
+the liberalizing of practice, defensive even as Chasters was defensive,
+but still with the palace and his dignities, differing in opinion rather
+than in any tangible reality from his previous self. For a bishop,
+disbelief in the Church is a far profounder scepticism than mere
+disbelief in God. God is unseen, and in daily things unfelt; but
+the Church is with the predestined bishop always. His concept of the
+extremest possible departure from orthodoxy had been something that
+Chasters had phrased as "a restatement of Christ." It was a new idea, an
+idea that had come with an immense effect of severance and novelty, that
+God could be other than the God of the Creed, could present himself
+to the imagination as a figure totally unlike the white, gentle, and
+compromising Redeemer of an Anglican's thought. That the bishop should
+treat the whole teaching of the church and the church itself as wrong,
+was an idea so new that it fell upon him now like a thunderbolt out of a
+cloudless sky. But here, clear in his mind now, was a feeling, amounting
+to conviction, that it was the purpose and gesture of the true God that
+he should come right out of the church and all his professions.
+
+And in the first glow of his vision he felt this gesture imperative. He
+must step right out.... Whither? how? And when?
+
+To begin with it seemed to him that an immediate renunciation was
+demanded. But it was a momentous step. He wanted to think. And to go
+on thinking. Rather than to act precipitately. Although the imperative
+seemed absolute, some delaying and arresting instinct insisted that he
+must "think" If he went back to Princhester, the everyday duties of
+his position would confront him at once with an effect of a definite
+challenge. He decided to take one of the Reform club bedrooms for two or
+three days, and wire to Princhester that he was "unavoidably delayed in
+town," without further explanations. Then perhaps this inhibitory force
+would give way.
+
+It did not, however, give way. His mind sat down for two days in a blank
+amazement at the course before him, and at the end of that time this
+reasonless and formless institution was as strong as ever. During that
+time, except for some incidental exchanges at his clubs, he talked to no
+one. At first he did not want to talk to any one. He remained mentally
+and practically active, with a still intensely vivid sense that God,
+the true God, stood watching him and waiting for him to follow. And to
+follow meant slipping right out of all the world he had ever known.
+To thrust his foot right over the edge of a cliff would scarcely have
+demanded more from the bishop's store of resolution. He stood on the
+very verge. The chief secretion of his mind was a shadowy experiment or
+so in explanation of why he did not follow.
+
+(3)
+
+
+Insensibly the extreme vividness of his sense of God's nearness
+decreased. But he still retained a persuasion of the reality of an
+immediate listener waiting, and of the need of satisfying him.
+
+On the third day he found his mind still further changed. He no longer
+felt that God was in Pall Mall or St. James's Park, whither he
+resorted to walk and muse. He felt now that God was somewhere about the
+horizon....
+
+He felt too no longer that he thought straight into the mind of God. He
+thought now of what he would presently say to God. He turned over and
+rehearsed phrases. With that came a desire to try them first on some
+other hearer. And from that to the attentive head of Lady Sunderbund,
+prettily bent towards him, was no great leap. She would understand,
+if any one could understand, the great change that had happened in his
+mind.
+
+He found her address in the telephone book. She could be quite alone
+to him if he wouldn't mind "just me." It was, he said, exactly what he
+desired.
+
+But when he got to her great airy flat overlooking Hyde Park, with its
+Omega Workshop furniture and its arresting decoration, he was not so
+sure whether this encounter was so exactly the thing he had desired as
+he had supposed.
+
+The world had become opaque and real again as he walked up St. James's
+Street and past the Ritz. He had a feeling that he was taking an
+afternoon off from God. The adventurous modernity of the room in which
+he waited intensified that. One whole white wall was devoted to a small
+picture by Wyndham Lewis. It was like a picture of an earthquake in a
+city of aniline pink and grey and keen green cardboard, and he wished it
+had never existed.
+
+He turned his back upon it and stared out of the window over the trees
+and greenery. The balcony was decorated with white and pink geraniums in
+pots painted black and gold, and the railings of the balcony were black
+and gold with crimson shape like squares wildly out of drawing.
+
+Lady Sunderbund kept him waiting perhaps five minutes. Then she came
+sailing in to him.
+
+She was dressed in a way and moved across the room in a way that was
+more reminiscent of Botticelli's Spring than ever--only with a kind
+of superadded stiffish polonaise of lace--and he did not want to be
+reminded of Botticelli's Spring or wonder why she had taken to stiff
+lace polonaises. He did not enquire whether he had met Lady Sunderbund
+to better advantage at Mrs. Garstein Fellows' or whether his memory had
+overrated her or whether anything had happened to his standard of taste,
+but his feeling now was decidedly one of disappointment, and all the
+talk and self-examination he had promised himself seemed to wither and
+hide away within him. For a time he talked of her view, and then
+admired her room and its arrangement, which he thought really were quite
+unbecomingly flippant and undignified for a room. Then came the black
+tea-things on their orange tray, and he searched in his mind for small
+talk to sustain their interview.
+
+But he had already betrayed his disposition to "go on with our talk"
+in his telephone enquiry, and Lady Sunderbund, perceiving his shyness,
+began to make openings for him, at first just little hinting openings,
+and then larger and larger ones, until at last one got him.
+
+"I'm so glad," she said, "to see you again. I'm so glad to go on with
+our talk. I've thought about it and thought about it."
+
+She beamed at him happily.
+
+"I've thought ova ev'y wo'd you said," she went on, when she had
+finished conveying her pretty bliss to him. "I've been so helped by
+thinking the k'eeds are symbols. And all you said. And I've felt time
+after time, you couldn't stay whe' you we'. That what you we' saying to
+me, would have to be said 'ight out."
+
+That brought him in. He could not very well evade that opening without
+incivility. After all he had asked to see her, and it was a foolish
+thing to let little decorative accidentals put him off his friendly
+purpose. A woman may have flower-pots painted gold with black checkers
+and still be deeply understanding. He determined to tell her what was in
+his mind. But he found something barred him from telling that he had
+had an actual vision of God. It was as if that had been a private and
+confidential meeting. It wasn't, he felt, for him either to boast a
+privilege or tell others of things that God had not chosen to show them.
+
+"Since I saw you," he said, "I have thought a great deal--of the subject
+of our conversation."
+
+"I have been t'ying to think," she said in a confirmatory tone, as if
+she had co-operated.
+
+"My faith in God grows," he said.
+
+She glowed. Her lips fell apart. She flamed attention.
+
+"But it grows less like the faith of the church, less and less. I was
+born and trained in Anglicanism, and it is with a sort of astonishment I
+find myself passing now out of every sort of Catholicism--seeing it from
+the outside...."
+
+"Just as one might see Buddhism," she supplied.
+
+"And yet feeling nearer, infinitely nearer to God," he said.
+
+"Yes," she panted; "yes."
+
+"I thought if one went out, one went out just to doubt and darkness."
+
+"And you don't?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You have gone at one step to a new 'iligion!"
+
+He stared for a moment at the phrase.
+
+"To religion," he said.
+
+"It is so wondyful," she said, with her hands straight down upon the
+couch upon which she was sitting, and leaning forward at him, so as to
+seem almost as much out of drawing as a modern picture.
+
+"It seems," he reflected; "--as if it were a natural thing."
+
+She came back to earth very slowly. She turned to the tea-things with
+hushed and solemn movements as though she administered a ceremony of
+peculiar significance. The bishop too rose slowly out of the profundity
+of his confession. "No sugar please," he said, arresting the lump in mid
+air.
+
+It was only when they were embarked upon cups of tea and had a little
+refreshed themselves, that she carried the talk further.
+
+"Does it mean that you must leave the church?" she asked.
+
+"It seemed so at first," he said. "But now I do not know. I do not know
+what I ought to do."
+
+She awaited his next thought.
+
+"It is as if one had lived in a room all one's life and thought it the
+world--and then suddenly walked out through a door and discovered the
+sea and the mountains and stars. So it was with me and the Anglican
+Church. It seems so extraordinary now--and it would have seemed the
+most natural thing a year ago--to think that I ever believed that the
+Anglican Compromise was the final truth of religion, that nothing more
+until the end of the world could ever be known that Cosmo Gordon Lang
+did not know, that there could be no conception of God and his quality
+that Randall Davidson did not possess."
+
+He paused.
+
+"I did," he said.
+
+"I did," she responded with round blue eyes of wonder.
+
+"At the utmost the Church of England is a tabernacle on a road."
+
+"A 'oad that goes whe'?" she rhetorized.
+
+"Exactly," said the bishop, and put down his cup.
+
+"You see, my dear Lady Sunderbund," he resumed, "I am exactly in the
+same position of that man at the door."
+
+She quoted aptly and softly: "The wo'ld was all befo' them whe' to
+choose."
+
+He was struck by the aptness of the words.
+
+"I feel I have to come right out into the bare truth. What exactly then
+do I become? Do I lose my priestly function because I discover how great
+God is? But what am I to do?"
+
+He opened a new layer of his thoughts to her.
+
+"There is a saying," he remarked, "once a priest, always a priest. I
+cannot imagine myself as other than what I am."
+
+"But o'thodox no maw," she said.
+
+"Orthodox--self-satisfied, no longer. A priest who seeks, an exploring
+priest."
+
+"In a Chu'ch of P'og'ess and B'othe'hood," she carried him on.
+
+"At any rate, in a progressive and learning church."
+
+She flashed and glowed assent.
+
+"I have been haunted," he said, "by those words spoken at Athens. 'Whom
+therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.' That comes
+to me with an effect of--guidance is an old-fashioned word--shall I
+say suggestion? To stand by the altar bearing strange names and ancient
+symbols, speaking plainly to all mankind of the one true God--!"
+
+(4)
+
+
+He did not get much beyond this point at the time, though he remained
+talking with Lady Sunderbund for nearly an hour longer. The rest was
+merely a beating out of what had already been said. But insensibly she
+renewed her original charm, and as he became accustomed to her he forgot
+a certain artificiality in her manner and the extreme modernity of her
+costume and furniture. She was a wonderful listener; nobody else could
+have helped him to expression in quite the same way, and when he left
+her he felt that now he was capable of stating his case in a coherent
+and acceptable form to almost any intelligent hearer. He had a point of
+view now that was no longer embarrassed by the immediate golden
+presence of God; he was no longer dazzled nor ecstatic; his problem had
+diminished to the scale of any other great human problem, to the scale
+of political problems and problems of integrity and moral principle,
+problems about which there is no such urgency as there is about a house
+on fire, for example.
+
+And now the desire for expression was running strong. He wanted to
+state his situation; if he did not state he would have to act; and as he
+walked back to the club dinner he turned over possible interlocutors
+in his thoughts. Lord Rampound sat with him at dinner, and he came near
+broaching the subject with him. But Lord Rampound that evening had
+that morbid running of bluish legal anecdotes which is so common an
+affliction with lawyers, and theology sinks and dies in that turbid
+stream.
+
+But as he lay in bed that night he thought of his old friend and helper
+Bishop Likeman, and it was borne in upon him that he should consult him.
+And this he did next day.
+
+Since the days when the bishop had been only plain Mr. Scrope, the
+youngest and most helpful of Likeman's historical band of curates, their
+friendship had continued. Likeman had been a second father to him; in
+particular his tact and helpfulness had shone during those days of doubt
+and anxiety when dear old Queen Victoria, God's representative on earth,
+had obstinately refused, at the eleventh hour, to make him a bishop. She
+had those pigheaded fits, and she was touchy about the bishops. She had
+liked Scrope on account of the excellence of his German pronunciation,
+but she had been irritated by newspaper paragraphs--nobody could ever
+find out who wrote them and nobody could ever find out who showed them
+to the old lady--anticipating his elevation. She had gone very red
+in the face and stiffened in the Guelphic manner whenever Scrope was
+mentioned, and so a rich harvest of spiritual life had remained untilled
+for some months. Likeman had brought her round.
+
+It seemed arguable that Scrope owed some explanation to Likeman before
+he came to any open breach with the Establishment.
+
+He found Likeman perceptibly older and more shrivelled on account of the
+war, but still as sweet and lucid and subtle as ever. His voice sounded
+more than ever like a kind old woman's.
+
+He sat buried in his cushions--for "nowadays I must save every scrap
+of vitality"--and for a time contented himself with drawing out his
+visitor's story.
+
+Of course, one does not talk to Likeman of visions or intuitions. "I am
+disturbed, I find myself getting out of touch;" that was the bishop's
+tone.
+
+Occasionally Likeman nodded slowly, as a physician might do at the
+recital of familiar symptoms. "Yes," he said, "I have been through most
+of this.... A little different in the inessentials.... How clear you
+are!"
+
+"You leave our stupid old Trinities--as I left them long ago," said old
+Likeman, with his lean hand feeling and clawing at the arm of his chair.
+
+"But--!"
+
+The old man raised his hand and dropped it. "You go away from it
+all--straight as a line. I did. You take the wings of the morning and
+fly to the uttermost parts of the earth. And there you find--"
+
+He held up a lean finger, and inclined it to tick off each point.
+
+"Fate--which is God the Father, the Power of the Heart, which is God
+the Son, and that Light which comes in upon us from the inaccessible
+Godhead, which is God the Holy Spirit."
+
+"But I know of no God the Holy Spirit, and Fate is not God at all. I
+saw in my vision one sole God, uncrucified, militant--conquering and to
+conquer."
+
+Old Likeman stared. "You saw!"
+
+The Bishop of Princhester had not meant to go so far. But he stuck to
+his words. "As if I saw with my eyes. A God of light and courage."
+
+"You have had visions, Scrope?"
+
+"I seemed to see."
+
+"No, you have just been dreaming dreams."
+
+"But why should one not see?"
+
+"See! The things of the spirit. These symbols as realities! These
+metaphors as men walking!"
+
+"You talk like an agnostic."
+
+"We are all agnostics. Our creeds are expressions of ourselves and our
+attitude and relationship to the unknown. The triune God is just the
+form of our need and disposition. I have always assumed that you took
+that for granted. Who has ever really seen or heard or felt God? God
+is neither of the senses nor of the mind; he is of the soul. You are
+realistic, you are materialistic...."
+
+His voice expostulated.
+
+The Bishop of Princhester reflected. The vision of God was far off
+among his memories now, and difficult to recall. But he said at last: "I
+believe there is a God and that he is as real a person as you or I. And
+he is not the theological God we set out before the world."
+
+"Personification," said Likeman. "In the eighteenth century they used to
+draw beautiful female figures as Science and Mathematics. Young men have
+loved Science--and Freedom--as Pygmalion loved Galatea. Have it so
+if you will. Have a visible person for your Deity. But let me keep up
+my--spirituality."
+
+"Your spirituality seems as thin as a mist. Do you really
+believe--anything?"
+
+"Everything!" said Likeman emphatically, sitting up with a transitory
+vigour. "Everything we two have ever professed together. I believe that
+the creeds of my church do express all that can possibly be expressed in
+the relationship of--That"--he made a comprehensive gesture with a twist
+of his hand upon its wrist--"to the human soul. I believe that they
+express it as well as the human mind can express it. Where they seem
+to be contradictory or absurd, it is merely that the mystery is
+paradoxical. I believe that the story of the Fall and of the Redemption
+is a complete symbol, that to add to it or to subtract from it or to
+alter it is to diminish its truth; if it seems incredible at this point
+or that, then simply I admit my own mental defect. And I believe in our
+Church, Scrope, as the embodied truth of religion, the divine instrument
+in human affairs. I believe in the security of its tradition, in
+the complete and entire soundness of its teaching, in its essential
+authority and divinity."
+
+He paused, and put his head a little on one side and smiled sweetly.
+"And now can you say I do not believe?"
+
+"But the historical Christ, the man Jesus?"
+
+"A life may be a metaphor. Why not? Yes, I believe it all. All."
+
+The Bishop of Princhester was staggered by this complete acceptance. "I
+see you believe all you profess," he said, and remained for a moment or
+so rallying his forces.
+
+"Your vision--if it was a vision--I put it to you, was just some single
+aspect of divinity," said Likeman. "We make a mistake in supposing that
+Heresy has no truth in it. Most heresies are only a disproportionate
+apprehension of some essential truth. Most heretics are men who have
+suddenly caught a glimpse through the veil of some particular verity....
+They are dazzled by that aspect. All the rest has vanished.... They are
+obsessed. You are obsessed clearly by this discovery of the militancy of
+God. God the Son--as Hero. And you want to go out to the simple worship
+of that one aspect. You want to go out to a Dissenter's tent in the
+wilderness, instead of staying in the Great Temple of the Ages."
+
+Was that true?
+
+For some moments it sounded true.
+
+The Bishop of Princhester sat frowning and looking at that. Very far
+away was the vision now of that golden Captain who bade him come. Then
+at a thought the bishop smiled.
+
+"The Great Temple of the Ages," he repeated. "But do you remember the
+trouble we had when the little old Queen was so pigheaded?"
+
+"Oh! I remember, I remember," said Likeman, smiling with unshaken
+confidence. "Why not?"
+
+"For sixty years all we bishops in what you call the Great Temple of
+the Ages, were appointed and bullied and kept in our places by that
+pink irascible bit of dignity. I remember how at the time I didn't dare
+betray my boiling indignation even to you--I scarcely dared admit it to
+myself...."
+
+He paused.
+
+"It doesn't matter at all," and old Likeman waved it aside.
+
+"Not at all," he confirmed, waving again.
+
+"I spoke of the whole church of Christ on earth," he went on.
+"These things, these Victorias and Edwards and so on, are temporary
+accidents--just as the severance of an Anglican from a Roman communion
+and a Greek orthodox communion are temporary accidents. You will remark
+that wise men in all ages have been able to surmount the difficulty of
+these things. Why? Because they knew that in spite of all these splits
+and irregularities and defacements--like the cracks and crannies and
+lichens on a cathedral wall--the building held good, that it was shelter
+and security. There is no other shelter and security. And so I come to
+your problem. Suppose it is true that you have this incidental vision
+of the militant aspect of God, and he isn't, as you see him now that
+is,--he isn't like the Trinity, he isn't like the Creed, he doesn't seem
+to be related to the Church, then comes the question, are you going out
+for that? And whither do you go if you do go out? The Church remains. We
+alter doctrines not by changing the words but by shifting the accent. We
+can under-accentuate below the threshold of consciousness."
+
+"But can we?"
+
+"We do. Where's Hell now? Eighty years ago it warmed the whole Church.
+It was--as some atheist or other put it the other day--the central
+heating of the soul. But never mind that point now. Consider the
+essential question, the question of breaking with the church. Ask
+yourself, whither would you go? To become an oddity! A Dissenter. A
+Negative. Self emasculated. The spirit that denies. You would just go
+out. You would just cease to serve Religion. That would be all. You
+wouldn't do anything. The Church would go on; everything else would go
+on. Only you would be lost in the outer wilderness.
+
+"But then--"
+
+Old Likeman leant forward and pointed a bony finger. "Stay in the Church
+and modify it. Bring this new light of yours to the altar."
+
+There was a little pause.
+
+"No man," the bishop thought aloud, "putteth new wine into old bottles."
+
+Old Likeman began to speak and had a fit of coughing. "Some of these
+texts--whuff, whuff--like a conjuror's hat--whuff--make 'em--fit
+anything."
+
+A man-servant appeared and handed a silver box of lozenges into which
+the old bishop dipped with a trembling hand.
+
+"Tricks of that sort," he said, "won't do, Scrope--among professionals.
+
+"And besides," he was inspired; "true religion is old wine--as old as
+the soul.
+
+"You are a bishop in the Church of Christ on Earth," he summed it up.
+"And you want to become a detached and wandering Ancient Mariner from
+your shipwreck of faith with something to explain--that nobody wants to
+hear. You are going out I suppose you have means?"
+
+The old man awaited the answer to his abrupt enquiry with a handful of
+lozenges.
+
+"No," said the Bishop of Princhester, "practically--I haven't."
+
+"My dear boy!" it was as if they were once more rector and curate.
+"My dear brother! do you know what the value of an ex-bishop is in the
+ordinary labour market?"
+
+"I have never thought of that."
+
+"Evidently. You have a wife and children?"
+
+"Five daughters."
+
+"And your wife married you--I remember, she married you soon after you
+got that living in St. John's Wood. I suppose she took it for granted
+that you were fixed in an ecclesiastical career. That was implicit in
+the transaction."
+
+"I haven't looked very much at that side of the matter yet," said the
+Bishop of Princhester.
+
+"It shouldn't be a decisive factor," said Bishop Likeman, "not decisive.
+But it will weigh. It should weigh...."
+
+The old man opened out fresh aspects of the case. His argument was for
+delay, for deliberation. He went on to a wider set of considerations. A
+man who has held the position of a bishop for some years is, he held, no
+longer a free man in matters of opinion. He has become an official part
+of a great edifice which supports the faith of multitudes of simple
+and dependant believers. He has no right to indulge recklessly in
+intellectual and moral integrities. He may understand, but how is the
+flock to understand? He may get his own soul clear, but what will happen
+to them? He will just break away their supports, astonish them, puzzle
+them, distress them, deprive them of confidence, convince them of
+nothing.
+
+"Intellectual egotism may be as grave a sin," said Bishop Likeman, "as
+physical selfishness.
+
+"Assuming even that you are absolutely right," said Bishop Likeman,
+"aren't you still rather in the position of a man who insists upon
+Swedish exercises and a strengthening dietary on a raft?"
+
+"I think you have made out a case for delay," said his hearer.
+
+"Three months."
+
+The Bishop of Princhester conceded three months.
+
+"Including every sort of service. Because, after all, even supposing
+it is damnable to repeat prayers and creeds you do not believe in, and
+administer sacraments you think superstition, nobody can be damned
+but yourself. On the other hand if you express doubts that are not yet
+perfectly digested--you experiment with the souls of others...."
+
+(5)
+
+
+The bishop found much to ponder in his old friend's counsels. They were
+discursive and many-fronted, and whenever he seemed to be penetrating or
+defeating the particular considerations under examination the others
+in the background had a way of appearing invincible. He had a strong
+persuasion that Likeman was wrong--and unanswerable. And the true God
+now was no more than the memory of a very vividly realized idea. It
+was clear to the bishop that he was no longer a churchman or in the
+generally accepted sense of the word a Christian, and that he was bound
+to come out of the church. But all sense of urgency had gone. It was a
+matter demanding deliberation and very great consideration for others.
+
+He took no more of Dale's stuff because he felt bodily sound and slept
+well. And he was now a little shy of this potent fluid. He went down
+to Princhester the next day, for his compromise of an interval of three
+months made it seem possible to face his episcopal routine again. It
+was only when he was back in his own palace that the full weight of
+his domestic responsibilities in the discussion of the course he had to
+take, became apparent.
+
+Lady Ella met him with affection and solicitude.
+
+"I was tired and mentally fagged," he said. "A day or so in London had
+an effect of change."
+
+She agreed that he looked much better, and remained for a moment or so
+scrutinizing him with the faint anxiety of one resolved to be completely
+helpful.
+
+He regarded her with a renewed sense of her grace and dignity and
+kindliness. She was wearing a grey dress of soft silky material, touched
+with blue and covered with what seemed to him very rich and beautiful
+lace; her hair flowed back very graciously from her broad brow, and
+about her wrist and neck were delicate lines of gold. She seemed
+tremendously at home and right just where she was, in that big
+hospitable room, cultured but Anglican, without pretensions or
+novelties, with a glow of bound books, with the grand piano that Miriam,
+his third daughter, was beginning to play so well, with the tea equipage
+of shining silver and fine porcelain.
+
+He sat down contentedly in the low armchair beside her.
+
+It wasn't a setting that one would rashly destroy....
+
+And that evening at dinner this sense of his home as a complex of finely
+adjusted things not to be rashly disturbed was still more in the mind of
+the bishop. At dinner he had all his domesticities about him. It was the
+family time, from eight until ten, at which latter hour he would usually
+go back from the drawing-room to his study. He surveyed the table.
+Eleanor was at home for a few days, looking a little thin and bright
+but very keen and happy. She had taken a first in the first part of
+the Moral Science Tripos, and she was working hard now for part two.
+Clementina was to go back to Newnham with her next September. She
+aspired to history. Miriam's bent was musical. She and Phoebe and Daphne
+and Clementina were under the care of skilful Mademoiselle Lafarge,
+most tactful of Protestant French-women, Protestant and yet not too
+Protestant, one of those rare French Protestants in whom a touch of
+Bergson and the Pasteur Monod
+
+     "scarce suspected, animates the whole."
+
+And also they had lessons, so high are our modern standards of
+education, from Mr. Blent, a brilliant young mathematician in orders,
+who sat now next to Lady Ella. Mr. Whippham, the chaplain, was at the
+bishop's right hand, ready for any chance of making arrangements to
+clear off the small arrears of duty the little holiday in London had
+accumulated. The bishop surveyed all these bright young people between
+himself and the calm beauty of his wife. He spoke first to one and then
+another upon the things that interested them. It rejoiced his heart to
+be able to give them education and opportunity, it pleased him to see
+them in clothes that he knew were none the less expensive because of
+their complete simplicity. Miriam and Mr. Blent wrangled pleasantly
+about Debussy, and old Dunk waited as though in orders of some rare and
+special sort that qualified him for this service.
+
+All these people, the bishop reflected, counted upon him that this would
+go on....
+
+Eleanor was answering some question of her mother's. They were so oddly
+alike and so curiously different, and both in their several ways so
+fine. Eleanor was dark like his own mother. Perhaps she did a little
+lack Lady Ella's fine reserves; she could express more, she could feel
+more acutely, she might easily be very unhappy or very happy....
+
+All these people counted on him. It was indeed acutely true, as Likeman
+had said, that any sudden breach with his position would be a breach of
+faith--so far as they were concerned.
+
+And just then his eye fell upon the epergne, a very old and beautiful
+piece of silver, that graced the dinner-table. It had been given him,
+together with an episcopal ring, by his curates and choristers at the
+Church of the Holy Innocents, when he became bishop of Pinner. When they
+gave it him, had any one of them dreamt that some day he might be moved
+to strike an ungracious blow at the mother church that had reared them
+all?
+
+It was his custom to join the family in the drawing-room after dinner.
+To-night he was a little delayed by Whippham, with some trivialities
+about next month's confirmations in Pringle and Princhester. When he
+came in he found Miriam playing, and playing very beautifully one of
+those later sonatas of Beethoven, he could never remember whether it
+was Of. 109 or Of. 111, but he knew that he liked it very much; it
+was solemn and sombre with phases of indescribable sweetness--while
+Clementina, Daphne and Mademoiselle Lafarge went on with their war
+knitting and Phoebe and Mr. Blent bent their brows over chess. Eleanor
+was reading the evening paper. Lady Ella sat on a high chair by the
+coffee things, and he stood in the doorway surveying the peaceful scene
+for a moment or so, before he went across the room and sat down on the
+couch close to her.
+
+"You look tired," she whispered softly.
+
+"Worries."
+
+"That Chasters case?"
+
+"Things developing out of that. I must tell you later." It would be, he
+felt, a good way of breaking the matter to her.
+
+"Is the Chasters case coming on again, Daddy?" asked Eleanor.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"It's a pity," she said.
+
+"What?
+
+"That he can't be left alone."
+
+"It's Sir Reginald Phipps. The Church would be much more tolerant if
+it wasn't for the House of Laymen. But they--they feel they must do
+something."
+
+He seized the opportunity of the music ceasing to get away from the
+subject. "Miriam dear," he asked, raising his voice; "is that 109 or
+111? I can never tell."
+
+"That is always 111, Daddy," said Miriam. "It's the other one is 109."
+And then evidently feeling that she had been pert: "Would you like me to
+play you 109, Daddy?"
+
+"I should love it, my dear." And he leant back and prepared to listen in
+such a thorough way that Eleanor would have no chance of discussing the
+Chasters' heresies. But this was interrupted by the consummation of the
+coffee, and Mr. Blent, breaking a long silence with "Mate in three, if
+I'm not mistaken," leapt to his feet to be of service. Eleanor, with the
+rough seriousness of youth, would not leave the Chasters case alone.
+
+"But need you take action against Mr. Chasters?" she asked at once.
+
+"It's a very complicated subject, my dear," he said.
+
+"His arguments?"
+
+"The practical considerations."
+
+"But what are practical considerations in such a case?"
+
+"That's a post-graduate subject, Norah," her father said with a smile
+and a sigh.
+
+"But," began Eleanor, gathering fresh forces.
+
+"Daddy is tired," Lady Ella intervened, patting him on the head.
+
+"Oh, terribly!--of that," he said, and so escaped Eleanor for the
+evening.
+
+But he knew that before very long he would have to tell his wife of
+the changes that hung over their lives; it would be shabby to let the
+avalanche fall without giving the longest possible warning; and before
+they parted that night he took her hands in his and said: "There is much
+I have to tell you, dear. Things change, the whole world changes. The
+church must not live in a dream....
+
+"No," she whispered. "I hope you will sleep to-night," and held up her
+grave sweet face to be kissed.
+
+(6)
+
+
+But he did not sleep perfectly that night.
+
+He did not sleep indeed very badly, but he lay for some time thinking,
+thinking not onward but as if he pressed his mind against very strong
+barriers that had closed again. His vision of God which had filled the
+heavens, had become now gem-like, a minute, hard, clear-cut conviction
+in his mind that he had to disentangle himself from the enormous
+complications of symbolism and statement and organization and
+misunderstanding in the church and achieve again a simple and living
+worship of a simple and living God. Likeman had puzzled and silenced
+him, only upon reflection to convince him that amidst such intricacies
+of explanation the spirit cannot live. Creeds may be symbolical, but
+symbols must not prevaricate. A church that can symbolize everything and
+anything means nothing.
+
+It followed from this that he ought to leave the church. But there came
+the other side of this perplexing situation. His feelings as he lay in
+his bed were exactly like those one has in a dream when one wishes to
+run or leap or shout and one can achieve no movement, no sound. He could
+not conceive how he could possibly leave the church.
+
+His wife became as it were the representative of all that held him
+helpless. She and he had never kept secret from one another any plan of
+action, any motive, that affected the other. It was clear to him that
+any movement towards the disavowal of doctrinal Christianity and the
+renunciation of his see must be first discussed with her. He must tell
+her before he told the world.
+
+And he could not imagine his telling her except as an incredibly
+shattering act.
+
+So he left things from day to day, and went about his episcopal
+routines. He preached and delivered addresses in such phrases as he knew
+people expected, and wondered profoundly why it was that it should be
+impossible for him to discuss theological points with Lady Ella. And one
+afternoon he went for a walk with Eleanor along the banks of the Prin,
+and found himself, in response to certain openings of hers, talking to
+her in almost exactly the same terms as Likeman had used to him.
+
+Then suddenly the problem of this theological eclaircissement was
+complicated in an unexpected fashion.
+
+He had just been taking his Every Second Thursday Talk with Diocesan
+Men Helpers. He had been trying to be plain and simple upon the needless
+narrowness of enthusiastic laymen. He was still in the Bishop Andrews
+cap and purple cassock he affected on these occasions; the Men Helpers
+loved purple; and he was disentangling himself from two or three
+resolute bores--for our loyal laymen can be at times quite superlative
+bores--when Miriam came to him.
+
+"Mummy says, 'Come to the drawing-room if you can.' There is a Lady
+Sunderbund who seems particularly to want to see you."
+
+He hesitated for a moment, and then decided that this was a conversation
+he ought to control.
+
+He found Lady Sunderbund looking very tall and radiantly beautiful in
+a sheathlike dress of bright crimson trimmed with snow-white fur and a
+white fur toque. She held out a long white-gloved hand to him and
+cried in a tone of comradeship and profound understanding: "I've come,
+Bishop!"
+
+"You've come to see me?" he said without any sincerity in his polite
+pleasure.
+
+"I've come to P'inchesta to stay!" she cried with a bright triumphant
+rising note.
+
+She evidently considered Lady Ella a mere conversational stop-gap, to
+be dropped now that the real business could be commenced. She turned
+her pretty profile to that lady, and obliged the bishop with a compact
+summary of all that had preceded his arrival. "I have been telling
+Lady Ella," she said, "I've taken a house, fu'nitua and all! Hea.
+In P'inchesta! I've made up my mind to sit unda you--as they say
+in Clapham. I've come 'ight down he' fo' good. I've taken a little
+house--oh! a sweet little house that will be all over 'oses next month.
+I'm living f'om 'oom to 'oom and having the othas done up. It's in that
+little quiet st'eet behind you' ga'den wall. And he' I am!"
+
+"Is it the old doctor's house?" asked Lady Ella.
+
+"Was it an old docta?" cried Lady Sunderbund. "How delightful! And now I
+shall be a patient!"
+
+She concentrated upon the bishop.
+
+"Oh, I've been thinking all the time of all the things you told me. Ova
+and ova. It's all so wondyful and so--so like a G'ate Daw opening. New
+light. As if it was all just beginning."
+
+She clasped her hands.
+
+The bishop felt that there were a great number of points to this
+situation, and that it was extremely difficult to grasp them all
+at once. But one that seemed of supreme importance to his whirling
+intelligence was that Lady Ella should not know that he had gone to
+relieve his soul by talking to Lady Sunderbund in London. It had never
+occurred to him at the time that there was any shadow of disloyalty to
+Lady Ella in his going to Lady Sunderbund, but now he realized that this
+was a thing that would annoy Lady Ella extremely. The conversation had
+in the first place to be kept away from that. And in the second place it
+had to be kept away from the abrupt exploitation of the new theological
+developments.
+
+He felt that something of the general tension would be relieved if they
+could all three be got to sit down.
+
+"I've been talking for just upon two hours," he said to Lady Ella. "It's
+good to see the water boiling for tea."
+
+He put a chair for Lady Sunderbund to the right of Lady Ella, got her
+into it by infusing an ecclesiastical insistence into his manner, and
+then went and sat upon the music-stool on his wife's left, so as to
+establish a screen of tea-things and cakes and so forth against her more
+intimate enthusiasm. Meanwhile he began to see his way clearer and to
+develop his line.
+
+"Well, Lady Sunderbund," he said, "I can assure you that I think you
+will be no small addition to the church life of Princhester. But I warn
+you this is a hard-working and exacting diocese. We shall take your
+money, all we can get of it, we shall take your time, we shall work you
+hard."
+
+"Wo'k me hard!" cried Lady Sunderbund with passion.
+
+"We will, we will," said the bishop in a tone that ignored her
+passionate note.
+
+"I am sure Lady Sunderbund will be a great help to us," said Lady Ella.
+"We want brightening. There's a dinginess...."
+
+Lady Sunderbund beamed an acknowledgment. "I shall exact a 'eturn," she
+said. "I don't mind wo'king, but I shall wo'k like the poo' students in
+the Middle Ages did, to get my teaching. I've got my own soul to save as
+well as help saving othas. Since oua last talk--"
+
+She found the bishop handing her bread and butter. For a time the bishop
+fought a delaying action with the tea-things, while he sought eagerly
+and vainly in his mind for some good practical topic in which he could
+entangle and suppress Lady Sunderbund's enthusiasms. From this she broke
+away by turning suddenly to Lady Ella.
+
+"Youa husband's views," she said, "we'e a 'eal 'evelation to me. It was
+like not being blind--all at once."
+
+Lady Ella was always pleased to hear her husband praised. Her colour
+brightened a little. "They seem very ordinary views," she said modestly.
+
+"You share them?" cried Lady Sunderbund.
+
+"But of course," said Lady Ella.
+
+"Wondyful!" cried Lady Sunderbund.
+
+"Tell me, Lady Sunderbund," said the bishop, "are you going to alter the
+outer appearance of the old doctor's house?" And found that at last he
+had discovered the saving topic.
+
+"Ha'dly at all," she said. "I shall just have it pointed white and do
+the doa--I'm not su' how I shall do the doa. Whetha I shall do the doa
+gold or a vehy, vehy 'itch blue."
+
+For a time she and Lady Ella, to whom these ideas were novel, discussed
+the animation of grey and sombre towns by house painting. In such matter
+Lady Sunderbund had a Russian mind. "I can't bea' g'ey," she said. "Not
+in my su'oundings, not in my k'eed, nowhe'e." She turned to the bishop.
+"If I had my way I would paint you' cathed'al inside and out."
+
+"They used to be painted," said the bishop. "I don't know if you have
+seen Ely. There the old painting has been largely restored...."
+
+From that to the end there was no real danger, and at last the bishop
+found himself alone with his wife again.
+
+"Remarkable person," he said tentatively. "I never met any one whose
+faults were more visible. I met her at Wimbush House."
+
+He glanced at his watch.
+
+"What did she mean," asked Lady Ella abruptly, "by talking of your new
+views? And about revelations?"
+
+"She probably misunderstood something I said at the Garstein Fellows',"
+he said. "She has rather a leaping mind."
+
+He turned to the window, looked at his nails, and appeared to be
+suddenly reminded of duties elsewhere....
+
+It was chiefly manifest to him that the difficulties in explaining the
+changes of his outlook to Lady Ella had now increased enormously.
+
+(7)
+
+
+A day or so after Lady Sunderbund's arrival in Princhester the bishop
+had a letter from Likeman. The old man was manifestly in doubt about the
+effect of their recent conversation.
+
+"My dear Scrope," it began. "I find myself thinking continually about
+our interview and the difficulties you laid bare so frankly to me.
+We touched upon many things in that talk, and I find myself full of
+afterthoughts, and not perfectly sure either quite of what I said or
+of what I failed to say. I feel that in many ways I was not perhaps so
+clear and convincing as the justice of my case should have made me, and
+you are one of my own particular little company, you were one of the
+best workers in that band of good workers, your life and your career
+are very much my concern. I know you will forgive me if I still mingle
+something of the paternal with my fraternal admonitions. I watched you
+closely. I have still my old diaries of the St. Matthew's days, and I
+have been looking at them to remind me of what you once were. It was my
+custom to note my early impressions of all the men who worked with me,
+because I have a firm belief in the soundness of first impressions and
+the considerable risk one runs of having them obscured by the accidents
+and habituations of constant intercourse. I found that quite early in
+your days at St. Matthew's I wrote against your name 'enthusiastic, but
+a saving delicacy.' After all our life-long friendship I would not write
+anything truer. I would say of you to-day, 'This man might have been a
+revivalist, if he were not a gentleman.' There is the enthusiast,
+there is the revivalist, in you. It seems to me that the stresses and
+questions of this great crisis in the world's history have brought it
+nearer to the surface than I had ever expected it to come.
+
+"I quite understand and I sympathize with your impatience with
+the church at the present time; we present a spectacle of pompous
+insignificance hard to bear with. We are doing very little, and we are
+giving ourselves preposterous airs. There seems to be an opinion abroad
+that in some quasi-automatic way the country is going to collapse after
+the war into the arms of the church and the High Tories; a possibility
+I don't accept for a moment. Why should it? These forcible-feeble
+reactionaries are much more likely to explode a revolution that
+will disestablish us. And I quite understand your theological
+difficulties--quite. The creeds, if their entire symbolism is for a
+moment forgotten, if they are taken as opaque statements of fact, are
+inconsistent, incredible. So incredible that no one believes them;
+not even the most devout. The utmost they do is to avert their
+minds--reverentially. Credo quia impossibile. That is offensive to a
+Western mind. I can quite understand the disposition to cry out at such
+things, 'This is not the Church of God!'--to run out from it--
+
+"You have some dream, I suspect, of a dramatic dissidence.
+
+"Now, my dear Brother and erstwhile pupil, I ask you not to do this
+thing. Wait, I implore you. Give me--and some others, a little time. I
+have your promise for three months, but even after that, I ask you
+to wait. Let the reform come from within the church. The church is
+something more than either its creeds, its clergy, or its laymen. Look
+at your cathedral rising out of and dominating Princhester. It stands
+not simply for Athanasius; it stands but incidentally for Athanasius; it
+stands for all religion. Within that fabric--let me be as frank here
+as in our private conversation--doctrine has altered again and again.
+To-day two distinct religions worship there side by side; one that fades
+and one that grows brighter. There is the old quasi-materialistic belief
+of the barbarians, the belief in such things, for example, as that
+Christ the physical Son of God descended into hell and stayed there,
+seeing the sights I suppose like any tourist and being treated with
+diplomatic civilities for three terrestrial days; and on the other
+hand there is the truly spiritual belief that you and I share, which
+is absolutely intolerant of such grotesque ideas. My argument to you
+is that the new faith, the clearer vision, gains ground; that the
+only thing that can prevent or delay the church from being altogether
+possessed by what you call and I admit is, the true God, is that such
+men as yourself, as the light breaks upon you, should be hasty and leave
+the church. You see my point of view, do you not? It is not one that
+has been assumed for our discussion; it is one I came to long years ago,
+that I was already feeling my way to in my St. Matthew's Lenton sermons.
+
+"A word for your private ear. I am working. I cannot tell you fully
+because I am not working alone. But there are movements afoot in which
+I hope very shortly to be able to ask you to share. That much at least I
+may say at this stage. Obscure but very powerful influences are at
+work for the liberalizing of the church, for release from many
+narrow limitations, for the establishment of a modus vivendi with the
+nonconformist and dissentient bodies in Britain and America, and with
+the churches of the East. But of that no more now.
+
+"And in conclusion, my dear Scrope, let me insist again upon the eternal
+persistence of the essential Religious Fact:"
+
+(Greek Letters Here)
+
+(Rev. i. 18. "Fear not. I am the First and Last thing, the Living
+thing.")
+
+And these promises which, even if we are not to take them as promises in
+the exact sense in which, let us say, the payment of five sovereigns
+is promised by a five-pound note, are yet assertions of practically
+inevitable veracity:
+
+(Greek Letters Here)
+
+(Phil. i. 6. "He who began... will perfect." Eph. v. 14. "He will
+illuminate.")
+
+
+The old man had written his Greek tags in shakily resolute capitals. It
+was his custom always to quote the Greek Testament in his letters,
+never the English version. It is a practice not uncommon with the more
+scholarly of our bishops. It is as if some eminent scientific man were
+to insist upon writing H2O instead of "water," and "sodium chloride"
+instead of "table salt" in his private correspondence. Or upon hanging
+up a stuffed crocodile in his hall to give the place tone. The Bishop
+of Princhester construed these brief dicta without serious exertion, he
+found them very congenial texts, but there were insuperable difficulties
+in the problem why Likeman should suppose they had the slightest weight
+upon his side of their discussion. The more he thought the less they
+seemed to be on Likeman's side, until at last they began to take on a
+complexion entirely opposed to the old man's insidious arguments, until
+indeed they began to bear the extraordinary interpretation of a special
+message, unwittingly delivered.
+
+(8)
+
+
+The bishop was still thinking over this communication when he was
+interrupted by Lady Ella. She came with a letter in her hand to ask him
+whether she might send five-and-twenty pounds to a poor cousin of his,
+a teacher in a girls' school, who had been incapacitated from work by
+a dislocation of the cartilage of her knee. If she could go to that
+unorthodox but successful practitioner, Mr. Barker, the bone-setter, she
+was convinced she could be restored to efficiency. But she had no ready
+money. The bishop agreed without hesitation. His only doubt was the
+certainty of the cure, but upon that point Lady Ella was convinced;
+there had been a great experience in the Walshingham family.
+
+"It is pleasant to be able to do things like this," said Lady Ella,
+standing over him when this matter was settled.
+
+"Yes," the bishop agreed; "it is pleasant to be in a position to do
+things like this...."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SEVENTH - THE SECOND VISION
+
+(1)
+
+
+A MONTH later found the bishop's original state of perplexity and
+insomnia returned and intensified. He had done none of all the things
+that had seemed so manifestly needing to be done after his vision in the
+Athenaeum. All the relief and benefit of his experience in London had
+vanished out of his life. He was afraid of Dr. Dale's drug; he knew
+certainly that it would precipitate matters; and all his instincts
+in the state of moral enfeeblement to which he had relapsed, were to
+temporize.
+
+Although he had said nothing further about his changed beliefs to Lady
+Ella, yet he perceived clearly that a shadow had fallen between them.
+She had a wife's extreme sensitiveness to fine shades of expression and
+bearing, and manifestly she knew that something was different. Meanwhile
+Lady Sunderbund had become a frequent worshipper in the cathedral, she
+was a figure as conspicuous in sombre Princhester as a bird of paradise
+would have been; common people stood outside her very very rich blue
+door on the chance of seeing her; she never missed an opportunity of
+hearing the bishop preach or speak, she wrote him several long
+and thoughtful letters with which he did not bother Lady Ella, she
+communicated persistently, and manifestly intended to become a very
+active worker in diocesan affairs.
+
+It was inevitable that she and the bishop should meet and talk
+occasionally in the cathedral precincts, and it was inevitable that he
+should contrast the flexibility of her rapid and very responsive mind
+with a certain defensiveness, a stoniness, in the intellectual bearing
+of Lady Ella.
+
+If it had been Lady Sunderbund he had had to explain to, instead of Lady
+Ella, he could have explained a dozen times a day.
+
+And since his mind was rehearsing explanations it was not unnatural they
+should overflow into this eagerly receptive channel, and that the less
+he told Lady Ella the fuller became his spiritual confidences to Lady
+Sunderbund.
+
+She was clever in realizing that they were confidences and treating them
+as such, more particularly when it chanced that she and Lady Ella and
+the bishop found themselves in the same conversation.
+
+She made great friends with Miriam, and initiated her by a whole
+collection of pretty costume plates into the mysteries of the "Ussian
+Ballet" and the works of Mousso'gski and "Imsky Ko'zakof."
+
+The bishop liked a certain religiosity in the texture of Moussorgski's
+music, but failed to see the "significance "--of many of the costumes.
+
+(2)
+
+
+It was on a Sunday night--the fourth Sunday after Easter--that the
+supreme crisis of the bishop's life began. He had had a feeling all day
+of extreme dulness and stupidity; he felt his ministrations unreal, his
+ceremonies absurd and undignified. In the night he became bleakly and
+painfully awake. His mind occupied itself at first chiefly with the
+tortuousness and weakness of his own character. Every day he perceived
+that the difficulty of telling Lady Ella of the change in his faith
+became more mountainous. And every day he procrastinated. If he had
+told her naturally and simply on the evening of his return from
+London--before anything material intervened--everything would have been
+different, everything would have been simpler....
+
+He groaned and rolled over in his bed.
+
+There came upon him the acutest remorse and misery. For he saw that
+amidst these petty immediacies he had lost touch with God. The last
+month became incredible. He had seen God. He had touched God's hand. God
+had been given to him, and he had neglected the gift. He was still lost
+amidst the darkness and loneliness, the chaotic ends and mean shifts,
+of an Erastian world. For a month now and more, after a vision of God so
+vivid and real and reassuring that surely no saint nor prophet had ever
+had a better, he had made no more than vague responsive movements; he
+had allowed himself to be persuaded into an unreasonable and cowardly
+delay, and the fetters of association and usage and minor interests
+were as unbroken as they had been before ever the vision shone. Was it
+credible that there had ever been such a vision in a life so entirely
+dictated by immediacy and instinct as his? We are all creatures of the
+dark stream, we swim in needs and bodily impulses and small vanities; if
+ever and again a bubble of spiritual imaginativeness glows out of us, it
+breaks and leaves us where we were.
+
+"Louse that I am!" he cried.
+
+He still believed in God, without a shadow of doubt; he believed in the
+God that he had seen, the high courage, the golden intention, the light
+that had for a moment touched him. But what had he to do with God, he,
+the loiterer, the little thing?
+
+He was little, he was funny. His prevarications with his wife, for
+example, were comic. There was no other word for him but "funny."
+
+He rolled back again and lay staring.
+
+"Who will deliver me from the body of this death?" What right has a
+little bishop in a purple stock and doeskin breeches, who hangs back in
+his palace from the very call of God, to a phrase so fine and tragic as
+"the body of this death?"
+
+He was the most unreal thing in the universe. He was a base insect
+giving himself airs. What advantage has a bishop over the Praying
+Mantis, that cricket which apes the attitude of piety? Does he matter
+more--to God?
+
+"To the God of the Universe, who can tell? To the God of man,--yes."
+
+He sat up in bed struck by his own answer, and full of an indescribable
+hunger for God and an indescribable sense of his complete want of
+courage to make the one simple appeal that would satisfy that hunger.
+He tried to pray. "O God!" he cried, "forgive me! Take me!" It seemed to
+him that he was not really praying but only making believe to pray. It
+seemed to him that he was not really existing but only seeming to exist.
+He seemed to himself to be one with figures on a china plate, with
+figures painted on walls, with the flimsy imagined lives of men in
+stories of forgotten times. "O God!" he said, "O God," acting a gesture,
+mimicking appeal.
+
+"Anaemic," he said, and was given an idea.
+
+He got out of bed, he took his keys from the night-table at the bed head
+and went to his bureau.
+
+He stood with Dale's tonic in his hand. He remained for some time
+holding it, and feeling a curious indisposition to go on with the thing
+in his mind.
+
+He turned at last with an effort. He carried the little phial to his
+bedside, and into the tumbler of his water-bottle he let the drops fall,
+drop by drop, until he had counted twenty. Then holding it to the bulb
+of his reading lamp he added the water and stood watching the slow
+pearly eddies in the mixture mingle into an opalescent uniformity. He
+replaced the water-bottle and stood with the glass in his hand. But he
+did not drink.
+
+He was afraid.
+
+He knew that he had only to drink and this world of confusion would grow
+transparent, would roll back and reveal the great simplicities behind.
+And he was afraid.
+
+He was afraid of that greatness. He was afraid of the great imperatives
+that he knew would at once take hold of his life. He wanted to muddle
+on for just a little longer. He wanted to stay just where he was, in
+his familiar prison-house, with the key of escape in his hand. Before he
+took the last step into the very presence of truth, he would--think.
+
+He put down the glass and lay down upon his bed....
+
+(3)
+
+
+He awoke in a mood of great depression out of a dream of wandering
+interminably in an endless building of innumerable pillars, pillars so
+vast and high that the ceiling was lost in darkness. By the scale of
+these pillars he felt himself scarcely larger than an ant. He was always
+alone in these wanderings, and always missing something that passed
+along distant passages, something desirable, something in the nature
+of a procession or of a ceremony, something of which he was in futile
+pursuit, of which he heard faint echoes, something luminous of which he
+seemed at times to see the last fading reflection, across vast halls
+and wildernesses of shining pavement and through Cyclopaean archways. At
+last there was neither sound nor gleam, but the utmost solitude, and a
+darkness and silence and the uttermost profundity of sorrow....
+
+It was bright day. Dunk had just come into the room with his tea, and
+the tumbler of Dr. Dale's tonic stood untouched upon the night-table.
+The bishop sat up in bed. He had missed his opportunity. To-day was a
+busy day, he knew.
+
+"No," he said, as Dunk hesitated whether to remove or leave the tumbler.
+"Leave that."
+
+Dunk found room for it upon the tea-tray, and vanished softly with the
+bishop's evening clothes.
+
+The bishop remained motionless facing the day. There stood the draught
+of decision that he had lacked the decision even to touch.
+
+From his bed he could just read the larger items that figured upon the
+engagement tablet which it was Whippham's business to fill over-night
+and place upon his table. He had two confirmation services, first
+the big one in the cathedral and then a second one in the evening at
+Pringle, various committees and an interview with Chasters. He had not
+yet finished his addresses for these confirmation services....
+
+The task seemed mountainous--overwhelming.
+
+With a gesture of desperation he seized the tumblerful of tonic and
+drank it off at a gulp.
+
+(4)
+
+
+For some moments nothing seemed to happen.
+
+Then he began to feel stronger and less wretched, and then came a
+throbbing and tingling of artery and nerve.
+
+He had a sense of adventure, a pleasant fear in the thing that he had
+done. He got out of bed, leaving his cup of tea untasted, and began to
+dress. He had the sensation of relief a prisoner may feel who suddenly
+tries his cell door and finds it open upon sunshine, the outside world
+and freedom.
+
+He went on dressing although he was certain that in a few minutes the
+world of delusion about him would dissolve, and that he would find
+himself again in the great freedom of the place of God.
+
+This time the transition came much sooner and much more rapidly. This
+time the phases and quality of the experience were different. He felt
+once again that luminous confusion between the world in which a human
+life is imprisoned and a circumambient and interpenetrating world, but
+this phase passed very rapidly; it did not spread out over nearly half
+an hour as it had done before, and almost immediately he seemed to
+plunge away from everything in this life altogether into that outer
+freedom he sought. And this time there was not even the elemental
+scenery of the former vision. He stood on nothing; there was nothing
+below and nothing above him. There was no sense of falling, no terror,
+but a feeling as though he floated released. There was no light, but as
+it were a clear darkness about him. Then it was manifest to him that he
+was not alone, but that with him was that same being that in his former
+vision had called himself the Angel of God. He knew this without knowing
+why he knew this, and either he spoke and was answered, or he thought
+and his thought answered him back. His state of mind on this occasion
+was altogether different from the first vision of God; before it had
+been spectacular, but now his perception was altogether super-sensuous.
+
+(And nevertheless and all the time it seemed that very faintly he was
+still in his room.)
+
+It was he who was the first to speak. The great Angel whom he felt
+rather than saw seemed to be waiting for him to speak.
+
+"I have come," he said, "because once more I desire to see God."
+
+"But you have seen God."
+
+"I saw God. God was light, God was truth. And I went back to my life,
+and God was hidden. God seemed to call me. He called. I heard him, I
+sought him and I touched his hand. When I went back to my life I was
+presently lost in perplexity. I could not tell why God had called me nor
+what I had to do."
+
+"And why did you not come here before?"
+
+"Doubt and fear. Brother, will you not lay your hand on mine?"
+
+The figure in the darkness became distincter. But nothing touched the
+bishop's seeking hands.
+
+"I want to see God and to understand him. I want reassurance. I want
+conviction. I want to understand all that God asks me to do. The world
+is full of conflict and confusion and the spirit of war. It is dark and
+dreadful now with suffering and bloodshed. I want to serve God who could
+save it, and I do not know how."
+
+It seemed to the bishop that now he could distinguish dimly but surely
+the form and features of the great Angel to whom he talked. For a little
+while there was silence, and then the Angel spoke.
+
+"It was necessary first," said the Angel, "that you should apprehend God
+and desire him. That was the purport of your first vision. Now, since
+you require it, I will tell you and show you certain things about him,
+things that it seems you need to know, things that all men need to know.
+Know then first that the time is at hand when God will come into the
+world and rule it, and when men will know what is required of them.
+This time is close at hand. In a little while God will be made manifest
+throughout the earth. Men will know him and know that he is King. To you
+this truth is to be shown--that you may tell it to others."
+
+"This is no vision?" said the bishop, "no dream that will pass away?"
+
+"Am I not here beside you?"
+
+(5)
+
+
+The bishop was anxious to be very clear. Things that had been
+shapelessly present in his mind now took form and found words for
+themselves.
+
+"The God I saw in my vision--He is not yet manifest in the world?"
+
+"He comes. He is in the world, but he is not yet manifested. He whom you
+saw in your vision will speedily be manifest in the world. To you this
+vision is given of the things that come. The world is already glowing
+with God. Mankind is like a smouldering fire that will presently, in
+quite a little time, burst out into flame.
+
+"In your former vision I showed you God," said the Angel. "This time
+I will show you certain signs of the coming of God. And then you will
+understand the place you hold in the world and the task that is required
+of you."
+
+(6)
+
+
+And as the Angel spoke he lifted up his hands with the palms upward, and
+there appeared above them a little round cloud, that grew denser until
+it had the likeness of a silver sphere. It was a mirror in the form of
+a ball, but a mirror not shining uniformly; it was discoloured with
+greyish patches that had a familiar shape. It circled slowly upon the
+Angel's hands. It seemed no greater than the compass of a human skull,
+and yet it was as great as the earth. Indeed it showed the whole
+earth. It was the earth. The hands of the Angel vanished out of sight,
+dissolved and vanished, and the spinning world hung free. All about the
+bishop the velvet darkness broke into glittering points that shaped out
+the constellations, and nearest to them, so near as to seem only a few
+million miles away in the great emptiness into which everything had
+resolved itself, shone the sun, a ball of red-tongued fires. The Angel
+was but a voice now; the bishop and the Angel were somewhere aloof from
+and yet accessible to the circling silver sphere.
+
+At the time all that happened seemed to happen quite naturally, as
+things happen in a dream. It was only later, when all this was a matter
+of memory, that the bishop realized how strange and incomprehensible his
+vision had been. The sphere was the earth with all its continents and
+seas, its ships and cities, its country-sides and mountain ranges. It
+was so small that he could see it all at once, and so great and full
+that he could see everything in it. He could see great countries like
+little patches upon it, and at the same time he could see the faces of
+the men upon the highways, he could see the feelings in men's hearts and
+the thoughts in their minds. But it did not seem in any way wonderful
+to the bishop that so he should see those things, or that it was to him
+that these things were shown.
+
+"This is the whole world," he said.
+
+"This is the vision of the world," the Angel answered.
+
+"It is very wonderful," said the bishop, and stood for a moment
+marvelling at the compass of his vision. For here was India, here
+was Samarkand, in the light of the late afternoon; and China and the
+swarming cities upon her silvery rivers sinking through twilight to the
+night and throwing a spray and tracery of lantern spots upon the dark;
+here was Russia under the noontide, and so great a battle of artillery
+raging on the Dunajec as no man had ever seen before; whole lines of
+trenches dissolved into clouds of dust and heaps of blood-streaked
+earth; here close to the waiting streets of Constantinople were the
+hills of Gallipoli, the grave of British Imperialism, streaming to
+heaven with the dust and smoke of bursting shells and rifle fire and the
+smoke and flame of burning brushwood. In the sea of Marmora a big ship
+crowded with Turkish troops was sinking; and, purple under the clear
+water, he could see the shape of the British submarine which had
+torpedoed her and had submerged and was going away. Berlin prepared its
+frugal meals, still far from famine. He saw the war in Europe as if he
+saw it on a map, yet every human detail showed. Over hundreds of miles
+of trenches east and west of Germany he could see shells bursting and
+the men below dropping, and the stretcher-bearers going back with
+the wounded. The roads to every front were crowded with reserves and
+munitions. For a moment a little group of men indifferent to all this
+struggle, who were landing amidst the Antarctic wilderness, held his
+attention; and then his eyes went westward to the dark rolling Atlantic
+across which, as the edge of the night was drawn like a curtain, more
+and still more ships became visible beating upon their courses eastward
+or westward under the overtaking day.
+
+The wonder increased; the wonder of the single and infinitely
+multitudinous adventure of mankind.
+
+"So God perhaps sees it," he whispered.
+
+(7)
+
+
+"Look at this man," said the Angel, and the black shadow of a hand
+seemed to point.
+
+It was a Chinaman sitting with two others in a little low room separated
+by translucent paper windows from a noisy street of shrill-voiced
+people. The three had been talking of the ultimatum that Japan had sent
+that day to China, claiming a priority in many matters over European
+influences they were by no means sure whether it was a wrong or a
+benefit that had been done to their country. From that topic they had
+passed to the discussion of the war, and then of wars and national
+aggressions and the perpetual thrusting and quarrelling of mankind. The
+older man had said that so life would always be; it was the will of
+Heaven. The little, very yellow-faced, emaciated man had agreed with
+him. But now this younger man, to whose thoughts the Angel had so
+particularly directed the bishop's attention, was speaking. He did not
+agree with his companion.
+
+"War is not the will of Heaven," he said; "it is the blindness of men."
+
+"Man changes," he said, "from day to day and from age to age. The
+science of the West has taught us that. Man changes and war changes and
+all things change. China has been the land of flowery peace, and she may
+yet give peace to all the world. She has put aside that puppet Emperor
+at Peking, she turns her face to the new learning of the West as a man
+lays aside his heavy robes, in order that her task may be achieved."
+
+The older man spoke, his manner was more than a little incredulous, and
+yet not altogether contemptuous. "You believe that someday there will be
+no more war in the world, that a time will come when men will no longer
+plot and plan against the welfare of men?"
+
+"Even that last," said the younger man. "Did any of us dream twenty-five
+years ago that here in China we should live to see a republic? The age
+of the republics draws near, when men in every country of the world will
+look straight up to the rule of Right and the empire of Heaven."
+
+("And God will be King of the World," said the Angel. "Is not that
+faith exactly the faith that is coming to you?")
+
+The two other Chinamen questioned their companion, but without
+hostility.
+
+"This war," said the Chinaman, "will end in a great harvesting of
+kings."
+
+"But Japan--" the older man began.
+
+The bishop would have liked to hear more of that conversation, but
+the dark hand of the Angel motioned him to another part of the world.
+"Listen to this," said the Angel.
+
+He pointed the bishop to where the armies of Britain and Turkey lay in
+the heat of Mesopotamia. Along the sandy bank of a wide, slow-flowing
+river rode two horsemen, an Englishman and a Turk. They were returning
+from the Turkish lines, whither the Englishman had been with a flag of
+truce. When Englishmen and Turks are thrown together they soon
+become friends, and in this case matters had been facilitated by
+the Englishman's command of the Turkish language. He was quite an
+exceptional Englishman. The Turk had just been remarking cheerfully that
+it wouldn't please the Germans if they were to discover how amiably he
+and his charge had got on. "It's a pity we ever ceased to be friends,"
+he said.
+
+"You Englishmen aren't like our Christians," he went on.
+
+The Englishmen wanted to know why.
+
+"You haven't priests in robes. You don't chant and worship crosses and
+pictures, and quarrel among yourselves."
+
+"We worship the same God as you do," said the Englishman.
+
+"Then why do we fight?"
+
+"That's what we want to know."
+
+"Why do you call yourselves Christians? And take part against us? All
+who worship the One God are brothers."
+
+"They ought to be," said the Englishman, and thought. He was struck by
+what seemed to him an amazingly novel idea.
+
+"If it weren't for religions all men would serve God together," he
+said. "And then there would be no wars--only now and then perhaps just a
+little honest fighting...."
+
+"And see here," said the Angel. "Here close behind this frightful
+battle, where the German phalanx of guns pounds its way through the
+Russian hosts. Here is a young German talking to two wounded Russian
+prisoners, who have stopped to rest by the roadside. He is a German of
+East Prussia; he knows and thinks a little Russian. And they too are
+saying, all three of them, that the war is not God's will, but the
+confusion of mankind.
+
+"Here," he said, and the shadow of his hand hovered over the
+burning-ghats of Benares, where a Brahmin of the new persuasion watched
+the straight spires of funereal smoke ascend into the glow of the late
+afternoon, while he talked to an English painter, his friend, of the
+blind intolerance of race and caste and custom in India.
+
+"Or here."
+
+The Angel pointed to a group of people who had gathered upon a little
+beach at the head of a Norwegian fiord. There were three lads, an old
+man and two women, and they stood about the body of a drowned German
+sailor which had been washed up that day. For a time they had talked in
+whispers, but now suddenly the old man spoke aloud.
+
+"This is the fourth that has come ashore," he said. "Poor drowned souls!
+Because men will not serve God."
+
+"But folks go to church and pray enough," said one of the women.
+
+"They do not serve God," said the old man. "They just pray to him as one
+nods to a beggar. They do not serve God who is their King. They set up
+their false kings and emperors, and so all Europe is covered with dead,
+and the seas wash up these dead to us. Why does the world suffer these
+things? Why did we Norwegians, who are a free-spirited people, permit
+the Germans and the Swedes and the English to set up a king over us?
+Because we lack faith. Kings mean secret counsels, and secret counsels
+bring war. Sooner or later war will come to us also if we give the soul
+of our nation in trust to a king.... But things will not always be thus
+with men. God will not suffer them for ever. A day comes, and it is no
+distant day, when God himself will rule the earth, and when men will do,
+not what the king wishes nor what is expedient nor what is customary,
+but what is manifestly right."....
+
+"But men are saying that now in a thousand places," said the Angel.
+"Here is something that goes a little beyond that."
+
+His pointing hand went southward until they saw the Africanders riding
+down to Windhuk. Two men, Boer farmers both, rode side by side and
+talked of the German officer they brought prisoner with them. He had put
+sheep-dip in the wells of drinking-water; his life was fairly forfeit,
+and he was not to be killed. "We want no more hate in South Africa,"
+they agreed. "Dutch and English and German must live here now side by
+side. Men cannot always be killing."
+
+"And see his thoughts," said the Angel.
+
+The German's mind was one amazement. He had been sure of being shot, he
+had meant to make a good end, fierce and scornful, a relentless fighter
+to the last; and these men who might have shot him like a man were going
+to spare him like a dog. His mind was a tumbled muddle of old and
+new ideas. He had been brought up in an atmosphere of the foulest and
+fiercest militarism; he had been trained to relentlessness, ruthlessness
+and so forth; war was war and the bitterer the better, frightfulness
+was your way to victory over every enemy. But these people had found a
+better way. Here were Dutch and English side by side; sixteen years ago
+they had been at war together and now they wore the same uniform and
+rode together, and laughed at him for a queer fellow because he was
+for spitting at them and defying them, and folding his arms and looking
+level at the executioners' rifles. There were to be no executioners'
+rifles.... If it was so with Dutch and English, why shouldn't it be so
+presently with French and Germans? Why someday shouldn't French, German,
+Dutch and English, Russian and Pole, ride together under this new star
+of mankind, the Southern Cross, to catch whatever last mischief-maker
+was left to poison the wells of goodwill?
+
+His mind resisted and struggled against these ideas. "Austere," he
+whispered. "The ennobling tests of war." A trooner rode up alongside,
+and offered him a drink of water
+
+"Just a mouthful," he said apologetically. "We've had to go rather
+short."...
+
+"There's another brain busy here with the same idea," the Angel
+interrupted. And the bishop found himself looking into the bedroom of a
+young German attache in Washington, sleepless in the small hours.
+
+"Ach!" cried the young man, and sat up in bed and ran his hands through
+his fair hair.
+
+He had been working late upon this detestable business of the Lusitania;
+the news of her sinking had come to hand two days before, and all
+America was aflame with it. It might mean war. His task had been to pour
+out explanations and justifications to the press; to show that it was an
+act of necessity, to pretend a conviction that the great ship was loaded
+with munitions, to fight down the hostility and anger that blazed across
+a continent. He had worked to his limit. He had taken cup after cup of
+coffee, and had come to bed worked out not two hours ago. Now here he
+was awake after a nightmare of drowning women and children, trying to
+comfort his soul by recalling his own arguments. Never once since the
+war began had he doubted the rightness of the German cause. It seemed
+only a proof of his nervous exhaustion that he could doubt it now.
+Germany was the best organized, most cultivated, scientific and liberal
+nation the earth had ever seen, it was for the good of mankind that she
+should be the dominant power in the world; his patriotism had had the
+passion of a mission. The English were indolent, the French decadent,
+the Russians barbaric, the Americans basely democratic; the rest of the
+world was the "White man's Burthen"; the clear destiny of mankind
+was subservience to the good Prussian eagle. Nevertheless--those
+wet draggled bodies that swirled down in the eddies of the sinking
+Titan--Ach! He wished it could have been otherwise. He nursed his knees
+and prayed that there need not be much more of these things before the
+spirit of the enemy was broken and the great Peace of Germany came upon
+the world.
+
+And suddenly he stopped short in his prayer.
+
+Suddenly out of the nothingness and darkness about him came the
+conviction that God did not listen to his prayers....
+
+Was there any other way?
+
+It was the most awful doubt he had ever had, for it smote at the
+training of all his life. "Could it be possible that after all our old
+German God is not the proper style and title of the true God? Is our old
+German God perhaps only the last of a long succession of bloodstained
+tribal effigies--and not God at all?"
+
+For a long time it seemed that the bishop watched the thoughts that
+gathered in the young attache's mind. Until suddenly he broke into a
+quotation, into that last cry of the dying Goethe, for "Light. More
+Light!"...
+
+"Leave him at that," said the Angel. "I want you to hear these two young
+women."
+
+The hand came back to England and pointed to where Southend at the mouth
+of the Thames was all agog with the excitement of an overnight Zeppelin
+raid. People had got up hours before their usual time in order to
+look at the wrecked houses before they went up to their work in town.
+Everybody seemed abroad. Two nurses, not very well trained as nurses go
+nor very well-educated women, were snatching a little sea air upon the
+front after an eventful night. They were too excited still to sleep.
+They were talking of the horror of the moment when they saw the nasty
+thing "up there," and felt helpless as it dropped its bombs. They had
+both hated it.
+
+"There didn't ought to be such things," said one.
+
+"They don't seem needed," said her companion.
+
+"Men won't always go on like this--making wars and all such wickedness."
+
+"It's 'ow to stop them?"
+
+"Science is going to stop them."
+
+"Science?"
+
+"Yes, science. My young brother--oh, he's a clever one--he says such
+things! He says that it's science that they won't always go on like
+this. There's more sense coming into the world and more--my young
+brother says so. Says it stands to reason; it's Evolution. It's science
+that men are all brothers; you can prove it. It's science that there
+oughtn't to be war. Science is ending war now by making it horrible like
+this, and making it so that no one is safe. Showing it up. Only when
+nobody is safe will everybody want to set up peace, he says. He says
+it's proved there could easily be peace all over the world now if it
+wasn't for flags and kings and capitalists and priests. They still
+manage to keep safe and out of it. He says the world ought to be just
+one state. The World State, he says it ought to be."
+
+("Under God," said the bishop, "under God.")
+
+"He says science ought to be King of the whole world."
+
+"Call it Science if you will," said the bishop. "God is wisdom."
+
+"Out of the mouths of babes and elementary science students," said the
+Angel. "The very children in the board schools are turning against this
+narrowness and nonsense and mischief of nations and creeds and kings.
+You see it at a thousand points, at ten thousand points, look, the
+world is all flashing and flickering; it is like a spinthariscope; it is
+aquiver with the light that is coming to mankind. It is on the verge of
+blazing even now."
+
+"Into a light."
+
+"Into the one Kingdom of God. See here! See here! And here! This brave
+little French priest in a helmet of steel who is daring to think for the
+first time in his life; this gentle-mannered emir from Morocco looking
+at the grave-diggers on the battlefield; this mother who has lost her
+son....
+
+"You see they all turn in one direction, although none of them seem to
+dream yet that they are all turning in the same direction. They turn,
+every one, to the rule of righteousness, which is the rule of God. They
+turn to that communism of effort in the world which alone permits men
+to serve God in state and city and their economic lives.... They are all
+coming to the verge of the same salvation, the salvation of one human
+brotherhood under the rule of one Righteousness, one Divine will.... Is
+that the salvation your church offers?"
+
+(8)
+
+
+"And now that we have seen how religion grows and spreads in men's
+hearts, now that the fields are white with harvest, I want you to look
+also and see what the teachers of religion are doing," said the Angel.
+
+He smiled. His presence became more definite, and the earthly globe
+about them and the sun and the stars grew less distinct and less
+immediately there. The silence invited the bishop to speak.
+
+"In the light of this vision, I see my church plainly for the little
+thing it is," he said.
+
+He wanted to be perfectly clear with the Angel and himself.
+
+"This church of which I am a bishop is just a part of our poor human
+struggle, small and pitiful as one thinks of it here in the light of the
+advent of God's Kingdom, but very great, very great indeed, ancient and
+high and venerable, in comparison with me. But mostly it is human. It is
+most human. For my story is the church's story, and the church's story
+is mine. Here I could almost believe myself the church itself. The
+world saw a light, the nations that were sitting in darkness saw a great
+light. Even as I saw God. And then the church began to forget and lose
+itself among secondary things. As I have done.... It tried to express
+the truth and lost itself in a maze of theology. It tried to bring order
+into the world and sold its faith to Constantine. These men who had
+professed the Invisible King of the World, shirked his service. It is a
+most terrible disaster that Christianity has sold itself to emperors and
+kings. They forged a saying of the Master's that we should render unto
+Ceasar the things that are Ceasar's and unto God the things that are
+God's....
+
+"Who is this Ceasar to set himself up to share mankind with God? Nothing
+that is Ceasar's can be any the less God's. But Constantine Caesar sat
+in the midst of the council, his guards were all about it, and the poor
+fanatics and trimmers and schemers disputed nervously with their eyes
+on him, disputed about homoousian and homoiousian, and grimaced and
+pretended to be very very fierce and exact to hide how much they were
+frightened and how little they knew, and because they did not dare to
+lay violent hands upon that usurper of the empire of the world....
+
+"And from that day forth the Christian churches have been damned and
+lost. Kept churches. Lackey churches. Roman, Russian, Anglican; it
+matters not. My church indeed was twice sold, for it doubled the sin of
+Nicaea and gave itself over to Henry and Elizabeth while it shammed
+a dispute about the sacraments. No one cared really about
+transubstantiation any more than the earlier betrayers cared about
+consubstantiality; that dispute did but serve to mask the betrayal."
+
+He turned to the listening Angel. "What can you show me of my church
+that I do not know? Why! we Anglican bishops get our sees as footmen get
+a job. For months Victoria, that old German Frau, delayed me--because of
+some tittle-tattle.... The things we are! Snape, who afterwards became
+Bishop of Burnham, used to waylay the Prince Consort when he was riding
+in Hyde Park and give him, he boasts, 'a good loud cheer,' and then he
+would run very fast across the park so as to catch him as he came round,
+and do it again.... It is to that sort of thing we bearers of the light
+have sunken....
+
+"I have always despised that poor toady," the bishop went on. "And
+yet here am I, and God has called me and shown me the light of his
+countenance, and for a month I have faltered. That is the mystery of the
+human heart, that it can and does sin against the light. What right have
+I, who have seen the light--and failed, what right have I--to despise
+any other human being? I seem to have been held back by a sort of
+paralysis.
+
+"Men are so small, so small still, that they cannot keep hold of the
+vision of God. That is why I want to see God again.... But if it were
+not for this strange drug that seems for a little while to lift my mind
+above the confusion and personal entanglements of every day, I doubt if
+even now I could be here. I am here, passionate to hold this moment and
+keep the light. As this inspiration passes, I shall go back, I know,
+to my home and my place and my limitations. The littleness of men! The
+forgetfulness of men! I want to know what my chief duty is, to have it
+plain, in terms so plain that I can never forget.
+
+"See in this world," he said, turning to the globe, "while Chinese
+merchants and Turkish troopers, school-board boys and Norwegian
+fishermen, half-trained nurses and Boer farmers are full of the spirit
+of God, see how the priests of the churches of Nicaea spend their time."
+
+And now it was the bishop whose dark hands ran over the great silver
+globe, and it was the Angel who stood over him and listened, as a
+teacher might stand over a child who is learning a lesson. The bishop's
+hand rested for a second on a cardinal who was planning a political
+intrigue to produce a reaction in France, then for a moment on a
+Pomeranian pastor who was going out to his well-tilled fields with his
+Sunday sermon, full of fierce hatred of England, still echoing in his
+head. Then he paused at a Mollah preaching the Jehad, in doubt whether
+he too wasn't a German pastor, and then at an Anglican clergyman still
+lying abed and thinking out a great mission of Repentance and Hope that
+should restore the authority of the established church--by incoherent
+missioning--without any definite sin indicated for repentance nor any
+clear hope for anything in particular arising out of such activities.
+The bishop's hand went seeking to and fro, but nowhere could he find
+any religious teacher, any religious body rousing itself to meet the new
+dawn of faith in the world. Some few men indeed seemed thoughtful, but
+within the limitation of their vows. Everywhere it was church and creed
+and nation and king and property and partisanship, and nowhere was it
+the True God that the priests and teachers were upholding. It was always
+the common unhampered man through whom the light of God was breaking; it
+was always the creed and the organization of the religious professionals
+that stood in the way to God....
+
+"God is putting the priests aside," he cried, "and reaching out to
+common men. The churches do not serve God. They stand between man and
+God. They are like great barricades on the way to God."
+
+The bishop's hand brushed over Archbishop Pontifex, who was just coming
+down to breakfast in his palace. This pompous old man was dressed in
+a purple garment that set off his tall figure very finely, and he was
+holding out his episcopal ring for his guests to kiss, that being the
+customary morning greeting of Archbishop Pontifex. The thought of that
+ring-kissing had made much hard work at lower levels "worth while"
+to Archbishop Pontifex. And seventy miles away from him old Likeman
+breakfasted in bed on Benger's food, and searched his Greek Testament
+for tags to put to his letters. And here was the familiar palace at
+Princhester, and in an armchair in his bed-room sat Bishop Scrope
+insensible and motionless, in a trance in which he was dreaming of the
+coming of God.
+
+"I see my futility. I see my vanity. But what am I to do?" he said,
+turning to the darkness that now wrapped about the Angel again, fold
+upon fold. "The implications of yesterday bind me for the morrow. This
+is my world. This is what I am and what I am in. How can I save myself?
+How can I turn from these habits and customs and obligations to the
+service of the one true God? When I see myself, then I understand how it
+is with the others. All we priests and teachers are men caught in nets.
+I would serve God. Easily said! But how am I to serve God? How am I to
+help and forward His coming, to make myself part of His coming?"
+
+He perceived that he was returning into himself, and that the vision of
+the sphere and of the starry spaces was fading into non-existence.
+
+He struggled against this return. He felt that his demand was still
+unanswered. His wife's face had suddenly come very close to him, and he
+realized she intervened between him and that solution.
+
+What was she doing here?
+
+(9)
+
+
+The great Angel seemed still to be near at hand, limitless space was all
+about him, and yet the bishop perceived that he was now sitting in the
+arm-chair in his bedroom in the palace of Princhester. He was both
+there and not there. It seemed now as if he had two distinct yet kindred
+selves, and that the former watched the latter. The latter was now
+awakening to the things about him; the former marked his gestures and
+listened with an entire detachment to the words he was saying. These
+words he was saying to Lady Ella: "God is coming to rule the world, I
+tell you. We must leave the church."
+
+Close to him sat Lady Ella, watching him with an expression in which
+dismay and resolution mingled. Upon the other side of him, upon a little
+occasional table, was a tray with breakfast things. He was no longer the
+watcher now, but the watched.
+
+Lady Ella bent towards him as he spoke. She seemed to struggle with and
+dismiss his astonishing statement.
+
+"Edward," she said, "you have been taking a drug." He looked round at
+his night table to see the little phial. It had gone. Then he saw that
+Lady Ella held it very firmly in her hand.
+
+"Dunk came to me in great distress. He said you were insensible and
+breathing heavily. I came. I realized. I told him to say nothing to any
+one, but to fetch me a tray with your breakfast. I have kept all the
+other servants away and I have waited here by you.... Dunk I think
+is safe.... You have been muttering and moving your head from side to
+side...."
+
+The bishop's mind was confused. He felt as though God must be standing
+just outside the room. "I have failed in my duty," he said. "But I am
+very near to God." He laid his hand on her arm. "You know, Ella, He is
+very close to us...."
+
+She looked perplexed.
+
+He sat up in his chair.
+
+"For some months now," he said, "there have been new forces at work
+in my mind. I have been invaded by strange doubts and still stranger
+realizations. This old church of ours is an empty mask. God is not
+specially concerned in it."
+
+"Edward!" she cried, "what are you saying?"
+
+"I have been hesitating to tell you. But I see now I must tell you
+plainly. Our church is a cast hull. It is like the empty skin of a
+snake. God has gone out of it."
+
+She rose to her feet. She was so horrified that she staggered backward,
+pushing her chair behind her. "But you are mad," she said.
+
+He was astonished at her distress. He stood up also.
+
+"My dear," he said, "I can assure you I am not mad. I should have
+prepared you, I know...."
+
+She looked at him wild-eyed. Then she glanced at the phial, gripped in
+her hand.
+
+"Oh!" she exclaimed, and going swiftly to the window emptied out the
+contents of the little bottle. He realized what she was doing too late
+to prevent her.
+
+"Don't waste that!" he cried, and stepping forward caught hold of her
+wrist. The phial fell from her white fingers, and crashed upon the rough
+paved garden path below.
+
+"My dear," he cried, "my dear. You do not understand."
+
+They stood face to face. "It was a tonic," he said. "I have been ill. I
+need it."
+
+"It is a drug," she answered. "You have been uttering blasphemies."
+
+He dropped her arm and walked half-way across the room. Then he turned
+and faced her.
+
+"They are not blasphemies," he said. "But I ought not to have surprised
+you and shocked you as I have done. I want to tell you of changes that
+have happened to my mind."
+
+"Now!" she exclaimed, and then: "I will not hear them now. Until you are
+better. Until these fumes--"
+
+Her manner changed. "Oh, Edward!" she cried, "why have you done this?
+Why have you taken things secretly? I know you have been sleepless, but
+I have been so ready to help you. I have been willing--you know I have
+been willing--for any help. My life is all to be of use to you...."
+
+"Is there any reason," she pleaded, "why you should have hidden things
+from me?"
+
+He stood remorseful and distressed. "I should have talked to you," he
+said lamely.
+
+"Edward," she said, laying her hands on his shoulders, "will you do one
+thing for me? Will you try to eat a little breakfast? And stay here? I
+will go down to Mr. Whippham and arrange whatever is urgent with him.
+Perhaps if you rest--There is nothing really imperative until the
+confirmation in the afternoon.... I do not understand all this. For some
+time--I have felt it was going on. But of that we can talk. The thing
+now is that people should not know, that nothing should be seen....
+Suppose for instance that horrible White Blackbird were to hear of
+it.... I implore you. If you rest here--And if I were to send for that
+young doctor who attended Miriam."
+
+"I don't want a doctor," said the bishop.
+
+"But you ought to have a doctor."
+
+"I won't have a doctor," said the bishop.
+
+It was with a perplexed but powerless dissent that the externalized
+perceptions of the bishop witnessed his agreement with the rest of Lady
+Ella's proposals so soon as this point about the doctor was conceded.
+
+(10)
+
+
+For the rest of that day until his breakdown in the cathedral the sense
+of being in two places at the same time haunted the bishop's mind. He
+stood beside the Angel in the great space amidst the stars, and at the
+same time he was back in his ordinary life, he was in his palace at
+Princhester, first resting in his bedroom and talking to his wife
+and presently taking up the routines of his duties again in his study
+downstairs.
+
+His chief task was to finish his two addresses for the confirmation
+services of the day. He read over his notes, and threw them aside
+and remained for a time thinking deeply. The Greek tags at the end
+of Likeman's letter came into his thoughts; they assumed a quality of
+peculiar relevance to this present occasion. He repeated the words:
+"Epitelesei. Epiphausei."
+
+He took his little Testament to verify them. After some slight trouble
+he located the two texts. The first, from Philippians, ran in the old
+version, "He that hath begun a good work in you will perform it";
+the second was expressed thus: "Christ shall give thee light." He was
+dissatisfied with these renderings and resorted to the revised version,
+which gave "perfect" instead of "perform," and "shall shine upon you"
+for "give thee light." He reflected profoundly for a time.
+
+Then suddenly his addresses began to take shape in his mind, and these
+little points lost any significance. He began to write rapidly, and as
+he wrote he felt the Angel stood by his right hand and read and approved
+what he was writing. There were moments when his mind seemed to be
+working entirely beyond his control. He had a transitory questioning
+whether this curious intellectual automatism was not perhaps what people
+meant by "inspiration."
+
+(11)
+
+
+The bishop had always been sensitive to the secret fount of pathos that
+is hidden in the spectacle of youth. Long years ago when he and Lady
+Ella had been in Florence he had been moved to tears by the beauty
+of the fresh-faced eager Tobit who runs beside the great angel in the
+picture of Botticelli. And suddenly and almost as uncontrollably, that
+feeling returned at the sight of the young congregation below him,
+of all these scores of neophytes who were gathered to make a public
+acknowledgment of God. The war has invested all youth now with the
+shadow of tragedy; before it came many of us were a little envious of
+youth and a little too assured of its certainty of happiness. All that
+has changed. Fear and a certain tender solicitude mingle in our regard
+for every child; not a lad we pass in the street but may presently be
+called to face such pain and stress and danger as no ancient hero ever
+knew. The patronage, the insolent condescension of age, has vanished out
+of the world. It is dreadful to look upon the young.
+
+He stood surveying the faces of the young people as the rector read the
+Preface to the confirmation service. How simple they were, how innocent!
+Some were a little flushed by the excitement of the occasion; some a
+little pallid. But they were all such tender faces, so soft in outline,
+so fresh and delicate in texture and colour. They had soft credulous
+mouths. Some glanced sideways at one another; some listened with a
+forced intentness. The expression of one good-looking boy, sitting in a
+corner scat, struck the bishop as being curiously defiant. He stood
+very erect, he blinked his eyes as though they smarted, his lips were
+compressed bitterly. And then it seemed to the bishop that the Angel
+stood beside him and gave him understanding.
+
+"He is here," the bishop knew, "because he could not avoid coming. He
+tried to excuse himself. His mother wept. What could he do? But the
+church's teaching nowadays fails even to grip the minds of boys."
+
+The rector came to the end of his Preface: "They will evermore endeavour
+themselves faithfully to observe such things as they by their own
+confession have assented unto."
+
+"Like a smart solicitor pinning them down," said the bishop to himself,
+and then roused himself, unrolled the little paper in his hand, leant
+forward, and straightway began his first address.
+
+Nowadays it is possible to say very unorthodox things indeed in an
+Anglican pulpit unchallenged. There remains no alert doctrinal criticism
+in the church congregations. It was possible, therefore, for the bishop
+to say all that follows without either hindrance or disturbance. The
+only opposition, indeed, came from within, from a sense of dreamlike
+incongruity between the place and the occasion and the things that he
+found himself delivering.
+
+"All ceremonies," he began, "grow old. All ceremonies are tainted even
+from the first by things less worthy than their first intention, and
+you, my dear sons and daughters, who have gathered to-day in this worn
+and ancient building, beneath these monuments to ancient vanities and
+these symbols of forgotten or abandoned theories about the mystery of
+God, will do well to distinguish in your minds between what is essential
+and what is superfluous and confusing in this dedication you make of
+yourselves to God our Master and King. For that is the real thing you
+seek to do today, to give yourselves to God. This is your spiritual
+coming of age, in which you set aside your childish dependence upon
+teachers and upon taught phrases, upon rote and direction, and stand up
+to look your Master in the face. You profess a great brotherhood when
+you do that, a brotherhood that goes round the earth, that numbers men
+of every race and nation and country, that aims to bring God into
+all the affairs of this world and make him not only the king of your
+individual lives but the king--in place of all the upstarts, usurpers,
+accidents, and absurdities who bear crowns and sceptres today--of an
+united mankind."
+
+He paused, and in the pause he heard a little rustle as though the
+congregation before him was sitting up in its places, a sound that
+always nerves and reassures an experienced preacher.
+
+"This, my dear children, is the reality of this grave business to-day,
+as indeed it is the real and practical end of all true religion. This is
+your sacrament urn, your soldier's oath. You salute and give your fealty
+to the coming Kingdom of God. And upon that I would have you fix your
+minds to the exclusion of much that, I know only too well, has been
+narrow and evil and sectarian in your preparation for this solemn rite.
+God is like a precious jewel found among much rubble; you must cast the
+rubble from you. The crowning triumph of the human mind is simplicity;
+the supreme significance of God lies in his unity and universality. The
+God you salute to-day is the God of the Jews and Gentiles alike, the
+God of Islam, the God of the Brahmo Somaj, the unknown God of many a
+righteous unbeliever. He is not the God of those felted theologies and
+inexplicable doctrines with which your teachers may have confused your
+minds. I would have it very clear in your minds that having drunken the
+draught you should not reverence unduly the cracked old vessel that has
+brought it to your lips. I should be falling short of my duty if I did
+not make that and everything I mean by that altogether plain to you."
+
+He saw the lad whose face of dull defiance he had marked before, sitting
+now with a startled interest in his eyes. The bishop leant over the desk
+before him, and continued in the persuasive tone of a man who speaks of
+things too manifest for laboured argument.
+
+"In all ages religion has come from God through broad-minded creative
+men, and in all ages it has fallen very quickly into the hands
+of intense and conservative men. These last--narrow, fearful, and
+suspicious--have sought in every age to save the precious gift of
+religion by putting it into a prison of formulae and asseverations. Bear
+that in mind when you are pressed to definition. It is as if you made a
+box hermetically sealed to save the treasure of a fresh breeze from the
+sea. But they have sought out exact statements and tortuous explanations
+of the plain truth of God, they have tried to take down God in writing,
+to commit him to documents, to embalm his living faith as though it
+would otherwise corrupt. So they have lost God and fallen into endless
+differences, disputes, violence, and darkness about insignificant
+things. They have divided religion between this creed and teacher and
+that. The corruption of the best is the worst, said Aristotle; and the
+great religions of the world, and especially this Christianity of ours,
+are the ones most darkened and divided and wasted by the fussings and
+false exactitudes of the creed-monger and the sectary. There is no lie
+so bad as a stale disfigured truth. There is no heresy so damnable as
+a narrow orthodoxy. All religious associations carry this danger of the
+over-statement that misstates and the over-emphasis that divides and
+betrays. Beware of that danger. Do not imagine, because you are gathered
+in this queerly beautiful old building today, because I preside here in
+this odd raiment of an odder compromise, because you see about you in
+coloured glass and carven stone the emblems of much vain disputation,
+that thereby you cut yourselves off and come apart from the great world
+of faith, Catholic, Islamic, Brahministic, Buddhistic, that grows now
+to a common consciousness of the near Advent of God our King. You enter
+that waiting world fraternity now, you do not leave it. This place, this
+church of ours, should be to you not a seclusion and a fastness but a
+door.
+
+"I could quote you a score of instances to establish that this simple
+universalism was also the teaching of Christ. But now I will only remind
+you that it was Mary who went to her lord simply, who was commended, and
+not Martha who troubled about many things. Learn from the Mary of
+Faith and not from these Marthas of the Creeds. Let us abandon the
+presumptions of an ignorant past. The perfection of doctrine is not
+for finite men. Give yourselves to God. Give yourselves to God. Not to
+churches and uses, but to God. To God simply. He is the first word of
+religion and the last. He is Alpha; he is Omega. Epitelesei; it is He
+who will finish the good work begun."
+
+The bishop ended his address in a vivid silence. Then he began his
+interrogation.
+
+"Do you here, in the presence of God, and of this congregation, renew
+the solemn promise and vow that was made in your name at your Baptism;
+ratifying and confirming the same in your own persons, and acknowledging
+yourselves--"
+
+He stopped short. The next words were: "bound to believe and do all
+those things, which your Godfathers and Godmothers then undertook for
+you."
+
+He could not stand those words. He hesitated, and then substituted:
+"acknowledge yourselves to be the true servants of the one God, who is
+the Lord of Mankind?"
+
+For a moment silence hung in the cathedral. Then one voice, a boy's
+voice, led a ragged response. "I do."
+
+Then the bishop: "Our help is in the Name of the Lord."
+
+The congregation answered doubtfully, with a glance at its prayer books:
+"Who hath made heaven and earth."
+
+The bishop: "Blessed be the name of the Lord."
+
+The congregation said with returning confidence: "Henceforth, world
+without end."
+
+(12)
+
+
+Before his second address the bishop had to listen to Veni Creator
+Spiritus, in its English form, and it seemed to him the worst of all
+possible hymns. Its defects became monstrously exaggerated to his
+hypersensitive mind. It impressed him in its Englished travesty as a
+grotesque, as a veritable Charlie Chaplin among hymns, and in truth it
+does stick out most awkward feet, it misses its accusatives, it catches
+absurdly upon points of abstruse doctrine. The great Angel stood
+motionless and ironical at the bishop's elbow while it was being sung.
+"Your church," he seemed to say.
+
+"We must end this sort of thing," whispered the bishop. "We must end
+this sort of thing--absolutely." He glanced at the faces of the singers,
+and it became beyond all other things urgent, that he should lift them
+once for all above the sectarian dogmatism of that hymn to a simple
+vision of God's light....
+
+He roused himself to the touching business of the laying on of hands.
+While he did so the prepared substance of his second address was running
+through his mind. The following prayer and collects he read without
+difficulty, and so came to his second address. His disposition at first
+was explanatory.
+
+"When I spoke to you just now," he began, "I fell unintentionally into
+the use of a Greek word, epitelesei. It was written to me in a letter
+from a friend with another word that also I am now going to quote to
+you. This letter touched very closely upon the things I want to say to
+you now, and so these two words are very much in my mind. The former one
+was taken from the Epistle to the Philippians; it signifies, 'He will
+complete the work begun'; the one I have now in mind comes from the
+Epistle to the Ephesians; it is Epiphausei--or, to be fuller, epiphausei
+soi ho Christos, which signifies that He will shine upon us. And this is
+very much in my thoughts now because I do believe that this world, which
+seemed so very far from God a little while ago, draws near now to an
+unexampled dawn. God is at hand.
+
+"It is your privilege, it is your grave and terrible position, that you
+have been born at the very end and collapse of a negligent age, of an
+age of sham kingship, sham freedom, relaxation, evasion, greed, waste,
+falsehood, and sinister preparation. Your lives open out in the midst
+of the breakdown for which that age prepared. To you negligence is no
+longer possible. There is cold and darkness, there is the heat of the
+furnace before you; you will live amidst extremes such as our youth
+never knew; whatever betide, you of your generation will have small
+chance of living untempered lives. Our country is at war and half
+mankind is at war; death and destruction trample through the world;
+men rot and die by the million, food diminishes and fails, there is
+a wasting away of all the hoarded resources, of all the accumulated
+well-being of mankind; and there is no clear prospect yet of any end to
+this enormous and frightful conflict. Why did it ever arise? What made
+it possible? It arose because men had forgotten God. It was possible
+because they worshipped simulacra, were loyal to phantoms of race and
+empire, permitted themselves to be ruled and misled by idiot princes and
+usurper kings. Their minds were turned from God, who alone can rule and
+unite mankind, and so they have passed from the glare and follies of
+those former years into the darkness and anguish of the present day. And
+in darkness and anguish they will remain until they turn to that King
+who comes to rule them, until the sword and indignation of God have
+overthrown their misleaders and oppressors, and the Justice of God, the
+Kingdom of God set high over the republics of mankind, has brought peace
+for ever to the world. It is to this militant and imminent God, to this
+immortal Captain, this undying Law-giver, that you devote yourselves
+to-day.
+
+"For he is imminent now. He comes. I have seen in the east and in the
+west, the hearts and the minds and the wills of men turning to him as
+surely as when a needle is magnetized it turns towards the north. Even
+now as I preach to you here, God stands over us all, ready to receive
+us...."
+
+And as he said these words, the long nave of the cathedral, the shadows
+of its fretted roof, the brown choir with its golden screen, the rows
+of seated figures, became like some picture cast upon a flimsy and
+translucent curtain. Once more it seemed to the bishop that he saw
+God plain. Once more the glorious effulgence poured about him, and the
+beautiful and wonderful conquest of men's hearts and lives was manifest
+to him.
+
+He lifted up his hands and cried to God, and with an emotion so
+profound, an earnestness so commanding, that very many of those who
+were present turned their faces to see the figure to which he looked and
+spoke. And some of the children had a strange persuasion of a presence
+there, as of a divine figure militant, armed, and serene....
+
+"Oh God our Leader and our Master and our Friend," the bishop prayed,
+"forgive our imperfection and our little motives, take us and make us
+one with thy great purpose, use us and do not reject us, make us all
+here servants of thy kingdom, weave our lives into thy struggle to
+conquer and to bring peace and union to the world. We are small and
+feeble creatures, we are feeble in speech, feebler still in action,
+nevertheless let but thy light shine upon us and there is not one of
+us who cannot be lit by thy fire, and who cannot lose himself in thy
+salvation. Take us into thy purpose, O God. Let thy kingdom come into
+our hearts and into this world."
+
+His voice ceased, and he stood for a measurable time with his arms
+extended and his face upturned....
+
+The golden clouds that whirled and eddied so splendidly in his brain
+thinned out, his sense of God's immediacy faded and passed, and he was
+left aware of the cathedral pulpit in which he stood so strangely posed,
+and of the astonished congregation below him. His arms sank to his side.
+His eyes fell upon the book in front of him and he felt for and gripped
+the two upper corners of it and, regardless of the common order and
+practice, read out the Benediction, changing the words involuntarily as
+he read:
+
+"The Blessing of God who is the Father, the Son, the Spirit and the King
+of all Mankind, be upon you and remain with you for ever. Amen."
+
+Then he looked again, as if to look once more upon that radiant vision
+of God, but now he saw only the clear cool space of the cathedral vault
+and the coloured glass and tracery of the great rose window. And then,
+as the first notes of the organ came pealing above the departing stir of
+the congregation, he turned about and descended slowly, like one who is
+still half dreaming, from the pulpit.
+
+(13)
+
+
+In the vestry he found Canon Bliss. "Help me to take off these
+garments," the bishop said. "I shall never wear them again."
+
+"You are ill," said the canon, scrutinizing his face.
+
+"Not ill. But the word was taken out of my mouth. I perceive now that
+I have been in a trance, a trance in which the truth is real. It is a
+fearful thing to find oneself among realities. It is a dreadful thing
+when God begins to haunt a priest.... I can never minister in the church
+again."
+
+Whippham thrust forward a chair for the bishop to sit down. The bishop
+felt now extraordinarily fatigued. He sat down heavily, and rested his
+wrists on the arms of the chair. "Already," he resumed presently, "I
+begin to forget what it was I said."
+
+"You became excited," said Bliss, "and spoke very loudly and clearly."
+
+"What did I say?"
+
+"I don't know what you said; I have forgotten. I never want to remember.
+Things about the Second Advent. Dreadful things. You said God was close
+at hand. Happily you spoke partly in Greek. I doubt if any of those
+children understood. And you had a kind of lapse--an aphasia. You
+mutilated the interrogation and you did not pronounce the
+benediction properly. You changed words and you put in words. One sat
+frozen--waiting for what would happen next."
+
+"We must postpone the Pringle confirmation," said Whippham. "I wonder to
+whom I could telephone."
+
+Lady Ella appeared, and came and knelt down by the bishop's chair. "I
+never ought to have let this happen," she said, taking his wrists in her
+hands. "You are in a fever, dear."
+
+"It seemed entirely natural to say what I did," the bishop declared.
+
+Lady Ella looked up at Bliss.
+
+"A doctor has been sent for," said the canon to Lady Ella.
+
+"I must speak to the doctor," said Lady Ella as if her husband could
+not hear her. "There is something that will make things clearer to the
+doctor. I must speak to the doctor for a moment before he sees him."
+
+Came a gust of pretty sounds and a flash of bright colour that shamed
+the rich vestments at hand. Over the shoulder of the rector and quite at
+the back, appeared Lady Sunderbund resolutely invading the vestry. The
+rector intercepted her, stood broad with extended arms.
+
+"I must come in and speak to him. If it is only fo' a moment."
+
+The bishop looked up and saw Lady Ella's expression. Lady Ella was
+sitting up very stiffly, listening but not looking round.
+
+A vague horror and a passionate desire to prevent the entry of Lady
+Sunderbund at any cost, seized upon the bishop. She would, he felt, be
+the last overwhelming complication. He descended to a base subterfuge.
+He lay back in his chair slowly as though he unfolded himself, he
+covered his eyes with his hand and then groaned aloud.
+
+"Leave me alone!" he cried in a voice of agony. "Leave me alone! I can
+see no one.... I can--no more."
+
+There was a momentous silence, and then the tumult of Lady Sunderbund
+receded.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE EIGHTH - THE NEW WORLD
+
+(1)
+
+
+THAT night the bishop had a temperature of a hundred and a half. The
+doctor pronounced him to be in a state of intense mental excitement,
+aggravated by some drug. He was a doctor modern and clear-minded enough
+to admit that he could not identify the drug. He overruled, every one
+overruled, the bishop's declaration that he had done with the church,
+that he could never mock God with his episcopal ministrations again,
+that he must proceed at once with his resignation. "Don't think of
+these things," said the doctor. "Banish them from your mind until your
+temperature is down to ninety-eight. Then after a rest you may go into
+them."
+
+Lady Ella insisted upon his keeping his room. It was with difficulty
+that he got her to admit Whippham, and Whippham was exasperatingly in
+order. "You need not trouble about anything now, my lord," he said.
+"Everything will keep until you are ready to attend to it. It's well
+we're through with Easter. Bishop Buncombe of Eastern Blowdesia
+was coming here anyhow. And there is Canon Bliss. There's only two
+ordination candidates because of the war. We'll get on swimmingly."
+
+The bishop thought he would like to talk to those two ordination
+candidates, but they prevailed upon him not to do so. He lay for the
+best part of one night confiding remarkable things to two imaginary
+ordination candidates.
+
+He developed a marked liking for Eleanor's company. She was home again
+now after a visit to some friends. It was decided that the best thing
+to do with him would be to send him away in her charge. A journey abroad
+was impossible. France would remind him too dreadfully of the war. His
+own mind turned suddenly to the sweet air of Hunstanton. He had gone
+there at times to read, in the old Cambridge days. "It is a terribly
+ugly place," he said, "but it is wine in the veins."
+
+Lady Ella was doubtful about Zeppelins. Thrice they had been right over
+Hunstanton already. They came in by the easy landmark of the Wash.
+
+"It will interest him," said Eleanor, who knew her father better.
+
+(2)
+
+
+One warm and still and sunny afternoon the bishop found himself looking
+out upon the waters of the Wash. He sat where the highest pebble layers
+of the beach reached up to a little cliff of sandy earth perhaps a foot
+high, and he looked upon sands and sea and sky and saw that they were
+beautiful.
+
+He was a little black-gaitered object in a scene of the most exquisite
+and delicate colour. Right and left of him stretched the low grey salted
+shore, pale banks of marly earth surmounted by green-grey wiry grass
+that held and was half buried in fine blown sand. Above, the heavens
+made a complete hemisphere of blue in which a series of remote cumulus
+clouds floated and dissolved. Before him spread the long levels of the
+sands, and far away at its utmost ebb was the sea. Eleanor had gone to
+explore the black ribs of a wrecked fishing-boat that lay at the edge of
+a shallow lagoon. She was a little pink-footed figure, very bright
+and apparently transparent. She had reverted for a time to shameless
+childishness; she had hidden her stockings among the reeds of the bank,
+and she was running to and fro, from star-fish to razor shell and from
+cockle to weed. The shingle was pale drab and purple close at hand, but
+to the westward, towards Hunstanton, the sands became brown and
+purple, and were presently broken up into endless skerries of low flat
+weed-covered boulders and little intensely blue pools. The sea was
+a band of sapphire that became silver to the west; it met the silver
+shining sands in one delicate breathing edge of intensely white foam.
+Remote to the west, very small and black and clear against the afternoon
+sky, was a cart, and about it was a score or so of mussel-gatherers.
+A little nearer, on an apparently empty stretch of shining wet sand, a
+multitude of gulls was mysteriously busy. These two groups of activities
+and Eleanor's flitting translucent movements did but set off and
+emphasize the immense and soothing tranquillity.
+
+For a long time the bishop sat passively receptive to this healing
+beauty. Then a little flow of thought began and gathered in his mind. He
+had come out to think over two letters that he had brought with him.
+He drew these now rather reluctantly from his pocket, and after a long
+pause over the envelopes began to read them.
+
+He reread Likeman's letter first.
+
+Likeman could not forgive him.
+
+"My dear Scrope," he wrote, "your explanation explains nothing. This
+sensational declaration of infidelity to our mother church, made under
+the most damning and distressing circumstances in the presence of young
+and tender minds entrusted to your ministrations, and in defiance of the
+honourable engagements implied in the confirmation service, confirms my
+worst apprehensions of the weaknesses of your character. I have always
+felt the touch of theatricality in your temperament, the peculiar
+craving to be pseudo-deeper, pseudo-simpler than us all, the need of
+personal excitement. I know that you were never quite contented
+to believe in God at second-hand. You wanted to be taken notice
+of--personally. Except for some few hints to you, I have never breathed
+a word of these doubts to any human being; I have always hoped that
+the ripening that comes with years and experience would give you an
+increasing strength against the dangers of emotionalism and against your
+strong, deep, quiet sense of your exceptional personal importance...."
+
+The bishop read thus far, and then sat reflecting.
+
+Was it just?
+
+He had many weaknesses, but had he this egotism? No; that wasn't
+the justice of the case. The old man, bitterly disappointed, was
+endeavouring to wound. Scrope asked himself whether he was to blame for
+that disappointment. That was a more difficult question....
+
+He dismissed the charge at last, crumpled up the letter in his hand, and
+after a moment's hesitation flung it away.... But he remained acutely
+sorry, not so much for himself as for the revelation of Likeman this
+letter made. He had had a great affection for Likeman and suddenly it
+was turned into a wound.
+
+(3)
+
+
+The second letter was from Lady Sunderbund, and it was an altogether
+more remarkable document. Lady Sunderbund wrote on a notepaper that was
+evidently the result of a perverse research, but she wrote a letter far
+more coherent than her speech, and without that curious falling away
+of the r's that flavoured even her gravest observations with an unjust
+faint aroma of absurdity. She wrote with a thin pen in a rounded boyish
+handwriting. She italicized with slashes of the pen.
+
+He held this letter in both hands between his knees, and considered
+it now with an expression that brought his eyebrows forward until they
+almost met, and that tucked in the corners of his mouth.
+
+"My dear Bishop," it began.
+
+"I keep thinking and thinking and thinking of that wonderful service, of
+the wonderful, wonderful things you said, and the wonderful choice you
+made of the moment to say them--when all those young lives were coming
+to the great serious thing in life. It was most beautifully done. At any
+rate, dear Bishop and Teacher, it was most beautifully begun. And now we
+all stand to you like creditors because you have given us so much that
+you owe us ever so much more. You have started us and you have to go on
+with us. You have broken the shell of the old church, and here we are
+running about with nowhere to go. You have to make the shelter of a new
+church now for us, purged of errors, looking straight to God. The
+King of Mankind!--what a wonderful, wonderful phrase that is. It says
+everything. Tell us more of him and more. Count me first--not foremost,
+but just the little one that runs in first--among your disciples. They
+say you are resigning your position in the church. Of course that must
+be true. You are coming out of it--what did you call it?--coming out of
+the cracked old vessel from which you have poured the living waters. I
+called on Lady Ella yesterday. She did not tell me very much; I think
+she is a very reserved as well as a very dignified woman, but she said
+that you intended to go to London. In London then I suppose you will set
+up the first altar to the Divine King. I want to help.
+
+"Dear Bishop and Teacher, I want to help tremendously--with all my heart
+and all my soul. I want to be let do things for you." (The "you" was
+erased by three or four rapid slashes, and "our King" substituted.)
+
+"I want to be privileged to help build that First Church of the World
+Unified under God. It is a dreadful thing to says but, you see, I am
+very rich; this dreadful war has made me ever so much richer--steel and
+shipping and things--it is my trustees have done it. I am ashamed to be
+so rich. I want to give. I want to give and help this great beginning of
+yours. I want you to let me help on the temporal side, to make it
+easy for you to stand forth and deliver your message, amidst suitable
+surroundings and without any horrid worries on account of the sacrifices
+you have made. Please do not turn my offering aside. I have never wanted
+anything so much in all my life as I want to make this gift. Unless I
+can make it I feel that for me there is no salvation! I shall stick with
+my loads and loads of stocks and shares and horrid possessions outside
+the Needle's Eye. But if I could build a temple for God, and just live
+somewhere near it so as to be the poor woman who sweeps out the chapels,
+and die perhaps and be buried under its floor! Don't smile at me. I
+mean every word of it. Years ago I thought of such a thing. After I had
+visited the Certosa di Pavia--do you know it? So beautiful, and those
+two still alabaster figures--recumbent. But until now I could never see
+my way to any such service. Now I do. I am all afire to do it. Help me!
+Tell me! Let me stand behind you and make your mission possible. I feel
+I have come to the most wonderful phase in my life. I feel my call has
+come....
+
+"I have written this letter over three times, and torn each of them up.
+I do so want to say all this, and it is so desperately hard to say. I am
+full of fears that you despise me. I know there is a sort of high colour
+about me. My passion for brightness. I am absurd. But inside of me is
+a soul, a real, living, breathing soul. Crying out to you: 'Oh, let me
+help! Let me help!' I will do anything, I will endure anything if only I
+can keep hold of the vision splendid you gave me in the cathedral. I see
+it now day and night, the dream of the place I can make for you--and you
+preaching! My fingers itch to begin. The day before yesterday I said
+to myself, 'I am quite unworthy, I am a worldly woman, a rich, smart,
+decorated woman. He will never accept me as I am.' I took off all
+my jewels, every one, I looked through all my clothes, and at last I
+decided I would have made for me a very simple straight grey dress, just
+simple and straight and grey. Perhaps you will think that too is absurd
+of me, too self-conscious. I would not tell of it to you if I did not
+want you to understand how alive I am to my utter impossibilities, how
+resolved I am to do anything so that I may be able to serve. But never
+mind about silly me; let me tell you how I see the new church.
+
+"I think you ought to have some place near the centre of London; not too
+west, for you might easily become fashionable, not too east because you
+might easily be swallowed up in merely philanthropic work, but somewhere
+between the two. There must be vacant sites still to be got round about
+Kingsway. And there we must set up your tabernacle, a very plain, very
+simple, very beautifully proportioned building in which you can
+give your message. I know a young man, just the very young man to do
+something of the sort, something quite new, quite modern, and yet solemn
+and serious. Lady Ella seemed to think you wanted to live somewhere in
+the north-west of London--but she would tell me very little. I seem to
+see you not there at all, not in anything between west-end and suburb,
+but yourself as central as your mind, in a kind of clergy house that
+will be part of the building. That is how it is in my dream anyhow. All
+that though can be settled afterwards. My imagination and my desire is
+running away with me. It is no time yet for premature plans. Not that
+I am not planning day and night. This letter is simply to offer. I just
+want to offer. Here I am and all my worldly goods. Take me, I pray you.
+And not only pray you. Take me, I demand of you, in the name of God our
+king. I have a right to be used. And you have no right to refuse me. You
+have to go on with your message, and it is your duty to take me--just as
+you are obliged to step on any steppingstone that lies on your way to
+do God service.... And so I am waiting. I shall be waiting--on thorns.
+I know you will take your time and think. But do not take too much time.
+Think of me waiting.
+
+"Your servant, your most humble helper in God (your God),
+
+"AGATHA SUNDERBUND."
+
+
+And then scrawled along the margin of the last sheet:
+
+
+"If, when you know--a telegram. Even if you cannot say so much as
+'Agreed,' still such a word as 'Favourable.' I just hang over the Void
+until I hear.
+
+"AGATHA S."
+
+
+A letter demanding enormous deliberation. She argued closely in spite of
+her italics. It had never dawned upon the bishop before how light is
+the servitude of the disciple in comparison with the servitude of the
+master. In many ways this proposal repelled and troubled him, in many
+ways it attracted him. And the argument of his clear obligation to
+accept her co-operation gripped him; it was a good argument.
+
+And besides it worked in very conveniently with certain other
+difficulties that perplexed him.
+
+(4)
+
+
+The bishop became aware that Eleanor was returning to him across the
+sands. She had made an end to her paddling, she had put on her shoes and
+stockings and become once more the grave and responsible young woman
+who had been taking care of him since his flight from Princhester. He
+replaced the two letters in his pocket, and sat ready to smile as she
+drew near; he admired her open brow, the toss of her hair, and the poise
+of her head upon her neck. It was good to note that her hard reading at
+Cambridge hadn't bent her shoulders in the least....
+
+"Well, old Dad!" she said as she drew near. "You've got back a colour."
+
+"I've got back everything. It's time I returned to Princhester."
+
+"Not in this weather. Not for a day or so." She flung herself at his
+feet. "Consider your overworked little daughter. Oh,how good this is!"
+
+"No," said the bishop in a grave tone that made her look up into his
+face. "I must go hack."
+
+He met her clear gaze. "What do you think of all this business,
+Eleanor?" he asked abruptly. "Do you think I had a sort of fit in the
+cathedral?"
+
+He winced as he asked the question.
+
+"Daddy," she said, after a little pause; "the things you said and did
+that afternoon were the noblest you ever did in your life. I wish I had
+been there. It must have been splendid to be there. I've not told you
+before--I've been dying to.... I'd promised not to say a word--not to
+remind you. I promised the doctor. But now you ask me, now you are well
+again, I can tell you. Kitty Kingdom has told me all about it, how it
+felt. It was like light and order coming into a hopeless dark muddle.
+What you said was like what we have all been trying to think--I mean all
+of us young people. Suddenly it was all clear."
+
+She stopped short. She was breathless with the excitement of her
+confession.
+
+Her father too remained silent for a little while. He was reminded of
+his weakness; he was, he perceived, still a little hysterical. He felt
+that he might weep at her youthful enthusiasm if he did not restrain
+himself.
+
+"I'm glad," he said, and patted her shoulder. "I'm glad, Norah."
+
+She looked away from him out across the lank brown sands and water pools
+to the sea. "It was what we have all been feeling our way towards, the
+absolute simplification of religion, the absolute simplification of
+politics and social duty; just God, just God the King."
+
+"But should I have said that--in the cathedral?"
+
+She felt no scruples. "You had to," she said.
+
+"But now think what it means," he said. "I must leave the church."
+
+"As a man strips off his coat for a fight."
+
+"That doesn't dismay you?"
+
+She shook her head, and smiled confidently to sea and sky.
+
+"I'm glad if you're with me," he said. "Sometimes--I think--I'm not a
+very self-reliant man."
+
+"You'll have all the world with you," she was convinced, "in a little
+time."
+
+"Perhaps rather a longer time than you think, Norah. In the meantime--"
+
+She turned to him once more.
+
+"In the meantime there are a great many things to consider. Young
+people, they say, never think of the transport that is needed to win a
+battle. I have it in my mind that I should leave the church. But I can't
+just walk out into the marketplace and begin preaching there. I see the
+family furniture being carried out of the palace and put into vans. It
+has to go somewhere...."
+
+"I suppose you will go to London."
+
+"Possibly. In fact certainly. I have a plan. Or at least an
+opportunity.... But that isn't what I have most in mind. These things
+are not done without emotion and a considerable strain upon one's
+personal relationships. I do not think this--I do not think your mother
+sees things as we do."
+
+"She will," said young enthusiasm, "when she understands."
+
+"I wish she did. But I have been unlucky in the circumstances of
+my explanations to her. And of course you understand all this means
+risks--poverty perhaps--going without things--travel, opportunity, nice
+possessions--for all of us. A loss of position too. All this sort of
+thing," he stuck out a gaitered calf and smiled, "will have to go.
+People, some of them, may be disasagreeable to us...."
+
+"After all, Daddy," she said, smiling, "it isn't so bad as the cross and
+the lions and burning pitch. And you have the Truth."
+
+"You do believe--?" He left his sentence unfinished.
+
+She nodded, her face aglow. "We know you have the Truth."
+
+"Of course in my own mind now it is very clear. I had a kind of
+illumination...." He would have tried to tell her of his vision, and
+he was too shy. "It came to me suddenly that the whole world was in
+confusion because men followed after a thousand different immediate
+aims, when really it was quite easy, if only one could be simple it was
+quite easy, to show that nearly all men could only be fully satisfied
+and made happy in themselves by one single aim, which was also the aim
+that would make the whole world one great order, and that aim was to
+make God King of one's heart and the whole world. I saw that all this
+world, except for a few base monstrous spirits, was suffering hideous
+things because of this war, and before the war it was full of folly,
+waste, social injustice and suspicion for the same reason, because it
+had not realized the kingship of God. And that is so simple; the essence
+of God is simplicity. The sin of this war lies with men like myself, men
+who set up to tell people about God, more than it lies with any other
+class--"
+
+"Kings?" she interjected. "Diplomatists? Finance?"
+
+"Yes. Those men could only work mischief in the world because the
+priests and teachers let them. All things human lie at last at the
+door of the priest and teacher. Who differentiate, who qualify and
+complicate, who make mean unnecessary elaborations, and so divide
+mankind. If it were not for the weakness and wickedness of the priests,
+every one would know and understand God. Every one who was modest enough
+not to set up for particular knowledge. Men disputed whether God is
+Finite or Infinite, whether he has a triple or a single aspect. How
+should they know? All we need to know is the face he turns to us. They
+impose their horrible creeds and distinctions. None of those things
+matter. Call him Christ the God or call him simply God, Allah, Heaven;
+it does not matter. He comes to us, we know, like a Helper and Friend;
+that is all we want to know. You may speculate further if you like, but
+it is not religion. They dispute whether he can set aside nature. But
+that is superstition. He is either master of nature and he knows that it
+is good, or he is part of nature and must obey. That is an argument for
+hair-splitting metaphysicians. Either answer means the same for us. It
+does not matter which way we come to believe that he does not idly set
+the course of things aside. Obviously he does not set the course of
+things aside. What he does do for certain is to give us courage and save
+us from our selfishness and the bitter hell it makes for us. And every
+one knows too what sort of things we want, and for what end we want
+to escape from ourselves. We want to do right. And right, if you think
+clearly, is just truth within and service without, the service of God's
+kingdom, which is mankind, the service of human needs and the increase
+of human power and experience. It is all perfectly plain, it is all
+quite easy for any one to understand, who isn't misled and chattered at
+and threatened and poisoned by evil priests and teachers."
+
+"And you are going to preach that, Daddy?"
+
+"If I can. When I am free--you know I have still to resign and give
+up--I shall make that my message."
+
+"And so God comes."
+
+"God comes as men perceive him in his simplicity.... Let men but see God
+simply, and forthwith God and his kingdom possess the world."
+
+She looked out to sea in silence for awhile.
+
+Then she turned to her father. "And you think that His Kingdom will
+come--perhaps in quite a little time--perhaps in our lifetimes? And
+that all these ridiculous or wicked little kings and emperors, and
+these political parties, and these policies and conspiracies, and
+this nationalist nonsense and all the patriotism and rowdyism, all the
+private profit-seeking and every baseness in life, all the things that
+it is so horrible and disgusting to be young among and powerless among,
+you think they will fade before him?"
+
+The bishop pulled his faith together.
+
+"They will fade before him--but whether it will take a lifetime or a
+hundred lifetimes or a thousand lifetimes, my Norah--"
+
+He smiled and left his sentence unfinished, and she smiled back at him
+to show she understood.
+
+And then he confessed further, because he did not want to seem merely
+sentimentally hopeful.
+
+"When I was in the cathedral, Norah--and just before that service, it
+seemed to me--it was very real.... It seemed that perhaps the Kingdom of
+God is nearer than we suppose, that it needs but the faith and courage
+of a few, and it may be that we may even live to see the dawning of his
+kingdom, even--who knows?--the sunrise. I am so full of faith and hope
+that I fear to be hopeful with you. But whether it is near or far--"
+
+"We work for it," said Eleanor.
+
+Eleanor thought, eyes downcast for a little while, and then looked up.
+
+"It is so wonderful to talk to you like this, Daddy. In the old days, I
+didn't dream--Before I went to Newnham. I misjudged you. I thought Never
+mind what I thought. It was silly. But now I am so proud of you. And so
+happy to be back with you, Daddy, and find that your religion is after
+all just the same religion that I have been wanting."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE NINTH - THE THIRD VISION
+
+(1)
+
+
+ONE afternoon in October, four months and more after that previous
+conversation, the card of Mr. Edward Scrope was brought up to Dr.
+Brighton-Pomfrey. The name awakened no memories. The doctor descended to
+discover a man so obviously in unaccustomed plain clothes that he had a
+momentary disagreeable idea that he was facing a detective. Then he saw
+that this secular disguise draped the familiar form of his old friend,
+the former Bishop of Princhester. Scrope was pale and a little untidy;
+he had already acquired something of the peculiar, slightly faded
+quality one finds in a don who has gone to Hampstead and fallen amongst
+advanced thinkers and got mixed up with the Fabian Society. His anxious
+eyes and faintly propitiatory manner suggested an impending appeal.
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey had the savoir-faire of a successful consultant; he
+prided himself on being all things to all men; but just for an instant
+he was at a loss what sort of thing he had to be here. Then he adopted
+the genial, kindly, but by no means lavishly generous tone advisable
+in the case of a man who has suffered considerable social deterioration
+without being very seriously to blame.
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was a little round-faced man with defective
+eyesight and an unsuitable nose for the glasses he wore, and he
+flaunted--God knows why--enormous side-whiskers.
+
+"Well," he said, balancing the glasses skilfully by throwing back his
+head, "and how are you? And what can I do for you? There's no external
+evidence of trouble. You're looking lean and a little pale, but
+thoroughly fit."
+
+"Yes," said the late bishop, "I'm fairly fit--"
+
+"Only--?" said the doctor, smiling his teeth, with something of the
+manner of an old bathing woman who tells a child to jump.
+
+"Well, I'm run down and--worried."
+
+"We'd better sit down," said the great doctor professionally, and looked
+hard at him. Then he pulled at the arm of a chair.
+
+The ex-bishop sat down, and the doctor placed himself between his
+patient and the light.
+
+"This business of resigning my bishopric and so forth has involved very
+considerable strains," Scrope began. "That I think is the essence of the
+trouble. One cuts so many associations.... I did not realize how
+much feeling there would be.... Difficulties too of readjusting one's
+position."
+
+"Zactly. Zactly. Zactly," said the doctor, snapping his face and making
+his glasses vibrate. "Run down. Want a tonic or a change?"
+
+"Yes. In fact--I want a particular tonic."
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey made his eyes and mouth round and interrogative.
+
+"While you were away last spring--"
+
+"Had to go," said the doctor, "unavoidable. Gas gangrene. Certain
+enquiries. These young investigators all very well in their way. But we
+older reputations--Experience. Maturity of judgment. Can't do without
+us. Yes?"
+
+"Well, I came here last spring and saw, an assistant I suppose he was,
+or a supply,--do you call them supplies in your profession?--named, I
+think--Let me see--D--?"
+
+"Dale!"
+
+The doctor as he uttered this word set his face to the unaccustomed
+exercise of expressing malignity. His round blue eyes sought to blaze,
+small cherubic muscles exerted themselves to pucker his brows. His
+colour became a violent pink. "Lunatic!" he said. "Dangerous Lunatic! He
+didn't do anything--anything bad in your case, did he?"
+
+He was evidently highly charged with grievance in this matter. "That man
+was sent to me from Cambridge with the highest testimonials. The
+very highest. I had to go at twenty-four hours' notice. Enquiry--gas
+gangrene. There was nothing for it but to leave things in his hands."
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey disavowed responsibility with an open,
+stumpy-fingered hand.
+
+"He did me no particular harm," said Scrope.
+
+"You are the first he spared," said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.
+
+"Did he--? Was he unskilful?"
+
+"Unskilful is hardly the word."
+
+"Were his methods peculiar?"
+
+The little doctor sprang to his feet and began to pace about the room.
+"Peculiar!" he said. "It was abominable that they should send him to me.
+Abominable!"
+
+He turned, with all the round knobs that constituted his face, aglow.
+His side-whiskers waved apart like wings about to flap. He protruded his
+face towards his seated patient. "I am glad that he has been killed," he
+said. "Glad! There!"
+
+His glasses fell off--shocked beyond measure. He did not heed them. They
+swung about in front of him as if they sought to escape while he poured
+out his feelings.
+
+"Fool!" he spluttered with demonstrative gestures. "Dangerous fool! His
+one idea--to upset everybody. Drugs, Sir! The most terrible drugs! I
+come back. Find ladies. High social position. Morphine-maniacs. Others.
+Reckless use of the most dangerous expedients.... Cocaine not in it.
+Stimulants--violent stimulants. In the highest quarters. Terrible.
+Exalted persons. Royalty! Anxious to be given war work and become
+anonymous.... Horrible! He's been a terrible influence. One idea--to
+disturb soul and body. Minds unhinged. Personal relations deranged.
+Shattered the practice of years. The harm he has done! The harm!"
+
+He looked as though he was trying to burst--as a final expression of
+wrath. He failed. His hands felt trembling to recover his pince-nez.
+Then from his tail pocket he produced a large silk handkerchief and
+wiped the glasses. Replaced them. Wriggled his head in his collar,
+running his fingers round his neck. Patted his tie.
+
+"Excuse this outbreak!" he said. "But Dr. Dale has inflicted injuries!"
+
+Scrope got up, walked slowly to the window, clasping his hands behind
+his back, and turned. His manner still retained much of his episcopal
+dignity. "I am sorry. But still you can no doubt tell from your books
+what it was he gave me. It was a tonic that had a very great effect on
+me. And I need it badly now."
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was quietly malignant. "He kept no diary at all,"
+he said. "No diary at all."
+
+"But
+
+"If he did," said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey, holding up a flat hand and
+wagging it from side to side, "I wouldn't follow his treatment."
+He intensified with the hand going faster. "I wouldn't follow his
+treatment. Not under any circumstances."
+
+"Naturally," said Scrope, "if the results are what you say. But in
+my case it wasn't a treatment. I was sleepless, confused in my mind,
+wretched and demoralized; I came here, and he just produced the
+stuff--It clears the head, it clears the mind. One seems to get away
+from the cloud of things, to get through to essentials and fundamentals.
+It straightened me out.... You must know such a stuff. Just now,
+confronted with all sorts of problems arising out of my resignation,
+I want that tonic effect again. I must have it. I have matters to
+decide--and I can't decide. I find myself uncertain, changeable from
+hour to hour. I don't ask you to take up anything of this man Dale's.
+This is a new occasion. But I want that drug."
+
+At the beginning of this speech Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's hands had fallen
+to his hips. As Scrope went on the doctor's pose had stiffened. His head
+had gone a little on one side; he had begun to play with his glasses.
+At the end he gave vent to one or two short coughs, and then pointed his
+words with his glasses held out.
+
+"Tell me," he said, "tell me." (Cough.) "Had this drug that cleared your
+head--anything to do with your resignation?"
+
+And he put on his glasses disconcertingly, and threw his head back to
+watch the reply.
+
+"It did help to clear up the situation."
+
+"Exactly," said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey in a tone that defined his own
+position with remorseless clearness. "Exactly." And he held up a flat,
+arresting hand. .
+
+"My dear Sir," he said. "How can you expect me to help you to a drug so
+disastrous?--even if I could tell you what it is."
+
+"But it was not disastrous to me," said Scrope.
+
+"Your extraordinary resignation--your still more extraordinary way of
+proclaiming it!"
+
+"I don't think those were disasters."
+
+"But my dear Sir!"
+
+"You don't want to discuss theology with me, I know. So let me tell you
+simply that from my point of view the illumination that came to me--this
+drug of Dr. Dale's helping--has been the great release of my life. It
+crystallized my mind. It swept aside the confusing commonplace things
+about me. Just for a time I saw truth clearly.... I want to do so
+again."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"There is a crisis in my affairs--never mind what. But I cannot see my
+way clear."
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was meditating now with his eyes on his carpet
+and the corners of his mouth tucked in. He was swinging his glasses
+pendulum-wise. "Tell me," he said, looking sideways at Scrope, "what
+were the effects of this drug? It may have been anything. How did it
+give you this--this vision of the truth--that led to your resignation?"
+
+Scrope felt a sudden shyness. But he wanted Dale's drug again so badly
+that he obliged himself to describe his previous experiences to the best
+of his ability.
+
+"It was," he said in a matter-of-fact tone, "a golden, transparent
+liquid. Very golden, like a warm-tinted Chablis. When water was added
+it became streaked and opalescent, with a kind of living quiver in it. I
+held it up to the light."
+
+"Yes? And when you took it?"
+
+"I felt suddenly clearer. My mind--I had a kind of exaltation and
+assurance."
+
+"Your mind," Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey assisted, "began to go twenty-nine to
+the dozen."
+
+"It felt stronger and clearer," said Scrope, sticking to his quest.
+
+"And did things look as usual?" asked the doctor, protruding his knobby
+little face like a clenched fist.
+
+"No," said Scrope and regarded him. How much was it possible to tell a
+man of this type?
+
+"They differed?" said the doctor, relaxing.
+
+"Yes.... Well, to be plain.... I had an immediate sense of God. I
+saw the world--as if it were a transparent curtain, and then God
+became--evident.... Is it possible for that to determine the drug?"
+
+"God became--evident," the doctor said with some distaste, and shook his
+head slowly. Then in a sudden sharp cross-examining tone: "You mean you
+had a vision? Actually saw 'um?"
+
+"It was in the form of a vision." Scrope was now mentally very
+uncomfortable indeed.
+
+The doctor's lips repeated these words noiselessly, with an effect of
+contempt. "He must have given you something--It's a little like morphia.
+But golden--opalescent? And it was this vision made you astonish us all
+with your resignation?"
+
+"That was part of a larger process," said Scrope patiently. "I had been
+drifting into a complete repudiation of the Anglican positions long
+before that. All that this drug did was to make clear what was already
+in my mind. And give it value. Act as a developer."
+
+The doctor suddenly gave way to a botryoidal hilarity. "To think that
+one should be consulted about visions of God--in Mount Street!" he said.
+"And you know, you know you half want to believe that vision was real.
+You know you do."
+
+So far Scrope had been resisting his realization of failure. Now he
+gave way to an exasperation that made him reckless of Brighton-Pomfrey's
+opinion. "I do think," he said, "that that drug did in some way make God
+real to me. I think I saw God."
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey shook his head in a way that made Scrope want to
+hit him.
+
+"I think I saw God," he repeated more firmly. "I had a sudden
+realization of how great he was and how great life was, and how timid
+and mean and sordid were all our genteel, professional lives. I was
+seized upon, for a time I was altogether possessed by a passion to serve
+him fitly and recklessly, to make an end to compromises with comfort and
+self-love and secondary things. And I want to hold to that. I want to
+get back to that. I am given to lassitudes. I relax. I am by temperament
+an easy-going man. I want to buck myself up, I want to get on with my
+larger purposes, and I find myself tired, muddled, entangled.... The
+drug was a good thing. For me it was a good thing. I want its help
+again."
+
+"I know no more than you do what it was."
+
+"Are there no other drugs that you do know, that have a kindred effect?
+If for example I tried morphia in some form?"
+
+"You'd get visions. They wouldn't be divine visions. If you took small
+quantities very discreetly you might get a temporary quickening. But
+the swift result of all repeated drug-taking is, I can assure you,
+moral decay--rapid moral decay. To touch drugs habitually is to become
+hopelessly unpunctual, untruthful, callously selfish and insincere. I am
+talking mere textbook, mere everyday common-places, to you when I tell
+you that."
+
+"I had an idea. I had a hope...."
+
+"You've a stiff enough fight before you," said the doctor, "without such
+a handicap as that."
+
+"You won't help me?"
+
+The doctor walked up and down his hearthrug, and then delivered himself
+with an extended hand and waggling fingers.
+
+"I wouldn't if I could. For your good I wouldn't. And even if I would
+I couldn't, for I don't know the drug. One of his infernal brews,
+no doubt. Something--accidental. It's lost--for good--for your good,
+anyhow...."
+
+(2)
+
+
+Scrope halted outside the stucco portals of the doctor's house. He
+hesitated whether he should turn to the east or the west.
+
+"That door closes," he said. "There's no getting back that way."...
+
+He stood for a time on the kerb. He turned at last towards Park Lane and
+Hyde Park. He walked along thoughtfully, inattentively steering a course
+for his new home in Pembury Road, Notting Hill.
+
+(3)
+
+
+At the outset of this new phase in Scrope's life that had followed the
+crisis of the confirmation service, everything had seemed very clear
+before him. He believed firmly that he had been shown God, that he had
+himself stood in the presence of God, and that there had been a plain
+call to him to proclaim God to the world. He had realized God, and it
+was the task of every one who had realized God to help all mankind to
+the same realization. The proposal of Lady Sunderbund had fallen in with
+that idea. He had been steeling himself to a prospect of struggle and
+dire poverty, but her prompt loyalty had come as an immense relief to
+his anxiety for his wife and family. When he had talked to Eleanor
+upon the beach at Hunstanton it had seemed to him that his course was
+manifest, perhaps a little severe but by no means impossible. They had
+sat together in the sunshine, exalted by a sense of fine adventure and
+confident of success, they had looked out upon the future, upon
+the great near future in which the idea of God was to inspire and
+reconstruct the world.
+
+It was only very slowly that this pristine clearness became clouded and
+confused. It had not been so easy as Eleanor had supposed to win over
+the sympathy of Lady Ella with his resignation. Indeed it had not been
+won over. She had become a stern and chilling companion, mute now upon
+the issue of his resignation, but manifestly resentful. He was secretly
+disappointed and disconcerted by her tone. And the same hesitation of
+the mind, instinctive rather than reasoned, that had prevented a frank
+explanation of his earlier doubts to her, now restrained him from
+telling her naturally and at once of the part that Lady Sunderbund was
+to play in his future ministry. In his own mind he felt assured about
+that part, but in order to excuse his delay in being frank with his
+wife, he told himself that he was not as yet definitely committed to
+Lady Sunderbund's project. And in accordance with that idea he set
+up housekeeping in London upon a scale that implied a very complete
+cessation of income. "As yet," he told Lady Ella, "we do not know where
+we stand. For a time we must not so much house ourselves as camp. We
+must take some quite small and modest house in some less expensive
+district. If possible I would like to take it for a year, until we know
+better how things are with us."
+
+He reviewed a choice of London districts.
+
+Lady Ella said her bitterest thing. "Does it matter where we hide our
+heads?"
+
+That wrung him to: "We are not hiding our heads."
+
+She repented at once. "I am sorry, Ted," she said. "It slipped from
+me."...
+
+He called it camping, but the house they had found in Pembury Road,
+Notting Hill, was more darkened and less airy than any camp. Neither he
+nor his wife had ever had any experience of middle-class house-hunting
+or middle-class housekeeping before, and they spent three of the most
+desolating days of their lives in looking for this cheap and modest
+shelter for their household possessions. Hitherto life had moved them
+from one established and comfortable home to another; their worst
+affliction had been the modern decorations of the Palace at Princhester,
+and it was altogether a revelation to them to visit house after house,
+ill-lit, ill-planned, with dingy paint and peeling wallpaper, kitchens
+for the most part underground, and either without bathrooms or with
+built-out bathrooms that were manifestly grudging afterthoughts, such
+as harbour the respectable middle classes of London. The house agents
+perceived intimations of helplessness in their manner, adopted a
+"rushing" method with them strange to people who had hitherto lived in
+a glowing halo of episcopal dignity. "Take it or leave it," was the note
+of those gentlemen; "there are always people ready for houses." The
+line that property in land and houses takes in England, the ex-bishop
+realized, is always to hold up and look scornful. The position of the
+land-owning, house-owning class in a crowded country like England is
+ultra-regal. It is under no obligation to be of use, and people are
+obliged to get down to the land somewhere. They cannot conduct business
+and rear families in the air. England's necessity is the landlord's
+opportunity....
+
+Scrope began to generalize about this, and develop a new and sincerer
+streak of socialism in his ideas. "The church has been very remiss,"
+he said, as he and Lady Ella stared at the basement "breakfast room" of
+their twenty-seventh dismal possibility. "It should have insisted far
+more than it has done upon the landlord's responsibility. No one should
+tolerate the offer of such a house as this--at such a rent--to decent
+people. It is unrighteous."
+
+At the house agent's he asked in a cold, intelligent ruling-class voice,
+the name of the offending landlord.
+
+"It's all the property of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners that side of
+the railway," said the agent, picking his teeth with a pin. "Lazy
+lot. Dreadfully hard to get 'em to do anything. Own some of the worst
+properties in London."
+
+Lady Ella saw things differently again. "If you had stayed in the
+church," she said afterwards, "you might have helped to alter such
+things as that."
+
+At the time he had no answer.
+
+"But," he said presently as they went back in the tube to their modest
+Bloomsbury hotel, "if I had stayed in the church I should never have
+realized things like that."
+
+(4)
+
+
+But it does no justice to Lady Ella to record these two unavoidable
+expressions of regret without telling also of the rallying courage with
+which she presently took over the task of resettling herself and her
+stricken family. Her husband's change of opinion had fallen upon her out
+of a clear sky, without any premonition, in one tremendous day. In one
+day there had come clamouring upon her, with an effect of revelation
+after revelation, the ideas of drugs, of heresy and blasphemy, of an
+alien feminine influence, of the entire moral and material breakdown of
+the man who had been the centre of her life. Never was the whole world
+of a woman so swiftly and comprehensively smashed. All the previous
+troubles of her life seemed infinitesimal in comparison with any single
+item in this dismaying debacle. She tried to consolidate it in the idea
+that he was ill, "disordered." She assured herself that he would
+return from Hunstanton restored to health and orthodoxy, with all
+his threatenings of a resignation recalled; the man she had loved and
+trusted to succeed in the world and to do right always according to her
+ideas. It was only with extreme reluctance that she faced the fact that
+with the fumes of the drug dispelled and all signs of nervous exhaustion
+gone, he still pressed quietly but resolutely toward a severance from
+the church. She tried to argue with him and she found she could not
+argue. The church was a crystal sphere in which her life was wholly
+contained, her mind could not go outside it even to consider a
+dissentient proposition.
+
+While he was at Hunstanton, every day she had prayed for an hour, some
+days she had prayed for several hours, in the cathedral, kneeling upon
+a harsh hassock that hurt her knees. Even in her prayers she could not
+argue nor vary. She prayed over and over again many hundreds of times:
+"Bring him back, dear Lord. Bring him back again."
+
+In the past he had always been a very kind and friendly mate to her, but
+sometimes he had been irritable about small things, especially during
+his seasons of insomnia; now he came back changed, a much graver man,
+rather older in his manner, carefully attentive to her, kinder and more
+watchful, at times astonishingly apologetic, but rigidly set upon his
+purpose of leaving the church. "I know you do not think with me in
+this," he said. "I have to pray you to be patient with me. I have
+struggled with my conscience.... For a time it means hardship, I know.
+Poverty. But if you will trust me I think I shall be able to pull
+through. There are ways of doing my work. Perhaps we shall not have to
+undergo this cramping in this house for very long...."
+
+"It is not the poverty I fear," said Lady Ella.
+
+And she did face the worldly situation, if a little sadly, at any
+rate with the courage of practical energy. It was she who stood in
+one ungainly house after another and schemed how to make discomforts
+tolerable, while Scrope raged unhelpfully at landlordism and the
+responsibility of the church for economic disorder. It was she who at
+last took decisions into her hands when he was too jaded to do anything
+but generalize weakly, and settled upon the house in Pembury Road which
+became their London home. She got him to visit Hunstanton again for half
+a week while she and Miriam, who was the practical genius of the family,
+moved in and made the new home presentable. At the best it was barely
+presentable. There were many plain hardships. The girls had to share one
+of the chief bedrooms in common instead of their jolly little individual
+dens at Princhester.... One little room was all that could be squeezed
+out as a study for "father"; it was not really a separate room, it was
+merely cut off by closed folding doors from the dining-room, folding
+doors that slowly transmitted the dinner flavours to a sensitive worker,
+and its window looked out upon a blackened and uneventful yard and the
+skylights of a populous, conversational, and high-spirited millinery
+establishment that had been built over the corresponding garden of the
+house in Restharrow Street. Lady Ella had this room lined with open
+shelves, and Clementina (in the absence of Eleanor at Newuham)
+arranged the pick of her father's books. It is to be noted as a fact of
+psychological interest that this cramped, ill-lit little room distressed
+Lady Ella more than any other of the discomforts of their new quarters.
+The bishop's writing-desk filled a whole side of it. Parsimony ruled her
+mind, but she could not resist the impulse to get him at least a seemly
+reading-lamp.
+
+He came back from Hunstanton full of ideas for work in London. He was,
+he thought, going to "write something" about his views. He was very
+grateful and much surprised at what she had done to that forbidding
+house, and full of hints and intimations that it would not be long
+before they moved to something roomier. She was disposed to seek some
+sort of salaried employment for Clementina and Miriam at least, but he
+would not hear of that. "They must go on and get educated," he said, "if
+I have to give up smoking to do it. Perhaps I may manage even without
+that." Eleanor, it seemed, had a good prospect of a scholarship at the
+London School of Economics that would practically keep her. There would
+be no Cambridge for Clementina, but London University might still be
+possible with a little pinching, and the move to London had really
+improved the prospects of a good musical training for Miriam. Phoebe and
+Daphne, Lady Ella believed, might get in on special terms at the Notting
+Hill High School.
+
+Scrope found it difficult to guess at what was going on in the heads
+of his younger daughters. None displayed such sympathy as Eleanor had
+confessed. He had a feeling that his wife had schooled them to say
+nothing about the change in their fortunes to him. But they quarrelled
+a good deal, he could hear, about the use of the one bathroom--there was
+never enough hot water after the second bath. And Miriam did not seem to
+enjoy playing the new upright piano in the drawing-room as much as
+she had done the Princhester grand it replaced. Though she was always
+willing to play that thing he liked; he knew now that it was the Adagio
+of Of. 111; whenever he asked for it.
+
+London servants, Lady Ella found, were now much more difficult to get
+than they had been in the Holy Innocents' days in St. John's Wood. And
+more difficult to manage when they were got. The households of the more
+prosperous clergy are much sought after by domestics of a serious and
+excellent type; an unfrocked clergyman's household is by no means
+so attractive. The first comers were young women of unfortunate
+dispositions; the first cook was reluctant and insolent, she went before
+her month was up; the second careless; she made burnt potatoes and
+cindered chops, underboiled and overboiled eggs; a "dropped" look about
+everything, harsh coffee and bitter tea seemed to be a natural aspect of
+the state of being no longer a bishop. He would often after a struggle
+with his nerves in the bedroom come humming cheerfully to breakfast, to
+find that Phoebe, who was a delicate eater, had pushed her plate away
+scarcely touched, while Lady Ella sat at the end of the table in a state
+of dangerous calm, framing comments for delivering downstairs that would
+be sure to sting and yet leave no opening for repartee, and trying at
+the same time to believe that a third cook, if the chances were risked
+again, would certainly be "all right."
+
+The drawing-room was papered with a morose wallpaper that the landlord,
+in view of the fact that Scrope in his optimism would only take the
+house on a yearly agreement, had refused to replace; it was a design of
+very dark green leaves and grey gothic arches; and the apartment was lit
+by a chandelier, which spilt a pool of light in the centre of the room
+and splashed useless weak patches elsewhere. Lady Ella had to interfere
+to prevent the monopolization of this centre by Phoebe and Daphne for
+their home work. This light trouble was difficult to arrange; the plain
+truth was that there was not enough illumination to go round. In the
+Princhester drawing-room there had been a number of obliging little
+electric pushes. The size of the dining-room, now that the study was
+cut off from it, forbade hospitality. As it was, with only the family at
+home, the housemaid made it a grievance that she could scarcely squeeze
+by on the sideboard side to wait.
+
+The house vibrated to the trains in the adjacent underground railway.
+There was a lady next door but one who was very pluckily training a
+contralto voice that most people would have gladly thrown away. At the
+end of Restharrow Street was a garage, and a yard where chauffeurs were
+accustomed to "tune up" their engines. All these facts were persistently
+audible to any one sitting down in the little back study to think out
+this project of "writing something," about a change in the government of
+the whole world. Petty inconveniences no doubt all these inconveniences
+were, but they distressed a rather oversensitive mind which was also
+acutely aware that even upon this scale living would cost certainly two
+hundred and fifty pounds if not more in excess of the little private
+income available.
+
+
+(5)
+
+
+These domestic details, irrelevant as they may seem in a spiritual
+history, need to be given because they added an intimate keenness
+to Scrope's readiness for this private chapel enterprise that he was
+discussing with Lady Sunderbund. Along that line and along that line
+alone, he saw the way of escape from the great sea of London dinginess
+that threatened to submerge his family. And it was also, he felt, the
+line of his duty; it was his "call."
+
+At least that was how he felt at first. And then matters began to grow
+complicated again.
+
+Things had gone far between himself and Lady Sunderbund since that
+letter he had read upon the beach at Old Hunstanton. The blinds of the
+house with the very very blue door in Princhester had been drawn
+from the day when the first vanload of the renegade bishop's private
+possessions had departed from the palace. The lady had returned to
+the brightly decorated flat overlooking Hyde Park. He had seen her
+repeatedly since then, and always with a fairly clear understanding that
+she was to provide the chapel and pulpit in which he was to proclaim to
+London the gospel of the Simplicity and Universality of God. He was to
+be the prophet of a reconsidered faith, calling the whole world from
+creeds and sects, from egotisms and vain loyalties, from prejudices of
+race and custom, to the worship and service of the Divine King of all
+mankind. That in fact had been the ruling resolve in his mind, the
+resolve determining his relations not only with Lady Sunderbund but with
+Lady Ella and his family, his friends, enemies and associates. He had
+set out upon this course unchecked by any doubt, and overriding the
+manifest disapproval of his wife and his younger daughters. Lady
+Sunderbund's enthusiasm had been enormous and sustaining....
+
+Almost imperceptibly that resolve had weakened. Imperceptibly at first.
+Then the decline had been perceived as one sometimes perceives a thing
+in the background out of the corner of one's eye.
+
+In all his early anticipations of the chapel enterprise, he had imagined
+himself in the likeness of a small but eloquent figure standing in a
+large exposed place and calling this lost misled world back to God. Lady
+Sunderbund, he assumed, was to provide the large exposed place (which
+was dimly paved with pews) and guarantee that little matter which was
+to relieve him of sordid anxieties for his family, the stipend. He had
+agreed in an inattentive way that this was to be eight hundred a year,
+with a certain proportion of the subscriptions. "At first, I shall be
+the chief subscriber," she said. "Before the rush comes." He had been
+so content to take all this for granted and think no more about it--more
+particularly to think no more about it--that for a time he entirely
+disregarded the intense decorative activities into which Lady Sunderbund
+incontinently plunged. Had he been inclined to remark them he certainly
+might have done so, even though a considerable proportion was being
+thoughtfully veiled for a time from his eyes.
+
+For example, there was the young architect with the wonderful tie whom
+he met once or twice at lunch in the Hyde Park flat. This young man
+pulled the conversation again and again, Lady Sunderbund aiding and
+abetting, in the direction of the "ideal church." It was his ambition,
+he said, someday, to build an ideal church, "divorced from tradition."
+
+Scrope had been drawn at last into a dissertation. He said that hitherto
+all temples and places of worship had been conditioned by orientation
+due to the seasonal aspects of religion, they pointed to the west or--as
+in the case of the Egyptian temples--to some particular star, and by
+sacramentalism, which centred everything on a highly lit sacrificial
+altar. It was almost impossible to think of a church built upon other
+lines than that. The architect would be so free that--
+
+"Absolutely free," interrupted the young architect. "He might, for
+example, build a temple like a star."
+
+"Or like some wondyful casket," said Lady Sunderbund....
+
+And also there was a musician with fuzzy hair and an impulsive way of
+taking the salted almonds, who wanted to know about religious music.
+
+Scrope hazarded the idea that a chanting people was a religious people.
+He said, moreover, that there was a fine religiosity about Moussorgski,
+but that the most beautiful single piece of music in the world
+was Beethoven's sonata, Opus 111,--he was thinking, he said, more
+particularly of the Adagio at the end, molto semplice e cantabile. It
+had a real quality of divinity.
+
+The musician betrayed impatience at the name of Beethoven, and thought,
+with his mouth appreciatively full of salted almonds, that nowadays we
+had got a little beyond that anyhow.
+
+"We shall be superhuman before we get beyond either Purcell or
+Beethoven," said Scrope.
+
+Nor did he attach sufficient importance to Lady Sunderbund's disposition
+to invite Positivists, members of the Brotherhood Church, leaders among
+the Christian Scientists, old followers of the Rev. Charles Voysey,
+Swedenborgians, Moslem converts, Indian Theosophists, psychic phenomena
+and so forth, to meet him. Nevertheless it began to drift into his mind
+that he was by no means so completely in control of the new departure
+as he had supposed at first. Both he and Lady Sunderbund professed
+universalism; but while his was the universalism of one who would
+simplify to the bare fundamentals of a common faith, hers was the
+universalism of the collector. Religion to him was something that
+illuminated the soul, to her it was something that illuminated
+prayer-books. For a considerable time they followed their divergent
+inclinations without any realization of their divergence. None the less
+a vague doubt and dissatisfaction with the prospect before him arose to
+cloud his confidence.
+
+At first there was little or no doubt of his own faith. He was still
+altogether convinced that he had to confess and proclaim God in his
+life. He was as sure that God was the necessary king and saviour of
+mankind and of a man's life, as he was of the truth of the Binomial
+Theorem. But what began first to fade was the idea that he had been
+specially called to proclaim the True God to all the world. He would
+have the most amiable conference with Lady Sunderbund, and then as he
+walked back to Notting Hill he would suddenly find stuck into his
+mind like a challenge, Heaven knows how: "Another prophet?" Even if
+he succeeded in this mission enterprise, he found himself asking, what
+would he be but just a little West-end Mahomet? He would have founded
+another sect, and we have to make an end to all sects. How is there to
+be an end to sects, if there are still to be chapels--richly decorated
+chapels--and congregations, and salaried specialists in God?
+
+That was a very disconcerting idea. It was particularly active at night.
+He did his best to consider it with a cool detachment, regardless of
+the facts that his private income was just under three hundred pounds a
+year, and that his experiments in cultured journalism made it extremely
+improbable that the most sedulous literary work would do more than
+double this scanty sum. Yet for all that these nasty, ugly, sordid facts
+were entirely disregarded, they did somehow persist in coming in and
+squatting down, shapeless in a black corner of his mind--from which
+their eyes shone out, so to speak--whenever his doubt whether he ought
+to set up as a prophet at all was under consideration.
+
+(6)
+
+
+Then very suddenly on this October afternoon the situation had come to a
+crisis.
+
+He had gone to Lady Sunderbund's flat to see the plans and drawings for
+the new church in which he was to give his message to the world. They
+had brought home to him the complete realization of Lady Sunderbund's
+impossibility. He had attempted upon the spur of the moment an
+explanation of just how much they differed, and he had precipitated a
+storm of extravagantly perplexing emotions....
+
+She kept him waiting for perhaps ten minutes before she brought the
+plans to him. He waited in the little room with the Wyndham Lewis
+picture that opened upon the balcony painted with crazy squares of livid
+pink. On a golden table by the window a number of recently bought books
+were lying, and he went and stood over these, taking them up one after
+another. The first was "The Countess of Huntingdon and Her Circle,"
+that bearder of lightminded archbishops, that formidable harbourer of
+Wesleyan chaplains. For some minutes he studied the grim portrait of
+this inspired lady standing with one foot ostentatiously on her coronet
+and then turned to the next volume. This was a life of Saint Teresa,
+that energetic organizer of Spanish nunneries. The third dealt with
+Madame Guyon. It was difficult not to feel that Lady Sunderbund was
+reading for a part.
+
+She entered.
+
+She was wearing a long simple dress of spangled white with a very high
+waist; she had a bracelet of green jade, a waistband of green silk,
+and her hair was held by a wreath of artificial laurel, very stiff and
+green. Her arms were full of big rolls of cartridge paper and tracing
+paper. "I'm so pleased," she said. "It's 'eady at last and I can show
+you."
+
+She banged the whole armful down upon a vivid little table of inlaid
+black and white wood. He rescued one or two rolls and a sheet of tracing
+paper from the floor.
+
+"It's the Temple," she panted in a significant whisper. "It's the Temple
+of the One T'ue God!"
+
+She scrabbled among the papers, and held up the elevation of a strange
+square building to his startled eyes. "Iszi't it just pe'fect?" she
+demanded.
+
+He took the drawing from her. It represented a building, manifestly an
+enormous building, consisting largely of two great, deeply fluted towers
+flanking a vast archway approached by a long flight of steps. Between
+the towers appeared a dome. It was as if the Mosque of Saint Sophia had
+produced this offspring in a mesalliance with the cathedral of
+Wells. Its enormity was made manifest by the minuteness of the large
+automobiles that were driving away in the foreground after "setting
+down." "Here is the plan," she said, thrusting another sheet upon him
+before he could fully take in the quality of the design. "The g'eat Hall
+is to be pe'fectly 'ound, no aisle, no altar, and in lettas of sapphiah,
+'God is ev'ywhe'.'"
+
+She added with a note of solemnity, "It will hold th'ee thousand people
+sitting down."
+
+"But--!" said Scrope.
+
+"The'e's a sort of g'andeur," she said. "It's young Venable's wo'k. It's
+his fl'st g'ate oppo'tunity."
+
+"But--is this to go on that little site in Aldwych?"
+
+"He says the' isn't 'oom the'!" she explained. "He wants to put it out
+at Golda's G'een."
+
+"But--if it is to be this little simple chapel we proposed, then wasn't
+our idea to be central?"
+
+"But if the' isn't 'oem!" she said--conclusively. "And isn't this--isn't
+it rather a costly undertaking, rather more costly--"
+
+"That doesn't matta. I'm making heaps and heaps of money. Half my
+p'ope'ty is in shipping and a lot of the 'eat in munitions. I'm 'icher
+than eva. Isn't the' a sort of g'andeur?" she pressed.
+
+He put the elevation down. He took the plan from her hands and seemed to
+study it. But he was really staring blankly at the whole situation.
+
+"Lady Sunderbund," he said at last, with an effort, "I am afraid all
+this won't do."
+
+"Won't do!"
+
+"No. It isn't in the spirit of my intention. It isn't in a great
+building of this sort--so--so ornate and imposing, that the simple
+gospel of God's Universal Kingdom can be preached."
+
+"But oughtn't so gate a message to have as g'ate a pulpit?"
+
+And then as if she would seize him before he could go on to further
+repudiations, she sought hastily among the drawings again.
+
+"But look," she said. "It has ev'ything! It's not only a p'eaching
+place; it's a headquarters for ev'ything."
+
+With the rapid movements of an excited child she began to thrust the
+remarkable features and merits of the great project upon him. The
+preaching dome was only the heart of it. There were to be a library,
+"'efecto'ies," consultation rooms, classrooms, a publication department,
+a big underground printing establishment. "Nowadays," she said, "ev'y
+gate movement must p'int." There was to be music, she said, "a gate
+invisible o'gan," hidden amidst the architectural details, and pouring
+out its sounds into the dome, and then she glanced in passing at
+possible "p'ocessions" round the preaching dome. This preaching dome
+was not a mere shut-in drum for spiritual reverberations, around it ran
+great open corridors, and in these corridors there were to be "chapels."
+
+"But what for?" he asked, stemming the torrent. "What need is there for
+chapels? There are to be no altars, no masses, no sacraments?"
+
+"No," she said, "but they are to be chapels for special int'ests; a
+chapel for science, a chapel for healing, a chapel for gov'ment. Places
+for peoples to sit and think about those things--with paintings and
+symbols."
+
+"I see your intention," he admitted. "I see your intention."
+
+"The' is to be a gate da'k blue 'ound chapel for sta's and atoms and the
+myst'ry of matta." Her voice grew solemn. "All still and deep and high.
+Like a k'ystal in a da'k place. You will go down steps to it. Th'ough
+a da'k 'ounded a'ch ma'ked with mathematical symbols and balances and
+scientific app'atus.... And the ve'y next to it, the ve'y next, is to be
+a little b'ight chapel for bi'ds and flowas!"
+
+"Yes," he said, "it is all very fine and expressive. It is, I see, a
+symbolical building, a great artistic possibility. But is it the place
+for me? What I have to say is something very simple, that God is the
+king of the whole world, king of the ha'penny newspaper and the omnibus
+and the vulgar everyday things, and that they have to worship him and
+serve him as their leader in every moment of their lives. This isn't
+that. This is the old religions over again. This is taking God apart.
+This is putting him into a fresh casket instead of the old one. And....
+I don't like it."
+
+"Don't like it," she cried, and stood apart from him with her chin in
+the air, a tall astonishment and dismay.
+
+"I can't do the work I want to do with this."
+
+"But--Isn't it you' idea?"
+
+"No. It is not in the least my idea. I want to tell the whole world
+of the one God that can alone unite it and save it--and you make this
+extravagant toy."
+
+He felt as if he had struck her directly he uttered that last word.
+
+"Toy!" she echoed, taking it in, "you call it a Toy!"
+
+A note in her voice reminded him that there were two people who might
+feel strongly in this affair.
+
+"My dear Lady Sunderbund," he said with a sudden change of manner, "I
+must needs follow the light of my own mind. I have had a vision of God,
+I have seen him as a great leader towering over the little lives of men,
+demanding the little lives of men, prepared to take them and guide them
+to the salvation of mankind and the conquest of pain and death. I have
+seen him as the God of the human affair, a God of politics, a God of
+such muddy and bloody wars as this war, a God of economics, a God of
+railway junctions and clinics and factories and evening schools, a God
+in fact of men. This God--this God here, that you want to worship, is a
+God of artists and poets--of elegant poets, a God of bric-a-brac, a God
+of choice allusions. Oh, it has its grandeur! I don't want you to think
+that what you are doing may not be altogether fine and right for you to
+do. But it is not what I have to do.... I cannot--indeed I cannot--go on
+with this project--upon these lines."
+
+He paused, flushed and breathless. Lady Sunderbund had heard him to the
+end. Her bright face was brightly flushed, and there were tears in her
+eyes. It was like her that they should seem tears of the largest, most
+expensive sort, tears of the first water.
+
+"But," she cried, and her red delicate mouth went awry with dismay and
+disappointment, and her expression was the half incredulous expression
+of a child suddenly and cruelly disappointed: "You won't go on with all
+this?"
+
+"No," he said. "My dear Lady Sunderbund--"
+
+"Oh! don't Lady Sunderbund me!" she cried with a novel rudeness. "Don't
+you see I've done it all for you?"
+
+He winced and felt boorish. He had never liked and disapproved of Lady
+Sunderbund so much as he did at that moment. And he had no words for
+her.
+
+"How can I stop it all at once like this?"
+
+And still he had no answer.
+
+She pursued her advantage. "What am I to do?" she cried.
+
+She turned upon him passionately. "Look what you've done!" She marked
+her points with finger upheld, and gave odd suggestions in her face of
+an angry coster girl. "Eva' since I met you, I've wo'shipped you. I've
+been 'eady to follow you anywhe'--to do anything. Eva' since that night
+when you sat so calm and dignified, and they baited you and wo'id you.
+When they we' all vain and cleva, and you--you thought only of God
+and 'iligion and didn't mind fo' you'self.... Up to then--I'd been
+living--oh! the emptiest life..."
+
+The tears ran. "Pe'haps I shall live it again...." She dashed her grief
+away with a hand beringed with stones as big as beetles.
+
+"I said to myself, this man knows something I don't know. He's got the
+seeds of ete'nal life su'ely. I made up my mind then and the' I'd follow
+you and back you and do all I could fo' you. I've lived fo' you. Eve'
+since. Lived fo' you. And now when all my little plans are 'ipe, you--!
+Oh!"
+
+She made a quaint little gesture with pink fists upraised, and then
+stood with her hand held up, staring at the plans and drawings that were
+littered over the inlaid table. "I've planned and planned. I said, I
+will build him a temple. I will be his temple se'vant.... Just a me'
+se'vant...."
+
+She could not go on.
+
+"But it is just these temples that have confused mankind," he said.
+
+"Not my temple," she said presently, now openly weeping over the gay
+rejected drawings. "You could have explained...."
+
+"Oh!" she said petulantly, and thrust them away from her so that they
+went sliding one after the other on to the floor. For some long-drawn
+moments there was no sound in the room but the slowly accelerated slide
+and flop of one sheet of cartridge paper after another.
+
+"We could have been so happy," she wailed, "se'ving oua God."
+
+And then this disconcerting lady did a still more disconcerting thing.
+She staggered a step towards Scrape, seized the lapels of his coat,
+bowed her head upon his shoulder, put her black hair against his cheek,
+and began sobbing and weeping.
+
+"My dear lady!" he expostulated, trying weakly to disengage her.
+
+"Let me k'y," she insisted, gripping more resolutely, and following his
+backward pace. "You must let me k'y. You must let me k'y."
+
+His resistance ceased. One hand supported her, the other patted her
+shining hair. "My dear child!" he said. "My dear child! I had no idea.
+That you would take it like this...."
+
+(7)
+
+
+That was but the opening of an enormous interview. Presently he had
+contrived in a helpful and sympathetic manner to seat the unhappy lady
+on a sofa, and when after some cramped discourse she stood up before
+him, wiping her eyes with a wet wonder of lace, to deliver herself the
+better, a newborn appreciation of the tactics of the situation made
+him walk to the other side of the table under colour of picking up a
+drawing.
+
+In the retrospect he tried to disentangle the threads of a discussion
+that went to and fro and contradicted itself and began again far
+back among things that had seemed forgotten and disposed of. Lady
+Sunderbund's mind was extravagantly untrained, a wild-grown mental
+thicket. At times she reproached him as if he were a heartless God; at
+times she talked as if he were a recalcitrant servant. Her mingling of
+utter devotion and the completest disregard for his thoughts and wishes
+dazzled and distressed his mind. It was clear that for half a year her
+clear, bold, absurd will had been crystallized upon the idea of giving
+him exactly what she wanted him to want. The crystal sphere of those
+ambitions lay now shattered between them.
+
+She was trying to reconstruct it before his eyes.
+
+She was, she declared, prepared to alter her plans in any way that would
+meet his wishes. She had not understood. "If it is a Toy," she cried,
+"show me how to make it not a Toy! Make it 'eal!"
+
+He said it was the bare idea of a temple that made it impossible. And
+there was this drawing here; what did it mean? He held it out to her. It
+represented a figure, distressingly like himself, robed as a priest in
+vestments.
+
+She snatched the offending drawing from him and tore it to shreds.
+
+"If you don't want a Temple, have a meeting-house. You wanted a
+meeting-house anyhow."
+
+"Just any old meeting-house," he said. "Not that special one. A place
+without choirs and clergy."
+
+"If you won't have music," she responded, "don't have music. If God
+doesn't want music it can go. I can't think God does not app'ove of
+music, but--that is for you to settle. If you don't like the' being
+o'naments, we'll make it all plain. Some g'ate g'ey Dome--all g'ey and
+black. If it isn't to be beautiful, it can be ugly. Yes, ugly. It can
+be as ugly"--she sobbed--"as the City Temple. We will get some otha
+a'chitect--some City a'chitect. Some man who has built B'anch Banks or
+'ailway stations. That's if you think it pleases God.... B'eak young
+Venable's hea't.... Only why should you not let me make a place fo' you'
+message? Why shouldn't it be me? You must have a place. You've got 'to
+p'each somewhe'."
+
+"As a man, not as a priest."
+
+"Then p'each as a man. You must still wea' something."
+
+"Just ordinary clothes."
+
+"O'dina'y clothes a' clothes in the fashion," she said. "You would
+have to go to you' taila for a new p'eaching coat with b'aid put on
+dif'ently, or two buttons instead of th'ee...."
+
+"One needn't be fashionable."
+
+"Ev'ybody is fash'nable. How can you help it? Some people wea' old
+fashions; that's all.... A cassock's an old fashion. There's nothing so
+plain as a cassock."
+
+"Except that it's a clerical fashion. I want to be just as I am now."
+
+"If you think that--that owoble suit is o'dina'y clothes!" she said, and
+stared at him and gave way to tears of real tenderness.
+
+"A cassock," she cried with passion. "Just a pe'fectly plain cassock.
+Fo' deecency!... Oh, if you won't--not even that!"
+
+(8)
+
+
+As he walked now after his unsuccessful quest of Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey
+towards the Serpentine he acted that stormy interview with Lady
+Sunderbund over again. At the end, as a condition indeed of his
+departure, he had left things open. He had assented to certain promises.
+He was to make her understand better what it was he needed. He was not
+to let anything that had happened affect that "spi'tual f'enship."
+She was to abandon all her plans, she was to begin again "at the ve'y
+beginning." But he knew that indeed there should be no more beginning
+again with her. He knew that quite beyond these questions of the
+organization of a purified religion, it was time their association
+ended. She had wept upon him; she had clasped both his hands at parting
+and prayed to be forgiven. She was drawing him closer to her by their
+very dissension. She had infected him with the softness of remorse; from
+being a bright and spirited person, she had converted herself into a
+warm and touching person. Her fine, bright black hair against his cheek
+and the clasp of her hand on his shoulder was now inextricably in the
+business. The perplexing, the astonishing thing in his situation was
+that there was still a reluctance to make a conclusive breach.
+
+He was not the first of men who have tried to find in vain how and when
+a relationship becomes an entanglement. He ought to break off now, and
+the riddle was just why he should feel this compunction in breaking off
+now. He had disappointed her, and he ought not to have disappointed
+her; that was the essential feeling. He had never realized before as
+he realized now this peculiar quality of his own mind and the gulf into
+which it was leading him. It came as an illuminating discovery.
+
+He was a social animal. He had an instinctive disposition to act
+according to the expectations of the people about him, whether they were
+reasonable or congenial expectations or whether they were not. That, he
+saw for the first time, had been the ruling motive of his life; it was
+the clue to him. Man is not a reasonable creature; he is a socially
+responsive creature trying to be reasonable in spite of that fact. From
+the days in the rectory nursery when Scrope had tried to be a good boy
+on the whole and just a little naughty sometimes until they stopped
+smiling, through all his life of school, university, curacy, vicarage
+and episcopacy up to this present moment, he perceived now that he had
+acted upon no authentic and independent impulse. His impulse had always
+been to fall in with people and satisfy them. And all the painful
+conflicts of those last few years had been due to a growing realization
+of jarring criticisms, of antagonized forces that required from him
+incompatible things. From which he had now taken refuge--or at any rate
+sought refuge--in God. It was paradoxical, but manifestly in God he not
+only sank his individuality but discovered it.
+
+It was wonderful how much he had thought and still thought of the
+feelings and desires of Lady Sunderbund, and how little he thought of
+God. Her he had been assiduously propitiating, managing, accepting, for
+three months now. Why? Partly because she demanded it, and there was
+a quality in her demand that had touched some hidden spring--of vanity
+perhaps it was--in him, that made him respond. But partly also it was
+because after the evacuation of the palace at Princhester he had felt
+more and more, felt but never dared to look squarely in the face, the
+catastrophic change in the worldly circumstances of his family.
+Only this chapel adventure seemed likely to restore those fallen and
+bedraggled fortunes. He had not anticipated a tithe of the dire quality
+of that change. They were not simply uncomfortable in the Notting Hill
+home. They were miserable. He fancied they looked to him with something
+between reproach and urgency. Why had he brought them here? What next
+did he propose to do? He wished at times they would say it out instead
+of merely looking it. Phoebe's failing appetite chilled his heart.
+
+That concern for his family, he believed, had been his chief motive in
+clinging to Lady Sunderbund's projects long after he had realized how
+little they would forward the true service of God. No doubt there had
+been moments of flattery, moments of something, something rather in the
+nature of an excited affection; some touch of the magnificent in
+her, some touch of the infantile,--both appealed magnetically to his
+imagination; but the real effective cause was his habitual solicitude
+for his wife and children and his consequent desire to prosper
+materially. As his first dream of being something between Mohammed and
+Peter the Hermit in a new proclamation of God to the world lost colour
+and life in his mind, he realized more and more clearly that there was
+no way of living in a state of material prosperity and at the same time
+in a state of active service to God. The Church of the One True God (by
+favour of Lady Sunderbund) was a gaily-coloured lure.
+
+And yet he wanted to go on with it. All his imagination and intelligence
+was busy now with the possibility of in some way subjugating Lady
+Sunderbund, and modifying her and qualifying her to an endurable
+proposition. Why?
+
+Why?
+
+There could be but one answer, he thought. Brought to the test of
+action, he did not really believe in God! He did not believe in God as
+he believed in his family. He did not believe in the reality of either
+his first or his second vision; they had been dreams, autogenous
+revelations, exaltations of his own imaginations. These beliefs were
+upon different grades of reality. Put to the test, his faith in God gave
+way; a sword of plaster against a reality of steel.
+
+And yet he did believe in God. He was as persuaded that there was a
+God as he was that there was another side to the moon. His
+intellectual conviction was complete. Only, beside the living,
+breathing--occasionally coughing--reality of Phoebe, God was something
+as unsubstantial as the Binomial Theorem....
+
+Very like the Binomial Theorem as one thought over that comparison.
+
+By this time he had reached the banks of the Serpentine and was
+approaching the grey stone bridge that crosses just where Hyde Park
+ends and Kensington Gardens begins. Following upon his doubts of his
+religious faith had come another still more extraordinary question:
+"Although there is a God, does he indeed matter more in our ordinary
+lives than that same demonstrable Binomial Theorem? Isn't one's duty to
+Phoebe plain and clear?" Old Likeman's argument came back to him with
+novel and enhanced powers. Wasn't he after all selfishly putting his
+own salvation in front of his plain duty to those about him? What did
+it matter if he told lies, taught a false faith, perjured and damned
+himself, if after all those others were thereby saved and comforted?
+
+"But that is just where the whole of this state of mind is false
+and wrong," he told himself. "God is something more than a priggish
+devotion, an intellectual formula. He has a hold and a claim--he should
+have a hold and a claim--exceeding all the claims of Phoebe, Miriam,
+Daphne, Clementina--all of them.... But he hasn't'!..."
+
+It was to that he had got after he had left Lady Sunderbund, and to that
+he now returned. It was the thinness and unreality of his thought of God
+that had driven him post-haste to Brighton-Pomfrey in search for that
+drug that had touched his soul to belief.
+
+Was God so insignificant in comparison with his family that after
+all with a good conscience he might preach him every Sunday in Lady
+Sunderbund's church, wearing Lady Sunderbund's vestments?
+
+Before him he saw an empty seat. The question was so immense and
+conclusive, it was so clearly a choice for all the rest of his life
+between God and the dear things of this world, that he felt he could not
+decide it upon his legs. He sat down, threw an arm along the back of the
+seat and drummed with his fingers.
+
+If the answer was "yes" then it was decidedly a pity that he had not
+stayed in the church. It was ridiculous to strain at the cathedral gnat
+and then swallow Lady Sunderbund's decorative Pantechnicon.
+
+For the first time, Scrope definitely regretted his apostasy.
+
+A trivial matter, as it may seem to the reader, intensified that regret.
+Three weeks ago Borrowdale, the bishop of Howeaster, had died, and
+Scrope would have been the next in rotation to succeed him on the
+bench of bishops. He had always looked forward to the House of Lords,
+intending to take rather a new line, to speak more, and to speak more
+plainly and fully upon social questions than had hitherto been the
+practice of his brethren. Well, that had gone....
+
+(9)
+
+
+Regrets were plain now. The question before his mind was growing clear;
+whether he was to persist in this self-imposed martyrdom of himself and
+his family or whether he was to go back upon his outbreak of visionary
+fanaticism and close with this last opportunity that Lady Sunderbund
+offered of saving at least the substance of the comfort and social
+status of his wife and daughters. In which case it was clear to him
+he would have to go to great lengths and exercise very considerable
+subtlety--and magnetism--in the management of Lady Sunderbund....
+
+He found himself composing a peculiar speech to her, very frank and
+revealing, and one that he felt would dominate her thoughts.... She
+attracted him oddly.... At least this afternoon she had attracted
+him....
+
+And repelled him....
+
+A wholesome gust of moral impatience stirred him. He smacked the back of
+the seat hard, as though he smacked himself.
+
+No. He did not like it....
+
+A torn sunset of purple and crimson streamed raggedly up above and
+through the half stripped trecs of Kensington Gardens, and he found
+himself wishing that Heaven would give us fewer sublimities in sky and
+mountain and more in our hearts. Against the background of darkling
+trees and stormily flaming sky a girl was approaching him. There was
+little to be seen of her but her outline. Something in her movement
+caught his eye and carried his memory back to a sundown at Hunstanton.
+Then as she came nearer he saw that it was Eleanor.
+
+It was odd to see her here. He had thought she was at Newnham.
+
+But anyhow it was very pleasant to see her. And there was something in
+Eleanor that promised an answer to his necessity. The girl had a kind
+of instinctive wisdom. She would understand the quality of his situation
+better perhaps than any one. He would put the essentials of that
+situation as fully and plainly as he could to her. Perhaps she, with
+that clear young idealism of hers, would give him just the lift and the
+light of which he stood in need. She would comprehend both sides of it,
+the points about Phoebe as well as the points about God.
+
+When first he saw her she seemed to be hurrying, but now she had fallen
+to a loitering pace. She looked once or twice behind her and then ahead,
+almost as though she expected some one and was not sure whether this
+person would approach from east or west. She did not observe her father
+until she was close upon him.
+
+Then she was so astonished that for a moment she stood motionless,
+regarding him. She made an odd movement, almost as if she would have
+walked on, that she checked in its inception. Then she came up to him
+and stood before him. "It's Dad," she said.
+
+"I didn't know you were in London, Norah," he began.
+
+"I came up suddenly."
+
+"Have you been home?"
+
+"No. I wasn't going home. At least--not until afterwards."
+
+Then she looked away from him, east and then west, and then met his eye
+again.
+
+"Won't you sit down, Norah?"
+
+"I don't know whether I can."
+
+She consulted the view again and seemed to come to a decision. "At
+least, I will for a minute."
+
+She sat down. For a moment neither of them spoke....
+
+"What are you doing here, little Norah?"
+
+She gathered her wits. Then she spoke rather volubly. "I know it looks
+bad, Daddy. I came up to meet a boy I know, who is going to France
+to-morrow. I had to make excuses--up there. I hardly remember what
+excuses I made."
+
+"A boy you know?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do we know him?"
+
+"Not yet."
+
+For a time Scrope forgot the Church of the One True God altogether. "Who
+is this boy?" he asked.
+
+With a perceptible effort Eleanor assumed a tone of commonsense
+conventionality. "He's a boy I met first when we were skating last year.
+His sister has the study next to mine."
+
+Father looked at daughter, and she met his eyes. "Well?"
+
+"It's all happened so quickly, Daddy," she said, answering all that was
+implicit in that "Well?" She went on, "I would have told you about him
+if he had seemed to matter. But it was just a friendship. It didn't
+seem to matter in any serious way. Of course we'd been good friends--and
+talked about all sorts of things. And then suddenly you see,"--her tone
+was offhand and matter-of-fact--"he has to go to France."
+
+She stared at her father with the expression of a hostess who talks
+about the weather. And then the tears gathered and ran down her cheek.
+
+She turned her face to the Serpentine and clenched her fist.
+
+But she was now fairly weeping. "I didn't know he cared. I didn't know I
+cared."
+
+His next question took a little time in coming.
+
+"And it's love, little Norah?" he asked.
+
+She was comfortably crying now, the defensive altogether abandoned.
+"It's love, Daddy.... Oh! love!.... He's going tomorrow." For a minute
+or so neither spoke. Scrope's mind was entirely made up in the matter.
+He approved altogether of his daughter. But the traditions of parentage,
+his habit of restrained decision, made him act a judicial part. "I'd
+like just to see this boy," he said, and added: "If it isn't rather
+interfering...."
+
+"Dear Daddy!" she said. "Dear Daddy!" and touched his hand. "He'll be
+coming here...."
+
+"If you could tell me a few things about him," said Scrope. "Is he an
+undergraduate?"
+
+"You see," began Eleanor and paused to marshal her facts. "He graduated
+this year. Then he's been in training at Cambridge. Properly he'd have
+a fellowship. He took the Natural Science tripos, zoology chiefly.
+He's good at philosophy, but of course our Cambridge philosophy is so
+silly--McTaggart blowing bubbles.... His father's a doctor, Sir Hedley
+Riverton."
+
+As she spoke her eyes had been roving up the path and down. "He's
+coming," she interrupted. She hesitated. "Would you mind if I went and
+spoke to him first, Daddy?"
+
+"Of course go to him. Go and warn him I'm here," said Scrope.
+
+Eleanor got up, and was immediately greeted with joyful gestures by an
+approaching figure in khaki. The two young people quickened their paces
+as they drew nearer one another. There was a rapid greeting; they stood
+close together and spoke eagerly. Scrope could tell by their movements
+when he became the subject of their talk. He saw the young man start
+and look over Eleanor's shoulder, and he assumed an attitude of
+philosophical contemplation of the water, so as to give the young man
+the liberty of his profile.
+
+He did not look up until they were quite close to him, and when he did
+he saw a pleasant, slightly freckled fair face a little agitated, and
+very honest blue eyes. "I hope you don't think, Sir, that it's bad form
+of me to ask Eleanor to come up and see me as I've done. I telegraphed
+to her on an impulse, and it's been very kind of her to come up to me."
+
+"Sit down," said Scrope, "sit down. You're Mr. Riverton?"
+
+"Yes, Sir," said the young man. He had the frequent "Sir" of the
+subaltern. Scrope was in the centre of the seat, and the young officer
+sat down on one side of him while Eleanor took up a watching position on
+her father's other hand. "You see, Sir, we've hardly known each other--I
+mean we've been associated over a philosophical society and all that
+sort of thing, but in a more familiar way, I mean...."
+
+He hung for a moment, just a little short of breath. Scrope helped
+him with a grave but sympathetic movement of the head. "It's a little
+difficult to explain," the young man apologized.
+
+"We hadn't understood, I think, either of us very much. We'd just
+been friendly--and liked each other. And so it went on even when I was
+training. And then when I found I had to go out--I'm going out a little
+earlier than I expected--I thought suddenly I wouldn't ever go to
+Cambridge again at all perhaps--and there was something in one of her
+letters.... I thought of it a lot, Sir, I thought it all over, and I
+thought it wasn't right for me to do anything and I didn't do anything
+until this morning. And then I sort of had to telegraph. I know it was
+frightful cheek and bad form and all that, Sir. It is. It would be
+worse if she wasn't different--I mean, Sir, if she was just an ordinary
+girl.... But I had a sort of feeling--just wanting to see her. I don't
+suppose you've ever felt anything, Sir, as I felt I wanted to see
+her--and just hear her speak to me...."
+
+He glanced across Scrope at Eleanor. It was as if he justified himself
+to them both.
+
+Scrope glanced furtively at his daughter who was leaning forward with
+tender eyes on her lover, and his heart went out to her. But his manner
+remained judicial.
+
+"All this is very sudden," he said.
+
+"Or you would have heard all about it, Sir," said young Riverton.
+"It's just the hurry that has made this seem furtive. All that there is
+between us, Sir, is just the two telegrams we've sent, hers and mine.
+I hope you won't mind our having a little time together. We won't do
+anything very committal. It's as much friendship as anything. I go by
+the evening train to-morrow."
+
+"Mm," said Serope with his eye on Eleanor.
+
+"In these uncertain times," he began.
+
+"Why shouldn't I take a risk too, Daddy?" said Eleanor sharply.
+
+"I know there's that side of it," said the young man. "I oughtn't to
+have telegraphed," he said.
+
+"Can't I take a risk?" exclaimed Eleanor. "I'm not a doll. I don't want
+to live in wadding until all the world is safe for me."
+
+Scrope looked at the glowing face of the young man.
+
+"Is this taking care of her?" he asked.
+
+"If you hadn't telegraphed--!" she cried with a threat in her voice, and
+left it at that.
+
+"Perhaps I feel about her--rather as if she was as strong as I am--in
+those ways. Perhaps I shouldn't. I could hardly endure myself, Sir--cut
+off from her. And a sort of blank. Nothing said."
+
+"You want to work out your own salvation," said Scrope to his daughter.
+
+"No one else can," she answered. "I'm--I'm grown up."
+
+"Even if it hurts?"
+
+"To live is to be hurt somehow," she said. "This--This--" She flashed
+her love. She intimated by a gesture that it is better to be stabbed
+with a clean knife than to be suffocated or poisoned or to decay....
+
+Scrope turned his eyes to the young man again. He liked him. He liked
+the modelling of his mouth and chin and the line of his brows. He liked
+him altogether. He pronounced his verdict slowly. "I suppose, after
+all," he said, "that this is better than the tender solicitude of a
+safe and prosperous middleaged man. Eleanor, my dear, I've been thinking
+to-day that a father who stands between his children and hardship, by
+doing wrong, may really be doing them a wrong. You are a dear girl to
+me. I won't stand between you two. Find your own salvation." He got up.
+"I go west," he said, "presently. You, I think, go east."
+
+"I can assure you, Sir," the young man began.
+
+Scrope held his hand out. "Take your life in your own way," he said.
+
+He turned to Eleanor. "Talk as you will," he said.
+
+She clasped his hand with emotion. Then she turned to the waiting young
+man, who saluted.
+
+"You'll come back to supper?" Scrope said, without thinking out the
+implications of that invitation.
+
+She assented as carelessly. The fact that she and her lover were to
+go, with their meeting legalized and blessed, excluded all other
+considerations. The two young people turned to each other.
+
+Scrope stood for a moment or so and then sat down again.
+
+For a time he could think only of Eleanor.... He watched the two young
+people as they went eastward. As they walked their shoulders and elbows
+bumped amicably together.
+
+(10)
+
+
+Presently he sought to resume the interrupted thread of his thoughts.
+He knew that he had been dealing with some very tremendous and urgent
+problem when Eleanor had appeared. Then he remembered that Eleanor at
+the time of her approach had seemed to be a solution rather than an
+interruption. Well, she had her own life. She was making her own life.
+Instead of solving his problems she was solving her own. God bless those
+dear grave children! They were nearer the elemental things than he was.
+That eastward path led to Victoria--and thence to a very probable death.
+The lad was in the infantry and going straight into the trenches.
+
+Love, death, God; this war was bringing the whole world back to
+elemental things, to heroic things. The years of comedy and comfort were
+at an end in Europe; the age of steel and want was here. And he had been
+thinking--What had he been thinking?
+
+He mused, and the scheme of his perplexities reshaped itself in his
+mind. But at that time he did not realize that a powerful new light
+was falling upon it now, cast by the tragic illumination of these young
+lovers whose love began with a parting. He did not see how reality had
+come to all things through that one intense reality. He reverted to
+the question as he had put it to himself, before first he recognized
+Eleanor. Did he believe in God? Should he go on with this Sunderbund
+adventure in which he no longer believed? Should he play for safety and
+comfort, trusting to God's toleration? Or go back to his family and warn
+them of the years of struggle and poverty his renunciation cast upon
+them?
+
+Somehow Lady Sunderbund's chapel was very remote and flimsy now, and the
+hardships of poverty seemed less black than the hardship of a youthful
+death.
+
+Did he believe in God? Again he put that fundamental question to
+himself.
+
+He sat very still in the sunset peace, with his eyes upon the steel
+mirror of the waters. The question seemed to fill the whole scene, to
+wait, even as the water and sky and the windless trees were waiting....
+
+And then by imperceptible degrees there grew in Scrope's mind the
+persuasion that he was in the presence of the living God. This time
+there was no vision of angels nor stars, no snapping of bow-strings, no
+throbbing of the heart nor change of scene, no magic and melodramatic
+drawing back of the curtain from the mysteries; the water and the
+bridge, the ragged black trees, and a distant boat that broke the
+silvery calm with an arrow of black ripples, all these things were still
+before him. But God was there too. God was everywhere about him. This
+persuasion was over him and about him; a dome of protection, a power in
+his nerves, a peace in his heart. It was an exalting beauty; it was a
+perfected conviction.... This indeed was the coming of God, the real
+coming of God. For the first time Scrope was absolutely sure that
+for the rest of his life he would possess God. Everything that had so
+perplexed him seemed to be clear now, and his troubles lay at the foot
+of this last complete realization like a litter of dust and leaves in
+the foreground of a sunlit, snowy mountain range.
+
+It was a little incredible that he could ever have doubted.
+
+(11)
+
+
+It was a phase of extreme intellectual clairvoyance. A multitude of
+things that hitherto had been higgledy-piggledy, contradictory and
+incongruous in his mind became lucid, serene, full and assured. He
+seemed to see all things plainly as one sees things plainly through
+perfectly clear still water in the shadows of a summer noon. His doubts
+about God, his periods of complete forgetfulness and disregard of God,
+this conflict of his instincts and the habits and affections of
+his daily life with the service of God, ceased to be perplexing
+incompatibilities and were manifest as necessary, understandable aspects
+of the business of living.
+
+It was no longer a riddle that little immediate things should seem
+of more importance than great and final things. For man is a creature
+thrusting his way up from the beast to divinity, from the blindness of
+individuality to the knowledge of a common end. We stand deep in
+the engagements of our individual lives looking up to God, and only
+realizing in our moments of exaltation that through God we can escape
+from and rule and alter the whole world-wide scheme of individual lives.
+Only in phases of illumination do we realize the creative powers that
+lie ready to man's hand. Personal affections, immediate obligations,
+ambitions, self-seeking, these are among the natural and essential
+things of our individual lives, as intimate almost as our primordial
+lusts and needs; God, the true God, is a later revelation, a newer, less
+natural thing in us; a knowledge still remote, uncertain, and confused
+with superstition; an apprehension as yet entangled with barbaric
+traditions of fear and with ceremonial surgeries, blood sacrifices, and
+the maddest barbarities of thought. We are only beginning to realize
+that God is here; so far as our minds go he is still not here
+continually; we perceive him and then again we are blind to him. God
+is the last thing added to the completeness of human life. To most His
+presence is imperceptible throughout their lives; they know as little
+of him as a savage knows of the electric waves that beat through us
+for ever from the sun. All this appeared now so clear and necessary
+to Scrope that he was astonished he had ever found the quality of
+contradiction in these manifest facts.
+
+In this unprecedented lucidity that had now come to him, Scrope saw as
+a clear and simple necessity that there can be no such thing as a
+continuous living presence of God in our lives. That is an unreasonable
+desire. There is no permanent exaltation of belief. It is contrary to
+the nature of life. One cannot keep actively believing in and realizing
+God round all the twenty-four hours any more than one can keep awake
+through the whole cycle of night and day, day after day. If it were
+possible so to apprehend God without cessation, life would dissolve in
+religious ecstasy. But nothing human has ever had the power to hold the
+curtain of sense continually aside and retain the light of God always.
+We must get along by remembering our moments of assurance. Even Jesus
+himself, leader of all those who have hailed the coming kingdom of God,
+had cried upon the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
+The business of life on earth, life itself, is a thing curtained off, as
+it were, from such immediate convictions. That is in the constitution of
+life. Our ordinary state of belief, even when we are free from doubt,
+is necessarily far removed from the intuitive certainty of sight and
+hearing. It is a persuasion, it falls far short of perception....
+
+"We don't know directly," Scrope said to himself with a checking gesture
+of the hand, "we don't see. We can't. We hold on to the remembered
+glimpse, we go over our reasons."...
+
+And it was clear too just because God is thus manifest like the
+momentary drawing of a curtain, sometimes to this man for a time and
+sometimes to that, but never continuously to any, and because the
+perception of him depends upon the ability and quality of the perceiver,
+because to the intellectual man God is necessarily a formula, to the
+active man a will and a commandment, and to the emotional man love,
+there can be no creed defining him for all men, and no ritual and
+special forms of service to justify a priesthood. "God is God," he
+whispered to himself, and the phrase seemed to him the discovery of
+a sufficient creed. God is his own definition; there is no other
+definition of God. Scrope had troubled himself with endless arguments
+whether God was a person, whether he was concerned with personal
+troubles, whether he loved, whether he was finite. It were as reasonable
+to argue whether God was a frog or a rock or a tree. He had imagined God
+as a figure of youth and courage, had perceived him as an effulgence
+of leadership, a captain like the sun. The vision of his drug-quickened
+mind had but symbolized what was otherwise inexpressible. Of that he was
+now sure. He had not seen the invisible but only its sign and visible
+likeness. He knew now that all such presentations were true and that all
+such presentations were false. Just as much and just as little was God
+the darkness and the brightness of the ripples under the bows of the
+distant boat, the black beauty of the leaves and twigs of those trees
+now acid-clear against the flushed and deepening sky. These riddles of
+the profundities were beyond the compass of common living. They were
+beyond the needs of common living. He was but a little earth parasite,
+sitting idle in the darkling day, trying to understand his infinitesimal
+functions on a minor planet. Within the compass of terrestrial living
+God showed himself in its own terms. The life of man on earth was a
+struggle for unity of spirit and for unity with his kind, and the aspect
+of God that alone mattered to man was a unifying kingship without and
+within. So long as men were men, so would they see God. Only when they
+reached the crest could they begin to look beyond. So we knew God, so
+God was to us; since we struggled, he led our struggle, since we were
+finite and mortal he defined an aim, his personality was the answer to
+our personality; but God, except in so far as he was to us, remained
+inaccessible, inexplicable, wonderful, shining through beauty, shining
+beyond research, greater than time or space, above good and evil and
+pain and pleasure.
+
+(12)
+
+
+Serope's mind was saturated as it had never been before by his sense of
+the immediate presence of God. He floated in that realization. He
+was not so much thinking now as conversing starkly with the divine
+interlocutor, who penetrated all things and saw into and illuminated
+every recess of his mind. He spread out his ideas to the test of this
+presence; he brought out his hazards and interpretations that this light
+might judge them.
+
+There came back to his mind the substance of his two former visions;
+they assumed now a reciprocal quality, they explained one another and
+the riddle before him. The first had shown him the personal human aspect
+of God, he had seen God as the unifying captain calling for his personal
+service, the second had set the stage for that service in the spectacle
+of mankind's adventure. He had been shown a great multitude of human
+spirits reaching up at countless points towards the conception of the
+racial unity under a divine leadership, he had seen mankind on the
+verge of awakening to the kingdom of God. "That solves no mystery,"
+he whispered, gripping the seat and frowning at the water; "mysteries
+remain mysteries; but that is the reality of religion. And now, now,
+what is my place? What have I to do? That is the question I have been
+asking always; the question that this moment now will answer; what have
+I to do?..."
+
+God was coming into the life of all mankind in the likeness of a captain
+and a king; all the governments of men, all the leagues of men, their
+debts and claims and possessions, must give way to the world republic
+under God the king. For five troubled years he had been staring religion
+in the face, and now he saw that it must mean this--or be no more than
+fetishism, Obi, Orphic mysteries or ceremonies of Demeter, a legacy
+of mental dirtiness, a residue of self-mutilation and superstitious
+sacrifices from the cunning, fear-haunted, ape-dog phase of human
+development. But it did mean this. And every one who apprehended as much
+was called by that very apprehension to the service of God's kingdom.
+To live and serve God's kingdom on earth, to help to bring it about, to
+propagate the idea of it, to establish the method of it, to incorporate
+all that one made and all that one did into its growing reality, was the
+only possible life that could be lived, once that God was known.
+
+He sat with his hands gripping his knees, as if he were holding on to
+his idea. "And now for my part," he whispered, brows knit, "now for my
+part."
+
+Ever since he had given his confirmation addresses he had been clear
+that his task, or at least a considerable portion of his task, was
+to tell of this faith in God and of this conception of service in his
+kingdom as the form and rule of human life and human society. But up to
+now he had been floundering hopelessly in his search for a method and
+means of telling. That, he saw, still needed to be thought out. For
+example, one cannot run through the world crying, "The Kingdom of God
+is at hand." Men's minds were still so filled with old theological ideas
+that for the most part they would understand by that only a fantasy of
+some great coming of angels and fiery chariots and judgments, and hardly
+a soul but would doubt one's sanity and turn scornfully away. But one
+must proclaim God not to confuse but to convince men's minds. It was
+that and the habit of his priestly calling that had disposed him towards
+a pulpit. There he could reason and explain. The decorative genius
+of Lady Sunderbund had turned that intention into a vast iridescent
+absurdity.
+
+This sense he had of thinking openly in the sight of God, enabled him to
+see the adventure of Lady Sunderbund without illusion and without shame.
+He saw himself at once honest and disingenuous, divided between two
+aims. He had no doubt now of the path he had to pursue. A stronger man
+of permanently clear aims might possibly turn Lady Sunderbund into a
+useful opportunity, oblige her to provide the rostrum he needed; but for
+himself, he knew he had neither the needed strength nor clearness;
+she would smother him in decoration, overcome him by her picturesque
+persistence. It might be ridiculous to run away from her, but it was
+necessary. And he was equally clear now that for him there must be
+no idea of any pulpit, of any sustained mission. He was a man of
+intellectual moods; only at times, he realized, had he the inspiration
+of truth; upon such uncertain snatches and glimpses he must live; to
+make his life a ministry would be to face phases when he would simply be
+"carrying on," with his mind blank and his faith asleep.
+
+His thought spread out from this perennial decision to more general
+things again. Had God any need of organized priests at all? Wasn't that
+just what had been the matter with religion for the last three thousand
+years?
+
+His vision and his sense of access to God had given a new courage to
+his mind; in these moods of enlightenment he could see the world as a
+comprehensible ball, he could see history as an understandable drama. He
+had always been on the verge of realizing before, he realized now, the
+two entirely different and antagonistic strands that interweave in the
+twisted rope of contemporary religion; the old strand of the priest,
+the fetishistic element of the blood sacrifice and the obscene rite, the
+element of ritual and tradition, of the cult, the caste, the consecrated
+tribe; and interwoven with this so closely as to be scarcely separable
+in any existing religion was the new strand, the religion of the
+prophets, the unidolatrous universal worship of the one true God. Priest
+religion is the antithesis to prophet religion. He saw that the
+founders of all the great existing religions of the world had been like
+himself--only that he was a weak and commonplace man with no creative
+force, and they had been great men of enormous initiative--men reaching
+out, and never with a complete definition, from the old kind of religion
+to the new. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus, whom the priests killed when
+Pilate would have spared him, Mohammed, Buddha, had this much in common
+that they had sought to lead men from temple worship, idol worship, from
+rites and ceremonies and the rule of priests, from anniversaryism and
+sacramentalism, into a direct and simple relation to the simplicity of
+God. Religious progress had always been liberation and simplification.
+But none of these efforts had got altogether clear. The organizing
+temper in men, the disposition to dogmatic theorizing, the distrust
+of the discretion of the young by the wisdom of age, the fear of
+indiscipline which is so just in warfare and so foolish in education,
+the tremendous power of the propitiatory tradition, had always caught
+and crippled every new gospel before it had run a score of years. Jesus
+for example gave man neither a theology nor a church organization; His
+sacrament was an innocent feast of memorial; but the fearful, limited,
+imitative men he left to carry on his work speedily restored all these
+three abominations of the antiquated religion, theology, priest, and
+sacrifice. Jesus indeed, caught into identification with the ancient
+victim of the harvest sacrifice and turned from a plain teacher into
+a horrible blood bath and a mock cannibal meal, was surely the supreme
+feat of the ironies of chance....
+
+"It is curious how I drift back to Jesus," said Scrope. "I have never
+seen how much truth and good there was in his teaching until I broke
+away from Christianity and began to see him plain. If I go on as I am
+going, I shall end a Nazarene...."
+
+He thought on. He had a feeling of temerity, but then it seemed as if
+God within him bade him be of good courage.
+
+Already in a glow of inspiration he had said practically as much as
+he was now thinking in his confirmation address, but now he realized
+completely what it was he had then said. There could be no priests,
+no specialized ministers of the one true God, because every man to
+the utmost measure of his capacity was bound to be God's priest and
+minister. Many things one may leave to specialists: surgery, detailed
+administration, chemistry, for example; but it is for every man to think
+his own philosophy and think out his own religion. One man may tell
+another, but no man may take charge of another. A man may avail himself
+of electrician or gardener or what not, but he must stand directly
+before God; he may suffer neither priest nor king. These other things
+are incidental, but God, the kingdom of God, is what he is for.
+
+"Good," he said, checking his reasoning. "So I must bear witness to
+God--but neither as priest nor pastor. I must write and talk about him
+as I can. No reason why I should not live by such writing and talking if
+it does not hamper my message to do so. But there must be no high place,
+no ordered congregation. I begin to see my way...."
+
+The evening was growing dark and chill about him now, the sky was barred
+with deep bluish purple bands drawn across a chilly brightness that
+had already forgotten the sun, the trees were black and dim, but his
+understanding of his place and duty was growing very definite.
+
+"And this duty to bear witness to God's kingdom and serve it is so plain
+that I must not deflect my witness even by a little, though to do
+so means comfort and security for my wife and children. God comes
+first...."
+
+"They must not come between God and me...."
+
+"But there is more in it than that."
+
+He had come round at last through the long clearing-up of his mind, to
+his fundamental problem again. He sat darkly reluctant.
+
+"I must not play priest or providence to them," he admitted at last. "I
+must not even stand between God and them."
+
+He saw now what he had been doing; it had been the flaw in his faith
+that he would not trust his family to God. And he saw too that this
+distrust has been the flaw in the faith of all religious systems
+hitherto....
+
+(13)
+
+
+In this strange voyage of the spirit which was now drawing to its end,
+in which Scrope had travelled from the confused, unanalyzed formulas and
+assumptions and implications of his rectory upbringing to his present
+stark and simple realization of God, he had at times made some
+remarkable self-identifications. He was naturally much given to analogy;
+every train of thought in his mind set up induced parallel currents. He
+had likened himself to the Anglican church, to the whole Christian body,
+as, for example, in his imagined second conversation with the angel
+of God. But now he found himself associating himself with a still more
+far-reaching section of mankind. This excess of solicitude was traceable
+perhaps in nearly every one in all the past of mankind who had ever had
+the vision of God. An excessive solicitude to shield those others from
+one's own trials and hardships, to preserve the exact quality of the
+revelation, for example, had been the fruitful cause of crippling
+errors, spiritual tyrannies, dogmatisms, dissensions, and futilities.
+"Suffer little children to come unto me"; the text came into his head
+with an effect of contribution. The parent in us all flares out at the
+thought of the younger and weaker minds; we hide difficulties, seek to
+spare them from the fires that temper the spirit, the sharp edge of
+the truth that shapes the soul. Christian is always trying to have a
+carriage sent back from the Celestial City for his family. Why, we ask,
+should they flounder dangerously in the morasses that we escaped, or
+wander in the forest in which we lost ourselves? Catch these souls
+young, therefore, save them before they know they exist, kidnap them to
+heaven; vaccinate them with a catechism they may never understand, lull
+them into comfort and routine. Instinct plays us false here as it plays
+the savage mother false when she snatches her fevered child from the
+doctor's hands. The last act of faith is to trust those we love to
+God....
+
+Hitherto he had seen the great nets of theological overstatement and
+dogma that kept mankind from God as if they were the work of purely evil
+things in man, of pride, of self-assertion, of a desire to possess and
+dominate the minds and souls of others. It was only now that he saw how
+large a share in the obstruction of God's Kingdom had been played by the
+love of the elder and the parent, by the carefulness, the fussy care,
+of good men and women. He had wandered in wildernesses of unbelief, in
+dangerous places of doubt and questioning, but he had left his wife and
+children safe and secure in the self-satisfaction of orthodoxy. To none
+of them except to Eleanor had he ever talked with any freedom of his
+new apprehensions of religious reality. And that had been at Eleanor's
+initiative. There was, he saw now, something of insolence and something
+of treachery in this concealment. His ruling disposition throughout the
+crisis had been to force comfort and worldly well-being upon all those
+dependants even at the price of his own spiritual integrity. In no way
+had he consulted them upon the bargain.... While we have pottered, each
+for the little good of his own family, each for the lessons and clothes
+and leisure of his own children, assenting to this injustice, conforming
+to that dishonest custom, being myopically benevolent and fundamentally
+treacherous, our accumulated folly has achieved this catastrophe. It is
+not so much human wickedness as human weakness that has permitted the
+youth of the world to go through this hell of blood and mud and fire.
+The way to the kingdom of God is the only way to the true safety, the
+true wellbeing of the children of men....
+
+It wasn't fair to them. But now he saw how unfair it was to them in a
+light that has only shone plainly upon European life since the great
+interlude of the armed peace came to an end in August, 1914. Until
+that time it had been the fashion to ignore death and evade poverty and
+necessity for the young. We can shield our young no longer, death has
+broken through our precautions and tender evasions--and his eyes went
+eastward into the twilight that had swallowed up his daughter and her
+lover.
+
+The tumbled darkling sky, monstrous masses of frowning blue, with icy
+gaps of cold light, was like the great confusions of the war. All our
+youth has had to go into that terrible and destructive chaos--because of
+the kings and churches and nationalities sturdier-souled men would have
+set aside.
+
+Everything was sharp and clear in his mind now. Eleanor after all had
+brought him his solution.
+
+He sat quite still for a little while, and then stood up and turned
+northward towards Notting Hill.
+
+The keepers were closing Kensington Gardens, and he would have to skirt
+the Park to Victoria Gate and go home by the Bayswater Road....
+
+(14)
+
+
+As he walked he rearranged in his mind this long-overdue apology for his
+faith that he was presently to make to his family. There was no one to
+interrupt him and nothing to embarrass him, and so he was able to
+set out everything very clearly and convincingly. There was perhaps a
+disposition to digress into rather voluminous subordinate explanations,
+on such themes, for instance, as sacramentalism, whereon he found
+himself summarizing Frazer's Golden Bough, which the Chasters'
+controversy had first obliged him to read, and upon the irrelevance of
+the question of immortality to the process of salvation. But the reality
+of his eclaircissement was very different from anything he prepared in
+these anticipations.
+
+Tea had been finished and put away, and the family was disposed about
+the dining-room engaged in various evening occupations; Phoebe sat at
+the table working at some mathematical problem, Clementina was reading
+with her chin on her fist and a frown on her brow; Lady Ella, Miriam and
+Daphne were busy making soft washing cloths for the wounded; Lady
+Ella had brought home the demand for them from the Red Cross centre
+in Burlington House. The family was all downstairs in the dining-room
+because the evening was chilly, and there were no fires upstairs yet
+in the drawing-room. He came into the room and exchanged greetings with
+Lady Ella. Then he stood for a time surveying his children. Phoebe, he
+noted, was a little flushed; she put passion into her work; on the whole
+she was more like Eleanor than any other of them. Miriam knitted with a
+steady skill. Clementina's face too expressed a tussle. He took up one
+of the rough-knit washing-cloths upon the side-table, and asked how many
+could be made in an hour. Then he asked some idle obvious question
+about the fire upstairs. Clementina made an involuntary movement; he was
+disturbing her. He hovered for a moment longer. He wanted to catch his
+wife's eye and speak to her first. She looked up, but before he could
+convey his wish for a private conference with her, she smiled at him and
+then bent over her work again.
+
+He went into the back study and lit his gas fire. Hitherto he had always
+made a considerable explosion when he did so, but this time by taking
+thought and lighting his match before he turned on the gas he did it
+with only a gentle thud. Then he lit his reading-lamp and pulled down
+the blind--pausing for a time to look at the lit dressmaker's opposite.
+Then he sat down thoughtfully before the fire. Presently Ella would come
+in and he would talk to her. He waited a long time, thinking only weakly
+and inconsecutively, and then he became restless. Should he call her?
+
+But he wanted their talk to begin in a natural-seeming way. He did not
+want the portentousness of "wanting to speak" to her and calling her out
+to him. He got up at last and went back into the other room. Clementina
+had gone upstairs, and the book she had been reading was lying closed on
+the sideboard. He saw it was one of Chasters' books, he took it up, it
+was "The Core of Truth in Christianity," and he felt an irrational
+shock at the idea of Clementina reading it. In spite of his own
+immense changes of opinion he had still to revise his conception of the
+polemical Chasters as an evil influence in religion. He fidgeted
+past his wife to the mantel in search of an imaginary mislaid pencil.
+Clementina came down with some bandage linen she was cutting out. He
+hung over his wife in a way that he felt must convey his desire for a
+conversation. Then he picked up Chasters' book again. "Does any one want
+this?" he asked.
+
+"Not if I may have it again," consented Clementina.
+
+He took it back with him and began to read again those familiar
+controversial pages. He read for the best part of an hour with his knees
+drying until they smoked over the gas. What curious stuff it was! How
+it wrangled! Was Chasters a religious man? Why did he write these
+books? Had he really a passion for truth or only a Swift-like hatred
+of weakly-thinking people? None of this stuff in his books was really
+wrong, provided it was religious-spirited. Much of it had been indeed
+destructively illuminating to its reader. It let daylight through all
+sorts of walls. Indeed, the more one read the more vividly true its
+acid-bit lines became.... And yet, and yet, there was something hateful
+in the man's tone. Scrope held the book and thought. He had seen
+Chasters once or twice. Chasters had the sort of face, the sort of
+voice, the sort of bearing that made one think of his possibly saying
+upon occasion, rudely and rejoicing, "More fool you!" Nevertheless
+Scrope perceived now with an effort of discovery that it was from
+Chasters that he had taken all the leading ideas of the new faith that
+was in him. Here was the stuff of it. He had forgotten how much of it
+was here. During those months of worried study while the threat of
+a Chasters prosecution hung over him his mind had assimilated almost
+unknowingly every assimilable element of the Chasters doctrine; he
+had either assimilated and transmuted it by the alchemy of his own
+temperament, or he had reacted obviously and filled in Chasters' gaps
+and pauses. Chasters could beat a road to the Holy of Holies, and shy
+at entering it. But in spite of all the man's roughness, in spite of a
+curious flavour of baseness and malice about him, the spirit of truth
+had spoken through him. God has a use for harsh ministers. In one man
+God lights the heart, in another the reason becomes a consuming fire.
+God takes his own where he finds it. He does not limit himself to nice
+people. In these matters of evidence and argument, in his contempt for
+amiable, demoralizing compromise, Chasters served God as Scrope could
+never hope to serve him. Scrope's new faith had perhaps been altogether
+impossible if the Chasters controversy had not ploughed his mind.
+
+For a time Scrope dwelt upon this remarkable realization. Then as
+he turned over the pages his eyes rested on a passage of uncivil and
+ungenerous sarcasm. Against old Likeman of all people!...
+
+What did a girl like Clementina make of all this? How had she got the
+book? From Eleanor? The stuff had not hurt Eleanor. Eleanor had been
+able to take the good that Chasters taught, and reject the evil of his
+spirit....
+
+He thought of Eleanor, gallantly working out her own salvation. The
+world was moving fast to a phase of great freedom--for the young and the
+bold.... He liked that boy....
+
+His thoughts came back with a start to his wife. The evening was
+slipping by and he had momentous things to say to her. He went and just
+opened the door.
+
+"Ella!" he said.
+
+"Did you want me?"
+
+"Presently."
+
+She put a liberal interpretation upon that "presently," so that after
+what seemed to him a long interval he had to call again, "Ella!"
+
+"Just a minute," she answered.
+
+(15)
+
+
+Lady Ella was still, so to speak, a little in the other room when she
+came to him.
+
+"Shut that door, please," he said, and felt the request had just that
+flavour of portentousness he wished to avoid.
+
+"What is it?" she asked.
+
+"I wanted to talk to you--about some things. I've done something rather
+serious to-day. I've made an important decision."
+
+Her face became anxious. "What do you mean?" she asked.
+
+"You see," he said, leaning upon the mantelshelf and looking down at the
+gas flames, "I've never thought that we should all have to live in this
+crowded house for long."
+
+"All!" she interrupted in a voice that made him look up sharply. "You're
+not going away, Ted?"
+
+"Oh, no. But I hoped we should all be going away in a little time. It
+isn't so."
+
+"I never quite understood why you hoped that."
+
+"It was plain enough."
+
+"How?"
+
+"I thought I should have found something to do that would have enabled
+us to live in better style. I'd had a plan."
+
+"What plan?"
+
+"It's fallen through."
+
+"But what plan was it?"
+
+"I thought I should be able to set up a sort of broad church chapel. I
+had a promise."
+
+Her voice was rich with indignation. "And she has betrayed you?"
+
+"No," he said, "I have betrayed her."
+
+Lady Ella's face showed them still at cross purposes. He looked down
+again and frowned. "I can't do that chapel business," he said. "I've had
+to let her down. I've got to let you all down. There's no help for it.
+It isn't the way. I can't have anything to do with Lady Sunderbund and
+her chapel."
+
+"But," Lady Ella was still perplexed.
+
+"It's too great a sacrifice."
+
+"Of us?"
+
+"No, of myself. I can't get into her pulpit and do as she wants and keep
+my conscience. It's been a horrible riddle for me. It means plunging
+into all this poverty for good. But I can't work with her, Ella. She's
+impossible."
+
+"You mean--you're going to break with Lady Sunderbund?"
+
+"I must."
+
+"Then, Teddy!"--she was a woman groping for flight amidst intolerable
+perplexities--"why did you ever leave the church?"
+
+"Because I have ceased to believe--"
+
+"But had it nothing to do with Lady Sunderbund?"
+
+He stared at her in astonishment.
+
+"If it means breaking with that woman," she said.
+
+"You mean," he said, beginning for the first time to comprehend her,
+"that you don't mind the poverty?"
+
+"Poverty!" she cried. "I cared for nothing but the disgrace."
+
+"Disgrace?"
+
+"Oh, never mind, Ted! If it isn't true, if I've been dreaming...."
+
+Instead of a woman stunned by a life sentence of poverty, he saw his
+wife rejoicing as if she had heard good news.
+
+Their minds were held for a minute by the sound of some one knocking
+at the house door; one of the girls opened the door, there was a brief
+hubbub in the passage and then they heard a cry of "Eleanor!" through
+the folding doors.
+
+"There's Eleanor," he said, realizing he had told his wife nothing of
+the encounter in Hyde Park.
+
+They heard Eleanor's clear voice: "Where's Mummy? Or Daddy?" and then:
+"Can't stay now, dears. Where's Mummy or Daddy?"
+
+"I ought to have told you," said Scrope quickly. "I met Eleanor in the
+Park. By accident. She's come up unexpectedly. To meet a boy going to
+the front. Quite a nice boy. Son of Riverton the doctor. The parting had
+made them understand one another. It's all right, Ella. It's a little
+irregular, but I'd stake my life on the boy. She's very lucky."
+
+Eleanor appeared through the folding doors. She came to business at
+once.
+
+"I promised you I'd come back to supper here, Daddy," she said. "But I
+don't want to have supper here. I want to stay out late."
+
+She saw her mother look perplexed. "Hasn't Daddy told you?"
+
+"But where is young Riverton?"
+
+"He's outside."
+
+Eleanor became aware of a broad chink in the folding doors that was
+making the dining-room an auditorium for their dialogue. She shut them
+deftly.
+
+"I have told Mummy," Scrope explained. "Bring him in to supper. We ought
+to see him."
+
+Eleanor hesitated. She indicated her sisters beyond the folding doors.
+"They'll all be watching us, Mummy," she said. "We'd be uncomfortable.
+And besides--"
+
+"But you can't go out and dine with him alone!"
+
+"Oh, Mummy! It's our only chance."
+
+"Customs are changing," said Scrope.
+
+"But can they?" asked Lady Ella.
+
+"I don't see why not."
+
+The mother was still doubtful, but she was in no mood to cross her
+husband that night. "It's an exceptional occasion," said Scrope, and
+Eleanor knew her point was won. She became radiant. "I can be late?"
+
+Scrope handed her his latch-key without a word.
+
+"You dear kind things," she said, and went to the door. Then turned and
+came back and kissed her father. Then she kissed her mother. "It is
+so kind of you," she said, and was gone. They listened to her passage
+through a storm of questions in the dining-room.
+
+"Three months ago that would have shocked me," said Lady Ella.
+
+"You haven't seen the boy," said Scrope.
+
+"But the appearances!"
+
+"Aren't we rather breaking with appearances?" he said.
+
+"And he goes to-morrow--perhaps to get killed," he added. "A lad like
+a schoolboy. A young thing. Because of the political foolery that we
+priests and teachers have suffered in the place of the Kingdom of God,
+because we have allowed the religion of Europe to become a lie; because
+no man spoke the word of God. You see--when I see that--see those two,
+those children of one-and-twenty, wrenched by tragedy, beginning with
+a parting.... It's like a knife slashing at all our appearances and
+discretions.... Think of our lovemaking...."
+
+The front door banged.
+
+He had some idea of resuming their talk. But his was a scattered mind
+now.
+
+"It's a quarter to eight," he said as if in explanation.
+
+"I must see to the supper," said Lady Ella.
+
+(16)
+
+
+There was an air of tension at supper as though the whole family felt
+that momentous words impended. But Phoebe had emerged victorious from
+her mathematical struggle, and she seemed to eat with better appetite
+than she had shown for some time. It was a cold meat supper; Lady Ella
+had found it impossible to keep up the regular practice of a cooked
+dinner in the evening, and now it was only on Thursdays that the
+Scropes, to preserve their social tradition, dressed and dined; the rest
+of the week they supped. Lady Ella never talked very much at supper;
+this evening was no exception. Clementina talked of London University
+and Bedford College; she had been making enquiries; Daphne described
+some of the mistresses at her new school. The feeling that something was
+expected had got upon Scrope's nerves. He talked a little in a flat and
+obvious way, and lapsed into thoughtful silences. While supper was being
+cleared away he went back into his study.
+
+Thence he returned to the dining-room hearthrug as his family resumed
+their various occupations.
+
+He tried to speak in a casual conversational tone.
+
+"I want to tell you all," he said, "of something that has happened
+to-day."
+
+He waited. Phoebe had begun to figure at a fresh sheet of computations.
+Miriam bent her head closer over her work, as though she winced at what
+was coming. Daphne and Clementina looked at one another. Their eyes said
+"Eleanor!" But he was too full of his own intention to read that glance.
+Only his wife regarded him attentively.
+
+"It concerns you all," he said.
+
+He looked at Phoebe. He saw Lady Ella's hand go out and touch the girl's
+hand gently to make her desist. Phoebe obeyed, with a little sigh.
+
+"I want to tell you that to-day I refused an income that would certainly
+have exceeded fifteen hundred pounds a year."
+
+Clementina looked up now. This was not what she expected. Her expression
+conveyed protesting enquiry.
+
+"I want you all to understand why I did that and why we are in the
+position we are in, and what lies before us. I want you to know what has
+been going on in my mind."
+
+He looked down at the hearthrug, and tried to throw off a memory of his
+Princhester classes for young women, that oppressed him. His manner
+he forced to a more familiar note. He stuck his hands into his trouser
+pockets.
+
+"You know, my dears, I had to give up the church. I just simply didn't
+believe any more in orthodox Church teaching. And I feel I've never
+explained that properly to you. Not at all clearly. I want to explain
+that now. It's a queer thing, I know, for me to say to you, but I want
+you to understand that I am a religious man. I believe that God matters
+more than wealth or comfort or position or the respect of men, that he
+also matters more than your comfort and prosperity. God knows I have
+cared for your comfort and prosperity. I don't want you to think that in
+all these changes we have been through lately, I haven't been aware of
+all the discomfort into which you have come--the relative discomfort.
+Compared with Princhester this is dark and crowded and poverty-stricken.
+I have never felt crowded before, but in this house I know you are
+horribly crowded. It is a house that seems almost contrived for small
+discomforts. This narrow passage outside; the incessant going up and
+down stairs. And there are other things. There is the blankness of our
+London Sundays. What is the good of pretending? They are desolating.
+There's the impossibility too of getting good servants to come into our
+dug-out kitchen. I'm not blind to all these sordid consequences. But all
+the same, God has to be served first. I had to come to this. I felt I
+could not serve God any longer as a bishop in the established church,
+because I did not believe that the established church was serving God.
+I struggled against that conviction--and I struggled against it largely
+for your sakes. But I had to obey my conviction.... I haven't talked
+to you about these things as much as I should have done, but partly at
+least that is due to the fact that my own mind has been changing and
+reconsidering, going forward and going back, and in that fluid state
+it didn't seem fair to tell you things that I might presently find
+mistaken. But now I begin to feel that I have really thought out things,
+and that they are definite enough to tell you...."
+
+He paused and resumed. "A number of things have helped to change the
+opinions in which I grew up and in which you have grown up. There were
+worries at Princhester; I didn't let you know much about them, but there
+were. There was something harsh and cruel in that atmosphere. I saw for
+the first time--it's a lesson I'm still only learning--how harsh and
+greedy rich people and employing people are to poor people and working
+people, and how ineffective our church was to make things better. That
+struck me. There were religious disputes in the diocese too, and they
+shook me. I thought my faith was built on a rock, and I found it was
+built on sand. It was slipping and sliding long before the war. But the
+war brought it down. Before the war such a lot of things in England and
+Europe seemed like a comedy or a farce, a bad joke that one tolerated.
+One tried half consciously, half avoiding the knowledge of what one was
+doing, to keep one's own little circle and life civilized. The war shook
+all those ideas of isolation, all that sort of evasion, down. The world
+is the rightful kingdom of God; we had left its affairs to kings and
+emperors and suchlike impostors, to priests and profit-seekers and
+greedy men. We were genteel condoners. The war has ended that. It
+thrusts into all our lives. It brings death so close--A fortnight ago
+twenty-seven people were killed and injured within a mile of this by
+Zeppelin bombs.... Every one loses some one.... Because through all that
+time men like myself were going through our priestly mummeries, abasing
+ourselves to kings and politicians, when we ought to have been crying
+out: 'No! No! There is no righteousness in the world, there is no right
+government, except it be the kingdom of God.'"
+
+He paused and looked at them. They were all listening to him now. But he
+was still haunted by a dread of preaching in his own family. He dropped
+to the conversational note again.
+
+"You see what I had in mind. I saw I must come out of this, and preach
+the kingdom of God. That was my idea. I don't want to force it upon you,
+but I want you to understand why I acted as I did. But let me come to
+the particular thing that has happened to-day. I did not think when I
+made my final decision to leave the church that it meant such poverty as
+this we are living in--permanently. That is what I want to make clear to
+you. I thought there would be a temporary dip into dinginess, but that
+was all. There was a plan; at the time it seemed a right and reasonable
+plan; for setting up a chapel in London, a very plain and simple
+undenominational chapel, for the simple preaching of the world kingdom
+of God. There was some one who seemed prepared to meet all the immediate
+demands for such a chapel."
+
+"Was it Lady Sunderbund?" asked Clementina.
+
+Scrope was pulled up abruptly. "Yes," he said. "It seemed at first a
+quite hopeful project."
+
+"We'd have hated that," said Clementina, with a glance as if for assent,
+at her mother. "We should all have hated that."
+
+"Anyhow it has fallen through."
+
+"We don't mind that," said Clementina, and Daphne echoed her words.
+
+"I don't see that there is any necessity to import this note
+of--hostility to Lady Sunderbund into this matter." He addressed
+himself rather more definitely to Lady Ella. "She's a woman of a very
+extraordinary character, highly emotional, energetic, generous to an
+extraordinary extent...."
+
+Daphne made a little noise like a comment.
+
+A faint acerbity in her father's voice responded.
+
+"Anyhow you make a mistake if you think that the personality of Lady
+Sunderbund has very much to do with this thing now. Her quality may have
+brought out certain aspects of the situation rather more sharply than
+they might have been brought out under other circumstances, but if
+this chapel enterprise had been suggested by quite a different sort of
+person, by a man, or by a committee, in the end I think I should have
+come to the same conclusion. Leave Lady Sunderbund out. Any chapel was
+impossible. It is just this specialization that has been the trouble
+with religion. It is just this tendency to make it the business of
+a special sort of man, in a special sort of building, on a special
+day--Every man, every building, every day belongs equally to God.
+That is my conviction. I think that the only possible existing sort of
+religions meeting is something after the fashion of the Quaker meeting.
+In that there is no professional religious man at all; not a trace of
+the sacrifices to the ancient gods.... And no room for a professional
+religions man...." He felt his argument did a little escape him. He
+snatched, "That is what I want to make clear to you. God is not a
+speciality; he is a universal interest."
+
+He stopped. Both Daphne and Clementina seemed disposed to say something
+and did not say anything.
+
+Miriam was the first to speak. "Daddy," she said, "I know I'm stupid.
+But are we still Christians?"
+
+"I want you to think for yourselves."
+
+"But I mean," said Miriam, "are we--something like Quakers--a sort of
+very broad Christians?"
+
+"You are what you choose to be. If you want to keep in the church, then
+you must keep in the church. If you feel that the Christian doctrine is
+alive, then it is alive so far as you are concerned."
+
+"But the creeds?" asked Clementina.
+
+He shook his head. "So far as Christianity is defined by its creeds,
+I am not a Christian. If we are going to call any sort of religious
+feeling that has a respect for Jesus, Christianity, then no doubt I am
+a Christian. But so was Mohammed at that rate. Let me tell you what I
+believe. I believe in God, I believe in the immediate presence of God in
+every human life, I believe that our lives have to serve the Kingdom of
+God...."
+
+"That practically is what Mr. Chasters calls 'The Core of Truth in
+Christianity.'"
+
+"You have been reading him?"
+
+"Eleanor lent me the book. But Mr. Chasters keeps his living."
+
+"I am not Chasters," said Scrope stiffly, and then relenting: "What he
+does may be right for him. But I could not do as he does."
+
+Lady Ella had said no word for some time.
+
+"I would be ashamed," she said quietly, "if you had not done as you
+have done. I don't mind--The girls don't mind--all this.... Not when we
+understand--as we do now."
+
+That was the limit of her eloquence.
+
+"Not now that we understand, Daddy," said Clementina, and a faint
+flavour of Lady Sunderbund seemed to pass and vanish.
+
+There was a queer little pause. He stood rather distressed and
+perplexed, because the talk had not gone quite as he had intended it
+to go. It had deteriorated towards personal issues. Phoebe broke the
+awkwardness by jumping up and coming to her father. "Dear Daddy," she
+said, and kissed him.
+
+"We didn't understand properly," said Clementina, in the tone of one who
+explains away much--that had never been spoken....
+
+"Daddy," said Miriam with an inspiration, "may I play something to you
+presently?"
+
+"But the fire!" interjected Lady Ella, disposing of that idea.
+
+"I want you to know, all of you, the faith I have," he said.
+
+Daphne had remained seated at the table.
+
+"Are we never to go to church again?" she asked, as if at a loss.
+
+(17)
+
+
+Scrope went back into his little study. He felt shy and awkward with his
+daughters now. He felt it would be difficult to get back to usualness
+with them. To-night it would be impossible. To-morrow he must come
+down to breakfast as though their talk had never occurred.... In his
+rehearsal of this deliverance during his walk home he had spoken much
+more plainly of his sense of the coming of God to rule the world and end
+the long age of the warring nations and competing traders, and he had
+intended to speak with equal plainness of the passionate subordination
+of the individual life to this great common purpose of God and man, an
+aspect he had scarcely mentioned at all. But in that little room, in the
+presence of those dear familiar people, those great horizons of life
+had vanished. The room with its folding doors had fixed the scale.
+The wallpaper had smothered the Kingdom of God; he had been, he felt,
+domestic; it had been an after-supper talk. He had been put out, too, by
+the mention of Lady Sunderbund and the case of Chasters....
+
+In his study he consoled himself for this diminution of his intention.
+It had taken him five years, he reflected, to get to his present real
+sense of God's presence and to his personal subordination to God's
+purpose. It had been a little absurd, he perceived, to expect these
+girls to leap at once to a complete understanding of the halting hints,
+the allusive indications of the thoughts that now possessed his soul. He
+tried like some maiden speaker to recall exactly what it was he had said
+and what it was he had forgotten to say.... This was merely a beginning,
+merely a beginning.
+
+After the girls had gone to bed, Lady Ella came to him and she was
+glowing and tender; she was in love again as she had not been since the
+shadow had first fallen between them. "I was so glad you spoke to them,"
+she said. "They had been puzzled. But they are dear loyal girls."
+
+He tried to tell her rather more plainly what he felt about the whole
+question of religion in their lives, but eloquence had departed from
+him.
+
+"You see, Ella, life cannot get out of tragedy--and sordid
+tragedy--until we bring about the Kingdom of God. It's no unreality that
+has made me come out of the church."
+
+"No, dear. No," she said soothingly and reassuringly. "With all these
+mere boys going to the most dreadful deaths in the trenches, with death,
+hardship and separation running amok in the world--"
+
+"One has to do something," she agreed.
+
+"I know, dear," he said, "that all this year of doubt and change has
+been a dreadful year for you."
+
+"It was stupid of me," she said, "but I have been so unhappy. It's
+over now--but I was wretched. And there was nothing I could say....
+I prayed.... It isn't the poverty I feared ever, but the disgrace.
+Now--I'm happy. I'm happy again.
+
+"But how far do you come with me?"
+
+"I'm with you."
+
+"But," he said, "you are still a churchwoman?"
+
+"I don't know," she said. "I don't mind."
+
+He stared at her.
+
+"But I thought always that was what hurt you most, my breach with the
+church."
+
+"Things are so different now," she said.
+
+Her heart dissolved within her into tender possessiveness. There came
+flooding into her mind the old phrases of an ancient story: "Whither
+thou goest I will go... thy people shall be my people and thy God my
+God.... The Lord do so to me and more also if aught but death part thee
+and me."
+
+Just those words would Lady Ella have said to her husband now, but she
+was capable of no such rhetoric.
+
+"Whither thou goest," she whispered almost inaudibly, and she could get
+no further. "My dear," she said.
+
+(18)
+
+
+At two o'clock the next morning Scrope was still up. He was sitting over
+the snoring gas fire in his study. He did not want to go to bed. His
+mind was too excited, he knew, for any hope of sleep. In the last twelve
+hours, since he had gone out across the park to his momentous talk with
+Lady Sunderbund, it seemed to him that his life had passed through its
+cardinal crisis and come to its crown and decision. The spiritual voyage
+that had begun five years ago amidst a stormy succession of theological
+nightmares had reached harbour at last. He was established now in the
+sure conviction of God's reality, and of his advent to unify the lives
+of men and to save mankind. Some unobserved process in his mind had
+perfected that conviction, behind the cloudy veil of his vacillations
+and moods. Surely that work was finished now, and the day's experience
+had drawn the veil and discovered God established for ever.
+
+He contrasted this simple and overruling knowledge of God as the supreme
+fact in a practical world with that vague and ineffective subject for
+sentiment who had been the "God" of his Anglican days. Some theologian
+once spoke of God as "the friend behind phenomena"; that Anglican deity
+had been rather a vague flummery behind court and society, wealth,
+"respectability," and the comfortable life. And even while he had lived
+in lipservice to that complaisant compromise, this true God had been
+here, this God he now certainly professed, waiting for his allegiance,
+waiting to take up the kingship of this distraught and bloodstained
+earth. The finding of God is but the stripping of bandages from the
+eyes. Seek and ye shall find....
+
+He whispered four words very softly: "The Kingdom of God!"
+
+He was quite sure he had that now, quite sure.
+
+The Kingdom of God!
+
+That now was the form into which all his life must fall. He recalled his
+vision of the silver sphere and of ten thousand diverse minds about the
+world all making their ways to the same one conclusion. Here at last was
+a king and emperor for mankind for whom one need have neither contempt
+nor resentment; here was an aim for which man might forge the steel
+and wield the scalpel, write and paint and till and teach. Upon this
+conception he must model all his life. Upon this basis he must found
+friendships and co-operations. All the great religions, Christianity,
+Islam, in the days of their power and honesty, had proclaimed the advent
+of this kingdom of God. It had been their common inspiration. A religion
+surrenders when it abandons the promise of its Millennium. He had
+recovered that ancient and immortal hope. All men must achieve it, and
+with their achievement the rule of God begins. He muttered his faith. It
+made it more definite to put it into words and utter it. "It comes.
+It surely comes. To-morrow I begin. I will do no work that goes not
+Godward. Always now it shall be the truth as near as I can put it.
+Always now it shall be the service of the commonweal as well as I can
+do it. I will live for the ending of all false kingship and priestcraft,
+for the eternal growth of the spirit of man...."
+
+He was, he knew clearly, only one common soldier in a great army that
+was finding its way to enlistment round and about the earth. He was not
+alone. While the kings of this world fought for dominion these others
+gathered and found themselves and one another, these others of the faith
+that grows plain, these men who have resolved to end the bloodstained
+chronicles of the Dynasts and the miseries of a world that trades in
+life, for ever. They were many men, speaking divers tongues. He was
+but one who obeyed the worldwide impulse. He could smile at the artless
+vanity that had blinded him to the import of his earlier visions, that
+had made him imagine himself a sole discoverer, a new Prophet, that had
+brought him so near to founding a new sect. Every soldier in the new
+host was a recruiting sergeant according to his opportunity.... And none
+was leader. Only God was leader....
+
+"The achievement of the Kingdom of God;" this was his calling.
+Henceforth this was his business in life....
+
+For a time he indulged in vague dreams of that kingdom of God on earth
+of which he would be one of the makers; it was a dream of a shadowy
+splendour of cities, of great scientific achievements, of a universal
+beauty, of beautiful people living in the light of God, of a splendid
+adventure, thrusting out at last among the stars. But neither his
+natural bent nor his mental training inclined him to mechanical or
+administrative explicitness. Much more was his dream a vision of
+men inwardly ennobled and united in spirit. He saw history growing
+reasonable and life visibly noble as mankind realized the divine aim.
+All the outward peace and order, the joy of physical existence finely
+conceived, the mounting power and widening aim were but the expression
+and verification of the growth of God within. Then we would bear
+children for finer ends than the blood and mud of battlefields. Life
+would tower up like a great flame. By faith we reached forward to that.
+The vision grew more splendid as it grew more metaphorical. And the
+price one paid for that; one gave sham dignities, false honour, a
+Levitical righteousness, immediate peace, one bartered kings and
+churches for God.... He looked at the mean, poverty-struck room, he
+marked the dinginess and tawdriness of its detail and all the sordid
+evidences of ungracious bargaining and grudging service in its
+appointments. For all his life now he would have to live in such rooms.
+He who had been one of the lucky ones.... Well, men were living in
+dug-outs and dying gaily in muddy trenches, they had given limbs and
+lives, eyes and the joy of movement, prosperity and pride, for a smaller
+cause and a feebler assurance than this that he had found....
+
+(19)
+
+
+Presently his thoughts were brought back to his family by the sounds of
+Eleanor's return. He heard her key in the outer door; he heard her move
+about in the hall and then slip lightly up to bed. He did not go out to
+speak to her, and she did not note the light under his door.
+
+He would talk to her later when this discovery of her own emotions no
+longer dominated her mind. He recalled her departing figure and how she
+had walked, touching and looking up to her young mate, and he a little
+leaning to her....
+
+"God bless them and save them," he said....
+
+He thought of her sisters. They had said but little to his clumsy
+explanations. He thought of the years and experience that they must
+needs pass through before they could think the fulness of his present
+thoughts, and so he tempered his disappointment. They were a gallant
+group, he felt. He had to thank Ella and good fortune that so they were.
+There was Clementina with her odd quick combatant sharpness, a harder
+being than Eleanor, but nevertheless a fine-spirited and even more
+independent. There was Miriam, indefatigably kind. Phoebe too had a real
+passion of the intellect and Daphne an innate disposition to service.
+But it was strange how they had taken his proclamation of a conclusive
+breach with the church as though it was a command they must, at least
+outwardly, obey. He had expected them to be more deeply shocked; he had
+thought he would have to argue against objections and convert them to
+his views. Their acquiescence was strange. They were content he should
+think all this great issue out and give his results to them. And his
+wife, well as he knew her, had surprised him. He thought of her words:
+"Whither thou goest--"
+
+He was dissatisfied with this unconditional agreement. Why could not
+his wife meet God as he had met God? Why must Miriam put the fantastic
+question--as though it was not for her to decide: "Are we still
+Christians?" And pursuing this thought, why couldn't Lady Sunderbund set
+up in religion for herself without going about the world seeking for
+a priest and prophet. Were women Undines who must get their souls from
+mortal men? And who was it tempted men to set themselves up as priests?
+It was the wife, the disciple, the lover, who was the last, the most
+fatal pitfall on the way to God.
+
+He began to pray, still sitting as he prayed.
+
+"Oh God!" he prayed. "Thou who has shown thyself to me, let me never
+forget thee again. Save me from forgetfulness. And show thyself to those
+I love; show thyself to all mankind. Use me, O God, use me; but keep my
+soul alive. Save me from the presumption of the trusted servant; save me
+from the vanity of authority....
+
+"And let thy light shine upon all those who are so dear to me.... Save
+them from me. Take their dear loyalty...."
+
+He paused. A flushed, childishly miserable face that stared indignantly
+through glittering tears, rose before his eyes. He forgot that he had
+been addressing God.
+
+"How can I help you, you silly thing?" he said. "I would give my own
+soul to know that God had given his peace to you. I could not do as you
+wished. And I have hurt you!... You hurt yourself.... But all the time
+you would have hampered me and tempted me--and wasted yourself. It was
+impossible.... And yet you are so fine!"
+
+He was struck by another aspect.
+
+"Ella was happy--partly because Lady Sunderbund was hurt and left
+desolated...."
+
+"Both of them are still living upon nothings. Living for nothings. A
+phantom way of living...."
+
+He stared blankly at the humming blue gas jets amidst the incandescent
+asbestos for a space.
+
+"Make them understand," he pleaded, as though he spoke confidentially of
+some desirable and reasonable thing to a friend who sat beside him. "You
+see it is so hard for them until they understand. It is easy enough when
+one understands. Easy--" He reflected for some moments--"It is as if
+they could not exist--except in relationship to other definite people.
+I want them to exist--as now I exist--in relationship to God. Knowing
+God...."
+
+But now he was talking to himself again.
+
+"So far as one can know God," he said presently.
+
+For a while he remained frowning at the fire. Then he bent forward,
+turned out the gas, arose with the air of a man who relinquishes a
+difficult task. "One is limited," he said. "All one's ideas must fall
+within one's limitations. Faith is a sort of tour de force. A feat of
+the imagination. For such things as we are. Naturally--naturally.... One
+perceives it clearly only in rare moments.... That alters nothing...."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:
+
+     LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
+     KIPPS
+     MR. POLLY
+     THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
+     THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
+     ANN VERONICA
+     TONO BUNGAY
+     MARRIAGE
+     BEALBY
+     THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
+     THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
+     THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+     MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
+
+     The following fantastic and imaginative romances:
+     THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
+     THE TIME MACHINE
+     THE WONDERFUL VISIT
+     THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
+     THE SEA LADY
+     THE SLEEPER AWAKES
+     THE FOOD OF THE GODS
+     THE WAR IN THE AIR
+     THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
+     IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
+     THE WORLD SET FREE
+
+     And numerous Short Stories now collected in
+     One Volume under the title of
+     THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
+
+     A Series of books upon Social, Religious and
+     Political questions:
+     ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
+     MANKIND IN THE MAKING
+     FIRST AND LAST THINGS (RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY)
+     NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
+     A MODERN UTOPIA
+     THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
+     AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
+     WHAT IS COMING?
+     WAR AND THE FUTURE
+     GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
+
+     And two little books about children's play, called:
+     FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Soul of a Bishop, by H. G. Wells
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Soul of a Bishop, by H. G. Wells
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+Soul of a Bishop
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+
+
+
+
+THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
+BY
+H. G. WELLS
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+CHAPTER THE FIRST   -  THE DREAM
+CHAPTER THE SECOND  -  THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY
+CHAPTER THE THIRD   -  INSOMNIA
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH  -  THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND
+CHAPTER THE FIFTH   -  THE FIRST VISION
+CHAPTER THE SIXTH   -  EXEGETICAL
+CHAPTER THE SEVENTH -  THE SECOND VISION
+CHAPTER THE EIGHTH  -  THE NEW WORLD
+CHAPTER THE NINTH   -  THE THIRD VISION
+
+
+"Man's true Environment is God"
+J. H. OLDHAM in "The Christian Gospel"
+(Tract of the N. M. R. and H.)
+
+
+
+
+THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST  -  THE DREAM
+
+(1)
+
+
+IT was a scene of bitter disputation. A hawk-nosed young man
+with a pointing finger was prominent. His face worked violently,
+his lips moved very rapidly, but what he said was inaudible.
+
+Behind him the little rufous man with the big eyes twitched at
+his robe and offered suggestions.
+
+And behind these two clustered a great multitude of heated,
+excited, swarthy faces....
+
+The emperor sat on his golden throne in the midst of the
+gathering, commanding silence by gestures, speaking inaudibly to
+them in a tongue the majority did not use, and then prevailing.
+They ceased their interruptions, and the old man, Arius, took up
+the debate. For a time all those impassioned faces were intent
+upon him; they listened as though they sought occasion, and
+suddenly as if by a preconcerted arrangement they were all
+thrusting their fingers into their ears and knitting their brows
+in assumed horror; some were crying aloud and making as if to
+fly. Some indeed tucked up their garments and fled. They spread
+out into a pattern. They were like the little monks who run from
+St. Jerome's lion in the picture by Carpaccio. Then one zealot
+rushed forward and smote the old man heavily upon the mouth....
+
+The hall seemed to grow vaster and vaster, the disputing,
+infuriated figures multiplied to an innumerable assembly, they
+drove about like snowflakes in a gale, they whirled in
+argumentative couples, they spun in eddies of contradiction, they
+made extraordinary patterns, and then amidst the cloudy darkness
+of the unfathomable dome above them there appeared and increased
+a radiant triangle in which shone an eye. The eye and the
+triangle filled the heavens, sent out flickering rays, glowed to
+a blinding incandescence, seemed to be speaking words of thunder
+that were nevertheless inaudible. It was as if that thunder
+filled the heavens, it was as if it were nothing but the beating
+artery in the sleeper's ear. The attention strained to hear and
+comprehend, and on the very verge of comprehension snapped like a
+fiddle-string.
+
+"Nicoea!"
+
+The word remained like a little ash after a flare.
+
+The sleeper had awakened and lay very still, oppressed by a
+sense of intellectual effort that had survived the dream in which
+it had arisen. Was it so that things had happened? The slumber-
+shadowed mind, moving obscurely, could not determine whether it
+was so or not. Had they indeed behaved in this manner when the
+great mystery was established? Who said they stopped their ears
+with their fingers and fled, shouting with horror? Shouting? Was
+it Eusebius or Athanasius? Or Sozomen.... Some letter or apology
+by Athanasius?... And surely it was impossible that the Trinity
+could have appeared visibly as a triangle and an eye. Above such
+an assembly.
+
+That was mere dreaming, of course. Was it dreaming after
+Raphael? After Raphael? The drowsy mind wandered into a side
+issue. Was the picture that had suggested this dream the one in
+the Vatican where all the Fathers of the Church are shown
+disputing together? But there surely God and the Son themselves
+were painted with a symbol--some symbol--also? But was that
+disputation about the Trinity at all? Wasn't it rather about a
+chalice and a dove? Of course it was a chalice and a dove! Then
+where did one see the triangle and the eye? And men disputing?
+Some such picture there was....
+
+What a lot of disputing there had been! What endless disputing!
+Which had gone on. Until last night. When this very disagreeable
+young man with the hawk nose and the pointing finger had tackled
+one when one was sorely fagged, and disputed; disputed. Rebuked
+and disputed. "Answer me this," he had said.... And still one's
+poor brains disputed and would not rest.... About the Trinity....
+
+The brain upon the pillow was now wearily awake. It was at once
+hopelessly awake and active and hopelessly unprogressive. It was
+like some floating stick that had got caught in an eddy in a
+river, going round and round and round. And round. Eternally--
+eternally--eternally begotten.
+
+"But what possible meaning do you attach then to such a phrase
+as eternally begotten?"
+
+The brain upon the pillow stared hopelessly at this question,
+without an answer, without an escape. The three repetitions spun
+round and round, became a swiftly revolving triangle, like some
+electric sign that had got beyond control, in the midst of which
+stared an unwinking and resentful eye.
+
+(2)
+
+
+Every one knows that expedient of the sleepless, the counting
+of sheep.
+
+You lie quite still, you breathe regularly, you imagine sheep
+jumping over a gate, one after another, you count them quietly
+and slowly until you count yourself off through a fading string
+of phantom numbers to number Nod....
+
+But sheep, alas! suggest an episcopal crook.
+
+And presently a black sheep had got into the succession and was
+struggling violently with the crook about its leg, a hawk-nosed
+black sheep full of reproof, with disordered hair and a pointing
+finger. A young man with a most disagreeable voice.
+
+At which the other sheep took heart and, deserting the numbered
+succession, came and sat about the fire in a big drawing-room and
+argued also. In particular there was Lady Sunderbund, a pretty
+fragile tall woman in the corner, richly jewelled, who sat with
+her pretty eyes watching and her lips compressed. What had she
+thought of it? She had said very little.
+
+It is an unusual thing for a mixed gathering of this sort to
+argue about the Trinity. Simply because a tired bishop had fallen
+into their party. It was not fair to him to pretend that the
+atmosphere was a liberal and inquiring one, when the young man
+who had sat still and dormant by the table was in reality a keen
+and bitter Irish Roman Catholic. Then the question, a
+question-begging question, was put quite suddenly, without
+preparation or prelude, by surprise. "Why, Bishop, was the
+Spermaticos Logos identified with the Second and not the Third
+Person of the Trinity?"
+
+It was indiscreet, it was silly, to turn upon the speaker and
+affect an air of disengagement and modernity and to say: "Ah,
+that indeed is the unfortunate aspect of the whole affair."
+
+Whereupon the fierce young man had exploded with:
+"To that, is it, that you Anglicans have come?"
+
+The whole gathering had given itself up to the disputation,
+Lady Sunderbund, an actress, a dancer--though she, it is true,
+did not say very much--a novelist, a mechanical expert of some
+sort, a railway peer, geniuses, hairy and Celtic, people of no
+clearly definable position, but all quite unequal to the task of
+maintaining that air of reverent vagueness, that tenderness of
+touch, which is by all Anglican standards imperative in so deep,
+so mysterious, and, nowadays, in mixed society at least, so
+infrequent a discussion.
+
+It was like animals breaking down a fence about some sacred
+spot. Within a couple of minutes the affair had become highly
+improper. They had raised their voices, they had spoken with the
+utmost familiarity of almost unspeakable things. There had been
+even attempts at epigram. Athanasian epigrams. Bent the novelist
+had doubted if originally there had been a Third Person in the
+Trinity at all. He suggested a reaction from a too-Manichaean
+dualism at some date after the time of St. John's Gospel. He
+maintained obstinately that that Gospel was dualistic.
+
+The unpleasant quality of the talk was far more manifest in the
+retrospect than it had been at the time. It had seemed then bold
+and strange, but not impossible; now in the cold darkness it
+seemed sacrilegious. And the bishop's share, which was indeed
+only the weak yielding of a tired man to an atmosphere he had
+misjudged, became a disgraceful display of levity and bad faith.
+They had baited him. Some one had said that nowadays every one
+was an Arian, knowingly or unknowingly. They had not concealed
+their conviction that the bishop did not really believe in the
+Creeds he uttered.
+
+And that unfortunate first admission stuck terribly in his
+throat.
+
+Oh! Why had he made it?
+
+(3)
+
+
+Sleep had gone.
+
+The awakened sleeper groaned, sat up in the darkness, and felt
+gropingly in this unaccustomed bed and bedroom first for the edge
+of the bed and then for the electric light that was possibly on
+the little bedside table.
+
+The searching hand touched something. A water-bottle. The hand
+resumed its exploration. Here was something metallic and smooth,
+a stem. Either above or below there must be a switch....
+
+The switch was found, grasped, and turned.
+
+The darkness fled.
+
+In a mirror the sleeper saw the reflection of his face and a
+corner of the bed in which he lay. The lamp had a tilted shade
+that threw a slanting bar of shadow across the field of
+reflection, lighting a right-angled triangle very brightly and
+leaving the rest obscure. The bed was a very great one, a bed for
+the Anakim. It had a canopy with yellow silk curtains, surmounted
+by a gilded crown of carved wood. Between the curtains was a
+man's face, clean-shaven, pale, with disordered brown hair and
+weary, pale-blue eyes. He was clad in purple pyjamas, and the
+hand that now ran its fingers through the brown hair was long and
+lean and shapely.
+
+Beside the bed was a convenient little table bearing the light,
+a water-bottle and glass, a bunch of keys, a congested pocket-
+book, a gold-banded fountain pen, and a gold watch that indicated
+a quarter past three. On the lower edge of the picture in the
+mirror appeared the back of a gilt chair, over which a garment of
+peculiar construction had been carelessly thrown. It was in the
+form of that sleeveless cassock of purple, opening at the side,
+whose lower flap is called a bishop's apron; the corner of the
+frogged coat showed behind the chair-back, and the sash lay
+crumpled on the floor. Black doeskin breeches, still warmly lined
+with their pants, lay where they had been thrust off at the
+corner of the bed, partly covering black hose and silver-buckled
+shoes.
+
+For a moment the tired gaze of the man in the bed rested upon
+these evidences of his episcopal dignity. Then he turned from
+them to the watch at the bedside.
+
+He groaned helplessly.
+
+(4)
+
+
+These country doctors were no good. There wasn't a physician in
+the diocese. He must go to London.
+
+He looked into the weary eyes of his reflection and said, as
+one makes a reassuring promise, "London."
+
+He was being worried. He was being intolerably worried, and he
+was ill and unable to sustain his positions. This doubt, this
+sudden discovery of controversial unsoundness, was only one
+aspect of his general neurasthenia. It had been creeping into his
+mind since the "Light Unden the Altar" controversy. Now suddenly
+it had leapt upon him from his own unwary lips.
+
+The immediate trouble arose from his loyalty. He had followed
+the King's example; he had become a total abstainer and, in
+addition, on his own account he had ceased to smoke. And his
+digestion, which Princhester had first made sensitive, was
+deranged. He was suffering chemically, suffering one of those
+nameless sequences of maladjustments that still defy our ordinary
+medical science. It was afflicting him with a general malaise, it
+was affecting his energy, his temper, all the balance and comfort
+of his nerves. All day he was weary; all night he was wakeful. He
+was estranged from his body. He was distressed by a sense of
+detachment from the things about him, by a curious intimation of
+unreality in everything he experienced. And with that went this
+levity of conscience, a heaviness of soul and a levity of
+conscience, that could make him talk as though the Creeds did not
+matter--as though nothing mattered....
+
+If only he could smoke!
+
+He was persuaded that a couple of Egyptian cigarettes, or three
+at the outside, a day, would do wonders in restoring his nervous
+calm. That, and just a weak whisky and soda at lunch and dinner.
+Suppose now--!
+
+His conscience, his sense of honour, deserted him. Latterly he
+had had several of these conscience-blanks; it was only when they
+were over that he realized that they had occurred.
+
+One might smoke up the chimney, he reflected. But he had no
+cigarettes! Perhaps if he were to slip downstairs....
+
+Why had he given up smoking?
+
+He groaned aloud. He and his reflection eyed one another in
+mutual despair.
+
+There came before his memory the image of a boy's face, a
+swarthy little boy, grinning, grinning with a horrible
+knowingness and pointing his finger--an accusing finger. It had
+been the most exasperating, humiliating, and shameful incident in
+the bishop's career. It was the afternoon for his fortnightly
+address to the Shop-girls' Church Association, and he had been
+seized with a panic fear, entirely irrational and unjustifiable,
+that he would not be able to deliver the address. The fear had
+arisen after lunch, had gripped his mind, and then as now had
+come the thought, "If only I could smoke!" And he had smoked. It
+seemed better to break a vow than fail the Association. He had
+fallen to the temptation with a completeness that now filled him
+with shame and horror. He had stalked Dunk, his valet-butler, out
+of the dining-room, had affected to need a book from the
+book-case
+beyond the sideboard, had gone insincerely to the sideboard
+humming "From Greenland's icy mountains," and then, glancing over
+his shoulder, had stolen one of his own cigarettes, one of the
+fatter sort. With this and his bedroom matches he had gone off to
+the bottom of the garden among the laurels, looked everywhere
+except above the wall to be sure that he was alone, and at last
+lit up, only as he raised his eyes in gratitude for the first
+blissful inhalation to discover that dreadful little boy peeping
+at him from the crotch in the yew-tree in the next garden. As
+though God had sent him to be a witness!
+
+Their eyes had met. The bishop recalled with an agonized
+distinctness every moment, every error, of that shameful
+encounter. He had been too surprised to conceal the state of
+affairs from the pitiless scrutiny of those youthful eyes. He had
+instantly made as if to put the cigarette behind his back, and
+then as frankly dropped it....
+
+His soul would not be more naked at the resurrection. The
+little boy had stared, realized the state of affairs slowly but
+surely, pointed his finger....
+
+Never had two human beings understood each other more
+completely.
+
+A dirty little boy! Capable no doubt of a thousand kindred
+scoundrelisms.
+
+It seemed ages before the conscience-stricken bishop could tear
+himself from the spot and walk back, with such a pretence of
+dignity as he could muster, to the house.
+
+And instead of the discourse he had prepared for the
+Shop-girls' Church Association, he had preached on temptation and
+falling, and how he knew they had all fallen, and how he
+understood and could sympathize with the bitterness of a secret
+shame, a moving but unsuitable discourse that had already been
+subjected to misconstruction and severe reproof in the local
+press of Princhester.
+
+But the haunting thing in the bishop's memory was the face and
+gesture of the little boy. That grubby little finger stabbed him
+to the heart.
+
+"Oh, God!" he groaned. "The meanness of it! How did I bring
+myself--?"
+
+He turned out the light convulsively, and rolled over in the
+bed, making a sort of cocoon of himself. He bored his head into
+the pillow and groaned, and then struggled impatiently to throw
+the bed-clothes off himself. Then he sat up and talked aloud.
+
+"I must go to Brighton-Pomfrey," he said. "And get a medical
+dispensation. If I do not smoke--"
+
+He paused for a long time.
+
+Then his voice sounded again in the darkness, speaking quietly,
+speaking with a note almost of satisfaction.
+
+"I shall go mad. I must smoke or I shall go mad."
+
+For a long time he sat up in the great bed with his arms about
+his knees.
+
+(5)
+
+
+Fearful things came to him; things at once dreadfully
+blasphemous and entirely weak-minded.
+
+The triangle and the eye became almost visible upon the black
+background of night. They were very angry. They were spinning
+round and round faster and faster. Because he was a bishop and
+because really he did not believe fully and completely in the
+Trinity. At one and the same time he did not believe in the
+Trinity and was terrified by the anger of the Trinity at his
+unbelief.... He was afraid. He was aghast.... And oh! he was
+weary....
+
+He rubbed his eyes.
+
+"If I could have a cup of tea!" he said.
+
+Then he perceived with surprise that he had not thought of
+praying. What should he say? To what could he pray?
+
+He tried not to think of that whizzing Triangle, that seemed
+now to be nailed like a Catherine wheel to the very centre of his
+forehead, and yet at the same time to be at the apex of the
+universe. Against that--for protection against that--he was
+praying. It was by a great effort that at last he pronounced the
+words:
+
+"Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord ...."
+
+Presently be had turned up his light, and was prowling about
+the room. The clear inky dinginess that comes before the raw dawn
+of a spring morning, found his white face at the window, looking
+out upon the great terrace and the park.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND  -  THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY
+
+(1)
+
+
+IT was only in the last few years that the bishop had
+experienced these nervous and mental crises. He was a belated
+doubter. Whatever questionings had marked his intellectual
+adolescence had either been very slight or had been too
+adequately answered to leave any serious scars upon his
+convictions.
+
+And even now he felt that he was afflicted physically rather
+than mentally, that some protective padding of nerve-sheath or
+brain-case had worn thin and weak, and left him a prey to strange
+disturbances, rather than that any new process of thought was
+eating into his mind. These doubts in his mind were still not
+really doubts; they were rather alien and, for the first time,
+uncontrolled movements of his intelligence. He had had a
+sheltered upbringing; he was the well-connected son of a
+comfortable rectory, the only son and sole survivor of a family
+of three; he had been carefully instructed and he had been a
+willing learner; it had been easy and natural to take many things
+for granted. It had been very easy and pleasant for him to take
+the world as he found it and God as he found Him. Indeed for all
+his years up to manhood he had been able to take life exactly as
+in his infancy he took his carefully warmed and prepared bottle
+--unquestioningly and beneficially.
+
+And indeed that has been the way with most bishops since
+bishops began.
+
+It is a busy continuous process that turns boys into bishops,
+and it will stand few jars or discords. The student of
+ecclesiastical biography will find that an early vocation has in
+every age been almost universal among them; few are there among
+these lives that do not display the incipient bishop from the
+tenderest years. Bishop How of Wakefield composed hymns before he
+was eleven, and Archbishop Benson when scarcely older possessed a
+little oratory in which he conducted services and--a pleasant
+touch of the more secular boy--which he protected from a too
+inquisitive sister by means of a booby trap. It is rare that
+those marked for episcopal dignities go so far into the outer
+world as Archbishop Lang of York, who began as a barrister. This
+early predestination has always been the common episcopal
+experience. Archbishop Benson's early attempts at religious
+services remind one both of St. Thomas a Becket, the "boy
+bishop," and those early ceremonies of St. Athanasius which were
+observed and inquired upon by the good bishop Alexander. (For
+though still a tender infant, St. Athanasius with perfect
+correctness and validity was baptizing a number of his innocent
+playmates, and the bishop who "had paused to contemplate the
+sports of the child remained to confirm the zeal of the
+missionary.") And as with the bishop of the past, so with the
+bishop of the future; the Rev. H. J. Campbell, in his story of
+his soul's pilgrimage, has given us a pleasant picture of himself
+as a child stealing out into the woods to build himself a little
+altar.
+
+Such minds as these, settled as it were from the outset, are
+either incapable of real scepticism or become sceptical only
+after catastrophic changes. They understand the sceptical mind
+with difficulty, and their beliefs are regarded by the sceptical
+mind with incredulity. They have determined their forms of belief
+before their years of discretion, and once those forms are
+determined they are not very easily changed. Within the shell it
+has adopted the intelligence may be active and lively enough, may
+indeed be extraordinarily active and lively, but only within the
+shell.
+
+There is an entire difference in the mental quality of those
+who are converts to a faith and those who are brought up in it.
+The former know it from outside as well as from within. They know
+not only that it is, but also that it is not. The latter have a
+confidence in their creed that is one with their apprehension of
+sky or air or gravitation. It is a primary mental structure, and
+they not only do not doubt but they doubt the good faith of those
+who do. They think that the Atheist and Agnostic really believe
+but are impelled by a mysterious obstinacy to deny. So it had
+been with the Bishop of Princhester; not of cunning or design but
+in simple good faith he had accepted all the inherited assurances
+of his native rectory, and held by Church, Crown, Empire,
+decorum, respectability, solvency--and compulsory Greek at the
+Little Go--as his father had done before him. If in his
+undergraduate days he had said a thing or two in the modern vein,
+affected the socialism of William Morris and learnt some
+Swinburne by heart, it was out of a conscious wildness. He did
+not wish to be a prig. He had taken a far more genuine interest
+in the artistry of ritual.
+
+Through all the time of his incumbency of the church of the
+Holy Innocents, St. John's Wood, and of his career as the bishop
+suffragan of Pinner, he had never faltered from his profound
+confidence in those standards of his home. He had been kind,
+popular, and endlessly active. His undergraduate socialism had
+expanded simply and sincerely into a theory of administrative
+philanthropy. He knew the Webbs. He was as successful with
+working-class audiences as with fashionable congregations. His
+home life with Lady Ella (she was the daughter of the fifth Earl
+of Birkenholme) and his five little girls was simple, beautiful,
+and happy as few homes are in these days of confusion. Until he
+became Bishop of Princhester--he followed Hood, the first
+bishop, as the reign of his Majesty King Edward the Peacemaker
+drew to its close--no anticipation of his coming distress fell
+across his path.
+
+(2)
+
+
+He came to Princhester an innocent and trustful man. The home
+life at the old rectory of Otteringham was still his standard of
+truth and reality. London had not disillusioned him. It was a
+strange waste of people, it made him feel like a missionary in
+infidel parts, but it was a kindly waste. It was neither
+antagonistic nor malicious. He had always felt there that if he
+searched his Londoner to the bottom, he would find the completest
+recognition of the old rectory and all its data and implications.
+
+But Princhester was different.
+
+Princhester made one think that recently there had been a
+second and much more serious Fall.
+
+Princhester was industrial and unashamed. It was a countryside
+savagely invaded by forges and mine shafts and gaunt black
+things. It was scarred and impeded and discoloured. Even before
+that invasion, when the heather was not in flower it must have
+been a black country. Its people were dour uncandid individuals,
+who slanted their heads and knitted their brows to look at you.
+Occasionally one saw woods brown and blistered by the gases from
+chemical works. Here and there remained old rectories, closely
+reminiscent of the dear old home at Otteringham, jostled and
+elbowed and overshadowed by horrible iron cylinders belching
+smoke and flame. The fine old abbey church of Princhester, which
+was the cathedral of the new diocese, looked when first he saw it
+like a lady Abbess who had taken to drink and slept in a coal
+truck. She minced apologetically upon the market-place; the
+parvenu Town Hall patronized and protected her as if she were a
+poor relation....
+
+The old aristocracy of the countryside was unpicturesquely
+decayed. The branch of the Walshinghams, Lady Ella's cousins, who
+lived near Pringle, was poor, proud and ignoble. And extremely
+unpopular. The rich people of the country were self-made and
+inclined to nonconformity, the working-people were not strictly
+speaking a "poor," they were highly paid, badly housed, and
+deeply resentful. They went in vast droves to football matches,
+and did not care a rap if it rained. The prevailing wind was
+sarcastic. To come here from London was to come from atmospheric
+blue-greys to ashen-greys, from smoke and soft smut to grime and
+black grimness.
+
+The bishop had been charmed by the historical associations of
+Princhester when first the see was put before his mind. His
+realization of his diocese was a profound shock.
+
+Only one hint had he had of what was coming. He had met during
+his season of congratulations Lord Gatling dining unusually at
+the Athenaeum. Lord Gatling and he did not talk frequently, but
+on this occasion the great racing peer came over to him. "You
+will feel like a cherub in a stokehole," Lord Gatling had
+said....
+
+"They used to heave lumps of slag at old Hood's gaiters," said
+Lord Gatling.
+
+"In London a bishop's a lord and a lark and nobody minds him,"
+said Lord Gatling, "but Princhester is different. It isn't used
+to bishops.... Well,--I hope you'll get to like 'em."
+
+(3)
+
+
+Trouble began with a fearful row about the position of the
+bishop's palace. Hood had always evaded this question, and a
+number of strong-willed self-made men of wealth and influence,
+full of local patriotism and that competitive spirit which has
+made England what it is, already intensely irritated by Hood's
+prevarications, were resolved to pin his successor to an
+immediate decision. Of this the new bishop was unaware. Mindful
+of a bishop's constant need to travel, he was disposed to seek a
+home within easy reach of Pringle Junction, from which nearly
+every point in the diocese could be simply and easily reached.
+This fell in with Lady Ella's liking for the rare rural quiet of
+the Kibe valley and the neighbourhood of her cousins the
+Walshinghams. Unhappily it did not fall in with the inflexible
+resolution of each and every one of the six leading towns of the
+see to put up, own, obtrude, boast, and swagger about the biggest
+and showiest thing in episcopal palaces in all industrial
+England, and the new bishop had already taken a short lease and
+gone some way towards the acquisition of Ganford House, two miles
+from Pringle, before he realized the strength and fury of these
+local ambitions.
+
+At first the magnates and influences seemed to be fighting only
+among themselves, and he was so ill-advised as to broach the
+Ganford House project as a compromise that would glorify no one
+unfairly, and leave the erection of an episcopal palace for some
+future date when he perhaps would have the good fortune to have
+passed to "where beyond these voices there is peace," forgetting
+altogether among other oversights the importance of architects
+and builders in local affairs. His proposal seemed for a time to
+concentrate the rich passions of the whole countryside upon
+himself and his wife.
+
+Because they did not leave Lady Ella alone. The Walshinghams
+were already unpopular in their county on account of a poverty
+and shyness that made them seem "stuck up" to successful captains
+of industry only too ready with the hand of friendship, the iron
+grip indeed of friendship, consciously hospitable and eager for
+admission and endorsements. And Princhester in particular was
+under the sway of that enterprising weekly, The White Blackbird,
+which was illustrated by, which indeed monopolized the gifts of,
+that brilliant young caricaturist "The Snicker."
+
+It had seemed natural for Lady Ella to acquiesce in the
+proposals of the leading Princhester photographer. She had always
+helped where she could in her husband's public work, and she had
+been popular upon her own merits in Wealdstone. The portrait was
+abominable enough in itself; it dwelt on her chin, doubled her
+age, and denied her gentleness, but it was a mere starting-point
+for the subtle extravagance of The Snicker's poisonous gift....
+The thing came upon the bishop suddenly from the book-stall at
+Pringle Junction.
+
+He kept it carefully from Lady Ella.... It was only later that
+he found that a copy of The White Blackbird had been sent to her,
+and that she was keeping the horror from him. It was in her vein
+that she should reproach herself for being a vulnerable side to
+him.
+
+Even when the bishop capitulated in favour of Princhester, that
+decision only opened a fresh trouble for him. Princhester wanted
+the palace to be a palace; it wanted to combine all the best
+points of Lambeth and Fulham with the marble splendours of a good
+modern bank. The bishop's architectural tastes, on the other
+hand, were rationalistic. He was all for building a useful palace
+in undertones, with a green slate roof and long horizontal lines.
+What he wanted more than anything else was a quite remote wing
+with a lot of bright little bedrooms and a sitting-room and so
+on, complete in itself, examination hall and everything, with a
+long intricate connecting passage and several doors, to prevent
+the ordination candidates straying all over the place and getting
+into the talk and the tea. But the diocese wanted a proud archway
+--and turrets, and did not care a rap if the ordination
+candidates slept about on the carpets in the bishop's bedroom.
+Ordination candidates were quite outside the sphere of its
+imagination.
+
+And he disappointed Princhester with his equipage. Princhester
+had a feeling that it deserved more for coming over to the church
+from nonconformity as it was doing. It wanted a bishop in a mitre
+and a gilt coach. It wanted a pastoral crook. It wanted something
+to go with its mace and its mayor. And (obsessed by The Snicker)
+it wanted less of Lady Ella. The cruelty and unreason of these
+attacks upon his wife distressed the bishop beyond measure, and
+baffled him hopelessly. He could not see any means of checking
+them nor of defending or justifying her against them.
+
+The palace was awaiting its tenant, but the controversies and
+bitternesses were still swinging and swaying and developing when
+King George was being crowned. Close upon that event came a wave
+of social discontent, the great railway strike, a curious sense
+of social and political instability, and the first beginnings of
+the bishop's ill health.
+
+(4)
+
+
+There came a day of exceptional fatigue and significance.
+
+The industrial trouble was a very real distress to the bishop.
+He had a firm belief that it is a function of the church to act
+as mediator between employer and employed. It was a common saying
+of his that the aim of socialism--the right sort of socialism
+--was to Christianize employment. Regardless of suspicion on
+either hand, regardless of very distinct hints that he should
+"mind his own business," he exerted himself in a search for
+methods of reconciliation. He sought out every one who seemed
+likely to be influential on either side, and did his utmost to
+discover the conditions of a settlement. As far as possible and
+with the help of a not very efficient chaplain he tried to
+combine such interviews with his more normal visiting.
+
+At times, and this was particularly the case on this day, he
+seemed to be discovering nothing but the incurable perversity and
+militancy of human nature. It was a day under an east wind, when
+a steely-blue sky full of colourless light filled a stiff-necked
+world with whitish high lights and inky shadows. These bright
+harsh days of barometric high pressure in England rouse and
+thwart every expectation of the happiness of spring. And as the
+bishop drove through the afternoon in a hired fly along a rutted
+road of slag between fields that were bitterly wired against the
+Sunday trespasser, he fell into a despondent meditation upon the
+political and social outlook.
+
+His thoughts were of a sort not uncommon in those days. The
+world was strangely restless. Since the passing of Victoria the
+Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national
+life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had
+been lifted from people's ideas, and as if at once they had begun
+to blow about anyhow. Not that Queen Victoria had really been a
+paper-weight or any weight at all, but it happened that she died
+as an epoch closed, an epoch of tremendous stabilities. Her son,
+already elderly, had followed as the selvedge follows the piece,
+he had passed and left the new age stripped bare. In nearly every
+department of economic and social life now there was upheaval,
+and it was an upheaval very different in character from the
+radicalism and liberalism of the Victorian days. There were not
+only doubt and denial, but now there were also impatience and
+unreason. People argued less and acted quicker. There was a pride
+in rebellion for its own sake, an indiscipline and disposition to
+sporadic violence that made it extremely hard to negotiate any
+reconciliations or compromises. Behind every extremist it seemed
+stood a further extremist prepared to go one better....
+
+The bishop had spent most of the morning with one of the big
+employers, a tall dark man, lean and nervous, and obviously tired
+and worried by the struggle. He did not conceal his opinion that
+the church was meddling with matters quite outside its sphere.
+Never had it been conveyed to the bishop before how remote a rich
+and established Englishman could consider the church from
+reality.
+
+"You've got no hold on them," he said. "It isn't your sphere."
+
+And again: "They'll listen to you--if you speak well. But
+they don't believe you know anything about it, and they don't
+trust your good intentions. They won't mind a bit what you say
+unless you drop something they can use against us."
+
+The bishop tried a few phrases. He thought there might be
+something in co-operation, in profit-sharing, in some more
+permanent relationship between the business and the employee.
+
+"There isn't," said the employer compactly. "It's just the
+malice of being inferior against the man in control. It's just
+the spirit of insubordination and boredom with duty. This
+trouble's as old as the Devil."
+
+"But that is exactly the business of the church," said the
+bishop brightly, "to reconcile men to their duty."
+
+"By chanting the Athanasian creed at 'em, I suppose," said the
+big employer, betraying the sneer he had been hiding hitherto.
+
+"This thing is a fight," said the big employer, carrying on
+before the bishop could reply. "Religion had better get out of
+the streets until this thing is over. The men won't listen to
+reason. They don't mean to. They're bit by Syndicalism. They're
+setting out, I tell you, to be unreasonable and impossible. It
+isn't an argument; it's a fight. They don't want to make friends
+with the employer. They want to make an end to the employer.
+Whatever we give them they'll take and press us for more.
+Directly we make terms with the leaders the men go behind it....
+It's a raid on the whole system. They don't mean to work the
+system--anyhow. I'm the capitalist, and the capitalist has to
+go. I'm to be bundled out of my works, and some--some "--he
+seemed to be rejecting unsuitable words--" confounded politician
+put in. Much good it would do them. But before that happens I'm
+going to fight. You would."
+
+The bishop walked to the window and stood staring at the
+brilliant spring bulbs in the big employer's garden, and at a
+long vista of newly-mown lawn under great shapely trees just
+budding into green.
+
+"I can't admit," he said, "that these troubles lie outside the
+sphere of the church."
+
+The employer came and stood beside him. He felt he was being a
+little hard on the bishop, but he could not see any way of making
+things easier.
+
+"One doesn't want Sacred Things," he tried, "in a scrap like
+this.
+
+"We've got to mend things or end things," continued the big
+employer. "Nothing goes on for ever. Things can't last as they
+are going on now...."
+
+Then he went on abruptly to something that for a time he had
+been keeping back.
+
+"Of course just at present the church may do a confounded lot
+of harm. Some of you clerical gentlemen are rather too fond of
+talking socialism and even preaching socialism. Don't think I
+want to be overcritical. I admit there's no end of things to be
+said for a proper sort of socialism, Ruskin, and all that. We're
+all Socialists nowadays. Ideals--excellent. But--it gets
+misunderstood. It gives the men a sense of moral support. It
+makes them fancy that they are It. Encourages them to forget
+duties and set up preposterous claims. Class war and all that
+sort of thing. You gentlemen of the clergy don't quite realize
+that socialism may begin with Ruskin and end with Karl Marx. And
+that from the Class War to the Commune is just one step."
+
+(5)
+
+
+From this conversation the bishop had made his way to the
+vicarage of Mogham Banks. The vicar of Mogham Banks was a
+sacerdotal socialist of the most advanced type, with the
+reputation of being closely in touch with the labour extremists.
+He was a man addicted to banners, prohibited ornaments, special
+services at unusual hours, and processions in the streets. His
+taste in chasubles was loud, he gardened in a cassock and, it was
+said, he slept in his biretta; he certainly slept in a hair
+shirt, and he littered his church with flowers, candles, side
+altars, confessional boxes, requests for prayers for the
+departed, and the like. There had already been two Kensitite
+demonstrations at his services, and altogether he was a source of
+considerable anxiety to the bishop. The bishop did his best not
+to know too exactly what was going on at Mogham Banks. Sooner or
+later he felt he would be forced to do something--and the
+longer he could put that off the better. But the Rev. Morrice
+Deans had promised to get together three or four prominent labour
+leaders for tea and a frank talk, and the opportunity was one not
+to be missed. So the bishop, after a hasty and not too digestible
+lunch in the refreshment room at Pringle, was now in a fly that
+smelt of straw and suggested infectious hospital patients, on his
+way through the industry-scarred countryside to this second
+conversation.
+
+The countryside had never seemed so scarred to him as it did
+that day.
+
+It was probably the bright hard spring sunshine that emphasized
+the contrast between that dear England of hedges and homes and
+the south-west wind in which his imagination lived, and the crude
+presences of a mechanical age. Never before had the cuttings and
+heapings, the smashing down of trees, the obtrusion of corrugated
+iron and tar, the belchings of smoke and the haste, seemed so
+harsh and disregardful of all the bishop's world. Across the
+fields a line of gaunt iron standards, abominably designed,
+carried an electric cable to some unknown end. The curve of the
+hill made them seem a little out of the straight, as if they
+hurried and bent forward furtively.
+
+"Where are they going?" asked the bishop, leaning forward to
+look out of the window of the fly, and then: "Where is it all
+going?"
+
+And presently the road was under repair, and was being done at
+a great pace with a huge steam-roller, mechanically smashed
+granite, and kettles of stinking stuff, asphalt or something of
+that sort, that looked and smelt like Milton's hell. Beyond, a
+gaunt hoarding advertised extensively the Princhester Music Hall,
+a mean beastly place that corrupted boys and girls; and also it
+clamoured of tyres and potted meats....
+
+The afternoon's conference gave him no reassuring answer to his
+question, "Where is it all going?"
+
+The afternoon's conference did no more than intensify the new
+and strange sense of alienation from the world that the morning's
+talk had evoked.
+
+The three labour extremists that Morrice Deans had assembled
+obviously liked the bishop and found him picturesque, and were
+not above a certain snobbish gratification at the purple-trimmed
+company they were in, but it was clear that they regarded his
+intervention in the great dispute as if it were a feeble waving
+from the bank across the waters of a great river.
+
+"There's an incurable misunderstanding between the modern
+employer and the modern employed," the chief labour spokesman
+said, speaking in a broad accent that completely hid from him and
+the bishop and every one the fact that he was by far the
+best-read man of the party. "Disraeli called them the Two
+Nations, but that was long ago. Now it's a case of two species.
+Machinery has made them into different species. The employer
+lives away from his work-people, marries a wife foreign, out of a
+county family or suchlike, trains his children from their very
+birth in a different manner. Why, the growth curve is different
+for the two species. They haven't even a common speech between
+them. One looks east and the other looks west. How can you expect
+them to agree? Of course they won't agree. We've got to fight it
+out. They say we're their slaves for ever. Have you ever read
+Lady Bell's 'At the Works'? A well-intentioned woman, but she
+gives the whole thing away. We say, No! It's our sort and not
+your sort. We'll do without you. We'll get a little more
+education and then we'll do without you. We're pressing for all
+we can get, and when we've got that we'll take breath and press
+for more. We're the Morlocks. Coming up. It isn't our fault that
+we've differentiated."
+
+"But you haven't understood the drift of Christianity," said
+the bishop. "It's just to assert that men are One community and
+not two."
+
+"There's not much of that in the Creeds," said a second labour
+leader who was a rationalist. "There's not much of that in the
+services of the church."
+
+The vicar spoke before his bishop, and indeed he had plenty of
+time to speak before his bishop. "Because you will not set
+yourselves to understand the symbolism of her ritual," he said.
+
+"If the church chooses to speak in riddles," said the
+rationalist.
+
+"Symbols," said Morrice Deans, "need not be riddles," and for a
+time the talk eddied about this minor issue and the chief labour
+spokesman and the bishop looked at one another. The vicar
+instanced and explained certain apparently insignificant
+observances, his antagonist was contemptuously polite to these
+explanations. "That's all very pratty," he said....
+
+The bishop wished that fine points of ceremonial might have
+been left out of the discussion.
+
+Something much bigger than that was laying hold of his
+intelligence, the realization of a world extravagantly out of
+hand. The sky, the wind, the telegraph poles, had been jabbing in
+the harsh lesson of these men's voices, that the church, as
+people say, "wasn't in it." And that at the same time the church
+held the one remedy for all this ugliness and contention in its
+teaching of the universal fatherhood of God and the universal
+brotherhood of men. Only for some reason he hadn't the phrases
+and he hadn't the voice to assert this over their wrangling and
+their stiff resolution. He wanted to think the whole business out
+thoroughly, for the moment he had nothing to say, and there was
+the labour leader opposite waiting smilingly to hear what he had
+to say so soon as the bout between the vicar and the rationalist
+was over.
+
+(6)
+
+
+That morning in the long galleries of the bishop's imagination
+a fresh painting had been added. It was a big wall painting
+rather in the manner of Puvis de Chavannes. And the central
+figure had been the bishop of Princhester himself. He had been
+standing upon the steps of the great door of the cathedral that
+looks upon the marketplace where the tram-lines meet, and he had
+been dressed very magnificently and rather after the older use.
+He had been wearing a tunicle and dalmatic under a chasuble, a
+pectoral cross, purple gloves, sandals and buskins, a mitre and
+his presentation ring. In his hand he had borne his pastoral
+staff. And the clustering pillars and arches of the great doorway
+were painted with a loving flat particularity that omitted
+nothing but the sooty tinge of the later discolourations.
+
+On his right hand had stood a group of employers very richly
+dressed in the fashion of the fifteenth century, and on the left
+a rather more numerous group of less decorative artisans. With
+them their wives and children had been shown, all greatly
+impressed by the canonicals. Every one had been extremely
+respectful.
+
+He had been reconciling the people and blessing them and
+calling them his "sheep" and his "little children."
+
+But all this was so different.
+
+Neither party resembled sheep or little children in the least
+degree. .
+
+The labour leader became impatient with the ritualistic
+controversy; he set his tea-cup aside out of danger and leant
+across the corner of the table to the bishop and spoke in a
+sawing undertone. "You see," he said, "the church does not talk
+our language. I doubt if it understands our language. I doubt if
+we understand clearly where we are ourselves. These things have
+to be fought out and hammered out. It's a big dusty dirty noisy
+job. It may be a bloody job before it's through. You can't
+suddenly call a halt in the middle of the scrap and have a sort
+of millennium just because you want it....
+
+"Of course if the church had a plan," he said, "if it had a
+proposal to make, if it had anything more than a few pious
+palliatives to suggest, that might be different. But has it?"
+
+The bishop had a bankrupt feeling. On the spur of the moment he
+could say no more than: "It offers its mediation."
+
+(7)
+
+
+Full as he was with the preoccupation of these things and so a
+little slow and inattentive in his movements, the bishop had his
+usual luck at Pringle Junction and just missed the 7.27 for
+Princhester. He might perhaps have got it by running through the
+subway and pushing past people, but bishops must not run through
+subways and push past people. His mind swore at the mischance,
+even if his lips refrained.
+
+He was hungry and, tired; he would not get to the palace now
+until long after nine; dinner would be over and Lady Ella would
+naturally suppose he had dined early with the Rev. Morrice Deans.
+Very probably there would be nothing ready for him at all.
+
+He tried to think he was exercising self-control, but indeed
+all his sub-conscious self was busy in a manner that would not
+have disgraced Tertullian with the eternal welfare of those city
+fathers whose obstinacy had fixed the palace at Princhester. He
+walked up and down the platform, gripping his hands very tightly
+behind him, and maintaining a serene upcast countenance by a
+steadfast effort. It seemed a small matter to him that the
+placards of the local evening papers should proclaim "Lloyd
+George's Reconciliation Meeting at Wombash Broken up by
+Suffragettes." For a year now he had observed a strict rule
+against buying the products of the local press, and he saw no
+reason for varying this protective regulation.
+
+His mind was full of angry helplessness.
+
+Was he to blame, was the church to blame, for its powerlessness
+in these social disputes? Could an abler man with a readier
+eloquence have done more?
+
+He envied the cleverness of Cardinal Manning. Manning would
+have got right into the front of this affair. He would have
+accumulated credit for his church and himself....
+
+But would he have done much?...
+
+The bishop wandered along the platform to its end, and stood
+contemplating the convergent ways that gather together beyond the
+station and plunge into the hillside and the wilderness of
+sidings and trucks, signal-boxes, huts, coal-pits, electric
+standards, goods sheds, turntables, and engine-houses, that ends
+in a bluish bricked-up cliff against the hill. A train rushed
+with a roar and clatter into the throat of the great tunnel and
+was immediately silenced; its rear lights twinkled and vanished,
+and then out of that huge black throat came wisps of white steam
+and curled slowly upward like lazy snakes until they caught the
+slanting sunshine. For the first time the day betrayed a softness
+and touched this scene of black energy to gold. All late
+afternoons are beautiful, whatever the day has been--if only
+there is a gleam of sun. And now a kind of mechanical greatness
+took the place of mere black disorder in the bishop's perception
+of his see. It was harsh, it was vast and strong, it was no lamb
+he had to rule but a dragon. Would it ever be given to him to
+overcome his dragon, to lead it home, and bless it?
+
+He stood at the very end of the platform, with his gaitered
+legs wide apart and his hands folded behind him, staring beyond
+all visible things.
+
+Should he do something very bold and striking? Should he invite
+both men and masters to the cathedral, and preach tremendous
+sermons to them upon these living issues?
+
+Short sermons, of course.
+
+But stating the church's attitude with a new and convincing
+vigour.
+
+He had a vision of the great aisle strangely full and alive and
+astir. The organ notes still echoed in the fretted vaulting, as
+the preacher made his way from the chancel to the pulpit. The
+congregation was tense with expectation, and for some reason his
+mind dwelt for a long time upon the figure of the preacher
+ascending the steps of the pulpit. Outside the day was dark and
+stormy, so that the stained-glass windows looked absolutely dead.
+For a little while the preacher prayed. Then in the attentive
+silence the tenor of the preacher would begin, a thin jet of
+sound, a ray of light in the darkness, speaking to all these men
+as they had never been spoken to before....
+
+Surely so one might call a halt to all these harsh conflicts.
+So one might lay hands afresh upon these stubborn minds, one
+might win them round to look at Christ the Master and Servant....
+
+That, he thought, would be a good phrase: "Christ the Master
+and Servant."....
+
+"Members of one Body," that should be his text.... At last it
+was finished. The big congregation, which had kept so still,
+sighed and stirred. The task of reconciliation was as good as
+done. "And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy
+Ghost...."
+
+Outside the day had become suddenly bright, the threatening
+storm had drifted away, and great shafts of coloured light from
+the pictured windows were smiting like arrows amidst his
+hearers....
+
+This idea of a great sermon upon capital and labour did so
+powerfully grip the bishop's imagination that he came near to
+losing the 8.27 train also.
+
+He discovered it when it was already in the station. He had to
+walk down the platform very quickly. He did not run, but his
+gaiters, he felt, twinkled more than a bishop's should.
+
+(8)
+
+
+Directly he met his wife he realized that he had to hear
+something important and unpleasant.
+
+She stood waiting for him in the inner hall, looking very grave
+and still. The light fell upon her pale face and her dark hair
+and her long white silken dress, making her seem more delicate
+and unworldly than usual and making the bishop feel grimy and
+sordid.
+
+"I must have a wash," he said, though before he had thought of
+nothing but food. "I have had nothing to eat since tea-time--
+and that was mostly talk."
+
+Lady Ella considered. "There are cold things.... You shall have
+a tray in the study. Not in the dining-room. Eleanor is there. I
+want to tell you something. But go upstairs first and wash your
+poor tired face."
+
+"Nothing serious, I hope?" he asked, struck by an unusual
+quality in her voice.
+
+"I will tell you," she evaded, and after a moment of mutual
+scrutiny he went past her upstairs.
+
+Since they had come to Princhester Lady Ella had changed very
+markedly. She seemed to her husband to have gained in dignity;
+she was stiller and more restrained; a certain faint arrogance, a
+touch of the "ruling class" manner had dwindled almost to the
+vanishing point. There had been a time when she had inclined to
+an authoritative hauteur, when she had seemed likely to develop
+into one of those aggressive and interfering old ladies who play
+so overwhelming a part in British public affairs. She had been
+known to initiate adverse judgments, to exercise the snub, to cut
+and humiliate. Princhester had done much to purge her of such
+tendencies. Princhester had made her think abundantly, and had
+put a new and subtler quality into her beauty. It had taken away
+the least little disposition to rustle as she moved, and it had
+softened her voice.
+
+Now, when presently she stood in the study, she showed a new
+circumspection in her treatment of her husband. She surveyed the
+tray before him.
+
+"You ought not to drink that Burgundy," she said. "I can see
+you are dog-tired. It was uncorked yesterday, and anyhow it is
+not very digestible. This cold meat is bad enough. You ought to
+have one of those quarter bottles of champagne you got for my
+last convalescence. There's more than a dozen left over."
+
+The bishop felt that this was a pretty return of his own kindly
+thoughts "after many days," and soon Dunk, his valet-butler, was
+pouring out the precious and refreshing glassful....
+
+"And now, dear?" said the bishop, feeling already much better.
+
+Lady Ella had come round to the marble fireplace. The
+mantel-piece was a handsome work by a Princhester artist in the
+Gill style--with contemplative ascetics as supporters.
+
+"I am worried about Eleanor," said Lady Ella.
+
+"She is in the dining-room now," she said, "having some dinner.
+She came in about a quarter past eight, half way through dinner."
+
+"Where had she been?" asked the bishop.
+
+"Her dress was torn--in two places. Her wrist had been
+twisted and a little sprained."
+
+"My dear!"
+
+"Her face--Grubby! And she had been crying."
+
+"But, my dear, what had happened to her? You don't mean--?"
+
+Husband and wife stared at one another aghast. Neither of them
+said the horrid word that flamed between them.
+
+"Merciful heaven!" said the bishop, and assumed an attitude of
+despair.
+
+"I didn't know she knew any of them. But it seems it is the
+second Walshingham girl--Phoebe. It's impossible to trace a
+girl's thoughts and friends. She persuaded her to go."
+
+"But did she understand?"
+
+"That's the serious thing," said Lady Ella.
+
+She seemed to consider whether he could bear the blow.
+
+"She understands all sorts of things. She argues.... I am quite
+unable to argue with her."
+
+"About this vote business?"
+
+"About all sorts of things. Things I didn't imagine she had
+heard of. I knew she had been reading books. But I never imagined
+that she could have understood...."
+
+The bishop laid down his knife and fork.
+
+"One may read in books, one may even talk of things, without
+fully understanding," he said.
+
+Lady Ella tried to entertain this comforting thought. "It isn't
+like that," she said at last. "She talks like a grown-up person.
+This--this escapade is just an accident. But things have gone
+further than that. She seems to think--that she is not being
+educated properly here, that she ought to go to a College. As if
+we were keeping things from her...."
+
+The bishop reconsidered his plate.
+
+"But what things?" he said.
+
+"She says we get all round her," said Lady Ella, and left the
+implications of that phrase to unfold.
+
+(9)
+
+
+For a time the bishop said very little.
+
+Lady Ella had found it necessary to make her first announcement
+standing behind him upon the hearthrug, but now she sat upon the
+arm of the great armchair as close to him as possible, and spoke
+in a more familiar tone.
+
+The thing, she said, had come to her as a complete surprise.
+Everything had seemed so safe. Eleanor had been thoughtful, it
+was true, but it had never occurred to her mother that she had
+really been thinking--about such things as she had been
+thinking about. She had ranged in the library, and displayed a
+disposition to read the weekly papers and the monthly reviews.
+But never a sign of discontent.
+
+"But I don't understand," said the bishop. "Why is she
+discontented? What is there that she wants different?"
+
+"Exactly," said Lady Ella.
+
+"She has got this idea that life here is secluded in some way,"
+she expanded. "She used words like 'secluded' and 'artificial'
+and--what was it?--'cloistered.' And she said--"
+
+Lady Ella paused with an effect of exact retrospection.
+
+"'Out there,' she said, 'things are alive. Real things are
+happening.' It is almost as if she did not fully believe--"
+
+Lady Ella paused again.
+
+The bishop sat with his arm over the back of his chair, and his
+face downcast.
+
+"The ferment of youth," he said at last. "The ferment of youth.
+Who has given her these ideas?"
+
+Lady Ella did not know. She could have thought a school like
+St. Aubyns would have been safe, but nowadays nothing was safe.
+It was clear the girls who went there talked as girls a
+generation ago did not talk. Their people at home encouraged them
+to talk and profess opinions about everything. It seemed that
+Phoebe Walshingham and Lady Kitty Kingdom were the leaders in
+these premature mental excursions. Phoebe aired religious doubts.
+
+"But little Phoebe!" said the bishop.
+
+"Kitty," said Lady Ella, "has written a novel."
+
+"Already! "
+
+"With elopements in it--and all sorts of things. She's had it
+typed. You'd think Mary Crosshampton would know better than to
+let her daughter go flourishing the family imagination about in
+that way."
+
+"Eleanor told you?"
+
+"By way of showing that they think of--things in general."
+
+The bishop reflected. "She wants to go to College."
+
+"They want to go in a set."
+
+"I  wonder if college can be much worse than school.... She's
+eighteen--? But I will talk to her...."
+
+(10)
+
+
+All our children are changelings. They are perpetually fresh
+strangers. Every day they vanish and a new person masquerades as
+yesterday's child until some unexpected development betrays the
+cheat.
+
+The bishop had still to learn this perennial newness of the
+young. He learnt it in half an hour at the end of a fatiguing
+day.
+
+He went into the dining-room. He went in as carelessly as
+possible and smoking a cigarette. He had an honourable dread of
+being portentous in his family; almost ostentatiously he laid the
+bishop aside. Eleanor had finished her meal, and was sitting in
+the arm-chair by the fire with one hand holding her sprained
+wrist.
+
+"Well," he said, and strolled to the hearthrug. He had had an
+odd idea that he would find her still dirty, torn, and tearful,
+as her mother had described her, a little girl in a scrape. But
+she had changed into her best white evening frock and put up her
+hair, and became in the firelight more of a lady, a very young
+lady but still a lady, than she had ever been to him before. She
+was dark like her mother, but not of the same willowy type; she
+had more of her father's sturdy build, and she had developed her
+shoulders at hockey and tennis. The firelight brought out the
+gracious reposeful lines of a body that ripened in adolescence.
+And though there was a vibration of resolution in her voice she
+spoke like one who is under her own control.
+
+"Mother has told you that I have disgraced myself," she began.
+
+"No," said the bishop, weighing it. "No. But you seem to have
+been indiscreet, little Norah."
+
+"I got excited," she said. "They began turning out the other
+women--roughly. I was indignant."
+
+"You didn't go to interrupt?" he asked.
+
+She considered. "No," she said. "But I went."
+
+He liked her disposition to get it right. "On that side," he
+assisted.
+
+"It isn't the same thing as really meaning, Daddy," she said.
+
+"And then things happened?"
+
+"Yes," she said to the fire.
+
+A pause followed. If they had been in a law-court, her
+barrister would have said, "That is my case, my lord." The bishop
+prepared to open the next stage in the proceedings.
+
+"I think, Norah, you shouldn't have been there at all," he
+said.
+
+"Mother says that."
+
+"A man in my position is apt to be judged by his family. You
+commit more than yourself when you commit an indiscretion. Apart
+from that, it wasn't the place for a girl to be at. You are not a
+child now. We give you freedom--more freedom than most girls
+get--because we think you will use it wisely. You knew--
+enough to know that there was likely to be trouble."
+
+The girl looked into the fire and spoke very carefully. "I
+don't think that I oughtn't to know the things that are going
+on."
+
+The bishop studied her face for an instant. It struck him that
+they had reached something very fundamental as between parent and
+child. His modernity showed itself in the temperance of his
+reply.
+
+"Don't you think, my dear, that on the whole your mother and I,
+who have lived longer and know more, are more likely to know when
+it is best that you should begin to know--this or that?"
+
+The girl knitted her brows and seemed to be reading her answer
+out of the depths of the coals. She was on the verge of speaking,
+altered her mind and tried a different beginning.
+
+"I think that every one must do their thinking--his thinking
+--for--oneself," she said awkwardly.
+
+"You mean you can't trust--?"
+
+"It isn't trusting. But one knows best for oneself when one is
+hungry."
+
+"And you find yourself hungry?"
+
+"I want to find out for myself what all this trouble about
+votes and things means."
+
+"And we starve you--intellectually?"
+
+"You know I don't think that. But you are busy...."
+
+"Aren't you being perhaps a little impatient, Eleanor? After
+all--you are barely eighteen.... We have given you all sorts of
+liberties."
+
+Her silence admitted it. "But still," she said after a long
+pause, "there are other girls, younger than I am, in these
+things. They talk about--oh, all sorts of things. Freely...."
+
+"You've been awfully good to me," she said irrelevantly. "And
+of course this meeting was all pure accident."
+
+Father and daughter remained silent for awhile, seeking a
+better grip.
+
+"What exactly do you want, Eleanor? " he asked.
+
+She looked up at him. "Generally?" she asked.
+
+"Your mother has the impression that you are discontented."
+
+"Discontented is a horrid word."
+
+"Well--unsatisfied."
+
+She remained still for a time. She felt the moment had come to
+make her demand.
+
+"I would like to go to Newnham or Somerville--and work. I
+feel--so horribly ignorant. Of all sorts of things. If I were a
+son I should go--"
+
+"Ye--es," said the bishop and reflected.
+
+He had gone rather far in the direction of the Woman Suffrage
+people; he had advocated equality of standard in all sorts of
+matters, and the memory of these utterances hampered him.
+
+"You could read here," he tried.
+
+"If I were a son, you wouldn't say that."
+
+His reply was vague. "But in this home," he said, "we have a
+certain atmosphere. .
+
+He left her to imply her differences in sensibility and
+response from the hardier male.
+
+Her hesitation marked the full gravity of her reply. "It's just
+that," she said. "One feels--" She considered it further. "As if
+we were living in a kind of magic world--not really real. Out
+there--" she glanced over her shoulder at the drawn blind that
+hid the night. "One meets with different sorts of minds and
+different--atmospheres. All this is very beautiful. I've had
+the most wonderful home. But there's a sort of feeling as though
+it couldn't really go on, as though all these strikes and doubts
+and questionings--"
+
+She stopped short at questionings, for the thing was said.
+
+The bishop took her meaning gallantly and honestly.
+
+"The church of Christ, little Norah, is built upon a rock."
+
+She made no answer. She moved her head very slightly so that he
+could not see her face, and remained sitting rather stiffly and
+awkwardly with her eyes upon the fire.
+
+Her silence was the third and greatest blow the bishop received
+that day....
+
+It seemed very long indeed before either of them spoke. At last
+he said: "We must talk about these things again, Norah, when we
+are less tired and have more time.... You have been reading
+books.... When Caxton set up his printing-press he thrust a new
+power between church and disciple and father and child.... And I
+am tired. We must talk it over a little later."
+
+The girl stood up. She took her father's hands. "Dear, dear
+Daddy," she said, "I am so sorry to be a bother. I am so sorry I
+went to that meeting.... You look tired out."
+
+"We must talk--properly," said the bishop, patting
+one hand, then discovering from her wincing face that it was the
+sprained one. "Your poor wrist," he said.
+
+"It's so hard to talk, but I want to talk to you, Daddy. It
+isn't that I have hidden things...."
+
+She kissed him, and the bishop had the odd fancy that she
+kissed him as though she was sorry for him....
+
+It occurred to him that really there could be no time like the
+present for discussing these "questionings" of hers, and then his
+fatigue and shyness had the better of him again.
+
+(11)
+
+
+The papers got hold of Eleanor's share in the suffragette
+disturbance. The White Blackbird said things about her.
+
+It did not attack her. It did worse. It admired her
+...impudently.
+
+It spoke of her once as "Norah," and once as "the Scrope
+Flapper."
+
+Its headline proclaimed: "Plucky Flappers Hold Up L. G."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD  -  INSOMNIA
+
+(1)
+
+
+THE night after his conversation with Eleanor was the first
+night of the bishop's insomnia. It was the definite beginning of
+a new phase in his life.
+
+Doctors explain to us that the immediate cause of insomnia is
+always some poisoned or depleted state of the body, and no doubt
+the fatigues and hasty meals of the day had left the bishop in a
+state of unprecedented chemical disorder, with his nerves
+irritated by strange compounds and unsoothed by familiar
+lubricants. But chemical disorders follow mental disturbances,
+and the core and essence of his trouble was an intellectual
+distress. For the first time in his life he was really in doubt,
+about himself, about his way of living, about all his
+persuasions. It was a general doubt. It was not a specific
+suspicion upon this point or that. It was a feeling of detachment
+and unreality at once extraordinarily vague and extraordinarily
+oppressive. It was as if he discovered himself flimsy and
+transparent in a world of minatory solidity and opacity. It was
+as if he found himself made not of flesh and blood but of tissue
+paper.
+
+But this intellectual insecurity extended into his physical
+sensations. It affected his feeling in his skin, as if it were
+not absolutely his own skin.
+
+And as he lay there, a weak phantom mentally and bodily, an
+endless succession and recurrence of anxieties for which he could
+find no reassurance besieged him.
+
+Chief of this was his distress for Eleanor.
+
+She was the central figure in this new sense of illusion in
+familiar and trusted things. It was not only that the world of
+his existence which had seemed to be the whole universe had
+become diaphanous and betrayed vast and uncontrollable realities
+beyond it, but his daughter had as it were suddenly opened a door
+in this glassy sphere of insecurity that had been his abiding
+refuge, a door upon the stormy rebel outer world, and she stood
+there, young, ignorant, confident, adventurous, ready to step
+out.
+
+"Could it be possible that she did not believe?"
+
+He saw her very vividly as he had seen her in the dining-room,
+slender and upright, half child, half woman, so fragile and so
+fearless. And the door she opened thus carelessly gave upon a
+stormy background like one of the stormy backgrounds that were
+popular behind portrait Dianas in eighteenth century paintings.
+Did she believe that all be had taught her, all the life he led
+was--what was her phrase?--a kind of magic world, not really
+real?
+
+He groaned and turned over and repeated the words:
+"A kind of magic world--not really real!"
+
+The wind blew through the door she opened, and scattered
+everything in the room. And still she held the door open.
+
+He was astonished at himself. He started up in swift
+indignation. Had he not taught the child? Had he not brought her
+up in an atmosphere of faith? What right had she to turn upon him
+in this matter? It was--indeed it was--a sort of insolence, a
+lack of reverence....
+
+It was strange he had not perceived this at the time.
+
+But indeed at the first mention of "questionings" he ought to
+have thundered. He saw that quite clearly now. He ought to have
+cried out and said, "On your knees, my Norah, and ask pardon of
+God!"
+
+Because after all faith is an emotional thing....
+
+He began to think very rapidly and copiously of things he ought
+to have said to Eleanor. And now the eloquence of reverie was
+upon him. In a little time he was also addressing the tea-party
+at Morrice Deans'. Upon them too he ought to have thundered. And
+he knew now also all that he should have said to the recalcitrant
+employer. Thunder also. Thunder is surely the privilege of the
+higher clergy--under Jove.
+
+But why hadn't he thundered?
+
+He gesticulated in the darkness, thrust out a clutching hand.
+
+There are situations that must be gripped--gripped firmly.
+And without delay. In the middle ages there had been grip enough
+in a purple glove.
+
+(2)
+
+
+From these belated seizures of the day's lost opportunities the
+bishop passed to such a pessimistic estimate of the church as had
+never entered his mind before.
+
+It was as if he had fallen suddenly out of a spiritual balloon
+into a world of bleak realism. He found himself asking
+unprecedented and devastating questions, questions that implied
+the most fundamental shiftings of opinion. Why was the church
+such a failure? Why had it no grip upon either masters or men
+amidst this vigorous life of modern industrialism, and why had it
+no grip upon the questioning young? It was a tolerated thing, he
+felt, just as sometimes he had felt that the Crown was a
+tolerated thing. He too was a tolerated thing; a curious
+survival....
+
+This was not as things should be. He struggled to recover a
+proper attitude. But he remained enormously dissatisfied....
+
+The church was no Levite to pass by on the other side away from
+the struggles and wrongs of the social conflict. It had no right
+when the children asked for the bread of life to offer them
+Gothic stone....
+
+He began to make interminable weak plans for fulfilling his
+duty to his diocese and his daughter.
+
+What could he do to revivify his clergy? He wished he had more
+personal magnetism, he wished he had a darker and a larger
+presence. He wished he had not been saddled with Whippham's
+rather futile son as his chaplain. He wished he had a dean
+instead of being his own dean. With an unsympathetic rector. He
+wished he had it in him to make some resounding appeal. He might
+of course preach a series of thumping addresses and sermons,
+rather on the lines of "Fors Clavigera," to masters and men, in
+the Cathedral. Only it was so difficult to get either masters or
+men into the Cathedral.
+
+Well, if the people will not come to the bishop the bishop must
+go out to the people. Should he go outside the Cathedral--to
+the place where the trains met?
+
+Interweaving with such thoughts the problem of Eleanor rose
+again into his consciousness.
+
+Weren't there books she ought to read? Weren't there books she
+ought to be made to read? And books--and friends--that ought
+to be imperatively forbidden? Imperatively!
+
+But how to define the forbidden?
+
+He began to compose an address on Modern Literature
+(so-called).
+
+It became acrimonious.
+
+Before dawn the birds began to sing.
+
+His mind had seemed to be a little tranquillized, there had
+been a distinct feeling of subsidence sleepwards, when first one
+and then another little creature roused itself and the bishop to
+greet the gathering daylight.
+
+It became a little clamour, a misty sea of sound in which
+individuality appeared and disappeared. For a time a distant
+cuckoo was very perceptible, like a landmark looming up over a
+fog, like the cuckoo in the Pastoral Symphony.
+
+The bishop tried not to heed these sounds, but they were by
+their very nature insistent sounds. He lay disregarding them
+acutely.
+
+Presently he pulled the coverlet over his ears.
+
+A little later he sat up in bed.
+
+Again in a slight detail he marked his strange and novel
+detachment from the world of his upbringing. His hallucination of
+disillusionment had spread from himself and his church and his
+faith to the whole animate creation. He knew that these were the
+voices of "our feathered songsters," that this was "a joyous
+chorus" greeting the day. He knew that a wakeful bishop ought to
+bless these happy creatures, and join with them by reciting Ken's
+morning hymn. He made an effort that was more than half habit, to
+repeat and he repeated with a scowling face and the voice of a
+schoolmaster:
+
+
+"Awake my soul, and with the sun
+
+ Thy daily stage of duty run...."
+
+
+He got no further. He stopped short, sat still, thinking what
+utterly detestable things singing birds were. A. blackbird had
+gripped his attention. Never had he heard such vain repetitions.
+He struggled against the dark mood of criticism. "He prayeth best
+who loveth best--"
+
+No, he did not love the birds. It was useless to pretend.
+Whatever one may say about other birds a cuckoo is a low
+detestable cad of a bird.
+
+Then the bishop began to be particularly tormented by a bird
+that made a short, insistent, wheezing sound at regular intervals
+of perhaps twenty seconds. If a bird could have whooping-cough,
+that, he thought, was the sort of whoop it would have. But even
+if it had whooping-cough he could not pity it. He hung in its
+intervals waiting for the return of the wheeze.
+
+And then that blackbird reasserted itself. It had a rich
+boastful note; it seemed proud of its noisy reiteration of simple
+self-assertion. For some obscure reason the phrase "oleographic
+sounds" drifted into the bishop's thoughts. This bird produced
+the peculiar and irrational impression that it had recently made
+a considerable sum of money by shrewd industrialism. It was, he
+thought grimly, a genuine Princhester blackbird.
+
+This wickedly uncharitable reference to his diocese ran all
+unchallenged through the bishop's mind. And others no less wicked
+followed it.
+
+Once during his summer holidays in Florence he and Lady Ella
+had subscribed to an association for the protection of
+song-birds. He recalled this now with a mild wonder. It seemed to
+him that perhaps after all it was as well to let fruit-growers
+and Italians deal with singing-birds in their own way. Perhaps
+after all they had a wisdom....
+
+He passed his hands over his face. The world after all is not
+made entirely for singing-birds; there is such a thing as
+proportion. Singing-birds may become a luxury, an indulgence, an
+excess.
+
+Did the birds eat the fruit in Paradise?
+
+Perhaps there they worked for some collective musical effect,
+had some sort of conductor in the place of this--hullabaloo....
+
+He decided to walk about the room for a time and then remake
+his bed....
+
+The sunrise found the bishop with his head and shoulders out of
+the window trying to see that blackbird. He just wanted to look
+at it. He was persuaded it was a quite exceptional blackbird.
+
+Again came that oppressive sense of the futility of the
+contemporary church, but this time it came in the most grotesque
+form. For hanging half out of the casement he was suddenly
+reminded of St. Francis of Assisi, and how at his rebuke the
+wheeling swallow stilled their cries.
+
+But it was all so different then.
+
+(3)
+
+
+It was only after he had passed four similar nights, with
+intervening days of lassitude and afternoon siestas, that the
+bishop realized that he was in the grip of insomnia.
+
+He did not go at once to a doctor, but he told his trouble to
+every one he met and received much tentative advice. He had meant
+to have his talk with Eleanor on the morning next after their
+conversation in the dining-room, but his bodily and spiritual
+anaemia prevented him.
+
+The fifth night was the beginning of the Whitsuntide Ember
+week, and he wore a red cassock and had a distracting and rather
+interesting day welcoming his ordination candidates. They had a
+good effect upon him; we spiritualize ourselves when we seek to
+spiritualize others, and he went to bed in a happier frame of
+mind than he had done since the day of the shock. He woke in the
+night, but he woke much more himself than he had been since the
+trouble began. He repeated that verse of Ken's:
+
+"When in the night I sleepless lie,
+My soul with heavenly thoughts supply;
+Let no ill dreams disturb my rest,
+No powers of darkness me molest."
+
+
+Almost immediately after these there floated into his mind, as
+if it were a message, the dear familiar words:
+
+"He giveth his Beloved sleep."
+
+
+These words irradiated and soothed him quite miraculously, the
+clouds of doubt seemed to dissolve and vanish and leave him safe
+and calm under a clear sky; he knew those words were a promise,
+and very speedily he fell asleep and slept until he was called.
+
+But the next day was a troubled one. Whippham had muddled his
+timetable and crowded his afternoon; the strike of the transport
+workers had begun, and the ugly noises they made at the tramway
+depot, where they were booing some one, penetrated into the
+palace. He had to snatch a meal between services, and the sense
+of hurry invaded his afternoon lectures to the candidates. He
+hated hurry in Ember week. His ideal was one of quiet serenity,
+of grave things said slowly, of still, kneeling figures, of a
+sort of dark cool spiritual germination. But what sort of dark
+cool spiritual germination is possible with an ass like Whippham
+about?
+
+In the fresh courage of the morning the bishop had arranged for
+that talk with Eleanor he had already deferred too long, and this
+had proved less satisfactory than he had intended it to be.
+
+The bishop's experience with the ordination candidates was
+following the usual course. Before they came there was something
+bordering upon distaste for the coming invasion; then always
+there was an effect of surprise at the youth and faith of the
+neophytes and a real response of the spirit to the occasion.
+Throughout the first twenty-four hours they were all simply
+neophytes, without individuality to break up their uniformity of
+self-devotion. Then afterwards they began to develop little
+personal traits, and scarcely ever were these pleasing traits.
+Always one or two of them would begin haunting the bishop, giving
+way to an appetite for special words, special recognitions. He
+knew the expression of that craving on their faces. He knew the
+way-laying movements in room and passage that presently began.
+
+This time in particular there was a freckled underbred young
+man who handed in what was evidently a carefully prepared
+memorandum upon what he called "my positions." Apparently he had
+a muddle of doubts about the early fathers and the dates of the
+earlier authentic copies of the gospels, things of no conceivable
+significance.
+
+The bishop glanced through this bale of papers--it had of
+course no index and no synopsis, and some of the pages were not
+numbered--handed it over to Whippham, and when he proved, as
+usual, a broken reed, the bishop had the brilliant idea of
+referring the young man to Canon Bliss (of Pringle), "who has a
+special knowledge quite beyond my own in this field."
+
+But he knew from the young man's eye even as he said this that
+it was not going to put him off for more than a day or so.
+
+The immediate result of glancing over these papers was,
+however, to enhance in the bishop's mind a growing disposition to
+minimize the importance of all dated and explicit evidences and
+arguments for orthodox beliefs, and to resort to vague symbolic
+and liberal interpretations, and it was in this state that he
+came to his talk with Eleanor.
+
+He did not give her much time to develop her objections. He met
+her half way and stated them for her, and overwhelmed her with
+sympathy and understanding. She had been "too literal." "Too
+literal" was his keynote. He was a little astonished at the
+liberality of his own views. He had been getting along now for
+some years without looking into his own opinions too closely and
+he was by no means prepared to discover how far he had come to
+meet his daughter's scepticisms. But he did meet them. He met
+them so thoroughly that he almost conveyed that hers was a
+needlessly conservative and oldfashioned attitude.
+
+Occasionally he felt he was being a little evasive, but she did
+not seem to notice it. As she took his drift, her relief and
+happiness were manifest. And he had never noticed before how
+clear and pretty her eyes were; they were the most honest eyes he
+had ever seen. She looked at him very steadily as he explained,
+and lit up at his points. She brightened wonderfully as she
+realized that after all they were not apart, they had not
+differed; simply they had misunderstood....
+
+And before he knew where he was, and in a mere parenthetical
+declaration of liberality, he surprised himself by conceding her
+demand for Newnham even before she had repeated it. It helped his
+case wonderfully.
+
+"Call in every exterior witness you can. The church will
+welcome them.... No, I want you to go, my dear...."
+
+But his mind was stirred again to its depths by this
+discussion. And in particular he was surprised and a little
+puzzled by this Newnham concession and the necessity of making
+his new attitude clear to Lady Ella....
+
+It was with a sense of fatality that he found himself awake
+again that night, like some one lying drowned and still and yet
+perfectly conscious at the bottom of deep cold water.
+
+He repeated, "He giveth his Beloved sleep," but all the
+conviction had gone out of the words.
+
+(4)
+
+
+Neither the bishop's insomnia nor his incertitudes about
+himself and his faith developed in a simple and orderly manner.
+There were periods of sustained suffering and periods of
+recovery; it was not for a year or so that he regarded these
+troubles as more than acute incidental interruptions of his
+general tranquillity or realized that he was passing into a new
+phase of life and into a new quality of thought. He told every
+one of the insomnia and no one of his doubts; these he betrayed
+only by an increasing tendency towards vagueness, symbolism,
+poetry and toleration. Eleanor seemed satisfied with his
+exposition; she did not press for further enlightenment. She
+continued all her outward conformities except that after a time
+she ceased to communicate; and in September she went away to
+Newnham. Her doubts had not visibly affected Clementina or her
+other sisters, and the bishop made no further attempts to explore
+the spiritual life of his family below the surface of its formal
+acquiescence.
+
+As a matter of fact his own spiritual wrestlings were almost
+exclusively nocturnal. During his spells of insomnia he led a
+curiously double existence. In the daytime he was largely the
+self he had always been, able, assured, ecclesiastical, except
+that he was a little jaded and irritable or sleepy instead of
+being quick and bright; he believed in God and the church and the
+Royal Family and himself securely; in the wakeful night time he
+experienced a different and novel self, a bare-minded self,
+bleakly fearless at its best, shamelessly weak at its worst,
+critical, sceptical, joyless, anxious. The anxiety was quite the
+worst element of all. Something sat by his pillow asking grey
+questions: "What are you doing? Where are you going? Is it really
+well with the children? Is it really well with the church? Is it
+really well with the country? Are you indeed doing anything at
+all? Are you anything more than an actor wearing a costume in an
+archaic play? The people turn their backs on you."
+
+He would twist over on his pillow. He would whisper hymns and
+prayers that had the quality of charms.
+
+"He giveth his Beloved sleep"; that answered many times, and
+many times it failed.
+
+The labour troubles of 1912 eased off as the year wore on, and
+the bitterness of the local press over the palace abated very
+considerably. Indeed there was something like a watery gleam of
+popularity when he brought down his consistent friend, the dear
+old Princess Christiana of Hoch and Unter, black bonnet,
+deafness, and all, to open a new wing of the children's hospital.
+The Princhester conservative paper took the occasion to inform
+the diocese that he was a fluent German scholar and consequently
+a persona grata with the royal aunts, and that the Princess
+Christiana was merely just one of a number of royalties now
+practically at the beck and call of Princhester. It was not true,
+but it was very effective locally, and seemed to justify a little
+the hauteur of which Lady Ella was so unjustly suspected. Yet it
+involved a possibility of disappointments in the future.
+
+He went to Brighton-Pomfrey too upon the score of his general
+health, and Brighton-Pomfrey revised his general regimen,
+discouraged indiscreet fasting, and suggested a complete
+abstinence from red wine except white port, if indeed that can be
+called a red wine, and a moderate use of Egyptian cigarettes.
+
+But 1913 was a strenuous year. The labour troubles revived, the
+suffragette movement increased greatly in violence and
+aggressiveness, and there sprang up no less than three
+ecclesiastical scandals in the diocese. First, the Kensitites set
+themselves firmly to make presentations and prosecutions against
+Morrice Deans, who was reserving the sacrament, wearing, they
+said, "Babylonish garments," going beyond all reason in the
+matter of infant confession, and generally brightening up Mogham
+Banks; next, a popular preacher in Wombash, published a book
+under the exasperating title, "The Light Under the Altar," in
+which he showed himself as something between an Arian and a
+Pantheist, and treated the dogma of the Trinity with as little
+respect as one would show to an intrusive cat; while thirdly, an
+obscure but overworked missioner of a tin mission church in the
+new working-class district at Pringle, being discovered in some
+sort of polygamous relationship, had seen fit to publish in
+pamphlet form a scandalous admission and defence, a pamphlet
+entitled "Marriage True and False," taking the public needlessly
+into his completest confidence and quoting the affairs of Abraham
+and Hosea, reviving many points that are better forgotten about
+Luther, and appealing also to such uncanonical authorities as
+Milton, Plato, and John Humphrey Noyes. This abnormal concurrence
+of indiscipline was extremely unlucky for the bishop. It plunged
+him into strenuous controversy upon three fronts, so to speak,
+and involved a great number of personal encounters far too vivid
+for his mental serenity.
+
+The Pringle polygamist was the most moving as Morrice Deans was
+the most exacting and troublesome and the Wombash Pantheist the
+most insidiously destructive figure in these three toilsome
+disputes. The Pringle man's soul had apparently missed the normal
+distribution of fig-leaves; he was an illiterate, open-eyed,
+hard-voiced, freckled, rational-minded creature, with large
+expository hands, who had come by a side way into the church
+because he was an indefatigable worker, and he insisted upon
+telling the bishop with an irrepressible candour and completeness
+just exactly what was the matter with his intimate life. The
+bishop very earnestly did not want these details, and did his
+utmost to avoid the controversial questions that the honest man
+pressed respectfully but obstinately upon him.
+
+"Even St. Paul, my lord, admitted that it is better to marry
+than burn," said the Pringle misdemeanant, "and here was I, my
+lord, married and still burning!" and, "I think you would find,
+my lord, considering all Charlotte's peculiarities, that the
+situation was really much more trying than the absolute celibacy
+St. Paul had in view."...
+
+The bishop listened to these arguments as little as possible,
+and did not answer them at all. But afterwards the offender came
+and wept and said he was ruined and heartbroken and unfairly
+treated because he wasn't a gentleman, and that was distressing.
+It was so exactly true--and so inevitable. He had been
+deprived, rather on account of his voice and apologetics than of
+his offence, and public opinion was solidly with the sentence. He
+made a gallant effort to found what he called a Labour Church in
+Pringle, and after some financial misunderstandings departed with
+his unambiguous menage to join the advanced movement on the
+Clyde.
+
+The Morrice Deans enquiry however demanded an amount of
+erudition that greatly fatigued the bishop. He had a very fair
+general knowledge of vestments, but he had never really cared for
+anything but the poetry of ornaments, and he had to work
+strenuously to master the legal side of the question. Whippham,
+his chaplain, was worse than useless as a helper. The bishop
+wanted to end the matter as quickly, quietly, and favourably to
+Morrice Deans as possible; he thought Morrice Deans a thoroughly
+good man in his parish, and he believed that the substitution of
+a low churchman would mean a very complete collapse of church
+influence in Mogham Banks, where people were now thoroughly
+accustomed to a highly ornate service. But Morrice Deans was
+intractable and his pursuers indefatigable, and on several
+occasions the bishop sat far into the night devising compromises
+and equivocations that should make the Kensitites think that
+Morrice Deans wasn't wearing vestments when he was, and that
+should make Morrice Deans think he was wearing vestments when he
+wasn't. And it was Whippham who first suggested green tea as a
+substitute for coffee, which gave the bishop indigestion, as his
+stimulant for these nocturnal bouts.
+
+Now green tea is the most lucid of poisons.
+
+And while all this extra activity about Morrice Deans, these
+vigils and crammings and writings down, were using all and more
+energy than the bishop could well spare, he was also doing his
+quiet utmost to keep "The Light under the Altar" ease from coming
+to a head.
+
+This man he hated.
+
+And he dreaded him as well as hated him. Chasters, the author
+of "The Light under the Altar," was a man who not only reasoned
+closely but indelicately. There was a demonstrating, jeering, air
+about his preaching and writing, and everything he said and did
+was saturated by the spirit of challenge. He did not so much
+imitate as exaggerate the style of Matthew Arnold. And whatever
+was done publicly against him would have to be done very publicly
+because his book had got him a London reputation.
+
+From the bishop's point of view Chasters was one of nature's
+ignoblemen. He seemed to have subscribed to the Thirty-Nine
+Articles and passed all the tests and taken all the pledges that
+stand on the way to ordination, chiefly for the pleasure of
+attacking them more successfully from the rear; he had been given
+the living of Wombash by a cousin, and filled it very largely
+because it was not only more piquant but more remunerative and
+respectable to be a rationalist lecturer in a surplice. And in a
+hard kind of ultra-Protestant way his social and parochial work
+was not badly done. But his sermons were terrible. "He takes a
+text," said one informant, "and he goes on firstly, secondly,
+thirdly, fourthly, like somebody tearing the petals from a
+flower. 'Finally,' he says, and throws the bare stalk into the
+dustbin."
+
+The bishop avoided "The Light under the Altar" for nearly a
+year. It was only when a second book was announced with the
+winning title of "The Core of Truth in Christianity" that he
+perceived he must take action. He sat up late one night with a
+marked copy, a very indignantly marked copy, of the former work
+that an elderly colonel, a Wombash parishioner, an orthodox
+Layman of the most virulent type, had sent him. He perceived that
+he had to deal with a dialectician of exceptional ability, who
+had concentrated a quite considerable weight of scholarship upon
+the task of explaining away every scrap of spiritual significance
+in the Eucharist. From Chasters the bishop was driven by
+reference to the works of Legge and Frazer, and for the first
+time he began to measure the dimensions and power of the modern
+criticism of church doctrine and observance. Green tea should
+have lit his way to refutation; instead it lit up the whole
+inquiry with a light of melancholy confirmation. Neither by night
+nor by day could the bishop find a proper method of opening a
+counter attack upon Chasters, who was indisputably an
+intellectually abler man and a very ruthless beast indeed to
+assail, and meanwhile the demand that action should be taken
+increased.
+
+The literature of church history and the controversies arising
+out of doctrinal development became the employment of the
+bishop's leisure and a commanding preoccupation. He would have
+liked to discuss with some one else the network of perplexities
+in which he was entangling himself, and more particularly with
+Canon Bliss, but his own positions were becoming so insecure that
+he feared to betray them by argument. He had grown up with a kind
+of intellectual modesty. Some things he had never yet talked
+about; it made his mind blench to think of talking about them.
+And his great aching gaps of wakefulness began now, thanks to the
+green tea, to be interspersed with theological dreams and visions
+of an extravagant vividness. He would see Frazer's sacrificial
+kings butchered picturesquely and terribly amidst strange and
+grotesque rituals; he would survey long and elaborate processions
+and ceremonials in which the most remarkable symbols were borne
+high in the sight of all men; he would cower before a gigantic
+and threatening Heaven. These green-tea dreams and visions were
+not so much phases of sleep as an intensification and vivid
+furnishing forth of insomnia. It added greatly to his disturbance
+that--exceeding the instructions of Brighton-Pomfrey--he had
+now experimented ignorantly and planlessly with one or two
+narcotics and sleeping mixtures that friends and acquaintances
+had mentioned in his hearing. For the first time in his life he
+became secretive from his wife. He knew he ought not to take
+these things, he knew they were physically and morally evil, but
+a tormenting craving drove him to them. Subtly and insensibly his
+character was being undermined by the growing nervous trouble.
+
+He astonished himself by the cunning and the hypocritical
+dignity he could display in procuring these drugs. He arranged to
+have a tea-making set in his bedroom, and secretly substituted
+green tea, for which he developed a powerful craving, in the
+place of the delicate China tea Lady Ella procured him.
+
+(5)
+
+
+These doctrinal and physical anxieties and distresses were at
+their worst in the spring and early summer of 1914. That was a
+time of great mental and moral disturbance. There was premonition
+in the air of those days. It was like the uneasiness sensitive
+people experience before a thunderstorm. The moral atmosphere was
+sullen and close. The whole world seemed irritable and
+mischievous. The suffragettes became extraordinarily malignant;
+the democratic movement went rotten with sabotage and with a cant
+of being "rebels"; the reactionary Tories and a crew of noisy old
+peeresses set themselves to create incurable confusion again in
+the healing wounds of Ireland, and feuds and frantic folly broke
+out at every point of the social and political edifice. And then
+a bomb burst at Sarajevo that silenced all this tumult. The
+unstable polity of Europe heeled over like a ship that founders.
+
+Through the swiftest, tensest week in history Europe capsized
+into war.
+
+(6)
+
+
+The first effect of the war upon the mind of the bishop, as
+upon most imaginative minds, was to steady and exalt it.
+Trivialities and exasperations seemed swept out of existence. Men
+lifted up their eyes from disputes that had seemed incurable and
+wrangling that promised to be interminable, and discovered a
+plain and tragic issue that involved every one in a common call
+for devotion. For a great number of men and women who had been
+born and bred in security, the August and September of 1914 were
+the supremely heroic period of their lives. Myriads of souls were
+born again to ideas of service and sacrifice in those tremendous
+days.
+
+Black and evil thing as the war was, it was at any rate a great
+thing; it did this much for countless minds that for the first
+time they realized the epic quality of history and their own
+relationship to the destinies of the race. The flimsy roof under
+which we had been living our lives of comedy fell and shattered
+the floor under our feet; we saw the stars above and the abyss
+below. We perceived that life was insecure and adventurous, part
+of one vast adventure in space and time....
+
+Presently the smoke and dust of battle hid the great distances
+again, but they could not altogether destroy the memories of this
+revelation.
+
+For the first two months the bishop's attention was so detached
+from his immediate surroundings and employments, so absorbed by
+great events, that his history if it were told in detail would
+differ scarcely at all from the histories of most comparatively
+unemployed minds during those first dramatic days, the days when
+the Germans made their great rush upon Paris and it seemed that
+France was down, France and the whole fabric of liberal
+civilization. He emerged from these stunning apprehensions after
+the Battle of the Marne, to find himself busy upon a score of
+dispersed and disconnected war jobs, and trying to get all the
+new appearances and forces and urgencies of the war into
+relations with himself. One thing became very vivid indeed, that
+he wasn't being used in any real and effective way in the war.
+There was a mighty going to and fro upon Red Cross work and
+various war committees, a vast preparation for wounded men and
+for the succour of dislocated families; a preparation, that
+proved to be needless, for catastrophic unemployment. The war
+problem and the puzzle of German psychology ousted for a time all
+other intellectual interests; like every one else the bishop swam
+deep in Nietzsche, Bernhardi, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and
+the like; he preached several sermons upon German materialism and
+the astonishing decay of the German character. He also read every
+newspaper he could lay his hands on--like any secular man. He
+signed an address to the Russian Orthodox church, beginning
+"Brethren," and he revised his impressions of the Filioque
+controversy. The idea of a reunion of the two great state
+churches of Russia and England had always attracted him. But
+hitherto it had been a thing quite out of scale, visionary,
+utopian. Now in this strange time of altered perspectives it
+seemed the most practicable of suggestions. The mayor and
+corporation and a detachment of the special reserve in uniform
+came to a great intercession service, and in the palace there
+were two conferences of local influential people, people of the
+most various types, people who had never met tolerantly before,
+expressing now opinions of unprecedented breadth and liberality.
+
+All this sort of thing was fresh and exciting at first, and
+then it began to fall into a routine and became habitual, and as
+it became habitual he found that old sense of detachment and
+futility was creeping back again. One day he realized that indeed
+the whole flood and tumult of the war would be going on almost
+exactly as it was going on now if there had been neither
+cathedral nor bishop in Princhester. It came to him that if
+archbishops were rolled into patriarchs and patriarchs into
+archbishops, it would matter scarcely more in the world process
+that was afoot than if two men shook hands while their house was
+afire. At times all of us have inappropriate thoughts. The
+unfortunate thought that struck the bishop as a bullet might
+strike a man in an exposed trench, as he was hurrying through the
+cloisters to a special service and address upon that doubly
+glorious day in our English history, the day of St. Crispin, was
+of Diogenes rolling his tub.
+
+It was a poisonous thought.
+
+It arose perhaps out of an article in a weekly paper at which
+he had glanced after lunch, an article written by one of those
+sceptical spirits who find all too abundant expression in our
+periodical literature. The writer boldly charged the "Christian
+churches" with absolute ineffectiveness. This war, he declared,
+was above all other wars a war of ideas, of material organization
+against rational freedom, of violence against law; it was a war
+more copiously discussed than any war had ever been before, the
+air was thick with apologetics. And what was the voice of the
+church amidst these elemental issues? Bishops and divines who
+were patriots one heard discordantly enough, but where were the
+bishops and divines who spoke for the Prince of Peace? Where was
+the blessing of the church, where was the veto of the church?
+When it came to that one discovered only a broad preoccupied back
+busied in supplementing the Army Medical Corps with Red Cross
+activities, good work in its way--except that the canonicals
+seemed superfluous. Who indeed looked to the church for any voice
+at all? And so to Diogenes.
+
+The bishop's mind went hunting for an answer to that
+indictment. And came back and came back to the image of Diogenes.
+
+It was with that image dangling like a barbed arrow from his
+mind that the bishop went into the pulpit to preach upon St.
+Crispin's day, and looked down upon a thin and scattered
+congregation in which the elderly, the childless, and the
+unoccupied predominated.
+
+That night insomnia resumed its sway.
+
+Of course the church ought to be controlling this great storm,
+the greatest storm of war that had ever stirred mankind. It ought
+to be standing fearlessly between the combatants like a figure in
+a wall painting, with the cross of Christ uplifted and the
+restored memory of Christendom softening the eyes of the armed
+nations. "Put down those weapons and listen to me," so the church
+should speak in irresistible tones, in a voice of silver
+trumpets.
+
+Instead it kept a long way from the fighting, tucked up its
+vestments, and was rolling its local tubs quite briskly.
+
+(7)
+
+
+And then came the aggravation of all these distresses by an
+abrupt abandonment of smoking and alcohol. Alcoholic relaxation,
+a necessary mitigation of the unreality of peacetime politics,
+becomes a grave danger in war, and it was with an understandable
+desire to forward the interests of his realm that the King
+decided to set his statesmen an example--which unhappily was
+not very widely followed--by abstaining from alcohol during the
+continuance of the struggle. It did however swing over the Bishop
+of Princhester to an immediate and complete abandonment of both
+drink and tobacco. At that time he was finding comfort for his
+nerves in Manila cheroots, and a particularly big and heavy type
+of Egyptian cigarette with a considerable amount of opium, and
+his disorganized system seized upon this sudden change as a
+grievance, and set all his jangling being crying aloud for one
+cigarette--just one cigarette.
+
+The cheroots, it seemed, he could better spare, but a cigarette
+became his symbol for his lost steadiness and ease.
+
+It brought him low.
+
+The reader has already been told the lamentable incident of the
+stolen cigarette and the small boy, and how the bishop, tormented
+by that shameful memory, cried aloud in the night.
+
+The bishop rolled his tub, and is there any tub-rolling in the
+world more busy and exacting than a bishop's? He rolled in it
+spite of ill-health and insomnia, and all the while he was
+tormented by the enormous background of the world war, by his
+ineffective realization of vast national needs, by his passionate
+desire, for himself and his church, not to be ineffective.
+
+The distressful alternation between nights of lucid doubt and
+days of dull acquiescence was resumed with an intensification of
+its contrasts. The brief phase of hope that followed the turn of
+the fighting upon the Maine, the hope that after all the war
+would end swiftly, dramatically, and justly, and everything be as
+it had been before--but pleasanter, gave place to a phase that
+bordered upon despair. The fall of Antwerp and the doubts and
+uncertainties of the Flanders situation weighed terribly upon the
+bishop. He was haunted for a time by nightmares of Zeppelins
+presently raining fire upon London. These visions became
+Apocalyptic. The Zeppelins came to England with the new year, and
+with the close of the year came the struggle for Ypres that was
+so near to being a collapse of the allied defensive. The events
+of the early spring, the bloody failure of British generalship at
+Neuve Chapelle, the naval disaster in the Dardanelles, the
+sinking of the Falaba, the Russian defeat in the Masurian Lakes,
+all deepened the bishop's impression of the immensity of the
+nation's difficulties and of his own unhelpfulness. He was
+ashamed that the church should hold back its curates from
+enlistment while the French priests were wearing their uniforms
+in the trenches; the expedition of the Bishop of London to hold
+open-air services at the front seemed merely to accentuate the
+tub-rolling. It was rolling the tub just where it was most in the
+way.
+
+What was wrong? What was wanting?
+
+The Westminster Gazette, The Spectator, and several other of
+the most trusted organs of public opinion were intermittently
+discussing the same question. Their discussions implied at once
+the extreme need that was felt for religion by all sorts of
+representative people, and the universal conviction that the
+church was in some way muddling and masking her revelation. "What
+is wrong with the Churches?" was, for example, the general
+heading of The Westminster Gazette's correspondence.
+
+One day the bishop skimmed a brief incisive utterance by Sir
+Harry Johnston that pierced to the marrow of his own shrinking
+convictions. Sir Harry is one of those people who seem to write
+as well as speak in a quick tenor. "Instead of propounding
+plainly and without the acereted mythology of Asia Minor, Greece
+and Rome, the pure Gospel of Christ.... they present it
+overloaded with unbelievable myths (such as, among a thousand
+others, that Massacre of the Innocents which never took
+place).... bore their listeners by a Tibetan repetition of creeds
+that have ceased to be credible.... Mutually contradictory
+propositions.... Prayers and litanies composed in Byzantine and
+mediaeval times.... the want of actuality, the curious silliness
+which has, ever since the destruction of Jerusalem, hung about
+the exposition of Christianity.... But if the Bishops continue
+to fuss about the trappings of religion.... the maintenance of
+codes compiled by people who lived sixteen hundred or two
+thousand five hundred years ago.... the increasingly educated and
+practical-minded working classes will not come to church, weekday
+or Sunday."
+
+The bishop held the paper in his hand, and with a mind that he
+felt to be terribly open, asked himself how true that sharp
+indictment might be, and, granting its general truth, what was
+the duty of the church, that is to say of the bishops, for as
+Cyprian says, ecelesia est in episcopo. We say the creeds; how
+far may we unsay them?
+
+So far be had taken no open action against Chasters. Suppose
+now be were to side with Chasters and let the whole diocese, the
+church of Princhester, drift as far as it chose under his
+inaction towards an extreme modernism, risking a conflict with,
+and if necessary fighting, the archbishop.... It was but for a
+moment that his mind swung to this possibility and then recoiled.
+The Laymen, that band of bigots, would fight. He could not
+contemplate litigation and wrangling about the teaching of the
+church. Besides, what were the "trappings of religion" and what
+the essentials? What after all was "the pure gospel of Christ" of
+which this writer wrote so glibly? He put the paper down and took
+a New Testament from his desk and opened it haphazard. He felt a
+curious wish that he could read it for the first time. It was
+over-familiar. Everything latterly in his theology and beliefs
+had become over-familiar. It had all become mechanical and dead
+and unmeaning to his tired mind....
+
+Whippham came with a reminder of more tub-rolling, and the
+bishop's speculations were broken off.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH  -  THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND
+
+(1)
+
+
+THAT night when he cried aloud at the memory of his furtive
+cigarette, the bishop was staying with a rich man named Garstein
+Fellows. These Garstein Fellows people were steel people with a
+financial side to them; young Garstein Fellows had his fingers in
+various chemical businesses, and the real life of the firm was in
+various minor partners called Hartstein and Blumenhart and so
+forth, who had acquired a considerable amount of ungentlemanly
+science and energy in Germany and German Switzerland. But the
+Fellows element was good old Princhester stuff. There had been a
+Fellows firm in Princhester in 1819. They were not people the
+bishop liked and it was not a house the bishop liked staying at,
+but it had become part of his policy to visit and keep in touch
+with as many of the local plutocracy as he could, to give and
+take with them, in order to make the presence of the church a
+reality to them. It had been not least among the negligences and
+evasions of the sainted but indolent Hood that he had invariably
+refused overnight hospitality whenever it was possible for him to
+get back to his home. The morning was his working time. His books
+and hymns had profited at the cost of missing many a generous
+after-dinner subscription, and at the expense of social unity.
+From the outset Scrope had set himself to alter this. A certain
+lack of enthusiasm on Lady Ella's part had merely provoked him to
+greater effort on his own. His ideal of what was needed with the
+people was something rather jolly and familiar, something like a
+very good and successful French or Irish priest, something that
+came easily and readily into their homes and laid a friendly hand
+on their shoulders. The less he liked these rich people naturally
+the more familiar his resolution to be successfully intimate made
+him. He put down the names and brief characteristics of their
+sons and daughters in a little note-book and consulted it before
+every visit so as to get his most casual enquiries right. And he
+invited himself to the Garstein Fellows house on this occasion by
+telegram.
+
+
+"A special mission and some business in Wombash may I have a
+scrap of supper and a bed?"
+
+
+Now Mrs. Garstein Fellows was a thoroughly London woman; she
+was one of the banking Grunenbaums, the fair tall sort, and she
+had a very decided tendency to smartness. She had a little party
+in the house, a sort of long week-end party, that made her
+hesitate for a minute or so before she framed a reply to the
+bishop's request.
+
+
+It was the intention of Mrs. Garstein Fellows to succeed very
+conspicuously in the British world, and the British world she
+felt was a complicated one; it is really not one world but
+several, and if you would surely succeed you must keep your peace
+with all the systems and be a source of satisfaction to all of
+them. So at least Mrs. Garstein Fellows saw it, and her method
+was to classify her acquaintances according to their systems, to
+keep them in their proper bundles, and to give every one the
+treatment he or she was accustomed to receive. And since all
+things British are now changing and passing away, it may not be
+uninteresting to record the classification Mrs. Garstein Fellows
+adopted. First she set apart as most precious and desirable, and
+requiring the most careful treatment, the "court dowdies "--for
+so it was that the dignity and quiet good taste that radiated
+from Buckingham Palace impressed her restless, shallow mind--
+the sort of people who prefer pair horse carriages to
+automobiles, have quiet friendships in the highest quarters,
+quietly do not know any one else, busy themselves with charities,
+dress richly rather than impressively, and have either little
+water-colour accomplishments or none at all, and no other
+relations with "art." At the skirts of this crowning British
+world Mrs. Garstein Fellows tugged industriously and expensively.
+She did not keep a carriage and pair and an old family coachman
+because that, she felt, would be considered pushing and
+presumptuous; she had the sense to stick to her common
+unpretending 80 h.p. Daimler; but she wore a special sort of
+blackish hat-bonnet for such occasions as brought her near the
+centre of honour, which she got from a little good shop known
+only to very few outside the inner ring, which hat-bonnet she was
+always careful to sit on for a few minutes before wearing. And it
+was to this first and highest and best section of her social
+scheme that she considered that bishops properly belonged. But
+some bishops, and in particular such a comparatively bright
+bishop as the Bishop of Princhester, she also thought of as being
+just as comfortably accommodated in her second system, the
+"serious liberal lot," which was more fatiguing and less boring,
+which talked of books and things, visited the Bells, went to all
+first-nights when Granville Barker was the producer, and knew and
+valued people in the grey and earnest plains between the Cecils
+and the Sidney Webbs. And thirdly there were the smart
+intellectual lot, again not very well marked off, and on the
+whole practicable to bishops, of whom fewer particulars are
+needed because theirs is a perennial species, and then finally
+there was that fourth world which was paradoxically at once very
+brilliant and a little shady, which had its Night Club side, and
+seemed to set no limit to its eccentricities. It seemed at times
+to be aiming to shock and yet it had its standards, but here it
+was that the dancers and actresses and forgiven divorcees came in
+--and the bishops as a rule, a rule hitherto always respected,
+didn't. This was the ultimate world of Mrs. Garstein Fellows; she
+had no use for merely sporting people and the merely correct
+smart and the duller county families, sets that led nowhere, and
+it was from her fourth system of the Glittering Doubtfuls that
+this party which made her hesitate over the bishop's telegram,
+was derived.
+
+She ran over their names as she sat considering her reply.
+
+What was there for a bishop to object to? There was that
+admirable American widow, Lady Sunderbund. She was enormously
+rich, she was enthusiastic. She was really on probation for
+higher levels; it was her decolletage delayed her. If only she
+kept off theosophy and the Keltic renascence and her disposition
+to profess wild intellectual passions, there would be no harm in
+her. Provided she didn't come down to dinner in anything too
+fantastically scanty--but a word in season was possible. No!
+there was no harm in Lady Sunderbund. Then there were Ridgeway
+Kelso and this dark excitable Catholic friend of his, Paidraig
+O'Gorman. Mrs. Garstein Fellows saw no harm in them. Then one had
+to consider Lord Gatling and Lizzie Barusetter. But nothing
+showed, nothing was likely to show even if there was anything.
+And besides, wasn't there a Church and Stage Guild?
+
+Except for those people there seemed little reason for alarm.
+Mrs. Garstein Fellows did not know that Professor Hoppart, who so
+amusingly combined a professorship of political economy with the
+writing of music-hall lyrics, was a keen amateur theologian, nor
+that Bent, the sentimental novelist, had a similar passion. She
+did not know that her own eldest son, a dark, romantic-looking
+youngster from Eton, had also come to the theological stage of
+development. She did however weigh the possibilities of too
+liberal opinions on what are called social questions on the part
+of Miss Sharsper, the novelist, and decided that if that lady was
+watched nothing so terrible could be said even in an undertone;
+and as for the Mariposa, the dancer, she had nothing but Spanish
+and bad French, she looked all right, and it wasn't very likely
+she would go out of her way to startle an Anglican bishop. Simply
+she needn't dance. Besides which even if a man does get a glimpse
+of a little something--it isn't as if it was a woman.
+
+But of course if the party mustn't annoy the bishop, the bishop
+must do his duty by the party. There must be the usual purple and
+the silver buckles.
+
+She wired back:
+
+
+"A little party but it won't put you out send your man with
+your change."
+
+(2)
+
+
+In making that promise Mrs. Garstein Fellows reckoned without
+the morbid sensibility of the bishop's disorganized nervous
+system and the unsuspected theological stirrings beneath the
+apparent worldliness of Hoppart and Bent.
+
+The trouble began in the drawing-room after dinner. Out of
+deference to the bishop's abstinence the men did not remain to
+smoke, but came in to find the Mariposa and Lady Sunderbund
+smoking cigarettes, which these ladies continued to do a little
+defiantly. They had hoped to finish them before the bishop came
+up. The night was chilly, and a cheerful wood fire cracking and
+banging on the fireplace emphasized the ordinary heating. Mrs.
+Garstein Fellows, who had not expected so prompt an appearance of
+the men, had arranged her chairs in a semicircle for a little
+womanly gossip, and before she could intervene she found her
+party, with the exception of Lord Gatling, who had drifted just a
+little too noticeably with Miss Barnsetter into a window, sitting
+round with a conscious air, that was perhaps just a trifle too
+apparent, of being "good."
+
+And Mr. Bent plunged boldly into general conversation.
+
+"Are you reading anything now, Mrs. Garstein Fellows?" he
+asked. "I'm an interested party."
+
+She was standing at the side of the fireplace. She bit her lip
+and looked at the cornice and meditated with a girlish
+expression. "Yes," she said. "I am reading again. I didn't think
+I should but I am."
+
+"For a time," said Hoppart, "I read nothing but the papers. I
+bought from a dozen to twenty a day."
+
+"That is wearing off," said the bishop.
+
+"The first thing I began to read again," said Mrs. Garstein
+Fellows, "--I'm not saying it for your sake, Bishop--was the
+Bible."
+
+"I went to the Bible," said Bent as if he was surprised.
+
+"I've heard that before," said Ridgeway Kelso, in that slightly
+explosive manner of his. "All sorts of people who don't usually
+read the Bible--"
+
+"But Mr. Kelso!" protested their hostess with raised eyebrows.
+
+"I was thinking of Bent. But anyhow there's been a great wave
+of seriousness, a sudden turning to religion and religious
+things. I don't know if it comes your way, Bishop...."
+
+"I've had no rows of penitents yet."
+
+"We may be coming," said Hoppart.
+
+He turned sideways to face the bishop. "I think we should be
+coming if--if it wasn't for old entangled difficulties. I don't
+know if you will mind my saying it to you, but...."
+
+The bishop returned his frank glance. "I'd like to know above
+all things," he said. "If Mrs. Garstein Fellow will permit us.
+It's my business to know."
+
+"We all want to know," said Lady Sunderbund, speaking from the
+low chair on the other side of the fireplace. There was a
+vibration in her voice and a sudden gleam of enthusiasm in her
+face. "Why shouldn't people talk se'iously sometimes?"
+
+"Well, take my own case," said Hoppart. "In the last few weeks,
+I've been reading not only in the Bible but in the Fathers. I've
+read most of Athanasius, most of Eusebius, and--I'll confess it
+--Gibbon. I find all my old wonder come back. Why are we pinned
+to--to the amount of creed we are pinned to? Why for instance
+must you insist on the Trinity?"
+
+"Yes," said the Eton boy explosively, and flushed darkly to
+find he had spoken.
+
+"Here is a time when men ask for God," said Hoppart. "And you
+give them three!" cried Bent rather cheaply. "I confess I find
+the way encumbered by these Alexandrian elaborations," Hoppart
+completed.
+
+"Need it be?" whispered Lady Sunderbund very softly.
+
+"Well," said the bishop, and leant back in his armchair and
+knitted his brow at the fire. "I do not think," he said, "that
+men coming to God think very much of the nature of God.
+Nevertheless," he spoke slowly and patted the arm of his chair,
+"nevertheless the church insists that certain vitally important
+truths have to be conveyed, certain mortal errors are best
+guarded against, by these symbols."
+
+"You admit they are symbols."
+
+"So the church has always called them."
+
+Hoppart showed by a little movement and grimace that he thought
+the bishop quibbled.
+
+"In every sense of the word," the bishop hastened to explain,
+"the creeds are symbolical. It is clear they seek to express
+ineffable things by at least an extended use of familiar words. I
+suppose we are all agreed nowadays that when we speak of the
+Father and of the Son we mean something only in a very remote and
+exalted way parallel with--with biological fatherhood and
+sonship."
+
+Lady Sunderbund nodded eagerly. "Yes," she said, "oh, yes," and
+held up an expectant face for more.
+
+"Our utmost words, our most elaborately phrased creeds, can at
+the best be no better than the shadow of something unseen thrown
+upon the screen of experience."
+
+He raised his rather weary eyes to Hoppart as if he would know
+what else needed explanation. He was gratified by Lady
+Sunderbund's approval, but he affected not to see or hear it. But
+it was Bent who spoke.
+
+He spoke in the most casual way. He made the thing seem the
+most incidental of observations.
+
+"What puzzles me," he said, "is why the early Christians
+identified the Spermaticos Logos of the Stoics with the second
+and not with the third person of the Trinity."
+
+To which the bishop, rising artlessly to the bait, replied,
+"Ah! that indeed is the unfortunate aspect of the whole affair."
+
+And then the Irish Catholic came down on him....
+
+(3)
+
+
+How the bishop awakened in the night after this dispute has
+been told already in the opening section of this story. To that
+night of discomfort we now return after this comprehensive
+digression. He awoke from nightmares of eyes and triangles to
+bottomless remorse and perplexity. For the first time he fully
+measured the vast distances he had travelled from the beliefs and
+attitudes of his early training, since his coming to Princhester.
+Travelled--or rather slipped and fallen down the long slopes of
+doubt.
+
+That clear inky dimness that comes before dawn found his white
+face at the window looking out upon the great terrace and the
+park.
+
+(4)
+
+
+After a bout of mental distress and sleeplessness the bishop
+would sometimes wake in the morning not so much exhausted as in a
+state of thin mental and bodily activity. This was more
+particularly so if the night had produced anything in the nature
+of a purpose. So it was on this occasion. The day was clear
+before him; at least it could be cleared by sending three
+telegrams; his man could go back to Princhester and so leave him
+perfectly free to go to Brighton-Pomfrey in London and secure
+that friendly dispensation to smoke again which seemed the only
+alternative to a serious mental breakdown. He would take his bag,
+stay the night in London, smoke, sleep well, and return the next
+morning. Dunk, his valet-butler, found him already bathed and
+ready for a cup of tea and a Bradshaw at half-past seven. He went
+on dressing although the good train for London did not start
+until 10.45.
+
+Mrs. Garstein Fellows was by nature and principle a late riser;
+the breakfast-room showed small promise yet of the repast, though
+the table was set and bright with silver and fresh flowers, and a
+wood fire popped and spurted to greet and encourage the March
+sunshine. But standing in the doorway that led to the promise and
+daffodils and crocuses of Mrs. Garstein Fellows' garden stood
+Lady Sunderbund, almost with an effect of waiting, and she
+greeted the bishop very cheerfully, doubted the immediate
+appearance of any one else, and led him in the most natural
+manner into the new but already very pleasant shrubbery.
+
+In some indefinable special way the bishop had been aware of
+Lady Sunderbund's presence since first he had met her, but it was
+only now that he could observe her with any particularity. She
+was tall like his own Lady Ella but not calm and quiet; she was
+electric, her eyes, her smiles, her complexion had as it were an
+established brightness that exceeded the common lustre of things.
+This morning she was dressed in grey that was nevertheless not
+grey but had an effect of colour, and there was a thread of black
+along the lines of her body and a gleam of gold. She carried her
+head back with less dignity than pride; there was a little frozen
+movement in her dark hair as if it flamed up out of her head.
+There were silver ornaments in her hair. She spoke with a pretty
+little weakness of the r's that had probably been acquired
+abroad. And she lost no time in telling him, she was eager to
+tell him, that she had been waylaying him. "I did so want to talk
+to you some maw," she said. "I was shy last night and they we'
+all so noisy and eaga'. I p'ayed that you might come down early.
+
+"It's an oppo'tunity I've longed for," she said.
+
+She did her very pretty best to convey what it was had been
+troubling her. 'iligion bad been worrying her for years. Life was
+--oh--just ornaments and games and so wea'isome, so wea'isome,
+unless it was 'iligious. And she couldn't get it 'iligious.
+
+The bishop nodded his head gravely.
+
+"You unde'stand?" she pressed.
+
+"I understand too well--the attempt to get hold--and keep
+hold."
+
+"I knew you would!" she cried.
+
+She went on with an impulsive rapidity. O'thodoxy had always
+'ipelled her,--always. She had felt herself confronted by the
+most insurmountable difficulties, and yet whenever she had gone
+away from Christianity--she had gone away from Christianity, to
+the Theosophists and the Christian Scientists--she had felt she
+was only "st'aying fu'tha." And then suddenly when he was
+speaking last night, she had felt he knew. It was so wonderful to
+hear the "k'eed was only a symbol."
+
+"Symbol is the proper name for it," said the bishop. "It wasn't
+for centuries it was called the Creed."
+
+Yes, and so what it really meant was something quite different
+from what it did mean.
+
+The bishop felt that this sentence also was only a symbol, and
+nodded encouragingly--but gravely, warily.
+
+And there she was, and the point was there were thousands and
+thousands and thousands of educated people like her who were
+dying to get through these old-fashioned symbols to the true
+faith that lay behind them. That they knew lay behind them. She
+didn't know if he had read "The Light under the Altar"?
+
+"He's vicar of Wombash--in my diocese," said the bishop with
+restraint.
+
+"It's wonde'ful stuff," said Lady Sunderbund. "It's spi'tually
+cold, but it's intellectually wonde'ful. But we want that with
+spi'tuality. We want it so badly. If some one--"
+
+She became daring. She bit her under lip and flashed her spirit
+at him.
+
+"If you--" she said and paused.
+
+"Could think aloud," said the bishop.
+
+"Yes," she said, nodding rapidly, and became breathless to
+hear.
+
+It would certainly be an astonishing end to the Chasters
+difficulty if the bishop went over to the heretic, the bishop
+reflected.
+
+"My dear lady, I won't disguise," he began; "in fact I don't
+see how I could, that for some years I have been growing more and
+more discontented with some of our most fundamental formulae. But
+it's been very largely a shapeless discontent--hitherto. I
+don't think I've said a word to a single soul. No, not a word.
+You are the first person to whom I've ever made the admission
+that even my feelings are at times unorthodox."
+
+She lit up marvellously at his words. "Go on," she whispered.
+
+But she did not need to tell him to go on. Now that he had once
+broached the casket of his reserves he was only too glad of a
+listener. He talked as if they were intimate and loving friends,
+and so it seemed to both of them they were. It was a wonderful
+release from a long and painful solitude.
+
+To certain types it is never quite clear what has happened to
+them until they tell it. So that now the bishop, punctuated very
+prettily by Lady Sunderbund, began to measure for the first time
+the extent of his departure from the old innate convictions of
+Otteringham Rectory. He said that it was strange to find doubt
+coming so late in life, but perhaps it was only in recent years
+that his faith had been put to any really severe tests. It had
+been sheltered and unchallenged.
+
+"This fearful wa'," Lady Sunderbund interjected.
+
+But Princhester had been a critical and trying change, and "The
+Light under the Altar" case had ploughed him deeply. It was
+curious that his doubts always seemed to have a double strand;
+there was a moral objection based on the church's practical
+futility and an intellectual strand subordinated to this which
+traced that futility largely to its unconvincing formulae.
+
+"And yet you know," said the bishop, "I find I can't go with
+Chasters. He beats at the church; he treats her as though she
+were wrong. I feel like a son, growing up, who finds his mother
+isn't quite so clear-spoken nor quite so energetic as she seemed
+to be once. She's right, I feel sure. I've never doubted her
+fundamental goodness."
+
+"Yes," said Lady Sunderbund, very eagerly, "yes."
+
+"And yet there's this futility.... You know, my dear lady, I
+don't know what to do. One feels on the one hand, that here is a
+cloud of witnesses, great men, sainted men, subtle men, figures
+permanently historical, before whom one can do nothing but bow
+down in the utmost humility, here is a great instrument and
+organization--what would the world be without the witness of the
+church?--and on the other hand here are our masses out of hand
+and hostile, our industrial leaders equally hostile; there is a
+failure to grip, and that failure to grip is so clearly traceable
+to the fact that our ideas are not modern ideas, that when we
+come to profess our faith we find nothing in our mouths but
+antiquated Alexandrian subtleties and phrases and ideas that may
+have been quite alive, quite significant, quite adequate in Asia
+Minor or Egypt, among men essentially orientals, fifteen hundred
+years ago, but which now--�
+
+He expressed just what they came to now by a gesture.
+
+She echoed his gesture.
+
+"Probably I'm not alone among my brethren," he went on, and
+then: "But what is one to do?"
+
+With her hands she acted her sense of his difficulty.
+
+"One may be precipitate," he said. "There's a kind of loyalty
+and discipline that requires one to keep the ranks until one's
+course of action is perfectly clear. One owes so much to so many.
+One has to consider how one may affect--oh! people one has never
+seen."
+
+He was lugging things now into speech that so far had been
+scarcely above the threshold of his conscious thought. He went on
+to discuss the entire position of the disbelieving cleric. He
+discovered a fine point.
+
+"If there was something else, an alternative, another religion,
+another Church, to which one could go, the whole case would be
+different. But to go from the church to nothingness isn't to go
+from falsehood to truth. It's to go from truth, rather badly
+expressed, rather conservatively hidden by its protections, truth
+in an antiquated costume, to the blackest lie--in the world."
+
+She took that point very brightly.
+
+"One must hold fast to 'iligion," she said, and looked
+earnestly at him and gripped fiercely, pink thumbs out, with her
+beautiful hands held up.
+
+That was it, exactly. He too was gripping. But while on the
+outside the Midianites of denial were prowling for these clinging
+souls, within the camp they were assailed by a meticulous
+orthodoxy that was only too eager to cast them forth. The bishop
+dwelt for a time upon the curious fierceness orthodoxy would
+sometimes display. Nowadays atheism can be civil, can be
+generous; it is orthodoxy that trails a scurrilous fringe.
+
+"Who was that young man with a strong Irish accent--who
+contradicted me so suddenly?" he asked.
+
+"The dark young man?"
+
+"The noisy young man."
+
+"That was Mist' Pat'ick O'Go'man. He is a Kelt and all that.
+Spells Pat'ick with eva so many letters. You know. They say he
+spends ouas and ouas lea'ning E'se. He wo'ies about it. They all
+t'y to lea'n E'se, and it wo'ies them and makes them hate England
+moa and moa."
+
+"He is orthodox. He--is what I call orthodox to the
+ridiculous extent."
+
+"'idiculous."
+
+A deep-toned gong proclaimed breakfast over a square mile or so
+of territory, and Lady Sunderbund turned about mechanically
+towards the house. But they continued their discussion.
+
+She started indeed a new topic. "Shall we eva, do 'ou think,
+have a new 'iligion--t'ua and betta?"
+
+That was a revolutionary idea to him.
+
+He was still fending it off from him when a gap in the shrubs
+brought them within sight of the house and of Mrs. Garstein
+Fellows on the portico waving a handkerchief and crying
+"Break-fast."
+
+"I wish we could talk for houas," said Lady Sunderbund.
+
+"I've been glad of this talk," said the bishop. "Very glad."
+
+She lifted her soft abundant skirts and trotted briskly across
+the still dewy lawn towards the house door. The bishop followed
+gravely and slowly with his hands behind his back and an
+unusually peaceful expression upon his face. He was thinking how
+rare and precious a thing it is to find intelligent friendship in
+women. More particularly when they were dazzlingly charming and
+pretty. It was strange, but this was really his first woman
+friend. If, as he hoped, she became his friend.
+
+Lady Sunderbund entered the breakfast room in a gusty abundance
+like Botticelli's Primavera, and kissed Mrs. Garstein Fellows
+good-morning. She exhaled a glowing happiness. "He is wondyful,"
+she panted. "He is most wondyful."
+
+"Mr. Hidgeway Kelso?"
+
+"No, the dee' bishop! I love him. Are those the little sausages
+I like? May I take th'ee? I've been up houas."
+
+The dee' bishop appeared in the sunlit doorway.
+
+(5)
+
+
+The bishop felt more contentment in the London train than he
+had felt for many weeks. He had taken two decisive and relieving
+steps. One was that he had stated his case to another human
+being, and that a very charming and sympathetic human being, he
+was no longer a prey to a current of secret and concealed
+thoughts running counter to all the appearances of his outward
+life; and the other was that he was now within an hour or so of
+Brighton-Pomfrey and a cigarette. He would lunch on the train,
+get to London about two, take a taxi at once to the wise old
+doctor, catch him over his coffee in a charitable and
+understanding mood, and perhaps be smoking a cigarette publicly
+and honourably and altogether satisfyingly before three.
+
+So far as Brighton-Pomfrey's door this program was fulfilled
+without a hitch. The day was fine and he had his taxi opened, and
+noted with a patriotic satisfaction as he rattled through the
+streets, the glare of the recruiting posters on every vacant
+piece of wall and the increasing number of men in khaki in the
+streets. But at the door he had a disappointment. Dr.
+Brighton-Pomfrey was away at the front--of all places; he had
+gone for some weeks; would the bishop like to see Dr. Dale?
+
+The bishop hesitated. He had never set eyes on this Dr. Dale.
+
+Indeed, he had never heard of Dr. Dale.
+
+Seeing his old friend Brighton-Pomfrey and being gently and
+tactfully told to do exactly what he was longing to do was one
+thing; facing some strange doctor and going slowly and
+elaborately through the whole story of his illness, his vow and
+his breakdown, and perhaps having his reaction time tested and
+all sorts of stripping and soundings done, was quite another. He
+was within an ace of turning away.
+
+If he had turned away his whole subsequent life would have been
+different. It was the very slightest thing in the world tipped
+the beam. It was the thought that, after all, whatever
+inconvenience and unpleasantness there might be in this
+interview, there was at the end of it a very reasonable prospect
+of a restored and legitimate cigarette.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIFTH  -  THE FIRST VISION
+
+(1)
+
+
+Dr. DALE exceeded the bishop's worst apprehensions. He was a
+lean, lank, dark young man with long black hair and irregular,
+rather prolonged features; his chin was right over to the left;
+he looked constantly at the bishop's face with a distinctly
+sceptical grey eye; he could not have looked harder if he had
+been a photographer or a portrait painter. And his voice was
+harsh, and the bishop was particularly sensitive to voices.
+
+He began by understanding far too much of the bishop's illness,
+and he insisted on various familiarities with the bishop's heart
+and tongue and eye and knee that ruffled the bishop's soul.
+
+"Brighton-Pomfrey talked of neurasthenia?" he asked. "That was
+his diagnosis," said the bishop. "Neurasthenia," said the young
+man as though he despised the word.
+
+The bishop went on buttoning up his coat.
+
+"You don't of course want to break your vows about drinking and
+smoking," said the young man with the very faintest suggestion of
+derision in his voice.
+
+"Not if it can possibly be avoided," the bishop asserted.
+"Without a loss, that is, of practical efficiency," he added.
+"For I have much to do."
+
+"I think that it is possible to keep your vow," said the young
+man, and the bishop could have sworn at him. "I think we can
+manage that all right."
+
+(2)
+
+
+The bishop sat at the table resting his arm upon it and
+awaiting the next development of this unsatisfactory interview.
+He was on the verge of asking as unpleasantly as possible when
+Brighton-Pomfrey would return.
+
+The young man stood upon Brighton-Pomfrey's hearth-rug and was
+evidently contemplating dissertations.
+
+"Of course," he said, as though he discussed a problem with
+himself, "you must have some sort of comfort. You must get out of
+this state, one way or another."
+
+The bishop nodded assent. He had faint hopes of this young
+man's ideas of comfort.
+
+Dr. Dale reflected. Then he went off away from the question of
+comfort altogether. "You see, the trouble in such a case as this
+is peculiarly difficult to trace to its sources because it comes
+just upon the border-line of bodily and mental things. You may
+take a drug or alter your regimen and it disturbs your thoughts,
+you may take an idea and it disturbs your health. It is easy
+enough to say, as some do, that all ideas have a physical
+substratum; it is almost as easy to say with the Christian
+Scientist that all bodily states are amenable to our ideas. The
+truth doesn't, I think, follow the border between those opposite
+opinions very exactly on either side. I can't, for instance, tell
+you to go home and pray against these uncertainties and despairs,
+because it is just these uncertainties and despairs that rob you
+of the power of efficient prayer."
+
+He did not seem to expect anything from the bishop.
+
+"I don't see that because a case brings one suddenly right up
+against the frontier of metaphysics, why a doctor should
+necessarily pull up short at that, why one shouldn't go on into
+either metaphysics or psychology if such an extension is
+necessary for the understanding of the case. At any rate if
+you'll permit it in this consultation...."
+
+"Go on," said the bishop, holding on to that promise of
+comfort. "The best thing is to thrash out the case in your own
+way. And then come to what is practical."
+
+"What is really the matter here--the matter with you that is
+--is a disorganization of your tests of reality. It's one of a
+group of states hitherto confused. Neurasthenia, that
+comprehensive phrase--well, it is one of the neurasthenias.
+Here, I confess, I begin to talk of work I am doing, work still
+to be published, finished first and then published.... But I go
+off from the idea that every living being lives in a state not
+differing essentially from a state of hallucination concerning
+the things about it. Truth, essential truth, is hidden. Always.
+Of course there must be a measure of truth in our working
+illusions, a working measure of truth, or the creature would
+smash itself up and end itself, but beyond that discretion of the
+fire and the pitfall lies a wide margin of error about which we
+may be deceived for years. So long as it doesn't matter, it
+doesn't matter. I don't know if I make myself clear."
+
+"I follow you," said the bishop a little wearily, "I follow
+you. Phenomena and noumena and so on and so on.  Kant and so
+forth. Pragmatism. Yes."
+
+With a sigh.
+
+"And all that," completed Dr. Dale in a voice that suggested
+mockery. "But you see we grow into a way of life, we settle down
+among habits and conventions, we say 'This is all right' and
+'That is always so.' We get more and more settled into our life
+as a whole and more and more confident. Unless something happens
+to shake us out of our sphere of illusion. That may be some
+violent contradictory fact, some accident, or it may be some
+subtle change in one's health and nerves that makes us feel
+doubtful. Or a change of habits. Or, as I believe, some subtle
+quickening of the critical faculty. Then suddenly comes the
+feeling as though we were lost in a strange world, as though we
+had never really seen the world before."
+
+He paused.
+
+The bishop was reluctantly interested. "That does describe
+something--of the mental side," he admitted. "I never believe
+in concealing my own thoughts from an intelligent patient," said
+Dr. Dale, with a quiet offensiveness. "That sort of thing belongs
+to the dark ages of the 'pothecary's art. I will tell you exactly
+my guesses and suppositions about you. At the base of it all is a
+slight and subtle kidney trouble, due I suggest to your going to
+Princhester and drinking the local water--"
+
+"But it's excellent water. They boast of it."
+
+"By all the established tests. As a matter of fact many of our
+best drinking waters have all sorts of unspecified qualities.
+Burton water, for example, is radioactive by Beetham's standards
+up to the ninth degree. But that is by the way. My theory about
+your case is that this produced a change in your blood, that
+quickened your sensibilities and your critical faculties just at
+a time when a good many bothers--I don't of course know what
+they were, but I can, so to speak, see the marks all over you--
+came into your life."
+
+The bishop nodded.
+
+"You were uprooted. You moved from house to house, and failed
+to get that curled up safe feeling one has in a real home in any
+of them."
+
+"If you saw the fireplaces and the general decoration of the
+new palace!" admitted the bishop. "I had practically no control."
+
+"That confirms me," said Dr. Dale. "Insomnia followed, and
+increased the feeling of physical strangeness by increasing the
+bodily disturbance. I suspect an intellectual disturbance."
+
+He paused.
+
+"There was," said the bishop.
+
+"You were no longer at home anywhere. You were no longer at
+home in your diocese, in your palace, in your body, in your
+convictions. And then came the war. Quite apart from everything
+else the mind of the whole world is suffering profoundly from the
+shock of this war--much more than is generally admitted. One
+thing you did that you probably did not observe yourself doing,
+you drank rather more at your meals, you smoked a lot more. That
+was your natural and proper response to the shock."
+
+"Ah!" said the bishop, and brightened up.
+
+"It was remarked by Tolstoy, I think, that few intellectual men
+would really tolerate the world as it is if it were not for
+smoking and drinking. Even novelists have their moments of
+lucidity. Certainly these things soothe the restlessness in men's
+minds, deaden their sceptical sensibilities. And just at the time
+when you were getting most dislodged--you gave them up."
+
+"And the sooner I go back to them the better," said the bishop
+brightly. "I quite see that."
+
+"I wouldn't say that," said Dr. Dale....
+
+(3)
+
+
+"That," said Dr. Dale, "is just where my treatment of this case
+differs from the treatment of "--he spoke the name reluctantly
+as if he disliked the mere sound of it--"Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey."
+
+"Hitherto, of course," said the bishop, "I've been in his
+hands."
+
+"He," said Dr. Dale, "would certainly set about trying to
+restore your old sphere of illusion, your old familiar sensations
+and ideas and confidences. He would in fact turn you back. He
+would restore all your habits. He would order you a rest. He
+would send you off to some holiday resort, fresh in fact but
+familiar in character, the High lands, North Italy, or
+Switzerland for example. He would forbid you newspapers and order
+you to botanize and prescribe tranquillizing reading; Trollope's
+novels, the Life of Gladstone, the works of Mr. A. C. Benson,
+memoirs and so on. You'd go somewhere where there was a good
+Anglican chaplain, and you'd take some of the services yourself.
+And we'd wash out the effects of the Princhester water with
+Contrexeville, and afterwards put you on Salutaris or Perrier. I
+don't know whether I shouldn't have inclined to some such
+treatment before the war began. Only--"
+
+He paused.
+
+"You think--?"
+
+Dr. Dale's face betrayed a sudden sombre passion. "It won't do
+now," he said in a voice of quiet intensity. "It won't do now."
+
+He remained darkly silent for so long that at last the bishop
+spoke. "Then what," he asked, "do you suggest?
+
+"Suppose we don't try to go back," said Dr. Dale. "Suppose we
+go on and go through."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"To reality.
+
+"I know it's doubtful, I know it's dangerous," he went on, "but
+I am convinced that now we can no longer keep men's minds and
+souls in these feathered nests, these spheres of illusion. Behind
+these veils there is either God or the Darkness.... Why should we
+not go on?"
+
+The bishop was profoundly perplexed. He heard himself speaking.
+"It would be unworthy of my cloth," he was saying.
+
+Dr. Dale completed the sentence: "to go back."
+
+"Let me explain a little more," he said, "what I mean by 'going
+on.' I think that this loosening of the ties of association that
+bind a man to his everyday life and his everyday self is in nine
+cases out of ten a loosening of the ties that bind him to
+everyday sanity. One common form of this detachment is the form
+you have in those cases of people who are found wandering unaware
+of their names, unaware of their places of residence, lost
+altogether from themselves. They have not only lost their sense
+of identity with themselves, but all the circumstances of their
+lives have faded out of their minds like an idle story in a book
+that has been read and put aside. I have looked into hundreds of
+such cases. I don't think that loss of identity is a necessary
+thing; it's just another side of the general weakening of the
+grip upon reality, a kind of anaemia of the brain so that
+interest fades and fails. There is no reason why you should
+forget a story because you do not believe it--if your brain is
+strong enough to hold it. But if your brain is tired and weak,
+then so soon as you lose faith in your records, your mind is glad
+to let them go. When you see these lost identity people that is
+always your first impression, a tired brain that has let go."
+
+The bishop felt extremely like letting go.
+
+"But how does this apply to my case?"
+
+"I come to that," said Dr. Dale, holding up a long large hand.
+"What if we treat this case of yours in a new way? What if we
+give you not narcotics but stimulants and tonics? What if we so
+touch the blood that we increase your sense of physical
+detachment while at the same time feeding up your senses to a new
+and more vivid apprehension of things about you?" He looked at
+his patient's hesitation and added: "You'd lose all that craving
+feeling, that you fancy at present is just the need of a smoke.
+The world might grow a trifle--transparent, but you'd keep
+real. Instead of drugging oneself back to the old contentment--"
+
+"You'd drug me on to the new," said the bishop.
+
+"But just one word more!" said Dr. Dale. "Hear why I would do
+this! It was easy and successful to rest and drug people back to
+their old states of mind when the world wasn't changing, wasn't
+spinning round in the wildest tornado of change that it has ever
+been in. But now--Where can I send you for a rest? Where can I
+send you to get you out of sight and hearing of the Catastrophe?
+Of course old Brighton-Pomfrey would go on sending people away
+for rest and a nice little soothing change if the Day of Judgment
+was coming in the sky and the earth was opening and the sea was
+giving up its dead. He'd send 'em to the seaside. Such things as
+that wouldn't shake his faith in the Channel crossing. My idea is
+that it's not only right for you to go through with this, but
+that it's the only thing to do. If you go right on and right
+through with these doubts and intimations--"
+
+He paused.
+
+"You may die like a madman," he said, "but you won't die like a
+tame rabbit."
+
+(4)
+
+
+The bishop sat reflecting. What fascinated and attracted him
+was the ending of all the cravings and uneasinesses and
+restlessness that had distressed his life for over four years;
+what deterred him was the personality of this gaunt young man
+with his long grey face, his excited manner, his shock of black
+hair. He wanted that tonic--with grave misgivings. "If you
+think this tonic is the wiser course," he began. "I'd give it you
+if you were my father," said Dr. Dale. "I've got everything for
+it," he added.
+
+"You mean you can make it up--without a prescription."
+
+"I can't give you a prescription. The essence of it--It's a
+distillate I have been trying. It isn't in the Pharmacopeia."
+
+Again the bishop had a twinge of misgiving.
+
+But in the end he succumbed. He didn't want to take the stuff,
+but also he did not want to go without his promised comfort.
+
+Presently Dale had given him a little phial--and was holding
+up to the window a small medicine glass into which he was pouring
+very carefully twenty drops of the precious fluid. "Take it
+only," he said, "when you feel you must."
+
+"It is the most golden of liquids," said the bishop, peering at
+it.
+
+"When you want more I will make you more. Later of course, it
+will be possible to write a prescription. Now add the water--
+so.
+
+"It becomes opalescent. How beautifully the light plays in it!
+
+"Take it."
+
+The bishop dismissed his last discretion and drank.
+
+"Well?" said Dr. Dale.
+
+"I am still here," said the bishop, smiling, and feeling a
+joyous tingling throughout his body. "It stirs me."
+
+(5)
+
+
+The bishop stood on the pavement outside Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's
+house. The massive door had closed behind him.
+
+It had been an act of courage, of rashness if you will, to take
+this draught. He was acutely introspective, ready for anything,
+for the most disagreeable or the most bizarre sensations. He was
+asking himself, Were his feet steady? Was his head swimming?
+
+His doubts glowed into assurance.
+
+Suddenly he perceived that he was sure of God.
+
+Not perhaps of the God of Nicaea, but what did these poor
+little quibblings and definitions of the theologians matter? He
+had been worrying about these definitions and quibblings for four
+long restless years. Now they were just failures to express--
+what surely every one knew--and no one would ever express
+exactly. Because here was God, and the kingdom of God was
+manifestly at hand. The visible world hung before him as a mist
+might hang before the rising sun. He stood proudly and
+masterfully facing a universe that had heretofore bullied him
+into doubt and apologetics, a universe that had hitherto been
+opaque and was now betrayed translucent.
+
+That was the first effect of the new tonic, complete
+reassurance, complete courage. He turned to walk towards Mount
+Street and Berkeley Square as a sultan might turn to walk among
+his slaves.
+
+But the tonic was only beginning.
+
+Before he had gone a dozen steps he was aware that he seemed
+more solid and larger than the people about him. They had all a
+curious miniature effect, as though he was looking at them
+through the wrong end of an opera glass. The houses on either
+side of the street and the traffic shared this quality in an
+equal measure. It was as if he was looking at the world through
+apertures in a miniature cinematograph peep-show. This surprised
+him and a little dashed his first glow of satisfaction.
+
+He passed a man in khaki who, he fancied, looked at him with an
+odd expression. He observed the next passers-by narrowly and
+suspiciously, a couple of smartish young men, a lady with a
+poodle, a grocer's boy with a basket, but none seemed to observe
+anything remarkable about him. Then he caught the eye of a taxi-
+driver and became doubtful again.
+
+He had a feeling that this tonic was still coming in like a
+tide. It seemed to be filling him and distending him, in spite of
+the fact that he was already full. After four years of flaccidity
+it was pleasant to be distended again, but already he felt more
+filled than he had ever been before. At present nothing was
+showing, but all his body seemed braced and uplifted. He must be
+careful not to become inflated in his bearing.
+
+And yet it was difficult not to betray a little inflation. He
+was so filled with assurance that things were right with him and
+that God was there with him. After all it was not mere fancy; he
+was looking through the peepholes of his eyes at the world of
+illusion and appearance. The world that was so intent upon its
+immediate business, so regardless of eternal things, that had so
+dominated him but a little while ago, was after all a thing more
+mortal than himself.
+
+Another man in khaki passed him.
+
+For the first time he saw the war as something measurable, as
+something with a beginning and an end, as something less than the
+immortal spirit in man. He had been too much oppressed by it. He
+perceived all these people in the street were too much oppressed
+by it. He wanted to tell them as much, tell them that all was
+well with them, bid them be of good cheer. He wanted to bless
+them. He found his arm floating up towards gestures of
+benediction. Self-control became increasingly difficult.
+
+All the way down Berkeley Square the bishop was in full-bodied
+struggle with himself. He was trying to control himself, trying
+to keep within bounds. He felt that he was stepping too high,
+that his feet were not properly reaching the ground, that he was
+walking upon cushions of air.
+
+The feeling of largeness increased, and the feeling of
+transparency in things about him. He avoided collision with
+passers-by--excessively. And he felt his attention was being
+drawn more and more to something that was going on beyond the
+veil of visible things. He was in Piccadilly now, but at the same
+time Piccadilly was very small and he was walking in the presence
+of God.
+
+He had a feeling that God was there though he could not see
+him. And at the same time he was in this transitory world, with
+people going to and fro, men with umbrellas tucked dangerously
+under their arms, men in a hurry, policemen, young women rattling
+Red Cross collecting boxes, smart people, loafers. They
+distracted one from God.
+
+He set out to cross the road just opposite Prince's, and
+jumping needlessly to give way to an omnibus had the narrowest
+escape from a taxicab.
+
+He paused on the pavement edge to recover himself. The shock of
+his near escape had, as people say, pulled him together.
+
+What was he to do? Manifestly this opalescent draught was
+overpowering him. He ought never to have taken it. He ought to
+have listened to the voice of his misgivings. It was clear that
+he was not in a fit state to walk about the streets. He was--
+what had been Dr. Dale's term?--losing his sense of reality.
+What was he to do? He was alarmed but not dismayed. His thoughts
+were as full-bodied as the rest of his being, they came throbbing
+and bumping into his mind. What was he to do?
+
+Brighton-Pomfrey ought never to have left his practice in the
+hands of this wild-eyed experimenter.
+
+Strange that after a lifetime of discretion and men's respect
+one should be standing on the Piccadilly pavement--intoxicated!
+
+It came into his head that he was not so very far from the
+Athenaeum, and surely there if anywhere a bishop may recover his
+sense of being--ordinary.
+
+And behind everything, behind the tall buildings and the
+swarming people there was still the sense of a wide illuminated
+space, of a light of wonder and a Presence. But he must not give
+way to that again! He had already given way altogether too much.
+He repeated to himself in a whisper, "I am in Piccadilly."
+
+If he kept tight hold upon himself he felt he might get to the
+Athenaeum before--before anything more happened.
+
+He murmured directions to himself. "Keep along the pavement.
+Turn to the right at the Circus. Now down the hill. Easily down
+the hill. Don't float! Junior Army and Navy Stores. And the
+bookseller."
+
+And presently he had a doubt of his name and began to repeat
+it.
+
+"Edward Princhester. Edward Scrope, Lord Bishop of
+Princhester."
+
+And all the while voices within him were asserting, "You are in
+the kingdom of Heaven. You are in the presence of God. Place and
+time are a texture of illusion and dreamland. Even now, you are
+with God."
+
+(6)
+
+
+The porter of the Athenaeum saw him come in, looking well--
+flushed indeed--but queer in expression; his blue eyes were
+wide open and unusually vague and blue.
+
+He wandered across towards the dining-room, hesitated, went to
+look at the news, seemed in doubt whether he would not go into
+the smoking-room, and then went very slowly upstairs, past the
+golden angel up to the great drawing-room.
+
+In the drawing-room he found only Sir James Mounce, the man who
+knew the novels of Sir Walter Scott by heart and had the minutest
+and most unsparing knowledge of every detail in the life of that
+supreme giant of English literature. He had even, it was said,
+acquired a Scotch burr in the enthusiasm of his hero-worship. It
+was usually sufficient only to turn an ear towards him for him to
+talk for an hour or so. He was now studying Bradshaw.
+
+The bishop snatched at him desperately. He felt that if he went
+away there would be no hold left upon the ordinary things of
+life.
+
+"Sir James," he said, "I was wondering the other day when was
+the exact date of the earliest public ascription of Waverley to
+Scott."
+
+"Eh!" said Sir James, "but I'd like to talk that over with ye.
+Indeed I would. It would be depending very largely on what ye
+called 'public.' But--"
+
+He explained something about an engagement in Birmingham that
+night, a train to catch. Reluctantly but relentlessly he
+abandoned the proffered ear. But he promised that the next time
+they met in the club he would go into the matter "exhausteevely."
+
+The door closed upon him. The bishop was alone. He was flooded
+with the light of the world that is beyond this world. The things
+about him became very small and indistinct.
+
+He would take himself into a quiet corner in the library of
+this doll's house, and sit his little body down in one of the
+miniature armchairs. Then if he was going to faint or if the
+trancelike feeling was to become altogether a trance--well, a
+bishop asleep in an armchair in the library of the Athenaeum is
+nothing to startle any one.
+
+He thought of that convenient hidden room, the North Library,
+in which is the bust of Croker. There often one can be quite
+alone.... It was empty, and he went across to the window that
+looks out upon Pall Mall and sat down in the little uncomfortable
+easy chair by the desk with its back to the Benvenuto Cellini.
+
+And as he sat down, something snapped--like the snapping of a
+lute string--in his brain.
+
+(7)
+
+
+With a sigh of deep relief the bishop realized that this world
+had vanished.
+
+He was in a golden light.
+
+He perceived it as a place, but it was a place without
+buildings or trees or any very definite features. There was a
+cloudy suggestion of distant hills, and beneath his feet were
+little gem-like flowers, and a feeling of divinity and infinite
+friendliness pervaded his being. His impressions grew more
+definite. His feet seemed to be bare. He was no longer a bishop
+nor clad as a bishop. That had gone with the rest of the world.
+He was seated on a slab of starry rock.
+
+This he knew quite clearly was the place of God.
+
+He was unable to disentangle thoughts from words. He seemed to
+be speaking in his mind.
+
+"I have been very foolish and confused and perplexed. I have
+been like a creature caught among thorns."
+
+"You served the purpose of God among those thorns." It seemed
+to him at first that the answer also was among his thoughts.
+
+"I seemed so silly and so little. My wits were clay."
+
+"Clay full of desires."
+
+"Such desires!"
+
+"Blind desires. That will presently come to the light."
+
+"Shall we come to the light?"
+
+"But here it is, and you see it!"
+
+(8)
+
+
+It became clearer in the mind of the bishop that a figure sat
+beside him, a figure of great strength and beauty, with a smiling
+face and kindly eyes. A strange thought and a strange courage
+came to the bishop.
+
+"Tell me," he whispered, "are you God?"
+
+"I am the Angel of God."
+
+The bishop thought over that for some moments.
+
+"I want," he said, "to know about God.
+
+"I want," he said, with a deepening passion of the soul, "to
+know about God. Slowly through four long years I have been
+awakening to the need of God. Body and soul I am sick for the
+want of God and the knowledge of God. I did not know what was the
+matter with me, why my life had become so disordered and confused
+that my very appetites and habits are all astray. But I am
+perishing for God as a waterless man upon a raft perishes for
+drink, and there is nothing but madness if I touch the seas about
+me. Not only in my thoughts but in my under thoughts and in my
+nerves and bones and arteries I have need of God. You see I grew
+up in the delusion that I knew God, I did not know that I was
+unprovisioned and unprovided against the tests and strains and
+hardships of life. I thought that I was secure and safe. I was
+told that we men--who were apes not a quarter of a million
+years ago, who still have hair upon our arms and ape's teeth in
+our jaws--had come to the full and perfect knowledge of God. It
+was all put into a creed. Not a word of it was to be altered, not
+a sentence was to be doubted any more. They made me a teacher of
+this creed. They seemed to explain it to me. And when I came to
+look into it, when my need came and I turned to my creed, it was
+old and shrivelled up, it was the patched-up speculations of
+vanished Greeks and Egyptians, it was a mummy of ancient
+disputes, old and dry, that fell to dust as I unwrapped it. And I
+was dressed up in the dress of old dead times and put before an
+altar of forgotten sacrifices, and I went through ceremonies as
+old as the first seedtime; and suddenly I knew clearly that God
+was not there, God was not in my Creed, not in my cathedral, not
+in my ceremonies, nowhere in my life. And at the same time I
+knew, I knew as I had never known before, that certainly there
+was God."
+
+He paused. "Tell me," said the friend at his side; "tell me."
+
+"It was as if a child running beside its mother, looked up and
+saw that he had never seen her face before, that she was not his
+mother, and that the words he had seemed to understand were--
+now that he listened--words in an unknown tongue.
+
+"You see, I am but a common sort of man, dear God; I have
+neither lived nor thought in any way greatly, I have gone from
+one day to the next day without looking very much farther than
+the end of the day, I have gone on as life has befallen; if no
+great trouble had come into my life, so I should have lived to
+the end of my days. But life which began for me easily and safely
+has become constantly more difficult and strange. I could have
+held my services and given my benedictions, I could have believed
+I believed in what I thought I believed.... But now I am lost and
+astray--crying out for God...."
+
+(9)
+
+
+"Let us talk a little about your troubles," said the Angel.
+"Let us talk about God and this creed that worries you and this
+church of yours."
+
+"I feel as though I had been struggling to this talk through
+all the years--since my doubts began."
+
+"The story your Creed is trying to tell is much the same story
+that all religions try to tell. In your heart there is God,
+beyond the stars there is God. Is it the same God?"
+
+"I don't know," said the bishop.
+
+"Does any one know?"
+
+"I thought I knew."
+
+"Your creed is full of Levantine phrases and images, full of
+the patched contradictions of the human intelligence utterly
+puzzled. It is about those two Gods, the God beyond the stars and
+the God in your heart. It says that they are the same God, but
+different. It says that they have existed together for all time,
+and that one is the Son of the other. It has added a third Person
+--but we won't go into that."
+
+The bishop was reminded suddenly of the dispute at Mrs.
+Garstein Fellows'. "We won't go into that," he agreed. "No!"
+
+"Other religions have told the story in a different way. The
+Cathars and Gnostics did. They said that the God in your heart is
+a rebel against the God beyond the stars, that the Christ in your
+heart is like Prometheus--or Hiawatha--or any other of the
+sacrificial gods, a rebel. He arises out of man. He rebels
+against that high God of the stars and crystals and poisons and
+monsters and of the dead emptiness of space.... The Manicheans
+and the Persians made out our God to be fighting eternally
+against that Being of silence and darkness beyond the stars. The
+Buddhists made the Lord Buddha the leader of men out of the
+futility and confusion of material existence to the great peace
+beyond. But it is all one story really, the story of the two
+essential Beings, always the same story and the same perplexity
+cropping up under different names, the story of one being who
+stirs us, calls to us, and leads us, and of another who is above
+and outside and in and beneath all things, inaccessible and
+incomprehensible. All these religions are trying to tell
+something they do not clearly know--of a relationship between
+these two, that eludes them, that eludes the human mind, as water
+escapes from the hand. It is unity and opposition they have to
+declare at the same time; it is agreement and propitiation, it is
+infinity and effort."
+
+"And the truth?" said the bishop in an eager whisper. "You can
+tell me the truth."
+
+The Angel's answer was a gross familiarity. He thrust his hand
+through the bishop's hair and ruffled it affectionately, and
+rested for a moment holding the bishop's cranium in his great
+palm.
+
+"But can this hold it?" he said....
+
+"Not with this little box of brains," said the Angel. "You
+could as soon make a meal of the stars and pack them into your
+belly. You haven't the things to do it with inside this."
+
+He gave the bishop's head a little shake and relinquished it.
+
+He began to argue as an elder brother might.
+
+"Isn't it enough for you to know something of the God that
+comes down to the human scale, who has been born on your planet
+and arisen out of Man, who is Man and God, your leader? He's more
+than enough to fill your mind and use up every faculty of your
+being. He is courage, he is adventure, he is the King, he fights
+for you and with you against death...."
+
+"And he is not infinite? He is not the Creator?" asked the
+bishop.
+
+"So far as you are concerned, no," said the Angel.
+
+"So far as I am concerned?"
+
+"What have you to do with creation?"
+
+And at that question it seemed that a great hand swept
+carelessly across the blackness of the farther sky, and smeared
+it with stars and suns and shining nebulas as a brush might smear
+dry paint across a canvas.
+
+The bishop stared in front of him. Then slowly he bowed his
+head, and covered his face with his hands.
+
+"And I have been in orders," he murmured; "I have been teaching
+people the only orthodox and perfect truth about these things for
+seven and twenty years."
+
+And suddenly he was back in his gaiters and his apron and his
+shovel hat, a little black figure exceedingly small in a very
+great space....
+
+(10)
+
+
+It was a very great space indeed because it was all space, and
+the roof was the ebony of limitless space from which the stars
+swung flaming, held by invisible ties, and the soil beneath his
+feet was a dust of atoms and the little beginnings of life. And
+long before the bishop bared his face again, he knew that he was
+to see his God.
+
+He looked up slowly, fearing to be dazzled.
+
+But he was not dazzled. He knew that he saw only the likeness
+and bodying forth of a being inconceivable, of One who is greater
+than the earth and stars and yet no greater than a man. He saw a
+being for ever young, for ever beginning, for ever triumphant.
+The quality and texture of this being was a warm and living light
+like the effulgence at sunrise; He was hope and courage like a
+sunlit morning in spring. He was adventure for ever, and His
+courage and adventure flowed into and submerged and possessed the
+being of the man who beheld him. And this presence of God stood
+over the bishop, and seemed to speak to him in a wordless speech.
+
+He bade him surrender himself. He bade him come out upon the
+Adventure of Life, the great Adventure of the earth that will
+make the atoms our bond-slaves and subdue the stars, that will
+build up the white fires of ecstasy to submerge pain for ever,
+that will overcome death. In Him the spirit of creation had
+become incarnate, had joined itself to men, summoning men to Him,
+having need of them, having need of them, having need of their
+service, even as great kings and generals and leaders need and
+use men. For a moment, for an endless age, the bishop bowed
+himself in the being and glory of God, felI the glow of the
+divine courage and confidence in his marrow, felt himself one
+with God.
+
+For a timeless interval....
+
+Never had the bishop had so intense a sense of reality. It
+seemed that never before had he known anything real. He knew
+certainly that God was his King and master, and that his unworthy
+service could be acceptable to God. His mind embraced that idea
+with an absolute conviction that was also absolute happiness.
+
+(11)
+
+
+The thoughts and sensations of the bishop seemed to have lifted
+for a time clean away from the condition of time, and then
+through a vast orbit to be returning to that limitation.
+
+He was aware presently that things were changing, that the
+light was losing its diviner rays, that in some indescribable
+manner the glory and the assurance diminished.
+
+The onset of the new phase was by imperceptible degrees. From a
+glowing, serene, and static realization of God, everything
+relapsed towards change and activity. He was in time again and
+things were happening, it was as if the quicksands of time poured
+by him, and it was as if God was passing away from him. He fell
+swiftly down from the heaven of self-forgetfulness to a
+grotesque, pathetic and earthly self-consciousness.
+
+He became acutely aware of his episcopal livery. And that God
+was passing away from him.
+
+It was as if God was passing, and as if the bishop was unable
+to rise up and follow him.
+
+Then it was as if God had passed, and as if the bishop was in
+headlong pursuit of him and in a great terror lest he should be
+left behind. And he was surely being left behind.
+
+He discovered that in some unaccountable way his gaiters were
+loose; most of their buttons seemed to have flown off, and his
+episcopal sash had slipped down about his feet. He was sorely
+impeded. He kept snatching at these things as he ran, in clumsy
+attempts to get them off.
+
+At last he had to stop altogether and kneel down and fumble
+with the last obstinate button.
+
+"Oh God!" he cried, "God my captain! Wait for me! Be patient
+with me!"
+
+And as he did so God turned back and reached out his hand. It
+was indeed as if he stood and smiled. He stood and smiled as a
+kind man might do; he dazzled and blinded his worshipper, and yet
+it was manifest that he had a hand a man might clasp.
+
+Unspeakable love and joy irradiated the whole being of the
+bishop as he seized God's hand and clasped it desperately with
+both his own. It was as if his nerves and arteries and all his
+substance were inundated with golden light....
+
+It was again as if he merged with God and became God....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SIXTH  -  EXEGETICAL
+
+(1)
+
+
+WITHOUT any sense of transition the bishop found himself
+seated in the little North Library of the Athenaeum club and
+staring at the bust of John Wilson Croker. He was sitting
+motionless and musing deeply. He was questioning with a cool and
+steady mind whether he had seen a vision or whether he had had a
+dream. If it had been a dream it had been an extraordinarily
+vivid and convincing dream. He still seemed to be in the presence
+of God, and it perplexed him not at all that he should also be in
+the presence of Croker. The feeling of mental rottenness and
+insecurity that had weakened his thought through the period of
+his illness, had gone. He was secure again within himself.
+
+It did not seem to matter fundamentally whether it was an
+experience of things without or of things within him that had
+happened to him. It was clear to him that much that he had seen
+was at most expressive, that some was altogether symbolical. For
+example, there was that sudden absurd realization of his sash and
+gaiters, and his perception of them as encumbrances in his
+pursuit of God. But the setting and essential of the whole thing
+remained in his mind neither expressive nor symbolical, but as
+real and immediately perceived, and that was the presence and
+kingship of God. God was still with him and about him and over
+him and sustaining him. He was back again in his world and his
+ordinary life, in his clothing and his body and his club, but God
+had been made and remained altogether plain and manifest.
+
+Whether an actual vision had made his conviction, or whether
+the conviction of his own subconscious mind had made the dream,
+seemed but a small matter beside the conviction that this was
+indeed the God he had desired and the God who must rule his life.
+
+"The stuff? The stuff had little to do with it. It just cleared
+my head.... I have seen. I have seen really. I know."
+
+(2)
+
+
+For a long time as it seemed the bishop remained wrapped in
+clouds of luminous meditation. Dream or vision it did not
+matter; the essential thing was that he had made up his mind
+about God, he had found God. Moreover, he perceived that his
+theological perplexities had gone. God was higher and simpler and
+nearer than any theological God, than the God of the Three
+Creeds. Those creeds lay about in his mind now like garments
+flung aside, no trace nor suspicion of divinity sustained them
+any longer. And now--Now he would go out into the world.
+
+The little Library of the Athenaeum has no visible door. He
+went to the book-masked entrance in the corner, and felt among
+the bookshelves for the hidden latch. Then he paused, held by a
+curious thought. What exactly was the intention of that
+symbolical struggle with his sash and gaiters, and why had they
+impeded his pursuit of God?
+
+To what particularly significant action was he going out?
+
+The Three Creeds were like garments flung aside. But he was
+still wearing the uniform of a priest in the service of those
+three creeds.
+
+After a long interval he walked into the big reading-room. He
+ordered some tea and dry toast and butter, and sat down very
+thoughtfully in a corner. He was still sitting and thinking at
+half-past eight.
+
+It may seem strange to the reader that this bishop who had been
+doubting and criticizing the church and his system of beliefs for
+four long years had never before faced the possibility of a
+severance from his ecclesiastical dignity. But he had grown up in
+the church, his life had been so entirely clerical and Anglican,
+that the widest separation he had hitherto been able to imagine
+from this past had left him still a bishop, heretical perhaps,
+innovating in the broadening of beliefs and the liberalizing of
+practice, defensive even as Chasters was defensive, but still
+with the palace and his dignities, differing in opinion rather
+than in any tangible reality from his previous self. For a
+bishop, disbelief in the Church is a far profounder scepticism
+than mere disbelief in God. God is unseen, and in daily things
+unfelt; but the Church is with the predestined bishop always. His
+concept of the extremest possible departure from orthodoxy had
+been something that Chasters had phrased as "a restatement of
+Christ." It was a new idea, an idea that had come with an immense
+effect of severance and novelty, that God could be other than the
+God of the Creed, could present himself to the imagination as a
+figure totally unlike the white, gentle, and compromising
+Redeemer of an Anglican's thought. That the bishop should treat
+the whole teaching of the church and the church itself as wrong,
+was an idea so new that it fell upon him now like a thunderbolt
+out of a cloudless sky. But here, clear in his mind now, was a
+feeling, amounting to conviction, that it was the purpose and
+gesture of the true God that he should come right out of the
+church and all his professions.
+
+And in the first glow of his vision he felt this gesture
+imperative. He must step right out.... Whither? how? And when?
+
+To begin with it seemed to him that an immediate renunciation
+was demanded. But it was a momentous step. He wanted to think.
+And to go on thinking. Rather than to act precipitately. Although
+the imperative seemed absolute, some delaying and arresting
+instinct insisted that he must "think" If he went back to
+Princhester, the everyday duties of his position would confront
+him at once with an effect of a definite challenge. He decided to
+take one of the Reform club bedrooms for two or three days, and
+wire to Princhester that he was "unavoidably delayed in town,"
+without further explanations. Then perhaps this inhibitory force
+would give way.
+
+It did not, however, give way. His mind sat down for two days
+in a blank amazement at the course before him, and at the end of
+that time this reasonless and formless institution was as strong
+as ever. During that time, except for some incidental exchanges
+at his clubs, he talked to no one. At first he did not want to
+talk to any one. He remained mentally and practically active,
+with a still intensely vivid sense that God, the true God, stood
+watching him and waiting for him to follow. And to follow meant
+slipping right out of all the world he had ever known. To thrust
+his foot right over the edge of a cliff would scarcely have
+demanded more from the bishop's store of resolution. He stood on
+the very verge. The chief secretion of his mind was a shadowy
+experiment or so in explanation of why he did not follow.
+
+(3)
+
+
+Insensibly the extreme vividness of his sense of God's nearness
+decreased. But he still retained a persuasion of the reality of
+an immediate listener waiting, and of the need of satisfying him.
+
+On the third day he found his mind still further changed. He no
+longer felt that God was in Pall Mall or St. James's Park,
+whither he resorted to walk and muse. He felt now that God was
+somewhere about the horizon....
+
+He felt too no longer that he thought straight into the mind of
+God. He thought now of what he would presently say to God. He
+turned over and rehearsed phrases. With that came a desire to try
+them first on some other hearer. And from that to the attentive
+head of Lady Sunderbund, prettily bent towards him, was no great
+leap. She would understand, if any one could understand, the
+great change that had happened in his mind.
+
+He found her address in the telephone book. She could be quite
+alone to him if he wouldn't mind "just me." It was, he said,
+exactly what he desired.
+
+But when he got to her great airy flat overlooking Hyde Park,
+with its Omega Workshop furniture and its arresting decoration,
+he was not so sure whether this encounter was so exactly the
+thing he had desired as he had supposed.
+
+The world had become opaque and real again as he walked up St.
+James's Street and past the Ritz. He had a feeling that he was
+taking an afternoon off from God. The adventurous modernity of
+the room in which he waited intensified that. One whole white
+wall was devoted to a small picture by Wyndham Lewis. It was like
+a picture of an earthquake in a city of aniline pink and grey and
+keen green cardboard, and he wished it had never existed.
+
+He turned his back upon it and stared out of the window over
+the trees and greenery. The balcony was decorated with white and
+pink geraniums in pots painted black and gold, and the railings
+of the balcony were black and gold with crimson shape like
+squares wildly out of drawing.
+
+Lady Sunderbund kept him waiting perhaps five minutes. Then she
+came sailing in to him.
+
+She was dressed in a way and moved across the room in a way
+that was more reminiscent of Botticelli's Spring than ever--
+only with a kind of superadded stiffish polonaise of lace--and
+he did not want to be reminded of Botticelli's Spring or wonder
+why she had taken to stiff lace polonaises. He did not enquire
+whether he had met Lady Sunderbund to better advantage at Mrs.
+Garstein Fellows' or whether his memory had overrated her or
+whether anything had happened to his standard of taste, but his
+feeling now was decidedly one of disappointment, and all the talk
+and self-examination he had promised himself seemed to wither and
+hide away within him. For a time he talked of her view, and then
+admired her room and its arrangement, which he thought really
+were quite unbecomingly flippant and undignified for a room. Then
+came the black tea-things on their orange tray, and he searched
+in his mind for small talk to sustain their interview.
+
+But he had already betrayed his disposition to "go on with our
+talk" in his telephone enquiry, and Lady Sunderbund, perceiving
+his shyness, began to make openings for him, at first just little
+hinting openings, and then larger and larger ones, until at last
+one got him.
+
+"I'm so glad," she said, "to see you again. I'm so glad to go
+on with oua talk. I've thought about it and thought about it."
+
+She beamed at him happily.
+
+"I've thought ova ev'y wo'd you said," she went on, when she
+had finished conveying her pretty bliss to him. "I've been so
+helped by thinking the k'eeds are symbols. And all you said. And
+I've felt time after time, you couldn't stay whe' you we'. That
+what you we' saying to me, would have to be said 'ight out."
+
+That brought him in. He could not very well evade that opening
+without incivility. After all he had asked to see her, and it was
+a foolish thing to let little decorative accidentals put him off
+his friendly purpose. A woman may have flower-pots painted gold
+with black checkers and still be deeply understanding. He
+determined to tell her what was in his mind. But he found
+something barred him from telling that he had had an actual
+vision of God. It was as if that had been a private and
+confidential meeting. It wasn't, he felt, for him either to boast
+a privilege or tell others of things that God had not chosen to
+show them.
+
+"Since I saw you," he said, "I have thought a great deal--of
+the subject of our conversation."
+
+"I have been t'ying to think," she said in a confirmatory tone,
+as if she had co-operated.
+
+"My faith in God grows," he said.
+
+She glowed. Her lips fell apart. She flamed attention.
+
+"But it grows less like the faith of the church, less and less.
+I was born and trained in Anglicanism, and it is with a sort of
+astonishment I find myself passing now out of every sort of
+Catholicism--seeing it from the outside...."
+
+"Just as one might see Buddhism," she supplied.
+
+"And yet feeling nearer � infinitely nearer to God," he said.
+
+"Yes," she panted; "yes."
+
+"I thought if one went out, one went out just to doubt and
+darkness."
+
+"And you don't?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You have gone at one step to a new 'iligion!"
+
+He stared for a moment at the phrase.
+
+"To religion," he said.
+
+"It is so wondyful," she said, with her hands straight down
+upon the couch upon which she was sitting, and leaning forward at
+him, so as to seem almost as much out of drawing as a modern
+picture.
+
+"It seems," he reflected; "--as if it were a natural thing."
+
+She came back to earth very slowly. She turned to the
+tea-things with hushed and solemn movements as though she
+administered a ceremony of peculiar significance. The bishop too
+rose slowly out of the profundity of his confession. "No sugar
+please," he said, arresting the lump in mid air.
+
+It was only when they were embarked upon cups of tea and had a
+little refreshed themselves, that she carried the talk further.
+
+"Does it mean that you must leave the church?" she asked.
+
+"It seemed so at first," he said. "But now I do not know. I do
+not know what I ought to do."
+
+She awaited his next thought.
+
+"It is as if one had lived in a room all one's life and thought
+it the world--and then suddenly walked out through a door and
+discovered the sea and the mountains and stars. So it was with me
+and the Anglican Church. It seems so extraordinary now--and it
+would have seemed the most natural thing a year ago--to think
+that I ever believed that the Anglican Compromise was the final
+truth of religion, that nothing more until the end of the world
+could ever be known that Cosmo Gordon Lang did not know, that
+there could be no conception of God and his quality that Randall
+Davidson did not possess."
+
+He paused.
+
+"I did," he said.
+
+"I did," she responded with round blue eyes of wonder.
+
+"At the utmost the Church of England is a tabernacle on a
+road."
+
+"A 'oad that goes whe'?" she rhetorized.
+
+"Exactly," said the bishop, and put down his cup.
+
+"You see, my dear Lady Sunderbund," he resumed, "I am exactly
+in the same position of that man at the door."
+
+She quoted aptly and softly: "The wo'ld was all befo' them whe'
+to choose."
+
+He was struck by the aptness of the words.
+
+"I feel I have to come right out into the bare truth. What
+exactly then do I become? Do I lose my priestly function because
+I discover how great God is? But what am I to do?"
+
+He opened a new layer of his thoughts to her.
+
+"There is a saying," he remarked, "once a priest, always a
+priest. I cannot imagine myself as other than what I am."
+
+"But o'thodox no maw," she said.
+
+"Orthodox--self-satisfied, no longer. A priest who seeks, an
+exploring priest."
+
+"In a Chu'ch of P'og'ess and B'othe'hood," she carried him on.
+
+"At any rate, in a progressive and learning church."
+
+She flashed and glowed assent.
+
+"I have been haunted," he said, "by those words spoken at
+Athens. 'Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto
+you.' That comes to me with an effect of--guidance is an
+old-fashioned word--shall I say suggestion? To stand by the
+altar bearing strange names and ancient symbols, speaking plainly
+to all mankind of the one true God--!"
+
+(4)
+
+
+He did not get much beyond this point at the time, though he
+remained talking with Lady Sunderbund for nearly an hour longer.
+The rest was merely a beating out of what had already been said.
+But insensibly she renewed her original charm, and as he became
+accustomed to her he forgot a certain artificiality in her manner
+and the extreme modernity of her costume and furniture. She was a
+wonderful listener; nobody else could have helped him to
+expression in quite the same way, and when he left her he felt
+that now he was capable of stating his case in a coherent and
+acceptable form to almost any intelligent hearer. He had a point
+of view now that was no longer embarrassed by the immediate
+golden presence of God; he was no longer dazzled nor ecstatic;
+his problem had diminished to the scale of any other great human
+problem, to the scale of political problems and problems of
+integrity and moral principle, problems about which there is no
+such urgency as there is about a house on fire, for example.
+
+And now the desire for expression was running strong. He wanted
+to state his situation; if he did not state he would have to act;
+and as he walked back to the club dinner he turned over possible
+interlocutors in his thoughts. Lord Rampound sat with him at
+dinner, and he came near broaching the subject with him. But Lord
+Rampound that evening had that morbid running of bluish legal
+anecdotes which is so common an affliction with lawyers, and
+theology sinks and dies in that turbid stream.
+
+But as he lay in bed that night he thought of his old friend
+and helper Bishop Likeman, and it was borne in upon him that he
+should consult him. And this he did next day.
+
+Since the days when the bishop had been only plain Mr. Scrope,
+the youngest and most helpful of Likeman's historical band of
+curates, their friendship had continued. Likeman had been a
+second father to him; in particular his tact and helpfulness had
+shone during those days of doubt and anxiety when dear old Queen
+Victoria, God's representative on earth, had obstinately refused,
+at the eleventh hour, to make him a bishop. She had those
+pigheaded fits, and she was touchy about the bishops. She had
+liked Scrope on account of the excellence of his German
+pronunciation, but she had been irritated by newspaper paragraphs
+--nobody could ever find out who wrote them and nobody could
+ever find out who showed them to the old lady--anticipating his
+elevation. She had gone very red in the face and stiffened in the
+Guelphic manner whenever Scrope was mentioned, and so a rich
+harvest of spiritual life had remained untilled for some months.
+Likeman had brought her round.
+
+It seemed arguable that Scrope owed some explanation to Likeman
+before he came to any open breach with the Establishment.
+
+He found Likeman perceptibly older and more shrivelled on
+account of the war, but still as sweet and lucid and subtle as
+ever. His voice sounded more than ever like a kind old woman's.
+
+He sat buried in his cushions--for "nowadays I must save
+every scrap of vitality"--and for a time contented himself with
+drawing out his visitor's story.
+
+Of course, one does not talk to Likeman of visions or
+intuitions. "I am disturbed, I find myself getting out of touch;"
+that was the bishop's tone.
+
+Occasionally Likeman nodded slowly, as a physician might do at
+the recital of familiar symptoms. "Yes," he said, "I have been
+through most of this.... A little different in the
+inessentials.... How clear you are!"
+
+"You leave our stupid old Trinities--as I left them long
+ago," said old Likeman, with his lean hand feeling and clawing at
+the arm of his chair.
+
+"But--!"
+
+The old man raised his hand and dropped it. "You go away from
+it all--straight as a line. I did. You take the wings of the
+morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the earth. And there
+you find--"
+
+He held up a lean finger, and inclined it to tick off each
+point.
+
+"Fate--which is God the Father, the Power of the Heart, which
+is God the Son, and that Light which comes in upon us from the
+inaccessible Godhead, which is God the Holy Spirit."
+
+"But I know of no God the Holy Spirit, and Fate is not God at
+all. I saw in my vision one sole God, uncrucified, militant--
+conquering and to conquer."
+
+Old Likeman stared. "You saw!"
+
+The Bishop of Princhester had not meant to go so far. But he
+stuck to his words. "As if I saw with my eyes. A God of light and
+courage."
+
+"You have had visions, Scrope?"
+
+"I seemed to see."
+
+"No, you have just been dreaming dreams."
+
+"But why should one not see?"
+
+"See! The things of the spirit. These symbols as realities!
+These metaphors as men walking!"
+
+"You talk like an agnostic."
+
+"We are all agnostics. Our creeds are expressions of ourselves
+and our attitude and relationship to the unknown. The triune God
+is just the form of our need and disposition. I have always
+assumed that you took that for granted. Who has ever really seen
+or heard or felt God? God is neither of the senses nor of the
+mind; he is of the soul. You are realistic, you are
+materialistic...."
+
+His voice expostulated.
+
+The Bishop of Princhester reflected. The vision of God was far
+off among his memories now, and difficult to recall. But he said
+at last: "I believe there is a God and that he is as real a
+person as you or I. And he is not the theological God we set out
+before the world."
+
+"Personification," said Likeman. "In the eighteenth century
+they used to draw beautiful female figures as Science and
+Mathematics. Young men have loved Science--and Freedom--as
+Pygmalion loved Galatea. Have it so if you will. Have a visible
+person for your Deity. But let me keep up my--spirituality."
+
+"Your spirituality seems as thin as a mist. Do you really
+believe--anything?"
+
+"Everything!" said Likeman emphatically, sitting up with a
+transitory vigour. "Everything we two have ever professed
+together. I believe that the creeds of my church do express all
+that can possibly be expressed in the relationship of--That "--
+he made a comprehensive gesture with a twist of his hand upon its
+wrist--"to the human soul. I believe that they express it as
+well as the human mind can express it. Where they seem to be
+contradictory or absurd, it is merely that the mystery is
+paradoxical. I believe that the story of the Fall and of the
+Redemption is a complete symbol, that to add to it or to subtract
+from it or to alter it is to diminish its truth; if it seems
+incredible at this point or that, then simply I admit my own
+mental defect. And I believe in our Church, Scrope, as the
+embodied truth of religion, the divine instrument in human
+affairs. I believe in the security of its tradition, in the
+complete and entire soundness of its teaching, in its essential
+authority and divinity."
+
+He paused, and put his head a little on one side and smiled
+sweetly. "And now can you say I do not believe?"
+
+"But the historical Christ, the man Jesus?"
+
+"A life may be a metaphor. Why not? Yes, I believe it all.
+All."
+
+The Bishop of Princhester was staggered by this complete
+acceptance. "I see you believe all you profess," he said, and
+remained for a moment or so rallying his forces.
+
+"Your vision--if it was a vision--I put it to you, was just
+some single aspect of divinity," said Likeman. "We make a mistake
+in supposing that Heresy has no truth in it. Most heresies are
+only a disproportionate apprehension of some essential truth.
+Most heretics are men who have suddenly caught a glimpse through
+the veil of some particular verity.... They are dazzled by that
+aspect. All the rest has vanished.... They are obsessed. You are
+obsessed clearly by this discovery of the militancy of God. God
+the Son--as Hero. And you want to go out to the simple worship
+of that one aspect. You want to go out to a Dissenter's tent in
+the wilderness, instead of staying in the Great Temple of the
+Ages."
+
+Was that true?
+
+For some moments it sounded true.
+
+The Bishop of Princhester sat frowning and looking at that.
+Very far away was the vision now of that golden Captain who bade
+him come. Then at a thought the bishop smiled.
+
+"The Great Temple of the Ages," he repeated. "But do you
+remember the trouble we had when the little old Queen was so
+pigheaded?"
+
+"Oh! I remember, I remember," said Likeman, smiling with
+unshaken confidence. "Why not?"
+
+"For sixty years all we bishops in what you call the Great
+Temple of the Ages, were appointed and bullied and kept in our
+places by that pink irascible bit of dignity. I remember how at
+the time I didn't dare betray my boiling indignation even to you
+--I scarcely dared admit it to myself...."
+
+He paused.
+
+"It doesn't matter at all," and old Likeman waved it aside.
+
+"Not at all," he confirmed, waving again.
+
+"I spoke of the whole church of Christ on earth," he went on.
+"These things, these Victorias and Edwards and so on, are
+temporary accidents--just as the severance of an Anglican from
+a Roman communion and a Greek orthodox communion are temporary
+accidents. You will remark that wise men in all ages have been
+able to surmount the difficulty of these things. Why? Because
+they knew that in spite of all these splits and irregularities
+and defacements--like the cracks and crannies and lichens on a
+cathedral wall--the building held good, that it was shelter and
+security. There is no other shelter and security. And so I come
+to your problem. Suppose it is true that you have this incidental
+vision of the militant aspect of God, and he isn't, as you see
+him now that is,--he isn't like the Trinity, he isn't like the
+Creed, he doesn't seem to be related to the Church, then comes
+the question, are you going out for that? And whither do you go
+if you do go out? The Church remains. We alter doctrines not by
+changing the words but by shifting the accent. We can
+under�accentuate below the threshold of consciousness."
+
+"But can we?"
+
+"We do. Where's Hell now? Eighty years ago it warmed the whole
+Church. It was--as some atheist or other put it the other day
+--the central heating of the soul. But never mind that point
+now. Consider the essential question, the question of breaking
+with the church. Ask yourself, whither would you go? To become an
+oddity! A Dissenter. A Negative. Self emasculated. The spirit
+that denies. You would just go out. You would just cease to serve
+Religion. That would be all. You wouldn't do anything. The Church
+would go on; everything else would go on. Only you would be lost
+in the outer wilderness.
+
+"But then--"
+
+Old Likeman leant forward and pointed a bony finger. "Stay in
+the Church and modify it. Bring this new light of yours to the
+altar."
+
+There was a little pause.
+
+"No man," the bishop thought aloud, "putteth new wine into old
+bottles."
+
+Old Likeman began to speak and had a fit of coughing. "Some of
+these texts--whuff, whuff--like a conjuror's hat--whuff--
+make 'em--fit anything."
+
+A man-servant appeared and handed a silver box of lozenges into
+which the old bishop dipped with a trembling hand.
+
+"Tricks of that sort," he said, "won't do, Scrope--among
+professionals.
+
+"And besides," he was inspired; "true religion is old wine--
+as old as the soul.
+
+"You are a bishop in the Church of Christ on Earth," he summed
+it up. "And you want to become a detached and wandering Ancient
+Mariner from your shipwreck of faith with something to explain--
+that nobody wants to hear. You are going out I suppose you have
+means?"
+
+The old man awaited the answer to his abrupt enquiry with a
+handful of lozenges.
+
+"No," said the Bishop of Princhester, "practically--I
+haven't."
+
+"My dear boy!" it was as if they were once more rector and
+curate. "My dear brother! do you know what the value of an
+ex-bishop is in the ordinary labour market?"
+
+"I have never thought of that."
+
+"Evidently. You have a wife and children?"
+
+"Five daughters."
+
+"And your wife married you--I remember, she married you soon
+after you got that living in St. John's Wood. I suppose she took
+it for granted that you were fixed in an ecclesiastical career.
+That was implicit in the transaction."
+
+"I haven't looked very much at that side of the matter yet,"
+said the Bishop of Princhester.
+
+"It shouldn't be a decisive factor," said Bishop Likeman, "not
+decisive. But it will weigh. It should weigh...."
+
+The old man opened out fresh aspects of the case. His argument
+was for delay, for deliberation. He went on to a wider set of
+considerations. A man who has held the position of a bishop for
+some years is, he held, no longer a free man in matters of
+opinion. He has become an official part of a great edifice which
+supports the faith of multitudes of simple and dependant
+believers. He has no right to indulge recklessly in intellectual
+and moral integrities. He may understand, but how is the flock to
+understand? He may get his own soul clear, but what will happen
+to them? He will just break away their supports, astonish them,
+puzzle them, distress them, deprive them of confidence, convince
+them of nothing.
+
+"Intellectual egotism may be as grave a sin," said Bishop
+Likeman, "as physical selfishness.
+
+"Assuming even that you are absolutely right," said Bishop
+Likeman, "aren't you still rather in the position of a man who
+insists upon Swedish exercises and a strengthening dietary on a
+raft?"
+
+"I think you have made out a case for delay," said his hearer.
+
+"Three months."
+
+The Bishop of Princhester conceded three months.
+
+"Including every sort of service. Because, after all, even
+supposing it is damnable to repeat prayers and creeds you do not
+believe in, and administer sacraments you think superstition,
+nobody can be damned but yourself. On the other hand if you
+express doubts that are not yet perfectly digested--you
+experiment with the souls of others...."
+
+(5)
+
+
+The bishop found much to ponder in his old friend's counsels.
+They were discursive and many-fronted, and whenever he seemed to
+be penetrating or defeating the particular considerations under
+examination the others in the background had a way of appearing
+invincible. He had a strong persuasion that Likeman was wrong--
+and unanswerable. And the true God now was no more than the
+memory of a very vividly realized idea. It was clear to the
+bishop that he was no longer a churchman or in the generally
+accepted sense of the word a Christian, and that he was bound to
+come out of the church. But all sense of urgency had gone. It was
+a matter demanding deliberation and very great consideration for
+others.
+
+He took no more of Dale's stuff because he felt bodily sound
+and slept well. And he was now a little shy of this potent fluid.
+He went down to Princhester the next day, for his compromise of
+an interval of three months made it seem possible to face his
+episcopal routine again. It was only when he was back in his own
+palace that the full weight of his domestic responsibilities in
+the discussion of the course he had to take, became apparent.
+
+Lady Ella met him with affection and solicitude.
+
+"I was tired and mentally fagged," he said. "A day or so in
+London had an effect of change."
+
+She agreed that he looked much better, and remained for a
+moment or so scrutinizing him with the faint anxiety of one
+resolved to be completely helpful.
+
+He regarded her with a renewed sense of her grace and dignity
+and kindliness. She was wearing a grey dress of soft silky
+material, touched with blue and covered with what seemed to him
+very rich and beautiful lace; her hair flowed back very
+graciously from her broad brow, and about her wrist and neck were
+delicate lines of gold. She seemed tremendously at home and right
+just where she was, in that big hospitable room, cultured but
+Anglican, without pretensions or novelties, with a glow of bound
+books, with the grand piano that Miriam, his third daughter, was
+beginning to play so well, with the tea equipage of shining
+silver and fine porcelain.
+
+He sat down contentedly in the low armchair beside her.
+
+It wasn't a setting that one would rashly destroy....
+
+And that evening at dinner this sense of his home as a complex
+of finely adjusted things not to be rashly disturbed was still
+more in the mind of the bishop. At dinner he had all his
+domesticities about him. It was the family time, from eight until
+ten, at which latter hour he would usually go back from the
+drawing-room to his study. He surveyed the table. Eleanor was at
+home for a few days, looking a little thin and bright but very
+keen and happy. She had taken a first in the first part of the
+Moral Science Tripos, and she was working hard now for part two.
+Clementina was to go back to Newnham with her next September. She
+aspired to history. Miriam's bent was musical. She and Phoebe and
+Daphne and Clementina were under the care of skilful Mademoiselle
+Lafarge, most tactful of Protestant French-women, Protestant and
+yet not too Protestant, one of those rare French Protestants in
+whom a touch of Bergson and the Pasteur Monod
+
+
+           "scarce suspected, animates the whole."
+
+And also they had lessons, so high are our modern standards of
+education, from Mr. Blent, a brilliant young mathematician in
+orders, who sat now next to Lady Ella. Mr. Whippham, the
+chaplain, was at the bishop's right hand, ready for any chance of
+making arrangements to clear off the small arrears of duty the
+little holiday in London had accumulated. The bishop surveyed all
+these bright young people between himself and the calm beauty of
+his wife. He spoke first to one and then another upon the things
+that interested them. It rejoiced his heart to be able to give
+them education and opportunity, it pleased him to see them in
+clothes that he knew were none the less expensive because of
+their complete simplicity. Miriam and Mr. Blent wrangled
+pleasantly about Debussy, and old Dunk waited as though in orders
+of some rare and special sort that qualified him for this
+service.
+
+All these people, the bishop reflected, counted upon him that
+this would go on....
+
+Eleanor was answering some question of her mother's. They were
+so oddly alike and so curiously different, and both in their
+several ways so fine. Eleanor was dark like his own mother.
+Perhaps she did a little lack Lady Ella's fine reserves; she
+could express more, she could feel more acutely, she might easily
+be very unhappy or very happy....
+
+All these people counted on him. It was indeed acutely true, as
+Likeman had said, that any sudden breach with his position would
+be a breach of faith--so far as they were concerned.
+
+And just then his eye fell upon the epergne, a very old and
+beautiful piece of silver, that graced the dinner-table. It had
+been given him, together with an episcopal ring, by his curates
+and choristers at the Church of the Holy Innocents, when he
+became bishop of Pinner. When they gave it him, had any one of
+them dreamt that some day he might be moved to strike an
+ungracious blow at the mother church that had reared them all?
+
+It was his custom to join the family in the drawing-room after
+dinner. To-night he was a little delayed by Whippham, with some
+trivialities about next month's confirmations in Pringle and
+Princhester. When he came in he found Miriam playing, and playing
+very beautifully one of those later sonatas of Beethoven, he
+could never remember whether it was Of. 109 or Of. 111, but he
+knew that he liked it very much; it was solemn and sombre with
+phases of indescribable sweetness--while Clementina, Daphne
+and Mademoiselle Lafarge went on with their war knitting and
+Phoebe and Mr. Blent bent their brows over chess. Eleanor was
+reading the evening paper. Lady Ella sat on a high chair by the
+coffee things, and he stood in the doorway surveying the peaceful
+scene for a moment or so, before he went across the room and sat
+down on the couch close to her.
+
+"You look tired," she whispered softly.
+
+"Worries."
+
+"That Chasters case?"
+
+"Things developing out of that. I must tell you later." It
+would be, he felt, a good way of breaking the matter to her.
+
+"Is the Chasters case coming on again, Daddy?" asked Eleanor.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"It's a pity," she said.
+
+"What ?
+
+"That he can't be left alone."
+
+"It's Sir Reginald Phipps. The Church would be much more
+tolerant if it wasn't for the House of Laymen. But they--they
+feel they must do something."
+
+He seized the opportunity of the music ceasing to get away from
+the subject. "Miriam dear," he asked, raising his voice; "is that
+109 or 111? I can never tell."
+
+"That is always 111, Daddy," said Miriam. "It's the other one
+is 109." And then evidently feeling that she had been pert:
+"Would you like me to play you 109, Daddy?"
+
+"I should love it, my dear." And he leant back and prepared to
+listen in such a thorough way that Eleanor would have no chance
+of discussing the Chasters' heresies. But this was interrupted by
+the consummation of the coffee, and Mr. Blent, breaking a long
+silence with "Mate in three, if I'm not mistaken," leapt to his
+feet to be of service. Eleanor, with the rough seriousness of
+youth, would not leave the Chasters case alone.
+
+"But need you take action against Mr. Chasters?" she asked at
+once.
+
+"It's a very complicated subject, my dear," he said.
+
+"His arguments?"
+
+"The practical considerations."
+
+"But what are practical considerations in such a case?"
+
+"That's a post-graduate subject, Norah," her father said with a
+smile and a sigh.
+
+"But," began Eleanor, gathering fresh forces.
+
+"Daddy is tired," Lady Ella intervened, patting him on the
+head.
+
+"Oh, terribly!--of that," he said, and so escaped Eleanor for
+the evening.
+
+But he knew that before very long he would have to tell his
+wife of the changes that hung over their lives; it would be
+shabby to let the avalanche fall without giving the longest
+possible warning; and before they parted that night he took her
+hands in his and said: "There is much I have to tell you, dear.
+Things change, the whole world changes. The church must not live
+in a dream....
+
+"No," she whispered. "I hope you will sleep to-night," and held
+up her grave sweet face to be kissed.
+
+(6)
+
+
+But he did not sleep perfectly that night.
+
+He did not sleep indeed very badly, but he lay for some time
+thinking, thinking not onward but as if he pressed his mind
+against very strong barriers that had closed again. His vision of
+God which had filled the heavens, had become now gem-like, a
+minute, hard, clear-cut conviction in his mind that he had to
+disentangle himself from the enormous complications of symbolism
+and statement and organization and misunderstanding in the church
+and achieve again a simple and living worship of a simple and
+living God. Likeman had puzzled and silenced him, only upon
+reflection to convince him that amidst such intricacies of
+explanation the spirit cannot live. Creeds may be symbolical, but
+symbols must not prevaricate. A church that can symbolize
+everything and anything means nothing.
+
+It followed from this that he ought to leave the church. But
+there came the other side of this perplexing situation. His
+feelings as he lay in his bed were exactly like those one has in
+a dream when one wishes to run or leap or shout and one can
+achieve no movement, no sound. He could not conceive how he could
+possibly leave the church.
+
+His wife became as it were the representative of all that held
+him helpless. She and he had never kept secret from one another
+any plan of action, any motive, that affected the other. It was
+clear to him that any movement towards the disavowal of doctrinal
+Christianity and the renunciation of his see must be first
+discussed with her. He must tell her before he told the world.
+
+And he could not imagine his telling her except as an
+incredibly shattering act.
+
+So he left things from day to day, and went about his episcopal
+routines. He preached and delivered addresses in such phrases as
+he knew people expected, and wondered profoundly why it was that
+it should be impossible for him to discuss theological points
+with Lady Ella. And one afternoon he went for a walk with Eleanor
+along the banks of the Prin, and found himself, in response to
+certain openings of hers, talking to her in almost exactly the
+same terms as Likeman had used to him.
+
+Then suddenly the problem of this theological eclaircissement
+was complicated in an unexpected fashion.
+
+He had just been taking his Every Second Thursday Talk with
+Diocesan Men Helpers. He had been trying to be plain and simple
+upon the needless narrowness of enthusiastic laymen. He was still
+in the Bishop Andrews cap and purple cassock he affected on these
+occasions; the Men Helpers loved purple; and he was disentangling
+himself from two or three resolute bores--for our loyal laymen
+can be at times quite superlative bores--when Miriam came to
+him.
+
+"Mummy says, 'Come to the drawing-room if you can.' There is a
+Lady Sunderbund who seems particularly to want to see you."
+
+He hesitated for a moment, and then decided that this was a
+conversation he ought to control.
+
+He found Lady Sunderbund looking very tall and radiantly
+beautiful in a sheathlike dress of bright crimson trimmed with
+snow-white fur and a white fur toque. She held out a long
+white-gloved hand to him and cried in a tone of comradeship and
+profound understanding: "I've come, Bishop!"
+
+"You've come to see me?" he said without any sincerity in his
+polite pleasure.
+
+"I've come to P'inchesta to stay!" she cried with a bright
+triumphant rising note.
+
+She evidently considered Lady Ella a mere conversational
+stop-gap, to be dropped now that the real business could be
+commenced. She turned her pretty profile to that lady, and
+obliged the bishop with a compact summary of all that had
+preceded his arrival. "I have been telling Lady Ella," she said,
+"I've taken a house, fu'nitua and all! Hea. In P'inchesta! I've
+made up my mind to sit unda you--as they say in Clapham. I've
+come 'ight down he' fo' good. I've taken a little house--oh! a
+sweet little house that will be all over 'oses next month. I'm
+living f'om 'oom to 'oom and having the othas done up. It's in
+that little quiet st'eet behind you' ga'den wall. And he' I am!"
+
+"Is it the old doctor's house?" asked Lady Ella.
+
+"Was it an old docta?" cried Lady Sunderbund. "How delightful!
+And now I shall be a patient!"
+
+She concentrated upon the bishop.
+
+"Oh, I've been thinking all the time of all the things you told
+me. Ova and ova. It's all so wondyful and so--so like a G'ate
+Daw opening. New light. As if it was all just beginning."
+
+She clasped her hands.
+
+The bishop felt that there were a great number of points to
+this situation, and that it was extremely difficult to grasp them
+all at once. But one that seemed of supreme importance to his
+whirling intelligence was that Lady Ella should not know that he
+had gone to relieve his soul by talking to Lady Sunderbund in
+London. It had never occurred to him at the time that there was
+any shadow of disloyalty to Lady Ella in his going to Lady
+Sunderbund, but now he realized that this was a thing that would
+annoy Lady Ella extremely. The conversation had in the first
+place to be kept away from that. And in the second place it had
+to be kept away from the abrupt exploitation of the new
+theological developments.
+
+He felt that something of the general tension would be relieved
+if they could all three be got to sit down.
+
+"I've been talking for just upon two hours," he said to Lady
+Ella. "It's good to see the water boiling for tea."
+
+He put a chair for Lady Sunderbund to the right of Lady Ella,
+got her into it by infusing an ecclesiastical insistence into his
+manner, and then went and sat upon the music-stool on his wife's
+left, so as to establish a screen of tea-things and cakes and so
+forth against her more intimate enthusiasm. Meanwhile he began to
+see his way clearer and to develop his line.
+
+"Well, Lady Sunderbund," he said, "I can assure you that I
+think you will be no small addition to the church life of
+Princhester. But I warn you this is a hard-working and exacting
+diocese. We shall take your money, all we can get of it, we shall
+take your time, we shall work you hard."
+
+"Wo'k me hard!" cried Lady Sunderbund with passion.
+
+"We will, we will," said the bishop in a tone that ignored her
+passionate note.
+
+"I am sure Lady Sunderbund will be a great help to us," said
+Lady Ella. "We want brightening. There's a dinginess...."
+
+Lady Sunderbund beamed an acknowledgment. "I shall exact a
+'eturn," she said. "I don't mind wo'king, but I shall wo'k like
+the poo' students in the Middle Ages did, to get my teaching.
+I've got my own soul to save as well as help saving othas. Since
+oua last talk--"
+
+She found the bishop handing her bread and butter. For a time
+the bishop fought a delaying action with the tea-things, while he
+sought eagerly and vainly in his mind for some good practical
+topic in which he could entangle and suppress Lady Sunderbund's
+enthusiasms. From this she broke away by turning suddenly to Lady
+Ella.
+
+"Youa husband's views," she said, "we'e a 'eal 'evelation to
+me. It was like not being blind--all at once."
+
+Lady Ella was always pleased to hear her husband praised. Her
+colour brightened a little. "They seem very ordinary views," she
+said modestly.
+
+"You share them?" cried Lady Sunderbund.
+
+"But of course," said Lady Ella.
+
+"Wondyful!" cried Lady Sunderbund.
+
+"Tell me, Lady Sunderbund," said the bishop, "are you going to
+alter the outer appearance of the old doctor's house?" And found
+that at last he had discovered the saving topic.
+
+"Ha'dly at all," she said. "I shall just have it pointed white
+and do the doa--I'm not su' how I shall do the doa. Whetha I
+shall do the doa gold or a vehy, vehy 'itch blue."
+
+For a time she and Lady Ella, to whom these ideas were novel,
+discussed the animation of grey and sombre towns by house
+painting. In such matter Lady Sunderbund had a Russian mind. "I
+can't bea' g'ey," she said. "Not in my su'oundings, not in my
+k'eed, nowhe'e." She turned to the bishop. "If I had my way I
+would paint you' cathed'al inside and out."
+
+"They used to be painted," said the bishop. "I don't know if
+you have seen Ely. There the old painting has been largely
+restored...."
+
+From that to the end there was no real danger, and at last the
+bishop found himself alone with his wife again.
+
+"Remarkable person," he said tentatively. "I never met any one
+whose faults were more visible. I met her at Wimbush House."
+
+He glanced at his watch.
+
+"What did she mean," asked Lady Ella abruptly, "by talking of
+your new views? And about revelations?"
+
+"She probably misunderstood something I said at the Garstein
+Fellows'," he said. "She has rather a leaping mind."
+
+He turned to the window, looked at his nails, and appeared to
+be suddenly reminded of duties elsewhere....
+
+It was chiefly manifest to him that the difficulties in
+explaining the changes of his outlook to Lady Ella had now
+increased enormously.
+
+(7)
+
+
+A day or so after Lady Sunderbund's arrival in Princhester the
+bishop had a letter from Likeman. The old man was manifestly in
+doubt about the effect of their recent conversation.
+
+"My dear Scrope," it began. "I find myself thinking continually
+about our interview and the difficulties you laid bare so frankly
+to me. We touched upon many things in that talk, and I find
+myself full of afterthoughts, and not perfectly sure either quite
+of what I said or of what I failed to say. I feel that in many
+ways I was not perhaps so clear and convincing as the justice of
+my case should have made me, and you are one of my own particular
+little company, you were one of the best workers in that band of
+good workers, your life and your career are very much my concern.
+I know you will forgive me if I still mingle something of the
+paternal with my fraternal admonitions. I watched you closely. I
+have still my old diaries of the St. Matthew's days, and I have
+been looking at them to remind me of what you once were. It was
+my custom to note my early impressions of all the men who worked
+with me, because I have a firm belief in the soundness of first
+impressions and the considerable risk one runs of having them
+obscured by the accidents and habituations of constant
+intercourse. I found that quite early in your days at St.
+Matthew's I wrote against your name 'enthusiastic, but a saving
+delicacy.' After all our life-long friendship I would not write
+anything truer. I would say of you to-day, 'This man might have
+been a revivalist, if he were not a gentleman.' There is the
+enthusiast, there is the revivalist, in you. It seems to me that
+the stresses and questions of this great crisis in the world's
+history have brought it nearer to the surface than I had ever
+expected it to come.
+
+"I quite understand and I sympathize with your impatience with
+the church at the present time; we present a spectacle of pompous
+insignificance hard to bear with. We are doing very little, and
+we are giving ourselves preposterous airs. There seems to be an
+opinion abroad that in some quasi-automatic way the country is
+going to collapse after the war into the arms of the church and
+the High Tories; a possibility I don't accept for a moment. Why
+should it? These forcible-feeble reactionaries are much more
+likely to explode a revolution that will disestablish us. And I
+quite understand your theological difficulties--quite. The
+creeds, if their entire symbolism is for a moment forgotten, if
+they are taken as opaque statements of fact, are inconsistent,
+incredible. So incredible that no one believes them; not even the
+most devout. The utmost they do is to avert their minds--
+reverentially. Credo quia impossibile. That is offensive to a
+Western mind. I can quite understand the disposition to cry out
+at such things, 'This is not the Church of God!'--to run out
+from it--
+
+"You have some dream, I suspect, of a dramatic dissidence.
+
+"Now, my dear Brother and erstwhile pupil, I ask you not to do
+this thing. Wait, I implore you. Give me--and some others, a
+little time. I have your promise for three months, but even after
+that, I ask you to wait. Let the reform come from within the
+church. The church is something more than either its creeds, its
+clergy, or its laymen. Look at your cathedral rising out of and
+dominating Princhester. It stands not simply for Athanasius; it
+stands but incidentally for Athanasius; it stands for all
+religion. Within that fabric--let me be as frank here as in our
+private conversation--doctrine has altered again and again.
+To-day two distinct religions worship there side by side; one
+that fades and one that grows brighter. There is the old
+quasi-materialistic belief of the barbarians, the belief in such
+things, for example, as that Christ the physical Son of God
+descended into hell and stayed there, seeing the sights I suppose
+like any tourist and being treated with diplomatic civilities for
+three terrestrial days; and on the other hand there is the truly
+spiritual belief that you and I share, which is absolutely
+intolerant of such grotesque ideas. My argument to you is that
+the new faith, the clearer vision, gains ground; that the only
+thing that can prevent or delay the church from being altogether
+possessed by what you call and I admit is, the true God, is that
+such men as yourself, as the light breaks upon you, should be
+hasty and leave the church. You see my point of view, do you not?
+It is not one that has been assumed for our discussion; it is one
+I came to long years ago, that I was already feeling my way to in
+my St. Matthew's Lenton sermons.
+
+"A word for your private ear. I am working. I cannot tell you
+fully because I am not working alone. But there are movements
+afoot in which I hope very shortly to be able to ask you to
+share. That much at least I may say at this stage. Obscure but
+very powerful influences are at work for the liberalizing of the
+church, for release from many narrow limitations, for the
+establishment of a modus vivendi with the nonconformist and
+dissentient bodies in Britain and America, and with the churches
+of the East. But of that no more now.
+
+"And in conclusion, my dear Scrope, let me insist again upon
+the eternal persistence of the essential Religious Fact:
+
+
+            (Greek Letters Here)
+
+(Rev. i. 18. "Fear not. I am the First and Last thing, the Living
+thing.")
+
+And these promises which, even if we are not to take them as
+promises in the exact sense in which, let us say, the payment of
+five sovereigns is promised by a five-pound note, are yet
+assertions of practically inevitable veracity:
+
+
+            (Greek Letters Here)
+
+(Phil. i. 6. "He who began... will perfect."
+ Eph. v. 14. "He will illuminate.")
+
+
+The old man had written his Greek tags in shakily resolute
+capitals. It was his custom always to quote the Greek Testament
+in his letters, never the English version. It is a practice not
+uncommon with the more scholarly of our bishops. It is as if some
+eminent scientific man were to insist upon writing H20 instead of
+"water," and "sodium chloride" instead of "table salt" in his
+private correspondence. Or upon hanging up a stuffed crocodile in
+his hall to give the place tone. The Bishop of Princhester
+construed these brief dicta without serious exertion, he found
+them very congenial texts, but there were insuperable
+difficulties in the problem why Likeman should suppose they had
+the slightest weight upon his side of their discussion. The more
+he thought the less they seemed to be on Likeman's side, until at
+last they began to take on a complexion entirely opposed to the
+old man's insidious arguments, until indeed they began to bear
+the extraordinary interpretation of a special message,
+unwittingly delivered.
+
+(8)
+
+
+The bishop was still thinking over this communication when he
+was interrupted by Lady Ella. She came with a letter in her hand
+to ask him whether she might send five-and-twenty pounds to a
+poor cousin of his, a teacher in a girls' school, who had been
+incapacitated from work by a dislocation of the cartilage of her
+knee. If she could go to that unorthodox but successful
+practitioner, Mr. Barker, the bone-setter, she was convinced she
+could be restored to efficiency. But she had no ready money. The
+bishop agreed without hesitation. His only doubt was the
+certainty of the cure, but upon that point Lady Ella was
+convinced; there had been a great experience in the Walshingham
+family.
+
+"It is pleasant to be able to do things like this," said Lady
+Ella, standing over him when this matter was settled.
+
+"Yes," the bishop agreed; "it is pleasant to be in a position
+to do things like this...."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SEVENTH  -  THE SECOND VISION
+
+(1)
+
+
+A MONTH later found the bishop's original state of perplexity
+and insomnia returned and intensified. He had done none of all
+the things that had seemed so manifestly needing to be done after
+his vision in the Athenaeum. All the relief and benefit of his
+experience in London had vanished out of his life. He was afraid
+of Dr. Dale's drug; he knew certainly that it would precipitate
+matters; and all his instincts in the state of moral enfeeblement
+to which he had relapsed, were to temporize.
+
+Although he had said nothing further about his changed beliefs
+to Lady Ella, yet he perceived clearly that a shadow had fallen
+between them. She had a wife's extreme sensitiveness to fine
+shades of expression and bearing, and manifestly she knew that
+something was different. Meanwhile Lady Sunderbund had become a
+frequent worshipper in the cathedral, she was a figure as
+conspicuous in sombre Princhester as a bird of paradise would
+have been; common people stood outside her very very rich blue
+door on the chance of seeing her; she never missed an opportunity
+of hearing the bishop preach or speak, she wrote him several
+long and thoughtful letters with which he did not bother Lady
+Ella, she communicated persistently, and manifestly intended to
+become a very active worker in diocesan affairs.
+
+It was inevitable that she and the bishop should meet and talk
+occasionally in the cathedral precincts, and it was inevitable
+that he should contrast the flexibility of her rapid and very
+responsive mind with a certain defensiveness, a stoniness, in the
+intellectual bearing of Lady Ella.
+
+If it had been Lady Sunderbund he had had to explain to,
+instead of Lady Ella, he could have explained a dozen times a
+day.
+
+And since his mind was rehearsing explanations it was not
+unnatural they should overflow into this eagerly receptive
+channel, and that the less he told Lady Ella the fuller became
+his spiritual confidences to Lady Sunderbund.
+
+She was clever in realizing that they were confidences and
+treating them as such, more particularly when it chanced that she
+and Lady Ella and the bishop found themselves in the same
+conversation.
+
+She made great friends with Miriam, and initiated her by a
+whole collection of pretty costume plates into the mysteries of
+the "Ussian Ballet" and the works of Mousso'gski and "Imsky
+Ko'zakof."
+
+The bishop liked a certain religiosity in the texture of
+Moussorgski's music, but failed to see the "significance "--of
+many of the costumes.
+
+(2)
+
+
+It was on a Sunday night--the fourth Sunday after Easter--
+that the supreme crisis of the bishop's life began. He had had a
+feeling all day of extreme dulness and stupidity; he felt his
+ministrations unreal, his ceremonies absurd and undignified. In
+the night he became bleakly and painfully awake. His mind
+occupied itself at first chiefly with the tortuousness and
+weakness of his own character. Every day he perceived that the
+difficulty of telling Lady Ella of the change in his faith became
+more mountainous. And every day he procrastinated. If he had told
+her naturally and simply on the evening of his return from London
+--before anything material intervened--everything would have
+been different, everything would have been simpler....
+
+He groaned and rolled over in his bed.
+
+There came upon him the acutest remorse and misery. For he saw
+that amidst these petty immediacies he had lost touch with God.
+The last month became incredible. He had seen God. He had touched
+God's hand. God had been given to him, and he had neglected the
+gift. He was still lost amidst the darkness and loneliness, the
+chaotic ends and mean shifts, of an Erastian world. For a month
+now and more, after a vision of God so vivid and real and
+reassuring that surely no saint nor prophet had ever had a
+better, he had made no more than vague responsive movements; he
+had allowed himself to be persuaded into an unreasonable and
+cowardly delay, and the fetters of association and usage and
+minor interests were as unbroken as they had been before ever the
+vision shone. Was it credible that there had ever been such a
+vision in a life so entirely dictated by immediacy and instinct
+as his? We are all creatures of the dark stream, we swim in needs
+and bodily impulses and small vanities; if ever and again a
+bubble of spiritual imaginativeness glows out of us, it breaks
+and leaves us where we were.
+
+"Louse that I am!" he cried.
+
+He still believed in God, without a shadow of doubt; he
+believed in the God that he had seen, the high courage, the
+golden intention, the light that had for a moment touched him.
+But what had he to do with God, he, the loiterer, the little
+thing?
+
+He was little, he was funny. His prevarications with his wife,
+for example, were comic. There was no other word for him but
+"funny."
+
+He rolled back again and lay staring.
+
+"Who will deliver me from the body of this death?" What right
+has a little bishop in a purple stock and doeskin breeches, who
+hangs back in his palace from the very call of God, to a phrase
+so fine and tragic as "the body of this death?"
+
+He was the most unreal thing in the universe. He was a base
+insect giving himself airs. What advantage has a bishop over the
+Praying Mantis, that cricket which apes the attitude of piety?
+Does he matter more--to God?
+
+"To the God of the Universe, who can tell? To the God of man,--
+yes."
+
+He sat up in bed struck by his own answer, and full of an
+indescribable hunger for God and an indescribable sense of his
+complete want of courage to make the one simple appeal that would
+satisfy that hunger. He tried to pray. "O God! "he cried,
+"forgive me! Take me!" It seemed to him that he was not really
+praying but only making believe to pray. It seemed to him that he
+was not really existing but only seeming to exist. He seemed to
+himself to be one with figures on a china plate, with figures
+painted on walls, with the flimsy imagined lives of men in
+stories of forgotten times. "O God!" he said, "O God," acting a
+gesture, mimicking appeal.
+
+"Anaemic," he said, and was given an idea.
+
+He got out of bed, he took his keys from the night-table at the
+bed head and went to his bureau.
+
+He stood with Dale's tonic in his hand. He remained for some
+time holding it, and feeling a curious indisposition to go on
+with the thing in his mind.
+
+He turned at last with an effort. He carried the little phial
+to his bedside, and into the tumbler of his water-bottle he let
+the drops fall, drop by drop, until he had counted twenty. Then
+holding it to the bulb of his reading lamp he added the water and
+stood watching the slow pearly eddies in the mixture mingle into
+an opalescent uniformity. He replaced the water-bottle and stood
+with the glass in his hand. But he did not drink.
+
+He was afraid.
+
+He knew that he had only to drink and this world of confusion
+would grow transparent, would roll back and reveal the great
+simplicities behind. And he was afraid.
+
+He was afraid of that greatness. He was afraid of the great
+imperatives that he knew would at once take hold of his life. He
+wanted to muddle on for just a little longer. He wanted to stay
+just where he was, in his familiar prison-house, with the key of
+escape in his hand. Before he took the last step into the very
+presence of truth, he would--think.
+
+He put down the glass and lay down upon his bed....
+
+(3)
+
+
+He awoke in a mood of great depression out of a dream of
+wandering interminably in an endless building of innumerable
+pillars, pillars so vast and high that the ceiling was lost in
+darkness. By the scale of these pillars he felt himself scarcely
+larger than an ant. He was always alone in these wanderings, and
+always missing something that passed along distant passages,
+something desirable, something in the nature of a procession or
+of a ceremony, something of which he was in futile pursuit, of
+which he heard faint echoes, something luminous of which he
+seemed at times to see the last fading reflection, across vast
+halls and wildernesses of shining pavement and through Cyclopaean
+archways. At last there was neither sound nor gleam, but the
+utmost solitude, and a darkness and silence and the uttermost
+profundity of sorrow....
+
+It was bright day. Dunk had just come into the room with his
+tea, and the tumbler of Dr. Dale's tonic stood untouched upon the
+night-table. The bishop sat up in bed. He had missed his
+opportunity. To-day was a busy day, he knew.
+
+"No," he said, as Dunk hesitated whether to remove or leave the
+tumbler. "Leave that."
+
+Dunk found room for it upon the tea-tray, and vanished softly
+with the bishop's evening clothes.
+
+The bishop remained motionless facing the day. There stood the
+draught of decision that he had lacked the decision even to
+touch.
+
+From his bed he could just read the larger items that figured
+upon the engagement tablet which it was Whippham's business to
+fill over-night and place upon his table. He had two confirmation
+services, first the big one in the cathedral and then a second
+one in the evening at Pringle, various committees and an
+interview with Chasters. He had not yet finished his addresses
+for these confirmation services....
+
+The task seemed mountainous--overwhelming.
+
+With a gesture of desperation he seized the tumblerful of tonic
+and drank it off at a gulp.
+
+(4)
+
+
+For some moments nothing seemed to happen.
+
+Then he began to feel stronger and less wretched, and then came
+a throbbing and tingling of artery and nerve.
+
+He had a sense of adventure, a pleasant fear in the thing that
+he had done. He got out of bed, leaving his cup of tea untasted,
+and began to dress. He had the sensation of relief a prisoner may
+feel who suddenly tries his cell door and finds it open upon
+sunshine, the outside world and freedom.
+
+He went on dressing although he was certain that in a few
+minutes the world of delusion about him would dissolve, and that
+he would find himself again in the great freedom of the place of
+God.
+
+This time the transition came much sooner and much more
+rapidly. This time the phases and quality of the experience were
+different. He felt once again that luminous confusion between the
+world in which a human life is imprisoned and a circumambient and
+interpenetrating world, but this phase passed very rapidly; it
+did not spread out over nearly half an hour as it had done
+before, and almost immediately he seemed to plunge away from
+everything in this life altogether into that outer freedom he
+sought. And this time there was not even the elemental scenery of
+the former vision. He stood on nothing; there was nothing below
+and nothing above him. There was no sense of falling, no terror,
+but a feeling as though he floated released. There was no light,
+but as it were a clear darkness about him. Then it was manifest
+to him that he was not alone, but that with him was that same
+being that in his former vision had called himself the Angel of
+God. He knew this without knowing why he knew this, and either he
+spoke and was answered, or he thought and his thought answered
+him back. His state of mind on this occasion was altogether
+different from the first vision of God; before it had been
+spectacular, but now his perception was altogether
+super-sensuous.
+
+(And nevertheless and all the time it seemed that very faintly
+he was still in his room.)
+
+It was he who was the first to speak. The great Angel whom he
+felt rather than saw seemed to be waiting for him to speak.
+
+"I have come," he said, "because once more I desire to see
+God."
+
+"But you have seen God."
+
+"I saw God. God was light, God was truth. And I went back to my
+life, and God was hidden. God seemed to call me. He called. I
+heard him, I sought him and I touched his hand. When I went back
+to my life I was presently lost in perplexity. I could not tell
+why God had called me nor what I had to do."
+
+"And why did you not come here before?"
+
+"Doubt and fear. Brother, will you not lay your hand on mine?"
+
+The figure in the darkness became distincter. But nothing
+touched the bishop's seeking hands.
+
+"I want to see God and to understand him. I want reassurance. I
+want conviction. I want to understand all that God asks me to do.
+The world is full of conflict and confusion and the spirit of
+war. It is dark and dreadful now with suffering and bloodshed. I
+want to serve God who could save it, and I do not know how."
+
+It seemed to the bishop that now he could distinguish dimly but
+surely the form and features of the great Angel to whom he
+talked. For a little while there was silence, and then the Angel
+spoke.
+
+"It was necessary first," said the Angel, "that you should
+apprehend God and desire him. That was the purport of your first
+vision. Now, since you require it, I will tell you and show you
+certain things about him, things that it seems you need to know,
+things that all men need to know. Know then first that the time
+is at hand when God will come into the world and rule it, and
+when men will know what is required of them. This time is close
+at hand. In a little while God will be made manifest throughout
+the earth. Men will know him and know that he is King. To you
+this truth is to be shown--that you may tell it to others."
+
+"This is no vision?" said the bishop, "no dream that will pass
+away?"
+
+"Am I not here beside you?"
+
+(5)
+
+
+The bishop was anxious to be very clear. Things that had been
+shapelessly present in his mind now took form and found words for
+themselves.
+
+"The God I saw in my vision--He is not yet manifest in the
+world?"
+
+"He comes. He is in the world, but he is not yet manifested. He
+whom you saw in your vision will speedily be manifest in the
+world. To you this vision is given of the things that come. The
+world is already glowing with God. Mankind is like a smouldering
+fire that will presently, in quite a little time, burst out into
+flame.
+
+"In your former vision I showed you God," said the Angel. "This
+time I will show you certain signs of the coming of God. And then
+you will understand the place you hold in the world and the task
+that is required of you."
+
+(6)
+
+
+And as the Angel spoke he lifted up his hands with the palms
+upward, and there appeared above them a little round cloud, that
+grew denser until it had the likeness of a silver sphere. It was
+a mirror in the form of a ball, but a mirror not shining
+uniformly; it was discoloured with greyish patches that had a
+familiar shape. It circled slowly upon the Angel's hands. It
+seemed no greater than the compass of a human skull, and yet it
+was as great as the earth. Indeed it showed the whole earth. It
+was the earth. The hands of the Angel vanished out of sight,
+dissolved and vanished, and the spinning world hung free. All
+about the bishop the velvet darkness broke into glittering points
+that shaped out the constellations, and nearest to them, so near
+as to seem only a few million miles away in the great emptiness
+into which everything had resolved itself, shone the sun, a ball
+of red-tongued fires. The Angel was but a voice now; the bishop
+and the Angel were somewhere aloof from and yet accessible to the
+circling silver sphere.
+
+At the time all that happened seemed to happen quite naturally,
+as things happen in a dream. It was only later, when all this was
+a matter of memory, that the bishop realized how strange and
+incomprehensible his vision had been. The sphere was the earth
+with all its continents and seas, its ships and cities, its
+country-sides and mountain ranges. It was so small that he could
+see it all at once, and so great and full that he could see
+everything in it. He could see great countries like little
+patches upon it, and at the same time he could see the faces of
+the men upon the highways, he could see the feelings in men s
+hearts and the thoughts in their minds. But it did not seem in
+any way wonderful to the bishop that so he should see those
+things, or that it was to him that these things were shown.
+
+"This is the whole world," he said.
+
+"This is the vision of the world," the Angel answered.
+
+"It is very wonderful," said the bishop, and stood for a moment
+marvelling at the compass of his vision. For here was India, here
+was Samarkand, in the light of the late afternoon; and China and
+the swarming cities upon her silvery rivers sinking through
+twilight to the night and throwing a spray and tracery of lantern
+spots upon the dark; here was Russia under the noontide, and so
+great a battle of artillery raging on the Dunajec as no man had
+ever seen before; whole lines of trenches dissolved into clouds
+of dust and heaps of blood-streaked earth; here close to the
+waiting streets of Constantinople were the hills of Gallipoli,
+the grave of British Imperialism, streaming to heaven with the
+dust and smoke of bursting shells and rifle fire and the smoke
+and flame of burning brushwood. In the sea of Marmora a big ship
+crowded with Turkish troops was sinking; and, purple under the
+clear water, he could see the shape of the British submarine
+which had torpedoed her and had submerged and was going away.
+Berlin prepared its frugal meals, still far from famine. He saw
+the war in Europe as if he saw it on a map, yet every human
+detail showed. Over hundreds of miles of trenches east and west
+of Germany he could see shells bursting and the men below
+dropping, and the stretcher-bearers going back with the wounded.
+The roads to every front were crowded with reserves and
+munitions. For a moment a little group of men indifferent to all
+this struggle, who were landing amidst the Antarctic wilderness,
+held his attention; and then his eyes went westward to the dark
+rolling Atlantic across which, as the edge of the night was drawn
+like a curtain, more and still more ships became visible beating
+upon their courses eastward or westward under the overtaking day.
+
+The wonder increased; the wonder of the single and infinitely
+multitudinous adventure of mankind.
+
+"So God perhaps sees it," he whispered.
+
+(7)
+
+
+"Look at this man," said the Angel, and the black shadow of a
+hand seemed to point.
+
+It was a Chinaman sitting with two others in a little low room
+separated by translucent paper windows from a noisy street of
+shrill-voiced people. The three had been talking of the ultimatum
+that Japan had sent that day to China, claiming a priority in
+many matters over European influences they were by no means sure
+whether it was a wrong or a benefit that had been done to their
+country. From that topic they had passed to the discussion of the
+war, and then of wars and national aggressions and the perpetual
+thrusting and quarrelling of mankind. The older man had said that
+so life would allways be; it was the will of Heaven. The little,
+very yellow-faced, emaciated man had agreed with him. But now
+this younger man, to whose thoughts the Angel had so particularly
+directed the bishop's attention, was speaking. He did not agree
+with his companion.
+
+"War is not the will of Heaven," he said; "it is the blindness
+of men."
+
+"Man changes," he said, "from day to day and from age to age.
+The science of the West has taught us that. Man changes and war
+changes and all things change. China has been the land of flowery
+peace, and she may yet give peace to all the world. She has put
+aside that puppet Emperor at Peking, she turns her face to the
+new learning of the West as a man lays aside his heavy robes, in
+order that her task may be achieved."
+
+The older man spoke, his manner was more than a little
+incredulous, and yet not altogether contemptuous. "You believe
+that someday there will be no more war in the world, that a time
+will come when men will no longer plot and plan against the
+welfare of men?"
+
+"Even that last," said the younger man. "Did any of us dream
+twenty-five years ago that here in China we should live to see a
+republic? The age of the republics draws near, when men in every
+country of the world will look straight up to the rule of Right
+and the empire of Heaven."
+
+(" And God will be King of the World," said the Angel. "Is not
+that faith exactly the faith that is coming to you? ")
+
+The two other Chinamen questioned their companion, but without
+hostility.
+
+"This war," said the Chinaman, "will end in a great harvesting
+of kings."
+
+"But Japan--" the older man began.
+
+The bishop would have liked to hear more of that conversation,
+but the dark hand of the Angel motioned him to another part of
+the world. "Listen to this," said the Angel.
+
+He pointed the bishop to where the armies of Britain and Turkey
+lay in the heat of Mesopotamia. Along the sandy bank of a wide,
+slow-flowing river rode two horsemen, an Englishman and a Turk.
+They were returning from the Turkish lines, whither the
+Englishman had been with a flag of truce. When Englishmen and
+Turks are thrown together they soon become friends, and in this
+case matters had been facilitated by the Englishman's command of
+the Turkish language. He was quite an exceptional Englishman. The
+Turk had just been remarking cheerfully that it wouldn't please
+the Germans if they were to discover how amiably he and his
+charge had got on. "It's a pity we ever ceased to be friends," he
+said.
+
+"You Englishmen aren't like our Christians," he went on.
+
+The Engiishmen wanted to know why.
+
+"You haven't priests in robes. You don't chant and worship
+crosses and pictures, and quarrel among yourselves."
+
+"We worship the same God as you do," said the Englishman.
+
+"Then why do we fight?"
+
+"That's what we want to know."
+
+"Why do you call yourselves Christians? And take part against
+us? All who worship the One God are brothers."
+
+"They ought to be," said the Englishman, and thought. He was
+struck by what seemed to him an amazingly novel idea.
+
+"If it weren't for religions all men would serve God together,"
+he said. "And then there would be no wars--only now and then
+perhaps just a little honest fighting...."
+
+"And see here," said the Angel. "Here close behind this
+frightful battle, where the German phalanx of guns pounds its way
+through the Russian hosts. Here is a young German talking to two
+wounded Russian prisoners, who have stopped to rest by the
+roadside. He is a German of East Prussia; he knows and thinks a
+little Russian. And they too are saying, all three of them, that
+the war is not God's will, but the confusion of mankind.
+
+"Here," he said, and the shadow of his hand hovered over the
+burning-ghats of Benares, where a Brahmin of the new persuasion
+watched the straight spires of funereal smoke ascend into the
+glow of the late afternoon, while he talked to an English
+painter, his friend, of the blind intolerance of race and caste
+and custom in India.
+
+"Or here."
+
+The Angel pointed to a group of people who had gathered upon a
+little beach at the head of a Norwegian fiord. There were three
+lads, an old man and two women, and they stood about the body of
+a drowned German sailor which had been washed up that day. For a
+time they had talked in whispers, but now suddenly the old man
+spoke aloud.
+
+"This is the fourth that has come ashore," he said. "Poor
+drowned souls! Because men will not serve God."
+
+"But folks go to church and pray enough," said one of the
+women.
+
+"They do not serve God," said the old man. "They just pray to
+him as one nods to a beggar. They do not serve God who is their
+King. They set up their false kings and emperors, and so all
+Europe is covered with dead, and the seas wash up these dead to
+us. Why does the world suffer these things? Why did we
+Norwegians, who are a free-spirited people, permit the Germans
+and the Swedes and the English to set up a king over us? Because
+we lack faith. Kings mean secret counsels, and secret counsels
+bring war. Sooner or later war will come to us also if we give
+the soul of our nation in trust to a king.... But things will not
+always be thus with men. God will not suffer them for ever. A day
+comes, and it is no distant day, when God himself will rule the
+earth, and when men will do, not what the king wishes nor what is
+expedient nor what is customary, but what is manifestly
+right."....
+
+"But men are saying that now in a thousand places," said the
+Angel. "Here is something that goes a little beyond that."
+
+His pointing hand went southward until they saw the Africanders
+riding down to Windhuk. Two men, Boer farmers both, rode side by
+side and talked of the German officer they brought prisoner with
+them. He had put sheep-dip in the wells of drinking-water; his
+life was fairly forfeit, and he was not to be killed. "We want no
+more hate in South Africa," they agreed. "Dutch and English and
+German must live here now side by side. Men cannot always be
+killing."
+
+"And see his thoughts," said the Angel.
+
+The German's mind was one amazement. He had been sure of being
+shot, he had meant to make a good end, fierce and scornful, a
+relentless fighter to the last; and these men who might have shot
+him like a man were going to spare him like a dog. His mind was a
+tumbled muddle of old and new ideas. He had been brought up in an
+atmosphere of the foulest and fiercest militarism; he had been
+trained to relentlessness, ruthlessness and so forth; war was war
+and the bitterer the better, frightfulness was your way to
+victory over every enemy. But these people had found a better
+way. Here were Dutch and English side by side; sixteen years ago
+they had been at war together and now they wore the same uniform
+and rode together, and laughed at him for a queer fellow because
+he was for spitting at them and defying them, and folding his
+arms and looking level at the executioners' rifles. There were to
+be no executioners' rifles.... If it was so with Dutch and
+English, why shouldn't it be so presently with French and
+Germans? Why someday shouldn't French, German, Dutch and English,
+Russian and Pole, ride together under this new star of mankind,
+the Southern Cross, to catch whatever last mischief-maker was
+left to poison the wells of goodwill?
+
+His mind resisted and struggled against these ideas. "Austere,"
+he whispered. "The ennobling tests of war." A trooner rode up
+alongside, and offered him a drink of water
+
+"Just a mouthful," he said apologetically. "We've had to go
+rather short."...
+
+"There's another brain busy here with the same idea," the Angel
+interrupted. And the bishop found himself looking into the
+bedroom of a young German attache in Washington, sleepless in the
+small hours.
+
+"Ach!" cried the young man, and sat up in bed and ran his hands
+through his fair hair.
+
+He had been working late upon this detestable business of the
+Lusitania; the news of her sinking had come to hand two days
+before, and all America was aflame with it. It might mean war.
+His task had been to pour out explanations and justifications to
+the press; to show that it was an act of necessity, to pretend a
+conviction that the great ship was loaded with munitions, to
+fight down the hostility and anger that blazed across a
+continent. He had worked to his limit. He had taken cup after cup
+of coffee, and had come to bed worked out not two hours ago. Now
+here he was awake after a nightmare of drowning women and
+children, trying to comfort his soul by recalling his own
+arguments. Never once since the war began had he doubted the
+rightness of the German cause. It seemed only a proof of his
+nervous exhaustion that he could doubt it now. Germany was the
+best organized, most cultivated, scientific and liberal nation
+the earth had ever seen, it was for the good of mankind that she
+should be the dominant power in the world; his patriotism had had
+the passion of a mission. The English were indolent, the French
+decadent, the Russians barbaric, the Americans basely democratic;
+the rest of the world was the "White man's Burthen"; the clear
+destiny of mankind was subservience to the good Prussian eagle.
+Nevertheless--those wet draggled bodies that swirled down in
+the eddies of the sinking Titan--Ach! He wished it could have
+been otherwise. He nursed his knees and prayed that there need
+not be much more of these things before the spirit of the enemy
+was broken and the great Peace of Germany came upon the world.
+
+And suddenly he stopped short in his prayer.
+
+Suddenly out of the nothingness and darkness about him came the
+conviction that God did not listen to his prayers....
+
+Was there any other way?
+
+It was the most awful doubt he had ever had, for it smote at
+the training of all his life. "Could it be possible that after
+all our old German God is not the proper style and title of the
+true God? Is our old German God perhaps only the last of a long
+succession of bloodstained tribal effigies--and not God at
+all?"
+
+For a long time it seemed that the bishop watched the thoughts
+that gathered in the young attache's mind. Until suddenly he
+broke into a quotation, into that last cry of the dying Goethe,
+for "Light. More Light!"...
+
+"Leave him at that," said the Angel. "I want you to hear these
+two young women."
+
+The hand came back to England and pointed to where Southend at
+the mouth of the Thames was all agog with the excitement of an
+overnight Zeppelin raid. People had got up hours before their
+usual time in order to look at the wrecked houses before they
+went up to their work in town. Everybody seemed abroad. Two
+nurses, not very well trained as nurses go nor very well-educated
+women, were snatching a little sea air upon the front after an
+eventful night. They were too excited still to sleep. They were
+talking of the horror of the moment when they saw the nasty thing
+"up there," and felt helpless as it dropped its bombs. They had
+both hated it.
+
+"There didn't ought to be such things," said one.
+
+"They don't seem needed," said her companion.
+
+"Men won't always go on like this--making wars and all such
+wickedness."
+
+"It's 'ow to stop them?"
+
+"Science is going to stop them."
+
+"Science?"
+
+"Yes, science. My young brother--oh, he's a clever one--he
+says such things! He says that it's science that they won't
+always go on like this. There's more sense coming into the world
+and more--my young brother says so. Says it stands to reason;
+it's Evolution. It's science that men are all brothers; you can
+prove it. It's science that there oughtn't to be war. Science is
+ending war now by making it horrible like this, and making it so
+that no one is safe. Showing it up. Only when nobody is safe will
+everybody want to set up peace, he says. He says it's proved
+there could easily be peace all over the world now if it wasn't
+for flags and kings and capitalists and priests. They still
+manage to keep safe and out of it. He says the world ought to be
+just one state. The World State, he says it ought to be."
+
+("Under God," said the bishop, "under God.")
+
+"He says science ought to be King of the whole world."
+
+"Call it Science if you will," said the bishop. "God is
+wisdom."
+
+"Out of the mouths of babes and elementary science students,"
+said the Angel. "The very children in the board schools are
+turning against this narrowness and nonsense and mischief of
+nations and creeds and kings. You see it at a thousand points, at
+ten thousand points, look, the world is all flashing and
+flickering; it is like a spinthariscope; it is aquiver with the
+light that is coming to mankind. It is on the verge of blazing
+even now."
+
+"Into a light."
+
+"Into the one Kingdom of God. See here! See here! And here!
+This brave little French priest in a helmet of steel who is
+daring to think for the first time in his life; this
+gentle-mannered emir from Morocco looking at the grave-diggers on
+the battlefield; this mother who has lost her son....
+
+"You see they all turn in one direction, although none of them
+seem to dream yet that they are all turning in the same
+direction. They turn, every one, to the rule of righteousness,
+which is the rule of God. They turn to that communism of effort
+in the world which alone permits men to serve God in state and
+city and their economic lives.... They are all coming to the
+verge of the same salvation, the salvation of one human
+brotherhood under the rule of one Righteousness, one Divine
+will.... Is that the salvation your church offers?"
+
+(8)
+
+
+"And now that we have seen how religion grows and spreads in
+men's hearts, now that the fields are white with harvest, I want
+you to look also and see what the teachers of religion are
+doing," said the Angel.
+
+He smiled. His presence became more definite, and the earthly
+globe about them and the sun and the stars grew less distinct and
+less immediately there. The silence invited the bishop to speak.
+
+"In the light of this vision, I see my church plainly for the
+little thing it is," he said.
+
+He wanted to be perfectly clear with the Angel and himself.
+
+"This church of which I am a bishop is just a part of our poor
+human struggle, small and pitiful as one thinks of it here in the
+light of the advent of God's Kingdom, but very great, very great
+indeed, ancient and high and venerable, in comparison with me.
+But mostly it is human. It is most human. For my story is the
+church's story, and the church's story is mine. Here I could
+almost believe myself the church itself. The world saw a light,
+the nations that were sitting in darkness saw a great light. Even
+as I saw God. And then the church began to forget and lose itself
+among secondary things. As I have done.... It tried to express
+the truth and lost itself in a maze of theology. It tried to
+bring order into the world and sold its faith to Constantine.
+These men who had professed the Invisible King of the World,
+shirked his service. It is a most terrible disaster that
+Christianity has sold itself to emperors and kings. They forged a
+saying of the Master's that we should render unto Ceasar the
+things that are Ceasar's and unto God the things that are
+God's....
+
+"Who is this Ceasar to set himself up to share mankind with
+God? Nothing that is Ceasar's can be any the less God's. But
+Constantine Caesar sat in the midst of the council, his guards
+were all about it, and the poor fanatics and trimmers and
+schemers disputed nervously with their eyes on him, disputed
+about homoousian and homoiousian, and grimaced and pretended to
+be very very fierce and exact to hide how much they were
+frightened and how little they knew, and because they did not
+dare to lay violent hands upon that usurper of the empire of the
+world....
+
+"And from that day forth the Christian churches have been
+damned and lost. Kept churches. Lackey churches. Roman, Russian,
+Anglican; it matters not. My church indeed was twice sold, for it
+doubled the sin of Nicaea and gave itself over to Henry and
+Elizabeth while it shammed a dispute about the sacraments. No one
+cared really about transubstantiation any more than the earlier
+betrayers cared about consubstantiality; that dispute did but
+serve to mask the betrayal."
+
+He turned to the listening Angel. "What can you show me of my
+church that I do not know? Why! we Anglican bishops get our sees
+as footmen get a job. For months Victoria, that old German Frau,
+delayed me--because of some tittle-tattle.... The things we
+are! Snape, who afterwards became Bishop of Burnham, used to
+waylay the Prince Consort when he was riding in Hyde Park and
+give him, he boasts, 'a good loud cheer,' and then he would run
+very fast across the park so as to catch him as he came round,
+and do it again.... It is to that sort of thing we bearers of the
+light have sunken....
+
+"I have always despised that poor toady," the bishop went on.
+"And yet here am I, and God has called me and shown me the light
+of his countenance, and for a month I have faltered. That is the
+mystery of the human heart, that it can and does sin against the
+light. What right have I, who have seen the light--and failed,
+what right have I--to despise any other human being? I seem to
+have been held back by a sort of paralysis.
+
+"Men are so small, so small still, that they cannot keep hold
+of the vision of God. That is why I want to see God again.... But
+if it were not for this strange drug that seems for a little
+while to lift my mind above the confusion and personal
+entanglements of every day, I doubt if even now I could be here.
+I am here, passionate to hold this moment and keep the light. As
+this inspiration passes, I shall go back, I know, to my home and
+my place and my limitations. The littleness of men! The
+forgetfulness of men! I want to know what my chief duty is, to
+have it plain, in terms so plain that I can never forget.
+
+"See in this world," he said, turning to the globe, "while
+Chinese merchants and Turkish troopers, school-board boys and
+Norwegian fishermen, half-trained nurses and Boer farmers are
+full of the spirit of God, see how the priests of the churches of
+Nicaea spend their time."
+
+And now it was the bishop whose dark hands ran over the great
+silver globe, and it was the Angel who stood over him and
+listened, as a teacher might stand over a child who is learning a
+lesson. The bishop's hand rested for a second on a cardinal who
+was planning a political intrigue to produce a reaction in
+France, then for a moment on a Pomeranian pastor who was going
+out to his well-tilled fields with his Sunday sermon, full of
+fierce hatred of England, still echoing in his head. Then he
+paused at a Mollah preaching the Jehad, in doubt whether he too
+wasn't a German pastor, and then at an Anglican clergyman still
+lying abed and thinking out a great mission of Repentance and
+Hope that should restore the authority of the established church
+--by incoherent missioning--without any definite sin indicated
+for repentance nor any clear hope for anything in particular
+arising out of such activities. The bishop's hand went seeking to
+and fro, but nowhere could he find any religious teacher, any
+religious body rousing itself to meet the new dawn of faith in
+the world. Some few men indeed seemed thoughtful, but within the
+limitation of their vows. Everywhere it was church and creed and
+nation and king and property and partisanship, and nowhere was it
+the True God that the priests and teachers were upholding. It was
+always the common unhampered man through whom the light of God
+was breaking; it was always the creed and the organization of the
+religious professionals that stood in the way to God....
+
+"God is putting the priests aside," he cried, "and reaching out
+to common men. The churches do not serve God. They stand between
+man and God. They are like great barricades on the way to God."
+
+The bishop's hand brushed over Archbishop Pontifex, who was
+just coming down to breakfast in his palace. This pompous old man
+was dressed in a purple garment that set off his tall figure very
+finely, and he was holding out his episcopal ring for his guests
+to kiss, that being the customary morning greeting of Archbishop
+Pontifex. The thought of that ring-kissing had made much hard
+work at lower levels "worth while" to Archbishop Pontifex. And
+seventy miles away from him old Likeman breakfasted in bed on
+Benger's food, and searched his Greek Testament for tags to put
+to his letters. And here was the familiar palace at Princhester,
+and in an armchair in his bed-room sat Bishop Scrope insensible
+and motionless, in a trance in which he was dreaming of the
+coming of God.
+
+"I see my futility. I see my vanity. But what am I to do?" he
+said, turning to the darkness that now wrapped about the Angel
+again, fold upon fold. "The implications of yesterday bind me for
+the morrow. This is my world. This is what I am and what I am in.
+How can I save myself? How can I turn from these habits and
+customs and obligations to the service of the one true God? When
+I see myself, then I understand how it is with the others. All we
+priests and teachers are men caught in nets. I would serve God.
+Easily said! But how am I to serve God? How am I to help and
+forward His coming, to make myself part of His coming?"
+
+He perceived that he was returning into himself, and that the
+vision of the sphere and of the starry spaces was fading into
+non-existence.
+
+He struggled against this return. He felt that his demand was
+still unanswered. His wife's face had suddenly come very close to
+him, and he realized she intervened between him and that
+solution.
+
+What was she doing here?
+
+(9)
+
+
+The great Angel seemed still to be near at hand, limitless
+space was all about him, and yet the bishop perceived that he was
+now sitting in the arm-chair in his bedroom in the palace of
+Princhester. He was both there and not there. It seemed now as if
+he had two distinct yet kindred selves, and that the former
+watched the latter. The latter was now awakening to the things
+about him; the former marked his gestures and listened with an
+entire detachment to the words he was saying. These words he was
+saying to Lady Ella: "God is coming to rule the world, I tell
+you. We must leave the church."
+
+Close to him sat Lady Ella, watching him with an expression in
+which dismay and resolution mingled. Upon the other side of him,
+upon a little occasional table, was a tray with breakfast things.
+He was no longer the watcher now, but the watched.
+
+Lady Ella bent towards him as he spoke. She seemed to struggle
+with and dismiss his astonishing statement.
+
+"Edward," she said, "you have been taking a drug." He looked
+round at his night table to see the little phial. It had gone.
+Then he saw that Lady Ella held it very firmly in her hand.
+
+"Dunk came to me in great distress. He said you were insensible
+and breathing heavily. I came. I realized. I told him to say
+nothing to any one, but to fetch me a tray with your breakfast. I
+have kept all the other servants away and I have waited here by
+you.... Dunk I think is safe.... You have been muttering and
+moving your head from side to side...."
+
+The bishop's mind was confused. He felt as though God must be
+standing just outside the room. "I have failed in my duty," he
+said. "But I am very near to God." He laid his hand on her arm.
+"You know, Ella, He is very close to us...."
+
+She looked perplexed.
+
+He sat up in his chair.
+
+"For some months now," he said, "there have been new forces at
+work in my mind. I have been invaded by strange doubts and still
+stranger realizations. This old church of ours is an empty mask.
+God is not specially concerned in it."
+
+"Edward!" she cried, "what are you saying?"
+
+"I have been hesitating to tell you. But I see now I must tell
+you plainly. Our church is a cast hull. It is like the empty skin
+of a snake. God has gone out of it."
+
+She rose to her feet. She was so horrified that she staggered
+backward, pushing her chair behind her. "But you are mad," she
+said.
+
+He was astonished at her distress. He stood up also.
+
+"My dear," he said, "I can assure you I am not mad. I should
+have prepared you, I know...."
+
+She looked at him wild-eyed. Then she glanced at the phial,
+gripped in her hand.
+
+"Oh!" she exclaimed, and going swiftly to the window emptied
+out the contents of the little bottle. He realized what she was
+doing too late to prevent her.
+
+"Don't waste that!" he cried, and stepping forward caught hold
+of her wrist. The phial fell from her white fingers, and crashed
+upon the rough paved garden path below.
+
+"My dear," he cried, "my dear. You do not understand."
+
+They stood face to face. "It was a tonic," he said. "I have
+been ill. I need it."
+
+"It is a drug," she answered. "You have been uttering
+blasphemies."
+
+He dropped her arm and walked half-way across the room. Then he
+turned and faced her.
+
+"They are not blasphemies," he said. "But I ought not to have
+surprised you and shocked you as I have done. I want to tell you
+of changes that have happened to my mind."
+
+"Now!" she exclaimed, and then: "I will not hear them now.
+Until you are better. Until these fumes--"
+
+Her manner changed. "Oh, Edward!" she cried, "why have you done
+this? Why have you taken things secretly? I know you have been
+sleepless, but I have been so ready to help you. I have been
+willing--you know I have been willing--for any help. My life
+is all to be of use to you...."
+
+"Is there any reason," she pleaded, "why you should have hidden
+things from me?"
+
+He stood remorseful and distressed. "I should have talked to
+you," he said lamely.
+
+"Edward," she said, laying her hands on his shoulders, "will
+you do one thing for me? Will you try to eat a little breakfast?
+And stay here? I will go down to Mr. Whippham and arrange
+whatever is urgent with him. Perhaps if you rest--There is
+nothing really imperative until the confirmation in the
+afternoon.... I do not understand all this. For some time--I
+have felt it was going on. But of that we can talk. The thing now
+is that people should not know, that nothing should be seen....
+Suppose for instance that horrible White Blackbird were to hear
+of it.... I implore you. If you rest here--And if I were to
+send for that young doctor who attended Miriam."
+
+"I don't want a doctor," said the bishop.
+
+"But you ought to have a doctor."
+
+"I won't have a doctor," said the bishop.
+
+It was with a perplexed but powerless dissent that the
+externalized perceptions of the bishop witnessed his agreement
+with the rest of Lady Ella's proposals so soon as this point
+about the doctor was conceded.
+
+(10)
+
+
+For the rest of that day until his breakdown in the cathedral
+the sense of being in two places at the same time haunted the
+bishop's mind. He stood beside the Angel in the great space
+amidst the stars, and at the same time he was back in his
+ordinary life, he was in his palace at Princhester, first resting
+in his bedroom and talking to his wife and presently taking up
+the routines of his duties again in his study downstairs.
+
+His chief task was to finish his two addresses for the
+confirmation services of the day. He read over his notes, and
+threw them aside and remained for a time thinking deeply. The
+Greek tags at the end of Likeman's letter came into his thoughts;
+they assumed a quality of peculiar relevance to this present
+occasion. He repeated the words: "Epitelesei. Epiphausei."
+
+He took his little Testament to verify them. After some slight
+trouble he located the two texts. The first, from Philippians,
+ran in the old version, "He that hath begun a good work in you
+will perform it"; the second was expressed thus: "Christ shall
+give thee light." He was dissatisfied with these renderings and
+resorted to the revised version, which gave "perfect" instead of
+"perform," and "shall shine upon you" for "give thee light." He
+reflected profoundly for a time.
+
+Then suddenly his addresses began to take shape in his mind,
+and these little points lost any significance. He began to write
+rapidly, and as he wrote he felt the Angel stood by his right
+hand and read and approved what he was writing. There were
+moments when his mind seemed to be working entirely beyond his
+control. He had a transitory questioning whether this curious
+intellectual automatism was not perhaps what people meant by
+"inspiration."
+
+(11)
+
+
+The bishop had always been sensitive to the secret fount of
+pathos that is hidden in the spectacle of youth. Long years ago
+when he and Lady Ella had been in Florence he had been moved to
+tears by the beauty of the fresh-faced eager Tobit who runs
+beside the great angel in the picture of Botticelli. And suddenly
+and almost as uncontrollably, that feeling returned at the sight
+of the young congregation below him, of all these scores of
+neophytes who were gathered to make a public acknowledgment of
+God. The war has invested all youth now with the shadow of
+tragedy; before it came many of us were a little envious of youth
+and a little too assured of its certainty of happiness. All that
+has changed. Fear and a certain tender solicitude mingle in our
+regard for every child; not a lad we pass in the street but may
+presently be called to face such pain and stress and danger as no
+ancient hero ever knew. The patronage, the insolent condescension
+of age, has vanished out of the world. It is dreadful to look
+upon the young.
+
+He stood surveying the faces of the young people as the rector
+read the Preface to the confirmation service. How simple they
+were, how innocent! Some were a little flushed by the excitement
+of the occasion; some a little pallid. But they were all such
+tender faces, so soft in outline, so fresh and delicate in
+texture and colour. They had soft credulous mouths. Some glanced
+sideways at one another; some listened with a forced intentness.
+The expression of one good-looking boy, sitting in a corner scat,
+struck the bishop as being curiously defiant. He stood very
+erect, he blinked his eyes as though they smarted, his lips were
+compressed bitterly. And then it seemed to the bishop that the
+Angel stood beside him and gave him understanding.
+
+"He is here," the bishop knew, "because he could not avoid
+coming. He tried to excuse himself. His mother wept. What could
+he do? But the church's teaching nowadays fails even to grip the
+minds of boys."
+
+The rector came to the end of his Preface: "They will evermore
+endeavour themselves faithfully to observe such things as they by
+their own confession have assented unto."
+
+"Like a smart solicitor pinning them down," said the bishop to
+himself, and then roused himself, unrolled the little paper in
+his hand, leant forward, and straightway began his first address.
+
+Nowadays it is possible to say very unorthodox things indeed in
+an Anglican pulpit unchallenged. There remains no alert doctrinal
+criticism in the church congregations. It was possible,
+therefore, for the bishop to say all that follows without either
+hindrance or disturbance. The only opposition, indeed, came from
+within, from a sense of dreamlike incongruity between the place
+and the occasion and the things that he found himself delivering.
+
+"All ceremonies," he began, "grow old. All ceremonies are
+tainted even from the first by things less worthy than their
+first intention, and you, my dear sons and daughters, who have
+gathered to-day in this worn and ancient building, beneath these
+monuments to ancient vanities and these symbols of forgotten or
+abandoned theories about the mystery of God, will do well to
+distinguish in your minds between what is essential and what is
+superfluous and confusing in this dedication you make of
+yourselves to God our Master and King. For that is the real thing
+you seek to do today, to give yourselves to God. This is your
+spiritual coming of age, in which you set aside your childish
+dependence upon teachers and upon taught phrases, upon rote and
+direction, and stand up to look your Master in the face. You
+profess a great brotherhood when you do that, a brotherhood that
+goes round the earth, that numbers men of every race and nation
+and country, that aims to bring God into all the affairs of this
+world and make him not only the king of your individual lives but
+the king--in place of all the upstarts, usurpers, accidents,
+and absurdities who bear crowns and sceptres today--of an
+united mankind."
+
+He paused, and in the pause he heard a little rustle as though
+the congregation before him was sitting up in its places, a sound
+that always nerves and reassures an experienced preacher.
+
+"This, my dear children, is the reality of this grave business
+to-day, as indeed it is the real and practical end of all true
+religion. This is your sacrament urn, your soldier's oath. You
+salute and give your fealty to the coming Kingdom of God. And
+upon that I would have you fix your minds to the exclusion of
+much that, I know only too well, has been narrow and evil and
+sectarian in your preparation for this solemn rite. God is like a
+precious jewel found among much rubble; you must cast the rubble
+from you. The crowning triumph of the human mind is simplicity;
+the supreme significance of God lies in his unity and
+universality. The God you salute to-day is the God of the Jews
+and Gentiles alike, the God of Islam, the God of the Brahmo
+Somaj, the unknown God of many a righteous unbeliever. He is not
+the God of those felted theologies and inexplicable doctrines
+with which your teachers may have confused your minds. I would
+have it very clear in your minds that having drunken the draught
+you should not reverence unduly the cracked old vessel that has
+brought it to your lips. I should be falling short of my duty if
+I did not make that and everything I mean by that altogether
+plain to you."
+
+He saw the lad whose face of dull defiance he had marked
+before, sitting now with a startled interest in his eyes. The
+bishop leant over the desk before him, and continued in the
+persuasive tone of a man who speaks of things too manifest for
+laboured argument.
+
+"In all ages religion has come from God through broad-minded
+creative men, and in all ages it has fallen very quickly into the
+hands of intense and conservative men. These last--narrow,
+fearful, and suspicious--have sought in every age to save the
+precious gift of religion by putting it into a prison of formulae
+and asseverations. Bear that in mind when you are pressed to
+definition. It is as if you made a box hermetically sealed to
+save the treasure of a fresh breeze from the sea. But they have
+sought out exact statements and tortuous explanations of the
+plain truth of God, they have tried to take down God in writing,
+to commit him to documents, to embalm his living faith as though
+it would otherwise corrupt. So they have lost God and fallen into
+endless differences, disputes, violence, and darkness about
+insignificant things. They have divided religion between this
+creed and teacher and that. The corruption of the best is the
+worst, said Aristotle; and the great religions of the world, and
+especially this Christianity of ours, are the ones most darkened
+and divided and wasted by the fussings and false exactitudes of
+the creed-monger and the sectary. There is no lie so bad as a
+stale disfigured truth. There is no heresy so damnable as a
+narrow orthodoxy. All religious associations carry this danger of
+the over-statement that misstates and the over-emphasis that
+divides and betrays. Beware of that danger. Do not imagine,
+because you are gathered in this queerly beautiful old building
+today, because I preside here in this odd raiment of an odder
+compromise, because you see about you in coloured glass and
+carven stone the emblems of much vain disputation, that thereby
+you cut yourselves off and come apart from the great world of
+faith, Catholic, Islamic, Brahministic, Buddhistic, that grows
+now to a common consciousness of the near Advent of God our King.
+You enter that waiting world fraternity now, you do not leave it.
+This place, this church of ours, should be to you not a seclusion
+and a fastness but a door.
+
+"I could quote you a score of instances to establish that this
+simple universalism was also the teaching of Christ. But now I
+will only remind you that it was Mary who went to her lord
+simply, who was commended, and not Martha who troubled about many
+things. Learn from the Mary of Faith and not from these Marthas
+of the Creeds. Let us abandon the presumptions of an ignorant
+past. The perfection of doctrine is not for finite men. Give
+yourselves to God. Give yourselves to God. Not to churches and
+uses, but to God. To God simply. He is the first word of religion
+and the last. He is Alpha; he is Omega. Epitelesei; it is He who
+will finish the good work begun."
+
+The bishop ended his address in a vivid silence. Then he began
+his interrogation.
+
+"Do you here, in the presence of God, and of this congregation,
+renew the solemn promise and vow that was made in your name at
+your Baptism; ratifying and confirming the same in your own
+persons, and acknowledging yourselves--"
+
+He stopped short. The next words were: "bound to believe and do
+all those things, which your Godfathers and Godmothers then
+undertook for you."
+
+He could not stand those words. He hesitated, and then
+substituted: "acknowledge yourselves to be the true servants of
+the one God, who is the Lord of Mankind?"
+
+For a moment silence hung in the cathedral. Then one voice, a
+boy's voice, led a ragged response. "I do."
+
+Then the bishop: "Our help is in the Name of the Lord."
+
+The congregation answered doubtfully, with a glance at its
+prayer books: "Who hath made heaven and earth."
+
+The bishop: "Blessed be the name of the Lord."
+
+The congregation said with returning confidence: "Henceforth,
+world without end."
+
+(12)
+
+
+Before his second address the bishop had to listen to Veni
+Creator Spiritus, in its English form, and it seemed to him the
+worst of all possible hymns. Its defects became monstrously
+exaggerated to his hypersensitive mind. It impressed him in its
+Englished travesty as a grotesque, as a veritable Charlie Chaplin
+among hymns, and in truth it does stick out most awkward feet, it
+misses its accusatives, it catches absurdly upon points of
+abstruse doctrine. The great Angel stood motionless and ironical
+at the bishop's elbow while it was being sung. "Your church," he
+seemed to say.
+
+"We must end this sort of thing," whispered the bishop. "We
+must end this sort of thing--absolutely." He glanced at the
+faces of the singers, and it became beyond all other things
+urgent, that he should lift them once for all above the sectarian
+dogmatism of that hymn to a simple vision of God's light....
+
+He roused himself to the touching business of the laying on of
+hands. While he did so the prepared substance of his second
+address was running through his mind. The following prayer and
+collects he read without difficulty, and so came to his second
+address. His disposition at first was explanatory.
+
+"When I spoke to you just now," he began, "I fell
+unintentionally into the use of a Greek word, epitelesei. It was
+written to me in a letter from a friend with another word that
+also I am now going to quote to you. This letter touched very
+closely upon the things I want to say to you now, and so these
+two words are very much in my mind. The former one was taken from
+the Epistle to the Philippians; it signifies, 'He will complete
+the work begun'; the one I have now in mind comes from the
+Epistle to the Ephesians; it is Epiphausei--or, to be fuller,
+epiphausei soi ho Christos, which signifies that He will shine
+upon us. And this is very much in my thoughts now because I do
+believe that this world, which seemed so very far from God a
+little while ago, draws near now to an unexampled dawn. God is at
+hand.
+
+"It is your privilege, it is your grave and terrible position,
+that you have been born at the very end and collapse of a
+negligent age, of an age of sham kingship, sham freedom,
+relaxation, evasion, greed, waste, falsehood, and sinister
+preparation. Your lives open out in the midst of the breakdown
+for which that age prepared. To you negligence is no longer
+possible. There is cold and darkness, there is the heat of the
+furnace before you; you will live amidst extremes such as our
+youth never knew; whatever betide, you of your generation will
+have small chance of living untempered lives. Our country is at
+war and half mankind is at war; death and destruction trample
+through the world; men rot and die by the million, food
+diminishes and fails, there is a wasting away of all the hoarded
+resources, of all the accumulated well-being of mankind; and
+there is no clear prospect yet of any end to this enormous and
+frightful conflict. Why did it ever arise? What made it possible?
+It arose because men had forgotten God. It was possible because
+they worshipped simulacra, were loyal to phantoms of race and
+empire, permitted themselves to be ruled and misled by idiot
+princes and usurper kings. Their minds were turned from God, who
+alone can rule and unite mankind, and so they have passed from
+the glare and follies of those former years into the darkness and
+anguish of the present day. And in darkness and anguish they will
+remain until they turn to that King who comes to rule them, until
+the sword and indignation of God have overthrown their misleaders
+and oppressors, and the Justice of God, the Kingdom of God set
+high over the republics of mankind, has brought peace for ever to
+the world. It is to this militant and imminent God, to this
+immortal Captain, this undying Law-giver, that you devote
+yourselves to-day.
+
+"For he is imminent now. He comes. I have seen in the east and
+in the west, the hearts and the minds and the wills of men
+turning to him as surely as when a needle is magnetized it turns
+towards the north. Even now as I preach to you here, God stands
+over us all, ready to receive us...."
+
+And as he said these words, the long nave of the cathedral, the
+shadows of its fretted roof, the brown choir with its golden
+screen, the rows of seated figures, became like some picture cast
+upon a flimsy and translucent curtain. Once more it seemed to the
+bishop that he saw God plain. Once more the glorious effulgence
+poured about him, and the beautiful and wonderful conquest of
+men's hearts and lives was manifest to him.
+
+He lifted up his hands and cried to God, and with an emotion so
+profound, an earnestness so commanding, that very many of those
+who were present turned their faces to see the figure to which he
+looked and spoke. And some of the children had a strange
+persuasion of a presence there, as of a divine figure militant,
+armed, and serene....
+
+"Oh God our Leader and our Master and our Friend," the bishop
+prayed, "forgive our imperfection and our little motives, take us
+and make us one with thy great purpose, use us and do not reject
+us, make us all here servants of thy kingdom, weave our lives
+into thy struggle to conquer and to bring peace and union to the
+world. We are small and feeble creatures, we are feeble in
+speech, feebler still in action, nevertheless let but thy light
+shine upon us and there is not one of us who cannot be lit by thy
+fire, and who cannot lose himself in thy salvation. Take us into
+thy purpose, O God. Let thy kingdom come into our hearts and into
+this world."
+
+His voice ceased, and he stood for a measurable time with his
+arms extended and his face upturned....
+
+The golden clouds that whirled and eddied so splendidly in his
+brain thinned out, his sense of God's immediacy faded and passed,
+and he was left aware of the cathedral pulpit in which he stood
+so strangely posed, and of the astonished congregation below him.
+His arms sank to his side. His eyes fell upon the book in front
+of him and he felt for and gripped the two upper corners of it
+and, regardless of the common order and practice, read out the
+Benediction, changing the words involuntarily as he read:
+
+"The Blessing of God who is the Father, the Son, the Spirit and
+the King of all Mankind, be upon you and remain with you for
+ever. Amen."
+
+Then he looked again, as if to look once more upon that radiant
+vision of God, but now he saw only the clear cool space of the
+cathedral vault and the coloured glass and tracery of the great
+rose window. And then, as the first notes of the organ came
+pealing above the departing stir of the congregation, he turned
+about and descended slowly, like one who is still half dreaming,
+from the pulpit.
+
+(13)
+
+
+In the vestry he found Canon Bliss. "Help me to take off these
+garments," the bishop said. "I shall never wear them again."
+
+"You are ill," said the canon, scrutinizing his face.
+
+"Not ill. But the word was taken out of my mouth. I perceive
+now that I have been in a trance, a trance in which the truth is
+real. It is a fearful thing to find oneself among realities. It
+is a dreadful thing when God begins to haunt a priest.... I can
+never minister in the church again."
+
+Whippham thrust forward a chair for the bishop to sit down. The
+bishop felt now extraordinarily fatigued. He sat down heavily,
+and
+rested his wrists on the arms of the chair. "Already," he resumed
+presently, "I begin to forget what it was I said."
+
+"You became excited," said Bliss, "and spoke very loudly and
+clearly."
+
+"What did I say?"
+
+"I don't know what you said; I have forgotten. I never want to
+remember. Things about the Second Advent. Dreadful things. You
+said God was close at hand. Happily you spoke partly in Greek. I
+doubt if any of those children understood. And you had a kind of
+lapse--an aphasia. You mutilated the interrogation and you did
+not pronounce the benediction properly. You changed words and you
+put in words. One sat frozen--waiting for what would happen
+next."
+
+"We must postpone the Pringle confirmation," said Whippham. "I
+wonder to whom I could telephone."
+
+Lady Ella appeared, and came and knelt down by the bishop's
+chair. "I never ought to have let this happen," she said, taking
+his wrists in her hands. "You are in a fever, dear."
+
+"It seemed entirely natural to say what I did," the bishop
+declared.
+
+Lady Ella looked up at Bliss.
+
+"A doctor has been sent for," said the canon to Lady Ella.
+
+"I must speak to the doctor," said Lady Ella as if her husband
+could not hear her. "There is something that will make things
+clearer to the doctor. I must speak to the doctor for a moment
+before he sees him."
+
+Came a gust of pretty sounds and a flash of bright colour that
+shamed the rich vestments at hand. Over the shoulder of the
+rector and quite at the back, appeared Lady Sunderbund resolutely
+invading the vestry. The rector intercepted her, stood broad with
+extended arms.
+
+"I must come in and speak to him. If it is only fo' a moment."
+
+The bishop looked up and saw Lady Ella's expression. Lady Ella
+was sitting up very stiffly, listening but not looking round.
+
+A vague horror and a passionate desire to prevent the entry of
+Lady Sunderbund at any cost, seized upon the bishop. She would,
+he felt, be the last overwhelming complication. He descended to a
+base subterfuge. He lay back in his chair slowly as though he
+unfolded himself, he covered his eyes with his hand and then
+groaned aloud.
+
+"Leave me alone!" he cried in a voice of agony. "Leave me
+alone! I can see no one.... I can--no more."
+
+There was a momentous silence, and then the tumult of Lady
+Sunderbund receded.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE EIGHTH  -  THE NEW WORLD
+
+(1)
+
+
+THAT night the bishop had a temperature of a hundred and a
+half. The doctor pronounced him to be in a state of intense
+mental excitement, aggravated by some drug. He was a doctor
+modern and clear-minded enough to admit that he could not
+identify the drug. He overruled, every one overruled, the
+bishop's declaration that he had done with the church, that he
+could never mock God with his episcopal ministrations again, that
+he must proceed at once with his resignation. "Don't think of
+these things," said the doctor. "Banish them from your mind until
+your temperature is down to ninety-eight. Then after a rest you
+may go into them."
+
+Lady Ella insisted upon his keeping his room. It was with
+difficulty that he got her to admit Whippham, and Whippham was
+exasperatingly in order. "You need not trouble about anything
+now, my lord," he said. "Everything will keep until you are ready
+to attend to it. It's well we're through with Easter. Bishop
+Buncombe of Eastern Blowdesia was coming here anyhow. And there
+is Canon Bliss. There's only two ordination candidates because of
+the war. We'll get on swimmingly."
+
+The bishop thought he would like to talk to those two
+ordination candidates, but they prevailed upon him not to do so.
+He lay for the best part of one night confiding remarkable things
+to two imaginary ordination candidates.
+
+He developed a marked liking for Eleanor's company. She was
+home again now after a visit to some friends. It was decided that
+the best thing to do with him would be to send him away in her
+charge. A journey abroad was impossible. France would remind him
+too dreadfully of the war. His own mind turned suddenly to the
+sweet air of Hunstanton. He had gone there at times to read, in
+the old Cambridge days. "It is a terribly ugly place," he said,
+"but it is wine in the veins."
+
+Lady Ella was doubtful about Zeppelins. Thrice they had been
+right over Hunstanton already. They came in by the easy landmark
+of the Wash.
+
+"It will interest him," said Eleanor, who knew her father
+better.
+
+(2)
+
+
+One warm and still and sunny afternoon the bishop found himself
+looking out upon the waters of the Wash. He sat where the highest
+pebble layers of the beach reached up to a little cliff of sandy
+earth perhaps a foot high, and he looked upon sands and sea and
+sky and saw that they were beautiful.
+
+He was a little black-gaitered object in a scene of the most
+exquisite and delicate colour. Right and left of him stretched
+the low grey salted shore, pale banks of marly earth surmounted
+by green-grey wiry grass that held and was half buried in fine
+blown sand. Above, the heavens made a complete hemisphere of blue
+in which a series of remote cumulus clouds floated and dissolved.
+Before him spread the long levels of the sands, and far away at
+its utmost ebb was the sea. Eleanor had gone to explore the black
+ribs of a wrecked fishing-boat that lay at the edge of a shallow
+lagoon. She was a little pink-footed figure, very bright and
+apparently transparent. She had reverted for a time to shameless
+childishness; she had hidden her stockings among the reeds of the
+bank, and she was running to and fro, from star-fish to razor
+shell and from cockle to weed. The shingle was pale drab and
+purple close at hand, but to the westward, towards Hunstanton,
+the sands became brown and purple, and were presently broken up
+into endless skerries of low flat weed-covered boulders and
+little intensely blue pools. The sea was a band of sapphire that
+became silver to the west; it met the silver shining sands in one
+delicate breathing edge of intensely white foam. Remote to the
+west, very small and black and clear against the afternoon sky,
+was a cart, and about it was a score or so of mussel-gatherers. A
+little nearer, on an apparently empty stretch of shining wet
+sand, a multitude of gulls was mysteriously busy. These two
+groups of activities and Eleanor's flitting translucent movements
+did but set off and emphasize the immense and soothing
+tranquillity.
+
+For a long time the bishop sat passively receptive to this
+healing beauty. Then a little flow of thought began and gathered
+in his mind. He had come out to think over two letters that he
+had brought with him. He drew these now rather reluctantly from
+his pocket, and after a long pause over the envelopes began to
+read them.
+
+He reread Likeman's letter first.
+
+Likeman could not forgive him.
+
+"My dear Scrope," he wrote, "your explanation explains nothing.
+This sensational declaration of infidelity to our mother church,
+made under the most damning and distressing circumstances in the
+presence of young and tender minds entrusted to your
+ministrations, and in defiance of the honourable engagements
+implied in the confirmation service, confirms my worst
+apprehensions of the weaknesses of your character. I have always
+felt the touch of theatricality in your temperament, the peculiar
+craving to be pseudo-deeper, pseudo-simpler than us all, the need
+of personal excitement. I know that you were never quite
+contented to believe in God at second-hand. You wanted to be
+taken notice of--personally. Except for some few hints to you,
+I have never breathed a word of these doubts to any human being;
+I have always hoped that the ripening that comes with years and
+experience would give you an increasing strength against the
+dangers of emotionalism and against your strong, deep, quiet
+sense of your exceptional personal importance...."
+
+The bishop read thus far, and then sat reflecting.
+
+Was it just?
+
+He had many weaknesses, but had he this egotism? No; that
+wasn't the justice of the case. The old man, bitterly
+disappointed, was endeavouring to wound. Scrope asked himself
+whether he was to blame for that disappointment. That was a more
+difficult question....
+
+He dismissed the charge at last, crumpled up the letter in his
+hand, and after a moment's hesitation flung it away.... But he
+remained acutely sorry, not so much for himself as for the
+revelation of Likeman this letter made. He had had a great
+affection for Likeman and suddenly it was turned into a wound.
+
+(3)
+
+
+The second letter was from Lady Sunderbund, and it was an
+altogether more remarkable document. Lady Sunderbund wrote on a
+notepaper that was evidently the result of a perverse research,
+but she wrote a letter far more coherent than her speech, and
+without that curious falling away of the r's that flavoured even
+her gravest observations with an unjust faint aroma of absurdity.
+She wrote with a thin pen in a rounded boyish handwriting. She
+italicized with slashes of the pen.
+
+He held this letter in both hands between his knees, and
+considered it now with an expression that brought his eyebrows
+forward until they almost met, and that tucked in the corners of
+his mouth.
+
+"My dear Bishop," it began.
+
+"I keep thinking and thinking and thinking of that wonderful
+service, of the wonderful, wonderful things you said, and the
+wonderful choice you made of the moment to say them--when all
+those young lives were coming to the great serious thing in life.
+It was most beautifully done. At any rate, dear Bishop and
+Teacher, it was most beautifully begun. And now we all stand to
+you like creditors because you have given us so much that you owe
+us ever so much more. You have started us and you have to go on
+with us. You have broken the shell of the old church, and here we
+are running about with nowhere to go. You have to make the
+shelter of a new church now for us, purged of errors, looking
+straight to God. The King of Mankind!--what a wonderful,
+wonderful phrase that is. It says everything. Tell us more of him
+and more. Count me first--not foremost, but just the little one
+that runs in first--among your disciples. They say you are
+resigning your position in the church. Of course that must be
+true. You are coming out of it--what did you call it?--coming
+out of the cracked old vessel from which you have poured the
+living waters. I called on Lady Ella yesterday. She did not tell
+me very much; I think she is a very reserved as well as a very
+dignified woman, but she said that you intended to go to London.
+In London then I suppose you will set up the first altar to the
+Divine King. I want to help.
+
+"Dear Bishop and Teacher, I want to help tremendously--with
+all my heart and all my soul. I want to be let do things for
+you." (The "you" was erased by three or four rapid slashes, and
+"our King" substituted.) "I want to be privileged to help build
+that First Church of the World Unified under God. It is a
+dreadful thing to says but, you see, I am very rich; this
+dreadful war has made me ever so much richer--steel and
+shipping and things--it is my trustees have done it. I am
+ashamed to be so rich. I want to give. I want to give and help
+this great beginning of yours. I want you to let me help on the
+temporal side, to make it easy for you to stand forth and deliver
+your message, amidst suitable surroundings and without any horrid
+worries on account of the sacrifices you have made. Please do not
+turn my offering aside. I have never wanted anything so much in
+all my life as I want to make this gift. Unless I can make it I
+feel that for me there is no salvation! I shall stick with my
+loads and loads of stocks and shares and horrid possessions
+outside the Needle's Eye. But if I could build a temple for God,
+and just live somewhere near it so as to be the poor woman who
+sweeps out the chapels, and die perhaps and be buried under its
+floor! Don't smile at me. I mean every word of it. Years ago I
+thought of such a thing. After I had visited the Certosa di Pavia
+--do you know it? So beautiful, and those two still alabaster
+figures--recumbent. But until now I could never see my way to
+any such service. Now I do. I am all afire to do it. Help me!
+Tell me! Let me stand behind you and make your mission possible.
+I feel I have come to the most wonderful phase in my life. I feel
+my call has come....
+
+
+"I have written this letter over three times, and torn each of
+them up. I do so want to say all this, and it is so desperately
+hard to say. I am full of fears that you despise me. I know there
+is a sort of high colour about me. My passion for brightness. I
+am absurd. But inside of me is a soul, a real, living, breathing
+soul. Crying out to you: 'Oh, let me help! Let me help!' I will
+do anything, I will endure anything if only I can keep hold of
+the vision splendid you gave me in the cathedral. I see it now
+day and night, the dream of the place I can make for you--and
+you preaching! My fingers itch to begin. The day before yesterday
+I said to myself, 'I am quite unworthy, I am a worldly woman, a
+rich, smart, decorated woman. He will never accept me as I am.' I
+took off all my jewels, every one, I looked through all my
+clothes, and at last I decided I would have made for me a very
+simple straight grey dress, just simple and straight and grey.
+Perhaps you will think that too is absurd of me, too
+self-conscious. I would not tell of it to you if I did not want
+you to understand how alive I am to my utter impossibilities, how
+resolved I am to do anything so that I may be able to serve. But
+never mind about silly me; let me tell you how I see the new
+church.
+
+
+"I think you ought to have some place near the centre of
+London; not too west, for you might easily become fashionable,
+not too east because you might easily be swallowed up in merely
+philanthropic work, but somewhere between the two. There must be
+vacant sites still to be got round about Kingsway. And there we
+must set up your tabernacle, a very plain, very simple, very
+beautifully proportioned building in which you can give your
+message. I know a young man, just the very young man to do
+something of the sort, something quite new, quite modern, and yet
+solemn and serious. Lady Ella seemed to think you wanted to live
+somewhere in the north-west of London--but she would tell me
+very little. I seem to see you not there at all, not in anything
+between west-end and suburb, but yourself as central as your
+mind, in a kind of clergy house that will be part of the
+building. That is how it is in my dream anyhow. All that though
+can be settled afterwards. My imagination and my desire is
+running away with me. It is no time yet for premature plans. Not
+that I am not planning day and night. This letter is simply to
+offer. I just want to offer. Here I am and all my worldly goods.
+Take me, I pray you. And not only pray you. Take me, I demand of
+you, in the name of God our king. I have a right to be used. And
+you have no right to refuse me. You have to go on with your
+message, and it is your duty to take me--just as you are
+obliged to step on any steppingstone that lies on your way to do
+God service.... And so I am waiting. I shall be waiting--on
+thorns. I know you will take your time and think. But do not take
+too much time. Think of me waiting.
+
+"Your servant, your most humble helper in God (your God),
+
+                              "AGATHA SUNDERBUND."
+
+
+And then scrawled along the margin of the last sheet:
+
+
+"If, when you know--a telegram. Even if you cannot say so
+much as 'Agreed,' still such a word as 'Favourable.' I just hang
+over the Void until I hear.
+
+                                     "AGATHA S."
+
+
+
+A letter demanding enormous deliberation. She argued closely in
+spite of her italics. It had never dawned upon the bishop before
+how light is the servitude of the disciple in comparison with the
+servitude of the master. In many ways this proposal repelled and
+troubled him, in many ways it attracted him. And the argument of
+his clear obligation to accept her co-operation gripped him; it
+was a good argument.
+
+And besides it worked in very conveniently with certain other
+difficulties that perplexed him.
+
+(4)
+
+
+The bishop became aware that Eleanor was returning to him
+across the sands. She had made an end to her paddling, she had
+put on her shoes and stockings and become once more the grave and
+responsible young woman who had been taking care of him since his
+flight from Princhester. He replaced the two letters in his
+pocket, and sat ready to smile as she drew near; he admired her
+open brow, the toss of her hair, and the poise of her head upon
+her neck. It was good to note that her hard reading at Cambridge
+hadn't bent her shoulders in the least....
+
+"Well, old Dad! " she said as she drew near. "You've got back a
+colour."
+
+"I've got back everything. It's time I returned to
+Princhester."
+
+"Not in this weather. Not for a day or so." She flung herself
+at his feet. "Consider your overworked little daughter. Oh,how
+good this is!"
+
+"No," said the bishop in a grave tone that made her look up
+into his face. "I must go hack."
+
+He met her clear gaze. "What do you think of all this business,
+Eleanor?" he asked abruptly. "Do you think I had a sort of fit in
+the cathedral?"
+
+He winced as he asked the question.
+
+"Daddy," she said, after a little pause; "the things you said
+and did that afternoon were the noblest you ever did in your
+life. I wish I had been there. It must have been splendid to be
+there. I've not told you before--I've been dying to.... I'd
+promised not to say a word--not to remind you. I promised the
+doctor. But now you ask me, now you are well again, I can tell
+you. Kitty Kingdom has told me all about it, how it felt. It was
+like light and order coming into a hopeless dark muddle. What you
+said was like what we have all been trying to think--I mean all
+of us young people. Suddenly it was all clear."
+
+She stopped short. She was breathless with the excitement of
+her confession.
+
+Her father too remained silent for a little while. He was
+reminded of his weakness; he was, he perceived, still a little
+hysterical. He felt that he might weep at her youthful enthusiasm
+if he did not restrain himself.
+
+I'm glad," he said, and patted her shoulder. "I'm glad, Norah."
+
+She looked away from him out across the lank brown sands and
+water pools to the sea. "It was what we have all been feeling our
+way towards, the absolute simplification of religion, the
+absolute simplification of politics and social duty; just God,
+just God the King."
+
+"But should I have said that--in the cathedral?"
+
+She felt no scruples. "You had to," she said.
+
+"But now think what it means," he said. "I must leave the
+church."
+
+"As a man strips off his coat for a fight."
+
+"That doesn't dismay you?"
+
+She shook her head, and smiled confidently to sea and sky.
+
+"I'm glad if you're with me," he said. "Sometimes--I think--
+I'm not a very self-reliant man."
+
+"You'll have all the world with you," she was convinced, "in a
+little time."
+
+"Perhaps rather a longer time than you think, Norah. In the
+meantime--"
+
+She turned to him once more.
+
+"In the meantime there are a great many things to consider.
+Young people, they say, never think of the transport that is
+needed to win a battle. I have it in my mind that I should leave
+the church. But I can't just walk out into the marketplace and
+begin preaching there. I see the family furniture being carried
+out of the palace and put into vans. It has to go somewhere...."
+
+"I suppose you will go to London."
+
+"Possibly. In fact certainly. I have a plan. Or at least an
+opportunity.... But that isn't what I have most in mind. These
+things are not done without emotion and a considerable strain
+upon one's personal relationships. I do not think this--I do
+not think your mother sees things as we do."
+
+"She will," said young enthusiasm, "when she understands."
+
+"I wish she did. But I have been unlucky in the circumstances
+of my explanations to her. And of course you understand all this
+means risks--poverty perhaps--going without things--travel,
+opportunity, nice possessions--for all of us. A loss of
+position too. All this sort of thing," he stuck out a gaitered
+calf and smiled, "will have to go. People, some of them, may be
+disasagreeable to us...."
+
+"After all, Daddy," she said, smiling, "it isn't so bad as the
+cross and the lions and burning pitch. And you have the Truth."
+
+"You do believe--?" He left his sentence unfinished.
+
+She nodded, her face aglow. "We know you have the Truth."
+
+"Of course in my own mind now it is very clear. I had a kind of
+illumination...." He would have tried to tell her of his vision,
+and he was too shy. "It came to me suddenly that the whole world
+was in confusion because men followed after a thousand different
+immediate aims, when really it was quite easy, if only one could
+be simple it was quite easy, to show that nearly all men could
+only be fully satisfied and made happy in themselves by one
+single aim, which was also the aim that would make the whole
+world one great order, and that aim was to make God King of one's
+heart and the whole world. I saw that all this world, except for
+a few base monstrous spirits, was suffering hideous things
+because of this war, and before the war it was full of folly,
+waste, social injustice and suspicion for the same reason,
+because it had not realized the kingship of God. And that is so
+simple; the essence of God is simplicity. The sin of this war
+lies with men like myself, men who set up to tell people about
+God, more than it lies with any other class--"
+
+"Kings?" she interjected. "Diplomatists? Finance?"
+
+"Yes. Those men could only work mischief in the world because
+the priests and teachers let them. All things human lie at last
+at the door of the priest and teacher. Who differentiate, who
+qualify and complicate, who make mean unnecessary elaborations,
+and so divide mankind. If it were not for the weakness and
+wickedness of the priests, every one would know and understand
+God. Every one who was modest enough not to set up for particular
+knowledge. Men disputed whether God is Finite or Infinite,
+whether he has a triple or a single aspect. How should they know?
+All we need to know is the face he turns to us. They impose their
+horrible creeds and distinctions. None of those things matter.
+Call him Christ the God or call him simply God, Allah, Heaven; it
+does not matter. He comes to us, we know, like a Helper and
+Friend; that is all we want to know. You may speculate further if
+you like, but it is not religion. They dispute whether he can set
+aside nature. But that is superstition. He is either master of
+nature and he knows that it is good, or he is part of nature and
+must obey. That is an argument for hair-splitting metaphysicians.
+Either answer means the same for us. It does not matter which way
+we come to believe that he does not idly set the course of things
+aside. Obviously he does not set the course of things aside. What
+he does do for certain is to give us courage and save us from our
+selfishness and the bitter hell it makes for us. And every one
+knows too what sort of things we want, and for what end we want
+to escape from ourselves. We want to do right. And right, if you
+think clearly, is just truth within and service without, the
+service of God's kingdom, which is mankind, the service of human
+needs and the increase of human power and experience. It is all
+perfectly plain, it is all quite easy for any one to understand,
+who isn't misled and chattered at and threatened and poisoned by
+evil priests and teachers."
+
+"And you are going to preach that, Daddy?"
+
+"If I can. When I am free--you know I have still to resign
+and give up--I shall make that my message."
+
+"And so God comes."
+
+"God comes as men perceive him in his simplicity.... Let men
+but see God simply, and forthwith God and his kingdom possess the
+world."
+
+She looked out to sea in silence for awhile.
+
+Then she turned to her father. "And you think that His Kingdom
+will come--perhaps in quite a little time--perhaps in our
+lifetimes? And that all these ridiculous or wicked little kings
+and emperors, and these political parties, and these policies and
+conspiracies, and this nationalist nonsense and all the
+patriotism and rowdyism, all the private profit-seeking and every
+baseness in life, all the things that it is so horrible and
+disgusting to be young among and powerless among, you think they
+will fade before him?"
+
+The bishop pulled his faith together.
+
+"They will fade before him--but whether it will take a
+lifetime or a hundred lifetimes or a thousand lifetimes, my Norah
+--"
+
+He smiled and left his sentence unfinished, and she smiled back
+at him to show she understood.
+
+And then he confessed further, because he did not want to seem
+merely sentimentally hopeful.
+
+"When I was in the cathedral, Norah--and just before that
+service, it seemed to me--it was very real.... It seemed that
+perhaps the Kingdom of God is nearer than we suppose, that it
+needs but the faith and courage of a few, and it may be that we
+may even live to see the dawning of his kingdom, even--who
+knows?--the sunrise. I am so full of faith and hope that I fear
+to be hopeful with you. But whether it is near or far--"
+
+"We work for it," said Eleanor.
+
+Eleanor thought, eyes downcast for a little while, and then
+looked up.
+
+"It is so wonderful to talk to you like this, Daddy. In the old
+days, I didn't dream--Before I went to Newnham. I misjudged
+you. I thought Never mind what I thought. It was silly. But now I
+am so proud of you. And so happy to be back with you, Daddy, and
+find that your religion is after all just the same religion that
+I have been wanting."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE NINTH  -  THE THIRD VISION
+
+(1)
+
+
+ONE afternoon in October, four months and more after that
+previous conversation, the card of Mr. Edward Scrope was brought
+up to Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey. The name awakened no memories. The
+doctor descended to discover a man so obviously in unaccustomed
+plain clothes that he had a momentary disagreeable idea that he
+was facing a detective. Then he saw that this secular disguise
+draped the familiar form of his old friend, the former Bishop of
+Princhester. Scrope was pale and a little untidy; he had already
+acquired something of the peculiar, slightly faded quality one
+finds in a don who has gone to Hampstead and fallen amongst
+advanced thinkers and got mixed up with the Fabian Society. His
+anxious eyes and faintly propitiatory manner suggested an
+impending appeal.
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey had the savoir-faire of a successful
+consultant; he prided himself on being all things to all men; but
+just for an instant he was at a loss what sort of thing he had to
+be here. Then he adopted the genial, kindly, but by no means
+lavishly generous tone advisable in the case of a man who has
+suffered considerable social deterioration without being very
+seriously to blame.
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was a little round-faced man with
+defective eyesight and an unsuitable nose for the glasses he
+wore, and he flaunted--God knows why--enormous side-whiskers.
+
+"Well," he said, balancing the glasses skilfully by throwing
+back his head, "and how are you? And what can I do for you?
+There's no external evidence of trouble. You're looking lean and
+a little pale, but thoroughly fit."
+
+"Yes," said the late bishop, "I'm fairly fit--"
+
+"Only--?" said the doctor, smiling his teeth, with something of
+the manner of an old bathing woman who tells a child to jump.
+
+"Well, I'm run down and--worried."
+
+"We'd better sit down," said the great doctor professionally,
+and looked hard at him. Then he pulled at the arm of a chair.
+
+The ex-bishop sat down, and the doctor placed himself between
+his patient and the light.
+
+"This business of resigning my bishopric and so forth has
+involved very considerable strains," Scrope began. "That I think
+is the essence of the trouble. One cuts so many associations....
+I did not realize how much feeling there would be....
+Difficulties too of readjusting one's position."
+
+"Zactly. Zactly. Zactly," said the doctor, snapping his face
+and making his glasses vibrate. "Run down. Want a tonic or a
+change?"
+
+"Yes. In fact--I want a particular tonic."
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey made his eyes and mouth round and
+interrogative.
+
+"While you were away last spring--"
+
+"Had to go," said the doctor, "unavoidable. Gas gangrene.
+Certain enquiries. These young investigators all very well in
+their way. But we older reputations--Experience. Maturity of
+judgment. Can't do without us. Yes?"
+
+"Well, I came here last spring and saw, an assistant I suppose
+he was, or a supply,--do you call them supplies in your
+profession?--named, I think--Let me see--D--?"
+
+"Dale!"
+
+The doctor as he uttered this word set his face to the
+unaccustomed exercise of expressing malignity. His round blue
+eyes sought to blaze, small cherubic muscles exerted themselves
+to pucker his brows. His colour became a violent pink. "Lunatic!"
+he said. "Dangerous Lunatic! He didn't do anything--anything
+bad in your case, did he?"
+
+He was evidently highly charged with grievance in this matter.
+"That man was sent to me from Cambridge with the highest
+testimonials. The very highest. I had to go at twenty-four hours'
+notice. Enquiry--gas gangrene. There was nothing for it but to
+leave things in his hands."
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey disavowed responsibility with an open,
+stumpy-fingered hand.
+
+"He did me no particular harm," said Scrope.
+
+"You are the first he spared," said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.
+
+"Did he--? Was he unskilful?"
+
+"Unskilful is hardly the word."
+
+"Were his methods peculiar?"
+
+The little doctor sprang to his feet and began to pace about
+the room. "Peculiar!" he said. "It was abominable that they
+should send him to me. Abominable!"
+
+He turned, with all the round knobs that constituted his face,
+aglow. His side-whiskers waved apart like wings about to flap. He
+protruded his face towards his seated patient. "I am glad that he
+has been killed," he said. "Glad! There!"
+
+His glasses fell off--shocked beyond measure. He did not heed
+them. They swnng about in front of him as if they sought to
+escape while he poured out his feelings.
+
+"Fool!" he spluttered with demonstrative gestures. "Dangerous
+fool! His one idea--to upset everybody. Drugs, Sir! The most
+terrible drugs! I come back. Find ladies. High social position.
+Morphine-maniacs. Others. Reckless use of the most dangerous
+expedients.... Cocaine not in it. Stimulants--violent
+stimulants. In the highest quarters. Terrible. Exalted persons.
+Royalty! Anxious to be given war work and become anonymous....
+Horrible! He's been a terrible influence. One idea--to disturb
+soul and body. Minds unhinged. Personal relations deranged.
+Shattered the practice of years. The harm he has done! The harm!"
+
+He looked as though he was trying to burst--as a final
+expression of wrath. He failed. His hands felt trembling to
+recover his pince-nez. Then from his tail pocket he produced a
+large silk handkerchief and wiped the glasses. Replaced them.
+Wriggled his head in his collar, running his fingers round his
+neck. Patted his tie.
+
+"Excuse this outbreak!" he said. "But Dr. Dale has inflicted
+injuries "
+
+Scrope got up, walked slowly to the window, clasping his hands
+behind his back, and turned. His manner still retained much of
+his episcopal dignity. "I am sorry. But still you can no doubt
+tell from your books what it was he gave me. It was a tonic that
+had a very great effect on me. And I need it badly now."
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was quietly malignant. "He kept no diary
+at all," he said. "No diary at all."
+
+"But
+
+"If he did," said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey, holding up a flat hand
+and wagging it from side to side, "I wouldn't follow his
+treatment." He intensified with the hand going faster. "I
+wouldn't follow his treatment. Not under any circumstances."
+
+"Naturally," said Scrope, "if the results are what you say. But
+in my case it wasn't a treatment. I was sleepless, confused in my
+mind, wretched and demoralized; I came here, and he just produced
+the stuff--It clears the head, it clears the mind. One seems to
+get away from the cloud of things, to get through to essentials
+and fundamentals. It straightened me out.... You must know such a
+stuff. Just now, confronted with all sorts of problems arising
+out of my resignation, I want that tonic effect again. I must
+have it. I have matters to decide--and I can't decide. I find
+myself uncertain, changeable from hour to hour. I don't ask you
+to take up anything of this man Dale's. This is a new occasion.
+But I want that drug."
+
+At the beginning of this speech Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's hands
+had fallen to his hips. As Scrope went on the doctor's pose had
+stiffened. His head had gone a little on one side; he had begun
+to play with his glasses. At the end he gave vent to one or two
+short coughs, and then pointed his words with his glasses held
+out.
+
+"Tell me," he said, "tell me." (Cough.) "Had this drug that
+cleared your head--anything to do with your resignation?"
+
+And he put on his glasses disconcertingly, and threw his head
+back to watch the reply.
+
+"It did help to clear up the situation."
+
+"Exactly," said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey in a tone that defined his
+own position with remorseless clearness. "Exactly." And he held
+up a flat, arresting hand. .
+
+"My dear Sir," he said. "How can you expect me to help you to a
+drug so disastrous?--even if I could tell you what it is."
+
+"But it was not disastrous to me," said Scrope.
+
+"Your extraordinary resignation--your still more
+extraordinary way of proclaiming it!"
+
+"I don't think those were disasters."
+
+"But my dear Sir!"
+
+"You don't want to discuss theology with me, I know. So let me
+tell you simply that from my point of view the illumination that
+came to me--this drug of Dr. Dale's helping--has been the
+great release of my life. It crystallized my mind. It swept aside
+the confusing commonplace things about me. Just for a time I saw
+truth clearly.... I want to do so again."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"There is a crisis in my affairs--never mind what. But I
+cannot see my way clear."
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was meditating now with his eyes on his
+carpet and the corners of his mouth tucked in. He was swinging
+his glasses pendulum-wise. "Tell me," he said, looking sideways
+at Scrope, "what were the effects of this drug? It may have been
+anything. How did it give you this--this vision of the truth--
+that led to your resignation?"
+
+Scrope felt a sudden shyness. But he wanted Dale's drug again
+so badly that he obliged himself to describe his previous
+experiences to the best of his ability.
+
+"It was," he said in a matter-of-fact tone, "a golden,
+transparent liquid. Very golden, like a warm-tinted Chablis. When
+water was added it became streaked and opalescent, with a kind of
+living quiver in it. I held it up to the light."
+
+"Yes? And when you took it?"
+
+"I felt suddenly clearer. My mind--I had a kind of exaltation
+and assurance."
+
+"Your mind," Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey assisted, "began to go
+twenty-nine to the dozen."
+
+"It felt stronger and clearer," said Scrope, sticking to his
+quest.
+
+"And did things look as usual?" asked the doctor, protruding
+his knobby little face like a clenched fist.
+
+"No," said Scrope and regarded him. How much was it possible to
+tell a man of this type?
+
+"They differed?" said the doctor, relaxing.
+
+"Yes.... Well, to be plain.... I had an immediate sense of God.
+I saw the world--as if it were a transparent curtain, and then
+God became--evident.... Is it possible for that to determine
+the drug?"
+
+"God became--evident," the doctor said with some distaste,
+and shook his head slowly. Then in a sudden sharp cross-examining
+tone: "You mean you had a vision? Actually saw 'um?"
+
+"It was in the form of a vision." Scrope was now mentally very
+uncomfortable indeed.
+
+The doctor's lips repeated these words noiselessly, with an
+effect of contempt. "He must have given you something--It's a
+little like morphia. But golden--opalescent? And it was this
+vision made you astonish us all with your resignation?"
+
+"That was part of a larger process," said Scrope patiently. "I
+had been drifting into a complete repudiation of the Anglican
+positions long before that. All that this drug did was to make
+clear what was already in my mind. And give it value. Act as a
+developer."
+
+The doctor suddenly gave way to a botryoidal hilarity. "To
+think that one should be consulted about visions of God--in
+Mount Street!" he said. "And you know, you know you half want to
+believe that vision was real. You know you do."
+
+So far Scrope had been resisting his realization of failure.
+Now he gave way to an exasperation that made him reckless of
+Brighton-Pomfrey's opinion. "I do think," he said, "that that
+drug did in some way make God real to me. I think I saw God."
+
+Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey shook his head in a way that made Scrope
+want to hit him.
+
+"I think I saw God," he repeated more firmly. "I had a sudden
+realization of how great he was and how great life was, and how
+timid and mean and sordid were all our genteel, professional
+lives. I was seized upon, for a time I was altogether possessed
+by a passion to serve him fitly and recklessly, to make an end to
+compromises with comfort and self-love and secondary things. And
+I want to hold to that. I want to get back to that. I am given to
+lassitudes. I relax. I am by temperament an easy-going man. I
+want to buck myself up, I want to get on with my larger purposes,
+and I find myself tired, muddled, entangled.... The drug was a
+good thing. For me it was a good thing. I want its help again."
+
+"I know no more than you do what it was."
+
+"Are there no other drugs that you do know, that have a kindred
+effect? If for example I tried morphia in some form?"
+
+"You'd get visions. They wouldn't be divine visions. If you
+took small quantities very discreetly you might get a temporary
+quickening. But the swift result of all repeated drug-taking is,
+I can assure you, moral decay--rapid moral decay. To touch drugs
+habitually is to become hopelessly unpunctual, untruthful,
+callously selfish and insincere. I am talking mere textbook, mere
+everyday common-places, to you when I tell you that."
+
+"I had an idea. I had a hope...."
+
+"You've a stiff enough fight before you," said the doctor,
+"without such a handicap as that."
+
+"You won't help me?"
+
+The doctor walked up and down his hearthrug, and then delivered
+himself with an extended hand and waggling fingers.
+
+"I wouldn't if I could. For your good I wouldn't. And even if I
+would I couldn't, for I don't know the drug. One of his infernal
+brews, no doubt. Something--accidental. It's lost--for good--
+for your good, anyhow...."
+
+(2)
+
+
+Scrope halted outside the stucco portals of the doctor's house.
+He hesitated whether he should turn to the east or the west.
+
+"That door closes," he said. "There's no getting back that
+way."...
+
+He stood for a time on the kerb. He turned at last towards Park
+Lane and Hyde Park. He walked along thoughtfully, inattentively
+steering a course for his new home in Pembury Road, Notting Hill.
+
+(3)
+
+
+At the outset of this new phase in Scrope's life that had
+followed the crisis of the confirmation service, everything had
+seemed very clear before him. He believed firmly that he had been
+shown God, that he had himself stood in the presence of God, and
+that there had been a plain call to him to proclaim God to the
+world. He had realized God, and it was the task of every one who
+had realized God to help all mankind to the same realization. The
+proposal of Lady Sunderbund had fallen in with that idea. He had
+been steeling himself to a prospect of struggle and dire poverty,
+but her prompt loyalty had come as an immense relief to his
+anxiety for his wife and family. When he had talked to Eleanor
+upon the beach at Hunstanton it had seemed to him that his course
+was manifest, perhaps a little severe but by no means impossible.
+They had sat together in the sunshine, exalted by a sense of fine
+adventure and confident of success, they had looked out upon the
+future, upon the great near future in which the idea of God was
+to inspire and reconstruct the world.
+
+It was only very slowly that this pristine clearness became
+clouded and confused. It had not been so easy as Eleanor had
+supposed to win over the sympathy of Lady Ella with his
+resignation. Indeed it had not been won over. She had become a
+stern and chilling companion, mute now upon the issue of his
+resignation, but manifestly resentful. He was secretly
+disappointed and disconcerted by her tone. And the same
+hesitation of the mind, instinctive rather than reasoned, that
+had prevented a frank explanation of his earlier doubts to her,
+now restrained him from telling her naturally and at once of the
+part that Lady Sunderbund was to play in his future ministry. In
+his own mind he felt assured about that part, but in order to
+excuse his delay in being frank with his wife, he told himself
+that he was not as yet definitely committed to Lady Sunderbund's
+project. And in accordance with that idea he set up housekeeping
+in London upon a scale that implied a very complete cessation of
+income. "As yet," he told Lady Ella, "we do not know where we
+stand. For a time we must not so much house ourselves as camp. We
+must take some quite small and modest house in some less
+expensive district. If possible I would like to take it for a
+year, until we know better how things are with us."
+
+He reviewed a choice of London districts.
+
+Lady Ella said her bitterest thing. "Does it matter where we
+hide our heads?"
+
+That wrung him to: "We are not hiding our heads."
+
+She repented at once. "I am sorry, Ted," she said. "It slipped
+from me."...
+
+He called it camping, but the house they had found in Pembury
+Road, Notting Hill, was more darkened and less airy than any
+camp. Neither he nor his wife had ever had any experience of
+middle-class house-hunting or middle-class housekeeping before,
+and they spent three of the most desolating days of their lives
+in looking for this cheap and modest shelter for their household
+possessions. Hitherto life had moved them from one established
+and comfortable home to another; their worst affliction had been
+the modern decorations of the Palace at Princhester, and it was
+altogether a revelation to them to visit house after house,
+ill-lit, ill-planned, with dingy paint and peeling wallpaper,
+kitchens for the most part underground, and either without
+bathrooms or with built-out bathrooms that were manifestly
+grudging afterthoughts, such as harbour the respectable middle
+classes of London. The house agents perceived intimations of
+helplessness in their manner, adopted a "rushing" method with
+them strange to people who had hitherto lived in a glowing halo
+of episcopal dignity. "Take it or leave it," was the note of
+those gentlemen; "there are always people ready for houses." The
+line that property in land and houses takes in England, the
+ex-bishop realized, is always to hold up and look scornful. The
+position of the land-owning, house-owning class in a crowded
+country like England is ultra-regal. It is under no obligation to
+be of use, and people are obliged to get down to the land
+somewhere. They cannot conduct business and rear families in the
+air. England's necessity is the landlord's opportunity....
+
+Scrope began to generalize about this, and develop a new and
+sincerer streak of socialism in his ideas. "The church has been
+very remiss," he said, as he and Lady Ella stared at the basement
+"breakfast room" of their twenty-seventh dismal possibility. "It
+should have insisted far more than it has done upon the
+landlord's responsibility. No one should tolerate the offer of
+such a house as this--at such a rent--to decent people. It is
+unrighteous."
+
+At the house agent's he asked in a cold, intelligent ruling-
+class voice, the name of the offending landlord.
+
+"It's all the property of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners that
+side of the railway," said the agent, picking his teeth with a
+pin. "Lazy lot. Dreadfully hard to get 'em to do anything. Own
+some of the worst properties in London."
+
+Lady Ella saw things differently again. "If you had stayed in
+the church," she said afterwards, "you might have helped to alter
+such things as that."
+
+At the time he had no answer.
+
+"But," he said presently as they went back in the tube to their
+modest Bloomsbury hotel, "if I had stayed in the church I should
+never have realized things like that."
+
+(4)
+
+
+But it does no justice to Lady Ella to record these two
+unavoidable expressions of regret without telling also of the
+rallying courage with which she presently took over the task of
+resettling herself and her stricken family. Her husband's change
+of opinion had fallen upon her out of a clear sky, without any
+premonition, in one tremendous day. In one day there had come
+clamouring upon her, with an effect of revelation after
+revelation, the ideas of drugs, of heresy and blasphemy, of an
+alien feminine influence, of the entire moral and material
+breakdown of the man who had been the centre of her life. Never
+was the whole world of a woman so swiftly and comprehensively
+smashed. All the previous troubles of her life seemed
+infinitesimal in comparison with any single item in this
+dismaying debacle. She tried to consolidate it in the idea that
+he was ill, "disordered." She assured herself that he would
+return from Hunstanton restored to health and orthodoxy, with all
+his threatenings of a resignation recalled; the man she had loved
+and trusted to succeed in the world and to do right always
+according to her ideas. It was only with extreme reluctance that
+she faced the fact that with the fumes of the drug dispelled and
+all signs of nervous exhaustion gone, he still pressed quietly
+but resolutely toward a severance from the church. She tried to
+argue with him and she found she could not argue. The church was
+a crystal sphere in which her life was wholly contained, her mind
+could not go outside it even to consider a dissentient
+proposition.
+
+While he was at Hunstanton, every day she had prayed for an
+hour, some days she had prayed for several hours, in the
+cathedral, kneeling upon a harsh hassock that hurt her knees.
+Even in her prayers she could not argue nor vary. She prayed over
+and over again many hundreds of times: "Bring him back, dear
+Lord. Bring him back again."
+
+In the past he had always been a very kind and friendly mate to
+her, but sometimes he had been irritable about small things,
+especially during his seasons of insomnia; now he came back
+changed, a much graver man, rather older in his manner, carefully
+attentive to her, kinder and more watchful, at times
+astonishingly apologetic, but rigidly set upon his purpose of
+leaving the church. "I know you do not think with me in this," he
+said. "I have to pray you to be patient with me. I have struggled
+with my conscience.... For a time it means hardship, I know.
+Poverty. But if you will trust me I think I shall be able to pull
+through. There are ways of doing my work. Perhaps we shall not
+have to undergo this cramping in this house for very long...."
+
+"It is not the poverty I fear," said Lady Ella.
+
+And she did face the worldly situation, if a little sadly, at
+any rate with the courage of practical energy. It was she who
+stood in one ungainly house after another and schemed how to make
+discomforts tolerable, while Scrope raged unhelpfully at
+landlordism and the responsibility of the church for economic
+disorder. It was she who at last took decisions into her hands
+when he was too jaded to do anything but generalize weakly, and
+settled upon the house in Pembury Road which became their London
+home. She got him to visit Hunstanton again for half a week while
+she and Miriam, who was the practical genius of the family, moved
+in and made the new home presentable. At the best it was barely
+presentable. There were many plain hardships. The girls had to
+share one of the chief bedrooms in common instead of their jolly
+little individual dens at Princhester.... One little room was all
+that could be squeezed out as a study for "father"; it was not
+really  a separate room, it was merely cut off by closed folding
+doors from the dining-room, folding doors that slowly transmitted
+the dinner flavours to a sensitive worker, and its window looked
+out upon a blackened and uneventful yard and the skylights of a
+populous, conversational, and high-spirited millinery
+establishment that had been built over the corresponding garden
+of the house in Restharrow Street. Lady Ella had this room lined
+with open shelves, and Clementina (in the absence of Eleanor at
+Newuham) arranged the pick of her father's books. It is to be
+noted as a fact of psychological interest that this cramped, ill-
+lit little room distressed Lady Ella more than any other of the
+discomforts of their new quarters. The bishop's writing-desk
+filled a whole side of it. Parsimony ruled her mind, but she
+could not resist the impulse to get him at least a seemly
+reading-lamp.
+
+He came back from Hunstanton full of ideas for work in London.
+He was, he thought, going to "write something" about his views.
+He was very grateful and much surprised at what she had done to
+that forbidding house, and full of hints and intimations that it
+would not be long before they moved to something roomier. She was
+disposed to seek some sort of salaried employment for Clementina
+and Miriam at least, but he would not hear of that. "They must go
+on and get educated," he said, "if I have to give up smoking to
+do it. Perhaps I may manage even without that." Eleanor, it
+seemed, had a good prospect of a scholarship at the London School
+of Economics that would practically keep her. There would be no
+Cambridge for Clementina, but London University might still be
+possible with a little pinching, and the move to London had
+really improved the prospects of a good musical training for
+Miriam. Phoebe and Daphne, Lady Ella believed, might get in on
+special terms at the Notting Hill High School.
+
+Scrope found it difficult to guess at what was going on in the
+heads of his younger daughters. None displayed such sympathy as
+Eleanor had confessed. He had a feeling that his wife had
+schooled them to say nothing about the change in their fortunes
+to him. But they quarrelled a good deal, he could hear, about the
+use of the one bathroom--there was never enough hot water after
+the second bath. And Miriam did not seem to enjoy playing the new
+upright piano in the drawing-room as much as she had done the
+Princhester grand it replaced. Though she was always willing to
+play that thing he liked; he knew now that it was the Adagio of
+Of. 111; whenever he asked for it.
+
+London servants, Lady Ella found, were now much more difficult
+to get than they had been in the Holy Innocents' days in St.
+John's Wood. And more difficult to manage when they were got. The
+households of the more prosperous clergy are much sought after by
+domestics of a serious and excellent type; an unfrocked
+clergyman's household is by no means so attractive. The first
+comers were young women of unfortunate dispositions; the first
+cook was reluctant and insolent, she went before her month was
+up; the second careless; she made burnt potatoes and cindered
+chops, underboiled and overboiled eggs; a "dropped" look about
+everything, harsh coffee and bitter tea seemed to be a natural
+aspect of the state of being no longer a bishop. He would often
+after a struggle with his nerves in the bedroom come humming
+cheerfully to breakfast, to find that Phoebe, who was a delicate
+eater, had pushed her plate away scarcely touched, while Lady
+Ella sat at the end of the table in a state of dangerous calm,
+framing comments for delivering downstairs that would be sure to
+sting and yet leave no opening for repartee, and trying at the
+same time to believe that a third cook, if the chances were
+risked again, would certainly be "all right."
+
+The drawing-room was papered with a morose wallpaper that the
+landlord, in view of the fact that Scrope in his optimism would
+only take the house on a yearly agreement, had refused to
+replace; it was a design of very dark green leaves and grey
+gothic arches; and the apartment was lit by a chandelier, which
+spilt a pool of light in the centre of the room and splashed
+useless weak patches elsewhere. Lady Ella had to interfere to
+prevent the monopolization of this centre by Phoebe and Daphne
+for their home work. This light trouble was difficult to arrange;
+the plain truth was that there was not enough illumination to go
+round. In the Princhester drawing-room there had been a number of
+obliging little electric pushes. The size of the dining-room, now
+that the study was cut off from it, forbade hospitality. As it
+was, with only the family at home, the housemaid made it a
+grievance that she could scarcely squeeze by on the sideboard
+side to wait.
+
+The house vibrated to the trains in the adjacent underground
+railway. There was a lady next door but one who was very pluckily
+training a contralto voice that most people would have gladly
+thrown away. At the end of Restharrow Street was a garage, and a
+yard where chauffeurs were accustomed to "tune up" their engines.
+All these facts were persistently audible to any one sitting down
+in the little back study to think out this project of "writing
+something," about a change in the government of the whole world.
+Petty inconveniences no doubt all these inconveniences were, but
+they distressed a rather oversensitive mind which was also
+acutely aware that even upon this scale living would cost
+certainly two hundred and fifty pounds if not more in excess of
+the little private income available.
+
+
+(5)
+
+
+These domestic details, irrelevant as they may seem in a
+spiritual history, need to be given because they added an
+intimate keenness to Scrope's readiness for this private chapel
+enterprise that he was discussing with Lady Sunderbund. Along
+that line and along that line alone, he saw the way of escape
+from the great sea of London dinginess that threatened to
+submerge his family. And it was also, he felt, the line of his
+duty; it was his "call."
+
+At least that was how he felt at first. And then matters began
+to grow complicated again.
+
+Things had gone far between himself and Lady Sunderbund since
+that letter he had read upon the beach at Old Hunstanton. The
+blinds of the house with the very very blue door in Princhester
+had been drawn from the day when the first vanload of the
+renegade bishop's private possessions had departed from the
+palace. The lady had returned to the brightly decorated flat
+overlooking Hyde Park. He had seen her repeatedly since then,
+and always with a fairly clear understanding that she was to
+provide the chapel and pulpit in which he was to proclaim to
+London the gospel of the Simplicity and Universality of God. He
+was to be the prophet of a reconsidered faith, calling the whole
+world from creeds and sects, from egotisms and vain loyalties,
+from prejudices of race and custom, to the worship and service of
+the Divine King of all mankind. That in fact had been the ruling
+resolve in his mind, the resolve determining his relations not
+only with Lady Sunderbund but with Lady Ella and his family, his
+friends, enemies and associates. He had set out upon this course
+unchecked by any doubt, and overriding the manifest disapproval
+of his wife and his younger daughters. Lady Sunderbund's
+enthusiasm had been enormous and sustaining....
+
+Almost imperceptibly that resolve had weakened. Imperceptibly
+at first. Then the decline had been perceived as one sometimes
+perceives a thing in the background out of the corner of one's
+eye.
+
+In all his early anticipations of the chapel enterprise, he had
+imagined himself in the likeness of a small but eloquent figure
+standing in a large exposed place and calling this lost misled
+world back to God. Lady Sunderbund, he assumed, was to provide
+the large exposed place (which was dimly paved with pews) and
+guarantee that little matter which was to relieve him of sordid
+anxieties for his family, the stipend. He had agreed in an
+inattentive way that this was to be eight hundred a year, with a
+certain proportion of the subscriptions. "At fl'st, I shall be
+the chief subsc'iber," she said. "Before the 'ush comes." He had
+been so content to take all this for granted and think no more
+about it--more particularly to think no more about it--that
+for a time he entirely disregarded the intense decorative
+activities into which Lady Sunderbund incontinently plunged. Had
+he been inclined to remark them he certainly might have done so,
+even though a considerable proportion was being thoughtfully
+veiled for a time from his eyes.
+
+For example, there was the young architect with the wonderful
+tie whom he met once or twice at lunch in the Hyde Park flat.
+This young man pulled the conversation again and again, Lady
+Sunderbund aiding and abetting, in the direction of the "ideal
+church." It was his ambition, he said, someday, to build an ideal
+church, "divorced from tradition."
+
+Scrope had been drawn at last into a dissertation. He said that
+hitherto all temples and places of worship had been conditioned
+by orientation due to the seasonal aspects of religion, they
+pointed to the west or--as in the case of the Egyptian temples
+--to some particular star, and by sacramentalism, which centred
+everything on a highly lit sacrificial altar. It was almost
+impossible to think of a church built upon other lines than that.
+The architect would be so free that--"
+
+"Absolutely free," interrupted the young architect. "He might,
+for example, build a temple like a star."
+
+"Or like some wondyful casket," said Lady Sunderbund....
+
+And also there was a musician with fuzzy hair and an impulsive
+way of taking the salted almonds, who wanted to know about
+religious music.
+
+Scrope hazarded the idea that a chanting people was a religious
+people. He said, moreover, that there was a fine religiosity
+about Moussorgski, but that the most beautiful single piece of
+music in the world was Beethoven's sonata, Opus 111,--he was
+thinking, he said, more particularly of the Adagio at the end,
+molto semplice e cantabile. It had a real quality of divinity.
+
+The musician betrayed impatience at the name of Beethoven, and
+thought, with his mouth appreciatively full of salted almonds,
+that nowadays we had got a little beyond that anyhow.
+
+"We shall be superhuman before we get beyond either Purcell or
+Beethoven," said Scrope.
+
+Nor did he attach sufficient importance to Lady Sunderbund's
+disposition to invite Positivists, members of the Brotherhood
+Church, leaders among the Christian Scientists, old followers of
+the Rev. Charles Voysey, Swedenborgians, Moslem converts, Indian
+Theosophists, psychic phenomena and so forth, to meet him.
+Nevertheless it began to drift into his mind that he was by no
+means so completely in control of the new departure as he had
+supposed at first. Both he and Lady Sunderbund professed
+universalism; but while his was the universalism of one who would
+simplify to the bare fundamentals of a common faith, hers was the
+universalism of the collector. Religion to him was something that
+illuminated the soul, to her it was something that illuminated
+prayer-books. For a considerable time they followed their
+divergent inclinations without any realization of their
+divergence. None the less a vague doubt and dissatisfaction with
+the prospect before him arose to cloud his confidence.
+
+At first there was little or no doubt of his own faith. He was
+still altogether convinced that he had to confess and proclaim
+God in his life. He was as sure that God was the necessary king
+and saviour of mankind and of a man's life, as he was of the
+truth of the Binomial Theorem. But what began first to fade was
+the idea that he had been specially called to proclaim the True
+God to all the world. He would have the most amiable conference
+with Lady Sunderbund, and then as he walked back to Notting Hill
+he would suddenly find stuck into his mind like a challenge,
+Heaven knows how: "Another prophet?" Even if he succeeded in this
+mission enterprise, he found himself asking, what would he be but
+just a little West-end Mahomet? He would have founded another
+sect, and we have to make an end to all sects. How is there to be
+an end to sects, if there are still to be chapels--richly
+decorated chapels--and congregations, and salaried specialists
+in God?
+
+That was a very disconcerting idea. It was particularly active
+at night. He did his best to consider it with a cool detachment,
+regardless of the facts that his private income was just under
+three hundred pounds a year, and that his experiments in cultured
+journalism made it extremely improbable that the most sedulous
+literary work would do more than double this scanty sum. Yet for
+all that these nasty, ugly, sordid facts were entirely
+disregarded, they did somehow persist in coming in and squatting
+down, shapeless in a black corner of his mind--from which their
+eyes shone out, so to speak--whenever his doubt whether he
+ought to set up as a prophet at all was under consideration.
+
+(6)
+
+
+Then very suddenly on this October afternoon the situation had
+come to a crisis.
+
+He had gone to Lady Sunderbund's flat to see the plans and
+drawings for the new church in which he was to give his message
+to the world. They had brought home to him the complete
+realization of Lady Sunderbund's impossibility. He had attempted
+upon the spur of the moment an explanation of just how much they
+differed, and he had precipitated a storm of extravagantly
+perplexing emotions....
+
+She kept him waiting for perhaps ten minutes before she brought
+the plans to him. He waited in the little room with the Wyndham
+Lewis picture that opened upon the balcony painted with crazy
+squares of livid pink. On a golden table by the window a number
+of recently bought books were lying, and he went and stood over
+these, taking them up one after another. The first was "The
+Countess of Huntingdon and Her Circle," that bearder of
+lightminded archbishops, that formidable harbourer of Wesleyan
+chaplains. For some minutes he studied the grim portrait of this
+inspired lady standing with one foot ostentatiously on her
+coronet and then turned to the next volume. This was a life of
+Saint Teresa, that energetic organizer of Spanish nunneries. The
+third dealt with Madame Guyon. It was difficult not to feel that
+Lady Sunderbund was reading for a part.
+
+She entered.
+
+She was wearing a long simple dress of spangled white with a
+very high waist; she had a bracelet of green jade, a waistband of
+green silk, and her hair was held by a wreath of artificial
+laurel, very stiff and green. Her arms were full of big rolls of
+cartridge paper and tracing paper. "I'm so pleased," she said.
+"It's 'eady at last and I can show you."
+
+She banged the whole armful down upon a vivid little table of
+inlaid black and white wood. He rescued one or two rolls and a
+sheet of tracing paper from the floor.
+
+"It's the Temple," she panted in a significant whisper. "It's
+the Temple of the One T'ue God!"
+
+She scrabbled among the papers, and held up the elevation of a
+strange square building to his startled eyes. "Iszi't it just
+pe'fect?" she demanded.
+
+He took the drawing from her. It represented a building,
+manifestly an enormous building, consisting largely of two great,
+deeply fluted towers flanking a vast archway approached by a long
+flight of steps. Between the towers appeared a dome. It was as if
+the Mosque of Saint Sophia had produced this offspring in a
+mesalliance with the cathedral of Wells. Its enormity was made
+manifest by the minuteness of the large automobiles that were
+driving away in the foreground after "setting down." "Here is the
+plan," she said, thrusting another sheet upon him before he could
+fully take in the quality of the design. "The g'eat Hall is to be
+pe'fectly 'ound, no aisle, no altar, and in lettas of sapphiah,
+'God is ev'ywhe'.'"
+
+She added with a note of solemnity, "It will hold th'ee
+thousand people sitting down."
+
+"But--!" said Scrope.
+
+"The'e's a sort of g'andeur," she said. "It's young Venable's
+wo'k. It's his fl'st g'ate oppo'tunity."
+
+"But--is this to go on that little site in Aldwych?"
+
+"He says the' isn't 'oom the'!" she explained. "He wants to put
+it out at Golda's G'een."
+
+"But--if it is to be this little simple chapel we proposed,
+then wasn't our idea to be central?"
+
+"But if the' isn't 'oem! "she said--conclusively. "And isn't
+this--isn't it rather a costly undertaking, rather more costly--"
+
+"That docsn't matta. I'm making heaps and heaps of money. Half
+my p'ope'ty is in shipping and a lot of the 'eat in munitions.
+I'm 'icher than eva. Isn't the' a sort of g'andeur?" she pressed.
+
+He put the elevation down. He took the plan from her hands and
+seemed to study it. But he was really staring blankly at the
+whole situation.
+
+"Lady Sunderbund," he said at last, with an effort, "I am
+afraid all this won't do."
+
+"Won't do!"
+
+"No. It isn't in the spirit of my intention. It isn't in a
+great building of this sort--so--so ornate and imposing, that
+the simple gospel of God's Universal Kingdom can be preached."
+
+"But oughtn't so gate a message to have as g'ate a pulpit?"
+
+And then as if she would seize him before he could go on to
+further repudiations, she sought hastily among the drawings
+again.
+
+"But look," she said. "It has ev'ything! It's not only a
+p'eaching place; it's a headquarters for ev'ything."
+
+With the rapid movements of an excited child she began to
+thrust the remarkable features and merits of the great project
+upon him. The preaching dome was only the heart of it. There were
+to be a library, "'efecto'ies," consultation rooms, classrooms, a
+publication department, a big underground printing establishment.
+"Nowadays," she said, "ev'y gate movement must p'int." There was
+to be music, she said, "a gate invisible o'gan," hidden amidst
+the architectural details, and pouring out its sounds into the
+dome, and then she glanced in passing at possible "p'ocessions"
+round the preaching dome. This preaching dome was not a mere
+shut-in drum for spiritual reverberations, around it ran great
+open corridors, and in these corridors there were to be
+"chapels."
+
+"But what for?" he asked, stemming the torrent. "What need is
+there for chapels? There are to be no altars, no masses, no
+sacraments?"
+
+"No," she said, "but they are to be chapels for special
+int'ests; a chapel for science, a chapel for healing, a chapel
+for gov'ment. Places for peoples to sit and think about those
+things--with paintings and symbols."
+
+"I see your intention," he admitted. "I see your intention."
+
+"The' is to be a gate da'k blue 'ound chapel for sta's and
+atoms and the myst'ry of matta." Her voice grew solemn. "All
+still and deep and high. Like a k'ystal in a da'k place. You will
+go down steps to it. Th'ough a da'k 'ounded a'ch ma'ked with
+mathematical symbols and balances and scientific app'atus.... And
+the ve'y next to it, the ve'y next, is to be a little b'ight
+chapel for bi'ds and flowas!"
+
+"Yes," he said, "it is all very fine and expressive. It is, I
+see, a symbolical building, a great artistic possibility. But is
+it the place for me? What I have to say is something very simple,
+that God is the king of the whole world, king of the ha'penny
+newspaper and the omnibus and the vulgar everyday things, and
+that they have to worship him and serve him as their leader in
+every moment of their lives. This isn't that. This is the old
+religions over again. This is taking God apart. This is putting
+him into a fresh casket instead of the old one. And.... I don't
+like it."
+
+"Don't like it," she cried, and stood apart from him with her
+chin in the air, a tall astonishment and dismay.
+
+"I can't do the work I want to do with this."
+
+"But--Isn't it you' idea?"
+
+"No. It is not in the least my idea. I want to tell the whole
+world of the one God that can alone unite it and save it--and
+you make this extravagant toy."
+
+He felt as if he had struck her directly he uttered that last
+word.
+
+"Toy!" she echoed, taking it in, "you call it a Toy!"
+
+A note in her voice reminded him that there were two people who
+might feel strongly in this affair.
+
+"My dear Lady Sunderbund," he said with a sudden change of
+manner, "I must needs follow the light of my own mind. I have had
+a vision of God, I have seen him as a great leader towering over
+the little lives of men, demanding the little lives of men,
+prepared to take them and guide them to the salvation of mankind
+and the conquest of pain and death. I have seen him as the God of
+the human affair, a God of politics, a God of such muddy and
+bloody wars as this war, a God of economics, a God of railway
+junctions and clinics and factories and evening schools, a God in
+fact of men. This God--this God here, that you want to worship,
+is a God of artists and poets--of elegant poets, a God of
+bric-a-brac, a God of choice allusions. Oh, it has its grandeur!
+I don't want you to think that what you are doing may not be
+altogether fine and right for you to do. But it is not what I
+have to do.... I cannot--indeed I cannot--go on with this
+project--upon these lines."
+
+He paused, flushed and breathless. Lady Sunderbund had heard
+him to the end. Her bright face was brightly flushed, and there
+were tears in her eyes. It was like her that they should seem
+tears of the largest, most expensive sort, tears of the first
+water.
+
+"But," she cried, and her red delicate mouth went awry with
+dismay and disappointment, and her expression was the half
+incredulous expression of a child suddenly and cruelly
+disappointed: "You won't go on with all this?"
+
+"No," he said. "My dear Lady Sunderbund--"
+
+"Oh! don't Lady Sunderbund me!" she cried with a novel
+rudeness. "Don't you see I've done it all for you?"
+
+He winced and felt boorish. He had never liked and disapproved
+of Lady Sunderbund so much as he did at that moment. And he had
+no words for her.
+
+"How can I stop it all at once like this?"
+
+And still he had no answer.
+
+She pursued her advantage. "What am I to do?" she cried.
+
+She turned upon him passionately. "Look what you've done!" She
+marked her points with finger upheld, and gave odd suggestions in
+her face of an angry coster girl. "Eva' since I met you, I've
+wo'shipped you. I've been 'eady to follow you anywhe'--to do
+anything. Eva' since that night when you sat so calm and
+dignified, and they baited you and wo'id you. When they we' all
+vain and cleva, and you--you thought only of God and 'iligion
+and didn't mind fo' you'self.... Up to then--I'd been living--
+oh! the emptiest life..."
+
+The tears ran. "Pe'haps I shall live it again...." She dashed
+her grief away with a hand beringed with stones as big as
+beetles.
+
+"I said to myself, this man knows something I don't know. He's
+got the seeds of ete'nal life su'ely. I made up my mind then and
+the' I'd follow you and back you and do all I could fo' you. I've
+lived fo' you. Eve' since. Lived fo' you. And now when all my
+little plans are 'ipe, you--! Oh!"
+
+She made a quaint little gesture with pink fists upraised, and
+then stood with her hand held up, staring at the plans and
+drawings that were littered over the inlaid table. "I've planned
+and planned. I said, I will build him a temple. I will be his
+temple se'vant.... Just a me' se'vant...."
+
+She could not go on.
+
+"But it is just these temples that have confused mankind," he
+said.
+
+"Not my temple," she said presently, now openly weeping over
+the gay rejected drawings. "You could have explained...."
+
+"Oh!" she said petulantly, and thrust them away from her so
+that they went sliding one after the other on to the floor. For
+some long-drawn moments there was no sound in the room but the
+slowly accelerated slide and flop of one sheet of cartridge paper
+after another.
+
+"We could have been so happy," she wailed, "se'ving oua God."
+
+And then this disconcerting lady did a still more disconcerting
+thing. She staggered a step towards Scrape, seized the lapels of
+his coat, bowed her head upon his shoulder, put her black hair
+against his cheek, and began sobbing and weeping.
+
+"My dear lady! " he expostulated, trying weakly to disengage
+her.
+
+"Let me k'y," she insisted, gripping more resolutely, and
+following his backward pace. "You must let me k'y. You must let
+me k'y."
+
+His resistance ceased. One hand supported her, the other patted
+her shining hair. "My dear child!" he said. "My dear child! I had
+no idea. That you would take it like this...."
+
+(7)
+
+
+That was but the opening of an enormous interview. Presently he
+had contrived in a helpful and sympathetic manner to seat the
+unhappy lady on a sofa, and when after some cramped discourse she
+stood up before him, wiping her eyes with a wet wonder of lace,
+to deliver herself the better, a newborn appreciation of the
+tactics of the situation made him walk to the other side of the
+table under colour of picking up a drawing.
+
+In the retrospect he tried to disentangle the threads of a
+discussion that went to and fro and contradicted itself and began
+again far back among things that had seemed forgotten and
+disposed of. Lady Sunderbund's mind was extravagantly untrained,
+a wild-grown mental thicket. At times she reproached him as if he
+were a heartless God; at times she talked as if he were a
+recalcitrant servant. Her mingling of utter devotion and the
+completest disregard for his thoughts and wishes dazzled and
+distressed his mind. It was clear that for half a year her clear,
+bold, absurd will had been crystallized upon the idea of giving
+him exactly what she wanted him to want. The crystal sphere of
+those ambitions lay now shattered between them.
+
+She was trying to reconstruct it before his eyes.
+
+She was, she declared, prepared to alter her plans in any way
+that would meet his wishes. She had not understood. "If it is a
+Toy," she cried, "show me how to make it not a Toy! Make it
+'eal!"
+
+He said it was the bare idea of a temple that made it
+impossible. And there was this drawing here; what did it mean? He
+held it out to her. It represented a figure, distressingly like
+himself, robed as a priest in vestments.
+
+She snatched the offending drawing from him and tore it to
+shreds.
+
+"If you don't want a Temple, have a meeting-house. You wanted a
+meeting-house anyhow."
+
+"Just any old meeting-house," he said. "Not that special one. A
+place without choirs and clergy."
+
+"If you won't have music," she responded, "don't have music. If
+God doesn't want music it can go. I can't think God does not
+app'ove of music, but--that is for you to settle. If you don't
+like the' being o'naments, we'll make it all plain. Some g'ate
+g'ey Dome--all g'ey and black. If it isn't to be beautiful, it
+can be ugly. Yes, ugly. It can be as ugly "--she sobbed--" as
+the City Temple. We will get some otha a'chitect--some City
+a'chitect. Some man who has built B'anch Banks or 'ailway
+stations. That's if you think it pleases God.... B'eak young
+Venable's hea't.... Only why should you not let me make a place
+fo' you' message? Why shouldn't it be me? You must have a place.
+You've got 'to p'each somewhe'."
+
+"As a man, not as a priest."
+
+"Then p'each as a man. You must still wea' something."
+
+"Just ordinary clothes."
+
+"O'dina'y clothes a' clothes in the fashion," she said. "You
+would have to go to you' taila for a new p'eaching coat with
+b'aid put on dif'ently, or two buttons instead of th'ee...."
+
+"One needn't be fashionable."
+
+"Ev'ybody is fash'nable. How can you help it? Some people wea'
+old fashions; that's all.... A cassock's an old fashion. There's
+nothing so plain as a cassock."
+
+"Except that it's a clerical fashion. I want to be just as I am
+now."
+
+"If you think that--that owoble suit is o'dina'y clothes!"
+she said, and stared at him and gave way to tears of real
+tenderness.
+
+"A cassock," she cried with passion. "Just a pe'fectly plain
+cassock. Fo' deecency!... Oh, if you won't--not even that!"
+
+(8)
+
+
+As he walked now after his unsuccessful quest of Dr.
+Brighton-Pomfrey towards the Serpentine he acted that stormy
+interview with Lady Sunderbund over again. At the end, as a
+condition indeed of his departure, he had left things open. He
+had assented to certain promises. He was to make her understand
+better what it was he needed. He was not to let anything that
+had happened affect that "spi'tual f'enship." She was to abandon
+all her plans, she was to begin again "at the ve'y beginning."
+But he knew that indeed there should be no more beginning again
+with her. He knew that quite beyond these questions of the
+organization of a purified religion, it was time their
+association ended. She had wept upon him; she had clasped both
+his hands at parting and prayed to be forgiven. She was drawing
+him closer to her by their very dissension. She had infected him
+with the softness of remorse; from being a bright and spirited
+person, she had converted herself into a warm and touching
+person. Her fine, bright black hair against his cheek and the
+clasp of her hand on his shoulder was now inextricably in the
+business. The perplexing, the astonishing thing in his situation
+was that there was still a reluctance to make a conclusive
+breach.
+
+He was not the first of men who have tried to find in vain how
+and when a relationship becomes an entanglement. He ought to
+break off now, and the riddle was just why he should feel this
+compunction in breaking off now. He had disappointed her, and he
+ought not to have disappointed her; that was the essential
+feeling. He had never realized before as he realized now this
+peculiar quality of his own mind and the gulf into which it was
+leading him. It came as an illuminating discovery.
+
+He was a social animal. He had an instinctive disposition to
+act according to the expectations of the people about him,
+whether they were reasonable or congenial expectations or whether
+they were not. That, he saw for the first time, had been the
+ruling motive of his life; it was the clue to him. Man is not a
+reasonable creature; he is a socially responsive creature trying
+to be reasonable in spite of that fact. From the days in the
+rectory nursery when Scrope had tried to be a good boy on the
+whole and just a little naughty sometimes until they stopped
+smiling, through all his life of school, university, curacy,
+vicarage and episcopacy up to this present moment, he perceived
+now that he had acted upon no authentic and independent impulse.
+His impulse had always been to fall in with people and satisfy
+them. And all the painful conflicts of those last few years had
+been due to a growing realization of jarring criticisms, of
+antagonized forces that required from him incompatible things.
+From which he had now taken refuge--or at any rate sought
+refuge--in God. It was paradoxical, but manifestly in God he
+not only sank his individuality but discovered it.
+
+It was wonderful how much he had thought and still thought of
+the feelings and desires of Lady Sunderbund, and how little he
+thought of God. Her he had been assiduously propitiating,
+managing, accepting, for three months now. Why? Partly because
+she demanded it, and there was a quality in her demand that had
+touched some hidden spring--of vanity perhaps it was--in him,
+that made him respond. But partly also it was because after the
+evacuation of the palace at Princhester he had felt more and
+more, felt but never dared to look squarely in the face, the
+catastrophic change in the worldly circumstances of his family.
+Only this chapel adventure seemed likely to restore those fallen
+and bedraggled fortunes. He had not anticipated a tithe of the
+dire quality of that change. They were not simply uncomfortable
+in the Notting Hill home. They were miserable. He fancied they
+looked to him with something between reproach and urgency. Why
+had he brought them here? What next did he propose to do? He
+wished at times they would say it out instead of merely looking
+it. Phoebe's failing appetite chilled his heart.
+
+That concern for his family, he believed, had been his chief
+motive in clinging to Lady Sunderbund's projects long after he
+had realized how little they would forward the true service of
+God. No doubt there had been moments of flattery, moments of
+something, something rather in the nature of an excited
+affection; some touch of the magnificent in her, some touch of
+the infantile,--both appealed magnetically to his imagination;
+but the real effective cause was his habitual solicitude for his
+wife and children and his consequent desire to prosper
+materially. As his first dream of being something between
+Mohammed and Peter the Hermit in a new proclamation of God to the
+world lost colour and life in his mind, he realized more and more
+clearly that there was no way of living in a state of material
+prosperity and at the same time in a state of active service to
+God. The Church of the One True God (by favour of Lady
+Sunderbund) was a gaily-coloured lure.
+
+And yet he wanted to go on with it. All his imagination and
+intelligence was busy now with the possibility of in some way
+subjugating Lady Sunderbund, and modifying her and qualifying her
+to an endurable proposition. Why?
+
+Why?
+
+There could be but one answer, he thought. Brought to the test
+of action, he did not really believe in God! He did not believe
+in God as he believed in his family. He did not believe in the
+reality of either his first or his second vision; they had been
+dreams, autogenous revelations, exaltations of his own
+imaginations. These beliefs were upon different grades of
+reality. Put to the test, his faith in God gave way; a sword of
+plaster against a reality of steel.
+
+And yet he did believe in God. He was as persuaded that there
+was a God as he was that there was another side to the moon. His
+intellectual conviction was complete. Only, beside the living,
+breathing--occasionally coughing--reality of Phoebe, God was
+something as unsubstantial as the Binomial Theorem....
+
+Very like the Binomial Theorem as one thought over that
+comparison.
+
+By this time he had reached the banks of the Serpentine and was
+approaching the grey stone bridge that crosses just where Hyde
+Park ends and Kensington Gardens begins. Following upon his
+doubts of his religious faith had come another still more
+extraordinary question: "Although there is a God, does he indeed
+matter more in our ordinary lives than that same demonstrable
+Binomial Theorem? Isn't one's duty to Phoebe plain and clear?"
+Old Likeman's argument came back to him with novel and enhanced
+powers. Wasn't he after all selfishly putting his own salvation
+in front of his plain duty to those about him? What did it matter
+if he told lies, taught a false faith, perjured and damned
+himself, if after all those others were thereby saved and
+comforted?
+
+"But that is just where the whole of this state of mind is
+false and wrong," he told himself. "God is something more than a
+priggish devotion, an intellectual formula. He has a hold and a
+claim--he should have a hold and a claim--exceeding all the
+claims of Phoebe, Miriam, Daphne, Clementina--all of them....
+
+But he hasn't'!...
+
+It was to that he had got after he had left Lady Sunderbund,
+and to that he now returned. It was the thinness and unreality of
+his thought of God that had driven him post-haste to
+Brighton-Pomfrey in search for that drug that had touched his
+soul to belief.
+
+Was God so insignificant in comparison with his family that
+after all with a good conscience he might preach him every Sunday
+in Lady Sunderbund's church, wearing Lady Sunderbund's vestments?
+
+Before him he saw an empty seat. The question was so immense
+and conclusive, it was so clearly a choice for all the rest of
+his life between God and the dear things of this world, that he
+felt he could not decide it upon his legs. He sat down, threw an
+arm along the back of the seat and drummed with his fingers.
+
+If the answer was "yes" then it was decidedly a pity that he
+had not stayed in the church. It was ridiculous to strain at the
+cathedral gnat and then swallow Lady Sunderbund's decorative
+Pantechnicon.
+
+For the first time, Scrope definitely regretted his apostasy.
+
+A trivial matter, as it may seem to the reader, intensified
+that regret. Three weeks ago Borrowdale, the bishop of Howeaster,
+had died, and Scrope would have been the next in rotation to
+succeed him on the bench of bishops. He had always looked forward
+to the House of Lords, intending to take rather a new line, to
+speak more, and to speak more plainly and fully upon social
+questions than had hitherto been the practice of his brethren.
+Well, that had gone....
+
+(9)
+
+
+Regrets were plain now. The question before his mind was
+growing clear; whether he was to persist in this self-imposed
+martyrdom of himself and his family or whether he was to go back
+upon his outbreak of visionary fanaticism and close with this
+last opportunity that Lady Sunderbund offered of saving at least
+the substance of the comfort and social status of his wife and
+daughters. In which case it was clear to him he would have to go
+to great lengths and exercise very considerable subtlety--and
+magnetism--in the management of Lady Sunderbund....
+
+He found himself composing a peculiar speech to her, very frank
+and revealing, and one that he felt would dominate her
+thoughts.... She attracted him oddly.... At least this afternoon
+she had attracted him....
+
+And repelled him....
+
+A wholesome gust of moral impatience stirred him. He smacked
+the back of the seat hard, as though he smacked himself.
+
+No. He did not like it....
+
+A torn sunset of purple and crimson streamed raggedly up above
+and through the half stripped trecs of Kensington Gardens, and he
+found himself wishing that Heaven would give us fewer sublimities
+in sky and mountain and more in our hearts. Against the
+background of darkling trees and stormily flaming sky a girl was
+approaching him. There was little to be seen of her but her
+outline. Something in her movement caught his eye and carried his
+memory back to a sundown at Hunstanton. Then as she came nearer
+he saw that it was Eleanor.
+
+It was odd to see her here. He had thought she was at Newnham.
+
+But anyhow it was very pleasant to see her. And there was
+something in Eleanor that promised an answer to his necessity.
+The girl had a kind of instinctive wisdom. She would understand
+the quality of his situation better perhaps than any one. He
+would put the essentials of that situation as fully and plainly
+as he could to her. Perhaps she, with that clear young idealism
+of hers, would give him just the lift and the light of which he
+stood in need. She would comprehend both sides of it, the points
+about Phoebe as well as the points about God.
+
+When first he saw her she seemed to be hurrying, but now she
+had fallen to a loitering pace. She looked once or twice behind
+her and then ahead, almost as though she expected some one and
+was not sure whether this person would approach from east or
+west. She did not observe her father until she was close upon
+him.
+
+Then she was so astonished that for a moment she stood
+motionless, regarding him. She made an odd movement, almost as if
+she would have walked on, that she checked in its inception. Then
+she came up to him and stood before him. "It's Dad," she said.
+
+"I didn't know you were in London, Norah," he began.
+
+"I came up suddenly."
+
+"Have you been home?"
+
+"No. I wasn't going home. At least--not until afterwards."
+
+Then she looked away from him, east and then west, and then met
+his eye again.
+
+"Won't you sit down, Norah?"
+
+"I don't know whether I can."
+
+She consulted the view again and seemed to come to a decision.
+"At least, I will for a minute."
+
+She sat down. For a moment neither of them spoke....
+
+"What are you doing here, little Norah?"
+
+She gathered her wits. Then she spoke rather volubly. "I know
+it looks bad, Daddy. I came up to meet a boy I know, who is going
+to France to-morrow. I had to make excuses--up there. I hardly
+remember what excuses I made."
+
+"A boy you know?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do we know him? "
+
+"Not yet."
+
+For a time Scrope forgot the Church of the One True God
+altogether. "Who is this boy?" he asked.
+
+With a perceptible effort Eleanor assumed a tone of commonsense
+conventionality. "He's a boy I met first when we were skating
+last year. His sister has the study next to mine."
+
+Father looked at daughter, and she met his eyes. "Well? "
+
+"It's all happened so quickly, Daddy," she said, answering all
+that was implicit in that "Well?" She went on, "I would have told
+you about him if he had seemed to matter. But it was just a
+friendship. It didn't seem to matter in any serious way. Of
+course we'd been good friends--and talked about all sorts of
+things. And then suddenly you see,"--her tone was offhand and
+matter-of-fact--" he has to go to France."
+
+She stared at her father with the expression of a hostess who
+talks about the weather. And then the tears gathered and ran down
+her cheek.
+
+She turned her face to the Serpentine and clenched her fist.
+
+But she was now fairly weeping. "I didn't know he cared. I
+didn't know I cared."
+
+His next question took a little time in coming.
+
+"And it's love, little Norah?" he asked.
+
+She was comfortably crying now, the defensive altogether
+abandoned. "It's love, Daddy.... Oh! love!.... He's going
+tomorrow." For a minute or so neither spoke. Scrope's mind was
+entirely made up in the matter. He approved altogether of his
+daughter. But the traditions of parentage, his habit of
+restrained decision, made him act a judicial part. "I'd like just
+to see this boy," he said, and added: "If it isn't rather
+interfering...."
+
+"Dear Daddy!" she said. "Dear Daddy!" and touched his hand.
+"He'll be coming here...."
+
+"If you could tell me a few things about him," said Scrope. "Is
+he an undergraduate?"
+
+"You see," began Eleanor and paused to marshal her facts. "He
+graduated this year. Then he's been in training at Cambridge.
+Properly he'd have a fellowship. He took the Natural Science
+tripos, zoology chiefly. He's good at philosophy, but of course
+our Cambridge philosophy is so silly--McTaggart blowing
+bubbles.... His father's a doctor, Sir Hedley Riverton."
+
+As she spoke her eyes had been roving up the path and down.
+"He's coming," she interrupted. She hesitated. "Would you mind if
+I went and spoke to him first, Daddy?"
+
+"Of course go to him. Go and warn him I'm here," said Scrope.
+
+Eleanor got up, and was immediately greeted with joyful
+gestures by an approaching figure in khaki. The two young people
+quickened their paces as they drew nearer one another. There was
+a rapid greeting; they stood close together and spoke eagerly.
+Scrope could tell by their movements when he became the subject
+of their talk. He saw the young man start and look over Eleanor's
+shoulder, and he assumed an attitude of philosophical
+contemplation of the water, so as to give the young man the
+liberty of his profile.
+
+He did not look up until they were quite close to him, and when
+he did he saw a pleasant, slightly freckled fair face a little
+agitated, and very honest blue eyes. "I hope you don't think,
+Sir, that it's bad form of me to ask Eleanor to come up and see
+me as I've done. I telegraphed to her on an impulse, and it's
+been very kind of her to come up to me."
+
+"Sit down," said Scrope, "sit down. You're Mr. Riverton?"
+
+"Yes, Sir," said the young man. He had the frequent "Sir" of
+the subaltern. Scrope was in the centre of the seat, and the
+young officer sat down on one side of him while Eleanor took up a
+watching position on her father's other hand. "You see, Sir,
+we've hardly known each other--I mean we've been associated
+over a philosophical society and all that sort of thing, but in a
+more familiar way, I mean...."
+
+He hung for a moment, just a little short of breath. Scrope
+helped him with a grave but sympathetic movement of the head.
+"It's a little difficult to explain," the young man apologized.
+
+"We hadn't understood, I think, either of us very much. We'd
+just been friendly--and liked each other. And so it went on
+even when I was training. And then when I found I had to go out
+--I'm going out a little earlier than I expected--I thought
+suddenly I wouldn't ever go to Cambridge again at all perhaps--
+and there was something in one of her letters.... I thought of it
+a lot, Sir, I thought it all over, and I thought it wasn't right
+for me to do anything and I didn't do anything until this
+morning. And then I sort of had to telegraph. I know it was
+frightful cheek and bad form and all that, Sir. It is. It would
+be worse if she wasn't different--I mean, Sir, if she was just
+an ordinary girl.... But I had a sort of feeling--just wanting
+to see her. I don't suppose you've ever felt anything, Sir, as I
+felt I wanted to see her--and just hear her speak to me...."
+
+He glanced across Scrope at Eleanor. It was as if he justified
+himself to them both.
+
+Scrope glanced furtively at his daughter who was leaning
+forward with tender eyes on her lover, and his heart went out to
+her. But his manner remained judicial.
+
+"All this is very sudden," he said.
+
+"Or you would have heard all about it, Sir," said young
+Riverton. "It's just the hurry that has made this seem furtive.
+All that there is between us, Sir, is just the two telegrams
+we've sent, hers and mine. I hope you won't mind our having a
+little time together. We won't do anything very committal. It's
+as much friendship as anything. I go by the evening train
+to-morrow."
+
+"Mm," said Serope with his eye on Eleanor.
+
+"In these uncertain times," he began.
+
+"Why shouldn't I take a risk too, Daddy?" said Eleanor sharply.
+
+"I know there's that side of it," said the young man. "I
+oughtn't to have telegraphed," he said.
+
+"Can't I take a risk?" exclaimed Eleanor. "I'm not a doll. I
+don't want to live in wadding until all the world is safe for
+me."
+
+Scrope looked at the glowing face of the young man.
+
+"Is this taking care of her?" he asked.
+
+"If you hadn't telegraphed--!" she cried with a threat in her
+voice, and left it at that.
+
+"Perhaps I feel about her--rather as if she was as strong as
+I am--in those ways. Perhaps I shouldn't. I could hardly endure
+myself, Sir--cut off from her. And a sort of blank. Nothing
+said."
+
+"You want to work out your own salvation," said Scrope to his
+daughter.
+
+"No one else can," she answered. "I'm--I'm grown up."
+
+"Even if it hurts?"
+
+"To live is to be hurt somehow," she said. "This--This--" She
+flashed her love. She intimated by a gesture that it is better to
+be stabbed with a clean knife than to be suffocated or poisoned
+or to decay....
+
+Scrope turned his eyes to the young man again. He liked him. He
+liked the modelling of his mouth and chin and the line of his
+brows. He liked him altogether. He pronounced his verdict slowly.
+"I suppose, after all," he said, "that this is better than the
+tender solicitude of a safe and prosperous middleaged man.
+Eleanor, my dear, I've been thinking to-day that a father who
+stands between his children and hardship, by doing wrong, may
+really be doing them a wrong. You are a dear girl to me.
+
+I won't stand between you two. Find your own salvation." He got
+up. "I go west," he said, "presently. You, I think, go east."
+
+"I can assure you, Sir," the young man began.
+
+Scrope held his hand out. "Take your life in your own way," he
+said.
+
+He turned to Eleanor. "Talk as you will," he said.
+
+She clasped his hand with emotion. Then she turned to the
+waiting young man, who saluted.
+
+"You'll come back to supper?" Scrope said, without thinking out
+the implications of that invitation.
+
+She assented as carelessly. The fact that she and her lover
+were to go, with their meeting legalized and blessed, excluded
+all other considerations. The two young people turned to each
+other.
+
+Scrope stood for a moment or so and then sat down again.
+
+For a time he could think only of Eleanor.... He watched the
+two young people as they went eastward. As they walked their
+shoulders and elbows bumped amicably together.
+
+(10)
+
+
+Presently he sought to resume the interrupted thread of his
+thoughts. He knew that he had been dealing with some very
+tremendous and urgent problem when Eleanor had appeared. Then he
+remembered that Eleanor at the time of her approach had seemed to
+be a solution rather than an interruption. Well, she had her own
+life. She was making her own life. Instead of solving his
+problems she was solving her own. God bless those dear grave
+children! They were nearer the elemental things than he was. That
+eastward path led to Victoria--and thence to a very probable
+death. The lad was in the infantry and going straight into the
+trenches.
+
+Love, death, God; this war was bringing the whole world back to
+elemental things, to heroic things. The years of comedy and
+comfort were at an end in Europe; the age of steel and want was
+here. And he had been thinking--What had he been thinking?
+
+He mused, and the scheme of his perplexities reshaped itself in
+his mind. But at that time he did not realize that a powerful new
+light was falling upon it now, cast by the tragic illumination of
+these young lovers whose love began with a parting. He did not
+see how reality had come to all things through that one intense
+reality. He reverted to the question as he had put it to himself,
+before first he recoguized Eleanor. Did he believe in God? Should
+he go on with this Sunderbund adventure in which he no longer
+believed? Should he play for safety and comfort, trusting to
+God's toleration? Or go back to his family and warn them of the
+years of struggle and poverty his renunciation cast upon them?
+
+Somehow Lady Sunderbund's chapel was very remote and flimsy
+now, and the hardships of poverty seemed less black than the
+hardship of a youthful death.
+
+Did he believe in God? Again he put that fundamental question
+to himself.
+
+He sat very still in the sunset peace, with his eyes upon the
+steel mirror of the waters. The question seemed to fill the whole
+scene, to wait, even as the water and sky and the windless trees
+were waiting....
+
+And then by imperceptible degrees there grew in Scrope's mind
+the persuasion that he was in the presence of the living God.
+This time there was no vision of angels nor stars, no snapping of
+bow-strings, no throbbing of the heart nor change of scene, no
+magic and melodramatic drawing back of the curtain from the
+mysteries; the water and the bridge, the ragged black trees, and
+a distant boat that broke the silvery calm with an arrow of black
+ripples, all these things were still before him. But God was
+there too. God was everywhere about him. This persuasion was over
+him and about him; a dome of protection, a power in his nerves, a
+peace in his heart. It was an exalting beauty; it was a perfected
+conviction.... This indeed was the coming of God, the real coming
+of God. For the first time Scrope was absolutely sure that for
+the rest of his life he would possess God. Everything that had so
+perplexed him seemed to be clear now, and his troubles lay at the
+foot of this last complete realization like a litter of dust and
+leaves in the foreground of a sunlit, snowy mountain range.
+
+It was a little incredible that he could ever have doubted.
+
+(11)
+
+
+It was a phase of extreme intellectual clairvoyance. A
+multitude of things that hitherto had been higgledy-piggledy,
+contradictory and incongruous in his mind became lucid, serene,
+full and assured. He seemed to see all things plainly as one sees
+things plainly through perfectly clear still water in the shadows
+of a summer noon. His doubts about God, his periods of complete
+forgetfulness and disregard of God, this conflict of his
+instincts and the habits and affections of his daily life with
+the service of God, ceased to be perplexing incompatibilities and
+were manifest as necessary, understandable aspects of the
+business of living.
+
+It was no longer a riddle that little immediate things should
+seem of more importance than great and final things. For man is a
+creature thrusting his way up from the beast to divinity, from
+the blindness of individuality to the knowledge of a common end.
+We stand deep in the engagements of our individual lives looking
+up to God, and only realizing in our moments of exaltation that
+through God we can escape from and rule and alter the whole
+world-wide scheme of individual lives. Only in phases of
+illumination do we realize the creative powers that lie ready to
+man's hand. Personal affections, immediate obligations,
+ambitions, self-seeking, these are among the natural and
+essential things of our individual lives, as intimate almost as
+our primordial lusts and needs; God, the true God, is a later
+revelation, a newer, less natural thing in us; a knowledge still
+remote, uncertain, and confused with superstition; an
+apprehension as yet entangled with barbaric traditions of fear
+and with ceremonial surgeries, blood sacrifices, and the maddest
+barbarities of thought. We are only beginning to realize that God
+is here; so far as our minds go he is still not here continually;
+we perceive him and then again we are blind to him. God is the
+last thing added to the completeness of human life. To most His
+presence is imperceptible throughout their lives; they know as
+little of him as a savage knows of the electric waves that beat
+through us for ever from the sun. All this appeared now so clear
+and necessary to Scrope that he was astonished he had ever found
+the quality of contradiction in these manifest facts.
+
+In this unprecedented lucidity that had now come to him, Scrope
+saw as a clear and simple necessity that there can be no such
+thing as a continuous living presence of God in our lives. That
+is an unreasonable desire. There is no permanent exaltation of
+belief. It is contrary to the nature of life. One cannot keep
+actively believing in and realizing God round all the twenty-four
+hours any more than one can keep awake through the whole cycle of
+night and day, day after day. If it were possible so to apprehend
+God without cessation, life would dissolve in religious ecstasy.
+But nothing human has ever had the power to hold the curtain of
+sense continually aside and retain the light of God always. We
+must get along by remembering our moments of assurance. Even
+Jesus himself, leader of all those who have hailed the coming
+kingdom of God, had cried upon the cross, "My God, my God, why
+hast thou forsaken me?" The business of life on earth, life
+itself, is a thing curtained off, as it were, from such immediate
+convictions. That is in the constitution of life. Our ordinary
+state of belief, even when we are free from doubt, is necessarily
+far removed from the intuitive certainty of sight and hearing. It
+is a persuasion, it falls far short of perception....
+
+"We don't know directly," Scrope said to himself with a
+checking gesture of the hand, "we don't see. We can't. We hold on
+to the remembered glimpse, we go over our reasons."...
+
+And it was clear too just because God is thus manifest like the
+momentary drawing of a curtain, sometimes to this man for a time
+and sometimes to that, but never continuously to any, and because
+the perception of him depends upon the ability and quality of the
+perceiver, because to the intellectual man God is necessarily a
+formula, to the active man a will and a commandment, and to the
+emotional man love, there can be no creed defining him for all
+men, and no ritual and special forms of service to justify a
+priesthood. "God is God," he whispered to himself, and the phrase
+seemed to him the discovery of a sufficient creed. God is his own
+definition; there is no other definition of God. Scrope had
+troubled himself with endless arguments whether God was a person,
+whether he was concerned with personal troubles, whether he
+loved, whether he was finite. It were as reasonable to argue
+whether God was a frog or a rock or a tree. He had imagined God
+as a figure of youth and courage, had perceived him as an
+effulgence of leadership, a captain like the sun. The vision of
+his drug-quickened mind had but symbolized what was otherwise
+inexpressible. Of that he was now sure. He had not seen the
+invisible but only its sign and visible likeness. He knew now
+that all such presentations were true and that all such
+presentations were false. Just as much and just as little was God
+the darkness and the brightness of the ripples under the bows of
+the distant boat, the black beauty of the leaves and twigs of
+those trees now acid-clear against the flushed and deepening sky.
+These riddles of the profundities were beyond the compass of
+common living. They were beyond the needs of common living. He
+was but a little earth parasite, sitting idle in the darkling
+day, trying to understand his infinitesimal functions on a minor
+planet. Within the compass of terrestrial living God showed
+himself in its own terms. The life of man on earth was a struggle
+for unity of spirit and for unity with his kind, and the aspect
+of God that alone mattered to man was a unifying kingship without
+and within. So long as men were men, so would they see God. Only
+when they reached the crest could they begin to look beyond. So
+we knew God, so God was to us; since we struggled, he led our
+struggle, since we were finite and mortal he defined an aim, his
+personality was the answer to our personality; but God, except in
+so far as he was to us, remained inaccessible, inexplicable,
+wonderful, shining through beauty, shining beyond research,
+greater than time or space, above good and evil and pain and
+pleasure.
+
+(12)
+
+
+Serope's mind was saturated as it had never been before by his
+sense of the immediate presence of God. He floated in that
+realization. He was not so much thinking now as conversing
+starkly with the divine interlocutor, who penetrated all things
+and saw into and illuminated every recess of his mind. He spread
+out his ideas to the test of this presence; he brought out his
+hazards and interpretations that this light might judge them.
+
+There came back to his mind the substance of his two former
+visions; they assumed now a reciprocal quality, they explained
+one another and the riddle before him. The first had shown him
+the personal human aspect of God, he had seen God as the unifying
+captain calling for his personal service, the second had set the
+stage for that service in the spectacle of mankind's adventure.
+He had been shown a great multitude of human spirits reaching up
+at countless points towards the conception of the racial unity
+under a divine leadership, he had seen mankind on the verge of
+awakening to the kingdom of God. "That solves no mystery," he
+whispered, gripping the seat and frowning at the water;
+"mysteries remain mysteries; but that is the reality of religion.
+And now, now, what is my place? What have I to do? That is the
+question I have been asking always; the question that this moment
+now will answer; what have I to do?...
+
+God was coming into the life of all mankind in the likeness of
+a captain and a king; all the governments of men, all the leagues
+of men, their debts and claims and possessions, must give way to
+the world republic under God the king. For five troubled years he
+had been staring religion in the face, and now he saw that it
+must mean this--or be no more than fetishism, Obi, Orphic
+mysteries or ceremonies of Demeter, a legacy of mental dirtiness,
+a residue of self-mutilation and superstitious sacrifices from
+the cunning, fear-haunted, ape-dog phase of human development.
+But
+it did mean this. And every one who apprehended as much was
+called by that very apprehension to the service of God's kingdom.
+To live and serve God's kingdom on earth, to help to bring it
+about, to propagate the idea of it, to establish the method of
+it, to incorporate all that one made and all that one did into
+its growing reality, was the only possible life that could be
+lived, once that God was known.
+
+He sat with his hands gripping his knees, as if he were holding
+on to his idea. "And now for my part," he whispered, brows knit,
+"now for my part."
+
+Ever since he had given his confirmation addresses he had been
+clear that his task, or at least a considerable portion of his
+task, was to tell of this faith in God and of this conception of
+service in his kingdom as the form and rule of human life and
+human society. But up to now he had been floundering hopelessly
+in his search for a method and means of telling. That, he saw,
+still needed to be thought out. For example, one cannot run
+through the world crying, "The Kingdom of God is at hand." Men's
+minds were still so filled with old theological ideas that for
+the most part they would understand by that only a fantasy of
+some great coming of angels and fiery chariots and judgments, and
+hardly a soul but would doubt one's sanity and turn scornfully
+away. But one must proclaim God not to confuse but to convince
+men's minds. It was that and the habit of his priestly calling
+that had disposed him towards a pulpit. There he could reason and
+explain. The decorative genius of Lady Sunderbund had turned that
+intention into a vast iridescent absurdity.
+
+This sense he had of thinking openly in the sight of God,
+enabled him to see the adventure of Lady Sunderbund without
+illusion and without shame. He saw himself at once honest and
+disingenuous, divided between two aims. He had no doubt now of
+the path he had to pursue. A stronger man of permanently clear
+aims might possibly turn Lady Sunderbund into a useful
+opportunity, oblige her to provide the rostrum he needed; but for
+himself, he knew he had neither the needed strength nor
+clearness; she would smother him in decoration, overcome him by
+her picturesque persistence. It might be ridiculous to run away
+from her, but it was necessary. And he was equally clear now that
+for him there must be no idea of any pulpit, of any sustained
+mission. He was a man of intellectual moods; only at times, he
+realized, had he the inspiration of truth; upon such uncertain
+snatches and glimpses he must live; to make his life a ministry
+would be to face phases when he would simply be "carrying on,"
+with his mind blank and his faith asleep.
+
+His thought spread out from this perennial decision to more
+general things again. Had God any need of organized priests at
+all? Wasn't that just what had been the matter with religion for
+the last three thousand years?
+
+His vision and his sense of access to God had given a new
+courage to his mind; in these moods of enlightenment he could see
+the world as a comprehensible ball, he could see history as an
+understandable drama. He had always been on the verge of
+realizing before, he realized now, the two entirely different and
+antagonistic strands that interweave in the twisted rope of
+contemporary religion; the old strand of the priest, the
+fetishistic element of the blood sacrifice and the obscene rite,
+the element of ritual and tradition, of the cult, the caste, the
+consecrated tribe; and interwoven with this so closely as to be
+scarcely separable in any existing religion was the new strand,
+the religion of the prophets, the unidolatrous universal worship
+of the one true God. Priest religion is the antithesis to prophet
+religion. He saw that the founders of all the great existing
+religions of the world had been like himself--only that he was
+a weak and commonplace man with no creative force, and they had
+been great men of enormous initiative--men reaching out, and
+never with a complete definition, from the old kind of religion
+to the new. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus, whom the priests killed
+when Pilate would have spared him, Mohammed, Buddha, had this
+much in common that they had sought to lead men from temple
+worship, idol worship, from rites and ceremonies and the rule of
+priests, from anniversaryism and sacramentalism, into a direct
+and simple relation to the simplicity of God. Religious progress
+had always been liberation and simplification. But none of these
+efforts had got altogether clear. The organizing temper in men,
+the disposition to dogmatic theorizing, the distrust of the
+discretion of the young by the wisdom of age, the fear of
+indiscipline which is so just in warfare and so foolish in
+education, the tremendous power of the propitiatory tradition,
+had always caught and crippled every new gospel before it had run
+a score of years. Jesus for example gave man neither a theology
+nor a church organization; His sacrament was an innocent feast of
+memorial; but the fearful, limited, imitative men he left to
+carry on his work speedily restored all these three abominations
+of the antiquated religion, theology, priest, and sacrifice.
+Jesus indeed, caught into identification with the ancient victim
+of the harvest sacrifice and turned from a plain teacher into a
+horrible blood bath and a mock cannibal meal, was surely the
+supreme feat of the ironies of chance....
+
+"It is curious how I drift back to Jesus," said Scrope. "I have
+never seen how much truth and good there was in his teaching
+until I broke away from Christianity and began to see him plain.
+If I go on as I am going, I shall end a Nazarene...."
+
+He thought on. He had a feeling of temerity, but then it seemed
+as if God within him bade him be of good courage.
+
+Already in a glow of inspiration he had said practically as
+much as he was now thinking in his confirmation address, but now
+he realized completely what it was he had then said. There could
+be no priests, no specialized ministers of the one true God,
+because every man to the utmost measure of his capacity was bound
+to be God's priest and minister. Many things one may leave to
+specialists: surgery, detailed administration, chemistry, for
+example; but it is for every man to think his own philosophy and
+think out his own religion. One man may tell another, but no man
+may take charge of another. A man may avail himself of
+electrician or gardener or what not, but he must stand directly
+before God; he may suffer neither priest nor king. These other
+things are incidental, but God, the kingdom of God, is what he is
+for.
+
+"Good," he said, checking his reasoning. "So I must bear
+witness to God--but neither as priest nor pastor. I must write
+and talk about him as I can. No reason why I should not live by
+such writing and talking if it does not hamper my message to do
+so. But there must be no high place, no ordered congregation. I
+begin to see my way....
+
+The evening was growing dark and chill about him now, the sky
+was barred with deep bluish purple bands drawn across a chilly
+brightness that had already forgotten the sun, the trees were
+black and dim, but his understanding of his place and duty was
+growing very definite.
+
+"And this duty to bear witness to God's kingdom and serve it is
+so plain that I must not deflect my witness even by a little,
+though to do so means comfort and security for my wife and
+children. God comes first...."
+
+"They must not come between God and me...."
+
+"But there is more in it than that."
+
+He had come round at last through the long clearing-up of his
+mind, to his fundamental problem again. He sat darkly reluctant.
+
+"I must not play priest or providence to them," he admitted at
+last. "I must not even stand between God and them."
+
+He saw now what he had been doing; it had been the flaw in his
+faith that he would not trust his family to God. And he saw too
+that this distrust has been the flaw in the faith of all
+religious systems hitherto....
+
+(13)
+
+
+In this strange voyage of the spirit which was now drawing to
+its end, in which Scrope had travelled from the confused,
+unanalyzed formulas and assumptions and implications of his
+rectory upbringing to his present stark and simple realization of
+God, he had at times made some remarkable self-identifications.
+He was naturally much given to analogy; every train of thought in
+his mind set up induced parallel currents. He had likened himself
+to the Anglican church, to the whole Christian body, as, for
+example, in his imagined second conversation with the angel of
+God. But now he found himself associating himself with a still
+more far-reaching section of mankind. This excess of solicitude
+was traceable perhaps in nearly every one in all the past of
+mankind who had ever had the vision of God. An excessive
+solicitude to shield those others from one's own trials and
+hardships, to preserve the exact quality of the revelation, for
+example, had been the fruitful cause of crippling errors,
+spiritual tyrannies, dogmatisms, dissensions, and futilities.
+"Suffer little children to come unto me"; the text came into his
+head with an effect of contribution. The parent in us all flares
+out at the thought of the younger and weaker minds; we hide
+difficulties, seek to spare them from the fires that temper the
+spirit, the sharp edge of the truth that shapes the soul.
+Christian is always trying to have a carriage sent back from the
+Celestial City for his family. Why, we ask, should they flounder
+dangerously in the morasses that we escaped, or wander in the
+forest in which we lost ourselves? Catch these souls young,
+therefore, save them before they know they exist, kidnap them to
+heaven; vaccinate them with a catechism they may never
+understand, lull them into comfort and routine. Instinct plays us
+false here as it plays the savage mother false when she snatches
+her fevered child from the doctor's hands. The last act of faith
+is to trust those we love to God....
+
+Hitherto he had seen the great nets of theological
+overstatement and dogma that kept mankind from God as if they
+were the work of purely evil things in man, of pride, of
+self-assertion, of a desire to possess and dominate the minds and
+souls of others. It was only now that he saw how large a share in
+the obstruction of God's Kingdom had been played by the love of
+the elder and the parent, by the carefulness, the fussy care, of
+good men and women. He had wandered in wildernesses of unbelief,
+in dangerous places of doubt and questioning, but he had left his
+wife and children safe and secure in the self-satisfaction of
+orthodoxy. To none of them except to Eleanor had he ever talked
+with any freedom of his new apprehensions of religious reality.
+And that had been at Eleanor's initiative. There was, he saw now,
+something of insolence and something of treachery in this
+concealment. His ruling disposition throughout the crisis had
+been to force comfort and worldly well-being upon all those
+dependants even at the price of his own spiritual integrity. In
+no way had he consulted them upon the bargain.... While we have
+pottered, each for the little good of his own family, each for
+the lessons and clothes and leisure of his own children,
+assenting to this injustice, conforming to that dishonest custom,
+being myopically benevolent and fundamentally treacherous, our
+accumulated folly has achieved this catastrophe. It is not so
+much human wickedness as human weakness that has permitted the
+youth of the world to go through this hell of blood and mud and
+fire. The way to the kingdom of God is the only way to the true
+safety, the true wellbeing of the children of men....
+
+It wasn't fair to them. But now he saw how unfair it was to
+them in a light that has only shone plainly upon European life
+since the great interlude of the armed peace came to an end in
+August, 1914. Until that time it had been the fashion to ignore
+death and evade poverty and necessity for the young. We can
+shield our young no longer, death has broken through our
+precautions and tender evasions--and his eyes went eastward
+into the twilight that had swallowed up his daughter and her
+lover.
+
+The tumbled darkling sky, monstrous masses of frowning blue,
+with icy gaps of cold light, was like the great confusions of the
+war. All our youth has had to go into that terrible and
+destructive chaos--because of the kings and churches and
+nationalities sturdier-souled men would have set aside.
+
+Everything was sharp and clear in his mind now. Eleanor after
+all had brought him his solution.
+
+He sat quite still for a little while, and then stood up and
+turned northward towards Notting Hill.
+
+The keepers were closing Kensington Gardens, and he would have
+to skirt the Park to Victoria Gate and go home by the Bayswater
+Road....
+
+(14)
+
+
+As he walked he rearranged in his mind this long-overdue
+apology for his faith that he was presently to make to his
+family. There was no one to interrupt him and nothing to
+embarrass him, and so he was able to set out everything very
+clearly and convincingly. There was perhaps a disposition to
+digress into rather voluminous subordinate explanations, on such
+themes, for instance, as sacramentalism, whereon he found himself
+summarizing Frazer's Golden Bough, which the Chasters'
+controversy had first obliged him to read, and upon the
+irrelevance of the question of immortality to the process of
+salvation. But the reality of his eclaircissement was very
+different from anything he prepared in these anticipations.
+
+Tea had been finished and put away, and the family was disposed
+about the dining-room engaged in various evening occupations;
+Phoebe sat at the table working at some mathematical problem,
+Clementina was reading with her chin on her fist and a frown on
+her brow; Lady Ella, Miriam and Daphne were busy making soft
+washing cloths for the wounded; Lady Ella had brought home the
+demand for them from the Red Cross centre in Burlington House.
+The family was all downstairs in the dining-room because the
+evening was chilly, and there were no fires upstairs yet in the
+drawing-room. He came into the room and exchanged greetings with
+Lady Ella. Then he stood for a time surveying his children.
+Phoebe, he noted, was a little flushed; she put passion into her
+work; on the whole she was more like Eleanor than any other of
+them. Miriam knitted with a steady skill. Clementina's face too
+expressed a tussle. He took up one of the rough-knit
+washing-cloths upon the side-table, and asked how many could be
+made in an hour. Then he asked some idle obvious question about
+the fire upstairs. Clementina made an involuntary movement; he
+was disturbing her. He hovered for a moment longer. He wanted to
+catch his wife's eye and speak to her first. She looked up, but
+before he could convey his wish for a private conference with
+her, she smiled at him and then bent over her work again.
+
+He went into the back study and lit his gas fire. Hitherto he
+had always made a considerable explosion when he did so, but this
+time by taking thought and lighting his match before he turned on
+the gas he did it with only a gentle thud. Then he lit his
+reading-lamp and pulled down the blind--pausing for a time to
+look at the lit dressmaker's opposite. Then he sat down
+thoughtfully before the fire. Presently Ella would come in and he
+would talk to her. He waited a long time, thinking only weakly
+and inconsecutively, and then he became restless. Should he call
+her?
+
+But he wanted their talk to begin in a natural-seeming way. He
+did not want the portentousness of "wanting to speak" to her and
+calling her out to him. He got up at last and went back into the
+other room. Clementina had gone upstairs, and the book she had
+been reading was lying closed on the sideboard. He saw it was one
+of Chasters' books, he took it up, it was "The Core of Truth in
+Christianity," and he felt an irrational shock at the idea of
+Clementina reading it. In spite of his own immense changes of
+opinion he had still to revise his conception of the polemical
+Chasters as an evil influence in religion. He fidgeted past his
+wife to the mantel in search of an imaginary mislaid pencil.
+Clementina came down with some bandage linen she was cutting out.
+He hung over his wife in a way that he felt must convey his
+desire for a conversation. Then he picked up Chasters' book
+again. "Does any one want this?" he asked.
+
+"Not if I may have it again," consented Clementina.
+
+He took it back with him and began to read again those familiar
+controversial pages. He read for the best part of an hour with
+his knees drying until they smoked over the gas. What curious
+stuff it was! How it wrangled! Was Chasters a religious man? Why
+did he write these books? Had he really a passion for truth or
+only a Swift-like hatred of weakly-thinking people? None of this
+stuff in his books was really wrong, provided it was religious-
+spirited. Much of it had been indeed destructively illuminating
+to its reader. It let daylight through all sorts of walls.
+Indeed, the more one read the more vividly true its acid-bit
+lines became.... And yet, and yet, there was something hateful in
+the man's tone. Scrope held the book and thought. He had seen
+Chasters once or twice. Chasters had the sort of face, the sort
+of voice, the sort of bearing that made one think of his possibly
+saying upon occasion, rudely and rejoicing, "More fool you!"
+Nevertheless Scrope perceived now with an effort of discovery
+that it was from Chasters that he had taken all the leading ideas
+of the new faith that was in him. Here was the stuff of it. He
+had forgotten how much of it was here. During those months of
+worried study while the threat of a Chasters prosecution hung
+over him his mind had assimilated almost unknowingly every
+assimilable element of the Chasters doctrine; he had either
+assimilated and transmuted it by the alchemy of his own
+temperament, or he had reacted obviously and filled in Chasters'
+gaps and pauses. Chasters could beat a road to the Holy of
+Holies, and shy at entering it. But in spite of all the man's
+roughness, in spite of a curious flavour of baseness and malice
+about him, the spirit of truth had spoken through him. God has a
+use for harsh ministers. In one man God lights the heart, in
+another the reason becomes a consuming fire. God takes his own
+where he finds it. He does not limit himself to nice people. In
+these matters of evidence and argument, in his contempt for
+amiable, demoralizing compromise, Chasters served God as Scrope
+could never hope to serve him. Scrope's new faith had perhaps
+been altogether impossible if the Chasters controversy had not
+ploughed his mind.
+
+For a time Scrope dwelt upon this remarkable realization. Then
+as he turned over the pages his eyes rested on a passage of
+uncivil and ungenerous sarcasm. Against old Likeman of all
+people!...
+
+What did a girl like Clementina make of all this? How had she
+got the book? From Eleanor? The stuff had not hurt Eleanor.
+Eleanor had been able to take the good that Chasters taught, and
+reject the evil of his spirit....
+
+He thought of Eleanor, gallantly working out her own salvation.
+The world was moving fast to a phase of great freedom--for the
+young and the bold.... He liked that boy....
+
+His thoughts came back with a start to his wife. The evening
+was slipping by and he had momentous things to say to her. He
+went and just opened the door.
+
+"Ella!" he said.
+
+"Did you want me?"
+
+"Presently."
+
+She put a liberal interpretation upon that "presently," so that
+after what seemed to him a long interval he had to call again,
+"Ella!"
+
+"Just a minute," she answered.
+
+(15)
+
+
+Lady Ella was still, so to speak, a little in the other room
+when she came to him.
+
+"Shut that door, please," he said, and felt the request had
+just that flavour of portentousness he wished to avoid.
+
+"What is it? " she asked.
+
+"I wanted to talk to you--about some things. I've done
+something rather serious to-day. I've made an important
+decision."
+
+Her face became anxious. "What do you mean?" she asked.
+
+"You see," he said, leaning upon the mantelshelf and looking
+down at the gas flames, "I've never thought that we should all
+have to live in this crowded house for long."
+
+"All!" she interrupted in a voice that made him look up
+sharply. "You're not going away, Ted?"
+
+"Oh, no. But I hoped we should all be going away in a little
+time. It isn't so."
+
+"I never quite understood why you hoped that."
+
+"It was plain enough."
+
+"How? "
+
+"I thought I should have found something to do that would have
+enabled us to live in better style. I'd had a plan."
+
+"What plan?
+
+"It's fallen through."
+
+"But what plan was it?"
+
+"I thought I should be able to set up a sort of broad church
+chapel. I had a promise."
+
+Her voice was rich with indignation. "And she has betrayed
+you?"
+
+"No," he said, "I have betrayed her."
+
+Lady Ella's face showed them still at cross purposes. He looked
+down again and frowned. "I can't do that chapel business," he
+said. "I've had to let her down. I've got to let you all down.
+There's no help for it. It isn't the way. I can't have anything
+to do with Lady Sunderbund and her chapel."
+
+"But," Lady Ella was still perplexed.
+
+"It's too great a sacrifice."
+
+"Of us?"
+
+"No, of myself. I can't get into her pulpit and do as she wants
+and keep my conscience. It's been a horrible riddle for me. It
+means plunging into all this poverty for good. But I can't work
+with her, Ella. She's impossible."
+
+"You mean--you're going to break with Lady Sunderbund?"
+
+"I must."
+
+"Then, Teddy!"--she was a woman groping for flight amidst
+intolerable perplexities--"why did you ever leave the church?"
+
+"Because I have ceased to believe--"
+
+"But had it nothing to do with Lady Sunderbund?"
+
+He stared at her in astonishment.
+
+"If it means breaking with that woman," she said.
+
+"You mean," he said, beginning for the first time to comprehend
+her, "that you don't mind the poverty?"
+
+"Poverty!" she cried. "I cared for nothing but the disgrace."
+
+"Disgrace?"
+
+"Oh, never mind, Ted! If it isn't true, if I've been
+dreaming...."
+
+Instead of a woman stunned by a life sentence of poverty, he
+saw his wife rejoicing as if she had heard good news.
+
+Their minds were held for a minute by the sound of some one
+knocking at the house door; one of the girls opened the door,
+there was a brief hubbub in the passage and then they heard a cry
+of "Eleanor!" through the folding doors.
+
+"There's Eleanor," he said, realizing he had told his wife
+nothing of the encounter in Hyde Park.
+
+They heard Eleanor's clear voice: "Where's Mummy? Or Daddy?"
+and then: "Can't stay now, dears. Where's Mummy or Daddy?"
+
+"I ought to have told you," said Scrope quickly. "I met Eleanor
+in the Park. By accident. She's come up unexpectedly. To meet a
+boy going to the front. Quite a nice boy. Son of Riverton the
+doctor. The parting had made them understand one another. It's
+all right, Ella. It's a little irregular, but I'd stake my life
+on the boy. She's very lucky."
+
+Eleanor appeared through the folding doors. She came to
+business at once.
+
+"I promised you I'd come back to supper here, Daddy," she said.
+"But I don't want to have supper here. I want to stay out late."
+
+She saw her mother look perplexed. "Hasn't Daddy told you?"
+
+"But where is young Riverton?"
+
+"He's outside."
+
+Eleanor became aware of a broad chink in the folding doors that
+was making the dining-room an auditorium for their dialogue. She
+shut them deftly.
+
+"I have told Mummy," Scrope explained. "Bring him in to supper.
+We ought to see him."
+
+Eleanor hesitated. She indicated her sisters beyond the folding
+doors. "They'll all be watching us, Mummy," she said. "We'd be
+uncomfortable. And besides
+
+"But you can't go out and dine with him alone!"
+
+"Oh, Mummy! It's our only chance."
+
+"Customs are changing," said Scrope.
+
+"But can they?" asked Lady Ella.
+
+"I don't see why not."
+
+The mother was still doubtful, but she was in no mood to cross
+her husband that night. "It's an exceptional occasion," said
+Scrope, and Eleanor knew her point was won. She became radiant.
+"I can be late?"
+
+Scrope handed her his latch-key without a word.
+
+"You dear kind things," she said, and went to the door. Then
+turned and came back and kissed her father. Then she kissed her
+mother. "It is so kind of you," she said, and was gone. They
+listened to her passage through a storm of questions in the
+dining-room.
+
+"Three months ago that would have shocked me," said Lady Ella.
+
+"You haven't seen the boy," said Scrope.
+
+"But the appearances!"
+
+"Aren't we rather breaking with appearances?" he said.
+
+"And he goes to-morrow--perhaps to get killed," he added. "A
+lad like a schoolboy. A young thing. Because of the political
+foolery that we priests and teachers have suffered in the place
+of the Kingdom of God, because we have allowed the religion of
+Europe to become a lie; because no man spoke the word of God. You
+see--when I see that--see those two, those children of one-and-
+twenty, wrenched by tragedy, beginning with a parting.... It's
+like a knife slashing at all our appearances and discretions....
+Think of our lovemaking...."
+
+The front door banged.
+
+He had some idea of resuming their talk. But his was a
+scattered mind now.
+
+"It's a quarter to eight," he said as if in explanation.
+
+"I must see to the supper," said Lady Ella.
+
+(16)
+
+
+There was an air of tension at supper as though the whole
+family felt that momentous words impended. But Phoebe had emerged
+victorious from her mathematical struggle, and she seemed to eat
+with better appetite than she had shown for some time. It was a
+cold meat supper; Lady Ella had found it impossible to keep up
+the regular practice of a cooked dinner in the evening, and now
+it was only on Thursdays that the Scropes, to preserve their
+social tradition, dressed and dined; the rest of the week they
+supped. Lady Ella never talked very much at supper; this evening
+was no exception. Clementina talked of London University and
+Bedford College; she had been making enquiries; Daphne described
+some of the mistresses at her new school. The feeling that
+something was expected had got upon Scrope's nerves. He talked a
+little in a flat and obvious way, and lapsed into thoughtful
+silences. While supper was being cleared away he went back into
+his study.
+
+Thence he returned to the dining-room hearthrug as his family
+resumed their various occupations.
+
+He tried to speak in a casual conversational tone.
+
+"I want to tell you all," he said, "of something that has
+happened to-day."
+
+He waited. Phoebe had begun to figure at a fresh sheet of
+computations. Miriam bent her head closer over her work, as
+though she winced at what was coming. Daphne and Clementina
+looked at one another. Their eyes said "Eleanor!" But he was too
+full of his own intention to read that glance. Only his wife
+regarded him attentively.
+
+"It concerns you all," he said.
+
+He looked at Phoebe. He saw Lady Ella's hand go out and touch
+the girl's hand gently to make her desist. Phoebe obeyed, with a
+little sigh.
+
+"I want to tell you that to-day I refused an income that would
+certainly have exceeded fifteen hundred pounds a year."
+
+Clementina looked up now. This was not what she expected. Her
+expression conveyed protesting enquiry.
+
+"I want you all to understand why I did that and why we are in
+the position we are in, and what lies before us. I want you to
+know what has been going on in my mind."
+
+He looked down at the hearthrug, and tried to throw off a
+memory of his Princhester classes for young women, that oppressed
+him. His manner he forced to a more familiar note. He stuck his
+hands into his trouser pockets.
+
+"You know, my dears, I had to give up the church. I just simply
+didn't believe any more in orthodox Church teaching. And I feel
+I've never explained that properly to you. Not at all clearly. I
+want to explain that now. It's a queer thing, I know, for me to
+say to you, but I want you to understand that I am a religious
+man. I believe that God matters more than wealth or comfort or
+position or the respect of men, that he also matters more than
+your comfort and prosperity. God knows I have cared for your
+comfort and prosperity. I don't want you to think that in all
+these changes we have been through lately, I haven't been aware
+of all the discomfort into which you have come--the relative
+discomfort. Compared with Princhester this is dark and crowded
+and poverty-stricken. I have never felt crowded before, but in
+this house I know you are horribly crowded. It is a house that
+seems almost contrived for small discomforts. This narrow passage
+outside; the incessant going up and down stairs. And there are
+other things. There is the blankness of our London Sundays. What
+is the good of pretending? They are desolating. There's the
+impossibility too of getting good servants to come into our
+dug-out kitchen. I'm not blind to all these sordid consequences.
+But all the same, God has to be served first. I had to come to
+this. I felt I could not serve God any longer as a bishop in the
+established church, because I did not believe that the
+established church was serving God. I struggled against that
+conviction--and I struggled against it largely for your sakes.
+But I had to obey my conviction.... I haven't talked to you about
+these things as much as I should have done, but partly at least
+that is due to the fact that my own mind has been changing and
+reconsidering, going forward and going back, and in that fluid
+state it didn't seem fair to tell you things that I might
+presently find mistaken. But now I begin to feel that I have
+really thought out things, and that they are definite enough to
+tell you....
+
+He paused and resumed. "A number of things have helped to
+change the opinions in which I grew up and in which you have
+grown up. There were worries at Princhester; I didn't let you
+know much about them, but there were. There was something harsh
+and cruel in that atmosphere. I saw for the first time--it's a
+lesson I'm still only learning--how harsh and greedy rich
+people and employing people are to poor people and working
+people, and how ineffective our church was to make things better.
+That struck me. There were religious disputes in the diocese too,
+and they shook me. I thought my faith was built on a rock, and I
+found it was built on sand. It was slipping and sliding long
+before the war. But the war brought it down. Before the war such
+a lot of things in England and Europe seemed like a comedy or a
+farce, a bad joke that one tolerated. One tried half consciously,
+half avoiding the knowledge of what one was doing, to keep one's
+own little circle and life civilized. The war shook all those
+ideas of isolation, all that sort of evasion, down. The world is
+the rightful kingdom of God; we had left its affairs to kings and
+emperors and suchlike impostors, to priests and profit-seekers
+and greedy men. We were genteel condoners. The war has ended
+that. It thrusts into all our lives. It brings death so close--
+A fortnight ago twenty-seven people were killed and injured
+within a mile of this by Zeppelin bombs.... Every one loses some
+one.... Because through all that time men like myself were going
+through our priestly mummeries, abasing ourselves to kings and
+politicians, when we ought to have been crying out: 'No! No!
+There is no righteousness in the world, there is no right
+government, except it be the kingdom of God.'"
+
+He paused and looked at them. They were all listening to him
+now. But he was still haunted by a dread of preaching in his own
+family. He dropped to the conversational note again.
+
+"You see what I had in mind. I saw I must come out of this, and
+preach the kingdom of God. That was my idea. I don't want to
+force it upon you, but I want you to understand why I acted as I
+did. But let me come to the particular thing that has happened
+to-day. I did not think when I made my final decision to leave
+the church that it meant such poverty as this we are living in--
+permanently. That is what I want to make clear to you. I thought
+there would be a temporary dip into dinginess, but that was all.
+There was a plan; at the time it seemed a right and reasonable
+plan; for setting up a chapel in London, a very plain and simple
+undenominational chapel, for the simple preaching of the world
+kingdom of God. There was some one who seemed prepared to meet
+all the immediate demands for such a chapel."
+
+"Was it Lady Sunderbund?" asked Clementina.
+
+Scrope was pulled up abruptly. "Yes," he said. "It seemed at
+first a quite hopeful project."
+
+"We'd have hated that," said Clementina, with a glance as if
+for assent, at her mother. "We should all have hated that."
+
+"Anyhow it has fallen through."
+
+"We don't mind that," said Clementina, and Daphne echoed her
+words.
+
+"I don't see that there is any necessity to import this note of
+--hostility to Lady Sunderbund into this matter." He addressed
+himself rather more definitely to Lady Ella. "She's a woman of a
+very extraordinary character, highly emotional, energetic,
+generous to an extraordinary extent...."
+
+Daphne made a little noise like a comment.
+
+A faint acerbity in her father's voice responded.
+
+"Anyhow you make a mistake if you think that the personality of
+Lady Sunderbund has very much to do with this thing now. Her
+quality may have brought out certain aspects of the situation
+rather more sharply than they might have been brought out under
+other circumstances, but if this chapel enterprise had been
+suggested by quite a different sort of person, by a man, or by a
+committee, in the end I think I should have come to the same
+conclusion. Leave Lady Sunderbund out. Any chapel was impossible.
+It is just this specialization that has been the trouble with
+religion. It is just this tendency to make it the business of a
+special sort of man, in a special sort of building, on a special
+day--Every man, every building, every day belongs equally to God.
+That is my conviction. I think that the only possible existing
+sort of religions meeting is something after the fashion of the
+Quaker meeting. In that there is no professional religious man at
+all; not a trace of the sacrifices to the ancient gods.... And no
+room for a professional religions man...." He felt his argument
+did a little escape him. He snatched, "That is what I want to
+make clear to you. God is not a speciality; he is a universal
+interest."
+
+He stopped. Both Daphne and Clementina seemed disposed to say
+something and did not say anything.
+
+Miriam was the first to speak. "Daddy," she said, "I know I'm
+stupid. But are we still Christians?"
+
+"I want you to think for yourselves."
+
+"But I mean," said Miriam, "are we--something like Quakers--
+a sort of very broad Christians?"
+
+"You are what you choose to be. If you want to keep in the
+church, then you must keep in the church. If you feel that the
+Christian doctrine is alive, then it is alive so far as you are
+concerned."
+
+"But the creeds?" asked Clementina.
+
+He shook his head. "So far as Christianity is defined by its
+creeds, I am not a Christian. If we are going to call any sort of
+religious feeling that has a respect for Jesus, Christianity,
+then no doubt I am a Christian. But so was Mohammed at that rate.
+Let me tell you what I believe. I believe in God, I believe in
+the immediate presence of God in every human life, I believe that
+our lives have to serve the Kingdom of God...."
+
+"That practically is what Mr. Chasters calls 'The Core of Truth
+in Chrlstianity.'"
+
+"You have been reading him?"
+
+"Eleanor lent me the book. But Mr. Chasters keeps his living."
+
+"I am not Chasters," said Scrope stiffly, and then relenting:
+"What he does may be right for him. But I could not do as he
+does."
+
+Lady Ella had said no word for some time.
+
+"I would be ashamed," she said quietly, "if you had not done as
+you have done. I don't mind--The girls don't mind--all this....
+Not when we understand--as we do now.
+
+That was the limit of her eloquence.
+
+"Not now that we understand, Daddy," said Clementina, and a
+faint flavour of Lady Sunderbund seemed to pass and vanish.
+
+There was a queer little pause. He stood rather distressed and
+perplexed, because the talk had not gone quite as he had intended
+it to go. It had deteriorated towards personal issues. Phoebe
+broke the awkwardness by jumping up and coming to her father.
+"Dear Daddy," she said, and kissed him.
+
+"We didn't understand properly," said Clementina, in the tone
+of one who explains away much--that had never been spoken....
+
+"Daddy," said Miriam with an inspiration, "may I play something
+to you presently?"
+
+"But the fire!" interjected Lady Ella, disposing of that idea.
+
+"I want you to know, all of you, the faith I have," he said.
+
+Daphne had remained seated at the table.
+
+"Are we never to go to church again?" she asked, as if at a
+loss.
+
+(17)
+
+
+Scrope went back into his little study. He felt shy and awkward
+with his daughters now. He felt it would be difficult to get back
+to usualness with them. To-night it would be impossible.
+To-morrow he must come down to breakfast as though their talk had
+never occurred.... In his rehearsal of this deliverance during
+his walk home he had spoken much more plainly of his sense of the
+coming of God to rule the world and end the long age of the
+warring nations and competing traders, and he had intended to
+speak with equal plainness of the passionate subordination of the
+individual life to this great common purpose of God and man, an
+aspect he had scarcely mentioned at all. But in that little room,
+in the presence of those dear familiar people, those great
+horizons of life had vanished. The room with its folding doors
+had fixed the scale. The wallpaper had smothered the Kingdom of
+God; he had been, he felt, domestic; it had been an after-supper
+talk. He had been put out, too, by the mention of Lady Sunderbund
+and the case of Chasters....
+
+In his study he consoled himself for this diminution of his
+intention. It had taken him five years, he reflected, to get to
+his present real sense of God's presence and to his personal
+subordination to God's purpose. It had been a little absurd, he
+perceived, to expect these girls to leap at once to a complete
+understanding of the halting hints, the allusive indications of
+the thoughts that now possessed his soul. He tried like some
+maiden speaker to recall exactly what it was he had said and what
+it was he had forgotten to say.... This was merely a beginning,
+merely a beginning.
+
+After the girls had gone to bed, Lady Ella came to him and she
+was glowing and tender; she was in love again as she had not been
+since the shadow had first fallen between them. "I was so glad
+you spoke to them," she said. "They had been puzzled. But they
+are dear loyal girls."
+
+He tried to tell her rather more plainly what he felt about the
+whole question of religion in their lives, but eloquence had
+departed from him.
+
+"You see, Ella, life cannot get out of tragedy--and sordid
+tragedy--until we bring about the Kingdom of God. It's no
+unreality that has made me come out of the church."
+
+"No, dear. No," she said soothingly and reassuringly. "With all
+these mere boys going to the most dreadful deaths in the
+trenches, with death, hardship and separation running amok in the
+world--"
+
+"One has to do something," she agreed.
+
+"I know, dear," he said, "that all this year of doubt and
+change has been a dreadful year for you."
+
+"It was stupid of me," she said, "but I have been so unhappy.
+It's over now--but I was wretched. And there was nothing I could
+say.... I prayed.... It isn't the poverty I feared ever, but the
+disgrace. Now--I'm happy. I'm happy again.
+
+"But how far do you come with me?"
+
+"I'm with you."
+
+"But," he said, "you are still a churchwoman?"
+
+"I don't know," she said. "I don't mind."
+
+He stared at her.
+
+"But I thought always that was what hurt you most, my breach
+with the church."
+
+"Things are so different now," she said.
+
+Her heart dissolved within her into tender possessiveness.
+There came flooding into her mind the old phrases of an ancient
+story: "Whither thou goest I will go... thy people shall be my
+people and thy God my God.... The Lord do so to me and more also
+if aught but death part thee and me."
+
+Just those words would Lady Ella have said to her husband now,
+but she was capable of no such rhetoric.
+
+"Whither thou goest," she whispered almost inaudibly, and she
+could get no further. "My dear," she said.
+
+(18)
+
+
+At two o'clock the next morning Scrope was still up. He was
+sitting over the snoring gas fire in his study. He did not want
+to go to bed. His mind was too excited, he knew, for any hope of
+sleep. In the last twelve hours, since he had gone out across the
+park to his momentous talk with Lady Sunderbund, it seemed to him
+that his life had passed through its cardinal crisis and come to
+its crown and decision. The spiritual voyage that had begun five
+years ago amidst a stormy succession of theological nightmares
+had reached harbour at last. He was established now in the sure
+conviction of God's reality, and of his advent to unify the lives
+of men and to save mankind. Some unobserved process in his mind
+had perfected that conviction, behind the cloudy veil of his
+vacillations and moods. Surely that work was finished now, and
+the day's experience had drawn the veil and discovered God
+established for ever.
+
+He contrasted this simple and overruling knowledge of God as
+the supreme fact in a practical world with that vague and
+ineffective subject for sentiment who had been the "God" of his
+Anglican days. Some theologian once spoke of God as "the friend
+behind phenomena"; that Anglican deity had been rather a vague
+flummery behind court and society, wealth, "respectability," and
+the comfortable life. And even while he had lived in lipservice
+to that complaisant compromise, this true God had been here, this
+God he now certainly professed, waiting for his allegiance,
+waiting to take up the kingship of this distraught and
+bloodstained earth. The finding of God is but the stripping of
+bandages from the eyes. Seek and ye shall find....
+
+He whispered four words very softly: "The Kingdom of God!"
+
+He was quite sure he had that now, quite sure.
+
+The Kingdom of God!
+
+That now was the form into which all his life must fall. He
+recalled his vision of the silver sphere and of ten thousand
+diverse minds about the world all making their ways to the same
+one conclusion. Here at last was a king and emperor for mankind
+for whom one need have neither contempt nor resentment; here was
+an aim for which man might forge the steel and wield the scalpel,
+write and paint and till and teach. Upon this conception he must
+model all his life. Upon this basis he must found friendships and
+co-operations. All the great religions, Christianity, Islam, in
+the days of their power and honesty, had proclaimed the advent of
+this kingdom of God. It had been their common inspiration. A
+religion surrenders when it abandons the promise of its
+Millennium. He had recovered that ancient and immortal hope. All
+men must achieve it, and with their achievement the rule of God
+begins. He muttered his faith. It made it more definite to put it
+into words and utter it. "It comes. It surely comes. To-morrow I
+begin. I will do no work that goes not Godward. Always now it
+shall be the truth as near as I can put it. Always now it shall
+be the service of the commonweal as well as I can do it. I will
+live for the ending of all false kingship and priestcraft, for
+the eternal growth of the spirit of man...."
+
+He was, he knew clearly, only one common soldier in a great
+army that was finding its way to enlistment round and about the
+earth. He was not alone. While the kings of this world fought for
+dominion these others gathered and found themselves and one
+another, these others of the faith that grows plain, these men
+who have resolved to end the bloodstained chronicles of the
+Dynasts and the miseries of a world that trades in life, for
+ever. They were many men, speaking divers tongues. He was but one
+who obeyed the worldwide impulse. He could smile at the artless
+vanity that had blinded him to the import of his earlier visions,
+that had made him imagine himself a sole discoverer, a new
+Prophet, that had brought him so near to founding a new sect.
+Every soldier in the new host was a recruiting sergeant according
+to his opportunity.... And none was leader. Only God was
+leader....
+
+"The achievement of the Kingdom of God;" this was his calling.
+Henceforth this was his business in life....
+
+For a time he indulged in vague dreams of that kingdom of God
+on earth of which he would be one of the makers; it was a dream
+of a shadowy splendour of cities, of great scientific
+achievements, of a universal beauty, of beautiful people living
+in the light of God, of a splendid adventure, thrusting out at
+last among the stars. But neither his natural bent nor his mental
+training inclined him to mechanical or administrative
+explicitness. Much more was his dream a vision of men inwardly
+ennobled and united in spirit. He saw history growing reasonable
+and life visibly noble as mankind realized the divine aim. All
+the outward peace and order, the joy of physical existence finely
+conceived, the mounting power and widening aim were but the
+expression and verification of the growth of God within. Then we
+would bear children for finer ends than the blood and mud of
+battlefields. Life would tower up like a great flame. By faith we
+reached forward to that. The vision grew more splendid as it grew
+more metaphorical. And the price one paid for that; one gave sham
+dignities, false honour, a Levitical righteousness, immediate
+peace, one bartered kings and churches for God.... He looked at
+the mean, poverty-struck room, he marked the dinginess and
+tawdriness of its detail and all the sordid evidences of
+ungracious bargaining and grudging service in its appointments.
+For all his life now he would have to live in such rooms. He who
+had been one of the lucky ones.... Well, men were living in
+dug-outs and dying gaily in muddy trenches, they had given limbs
+and lives, eyes and the joy of movement, prosperity and pride,
+for a smaller cause and a feebler assurance than this that he had
+found....
+
+(19)
+
+
+Presently his thoughts were brought back to his family by the
+sounds of Eleanor's return. He heard her key in the outer door;
+he heard her move about in the hall and then slip lightly up to
+bed. He did not go out to speak to her, and she did not note the
+light under his door.
+
+He would talk to her later when this discovery of her own
+emotions no longer dominated her mind. He recalled her departing
+figure and how she had walked, touching and looking up to her
+young mate, and he a little leaning to her....
+
+"God bless them and save them," he said....
+
+He thought of her sisters. They had said but little to his
+clumsy explanations. He thought of the years and experience that
+they must needs pass through before they could think the fulness
+of his present thoughts, and so he tempered his disappointment.
+They were a gallant group, he felt. He had to thank Ella and good
+fortune that so they were. There was Clementina with her odd
+quick combatant sharpness, a harder being than Eleanor, but
+nevertheless a finespirited and even more independent. There was
+Miriam, indefatigably kind. Phoebe too had a real passion of the
+intellect and Daphne an innate disposition to service. But it was
+strange how they had taken his proclamation of a conclusive
+breach with the church as though it was a command they must, at
+least outwardly, obey. He had expected them to be more deeply
+shocked; he had thought he would have to argue against objections
+and convert them to his views. Their acquiescence was strange.
+They were content he should think all this great issue out and
+give his results to them. And his wife, well as he knew her, had
+surprised him. He thought of her words: "Whither thou goest--"
+
+He was dissatisfied with this unconditional agreement. Why
+could not his wife meet God as he had met God? Why must Miriam
+put the fantastic question--as though it was not for her to
+decide: "Are we still Christians?" And pursuing this thought, why
+couldn't Lady Sunderbund set up in religion for herself without
+going about the world seeking for a priest and prophet. Were
+women Undines who must get their souls from mortal men? And who
+was it tempted men to set themselves up as priests? It was the
+wife, the disciple, the lover, who was the last, the most fatal
+pitfall on the way to God.
+
+He began to pray, still sitting as he prayed.
+
+"Oh God!" he prayed. "Thou who has shown thyself to me, let me
+never forget thee again. Save me from forgetfulness. And show
+thyself to those I love; show thyself to all mankind. Use me, O
+God, use me; but keep my soul alive. Save me from the presumption
+of the trusted servant; save me from the vanity of authority....
+
+"And let thy light shine upon all those who are so dear to
+me.... Save them from me. Take their dear loyalty...."
+
+He paused. A flushed, childishly miserable face that stared
+indignantly through glittering tears, rose before his eyes. He
+forgot that he had been addressing God.
+
+"How can I help you, you silly thing?" he said. "I would give
+my own soul to know that God had given his peace to you. I could
+not do as you wished. And I have hurt you!... You hurt
+yourself.... But all the time you would have hampered me and
+tempted me--and wasted yourself. It was impossible.... And yet
+you are so fine!"
+
+He was struck by another aspect.
+
+"Ella was happy--partly because Lady Sunderbund was hurt and
+left desolated...."
+
+"Both of them are still living upon nothings. Living for
+nothings. A phantom way of living...."
+
+He stared blankly at the humming blue gas jets amidst the
+incandescent asbestos for a space.
+
+"Make them understand," he pleaded, as though he spoke
+confidentially of some desirable and reasonable thing to a friend
+who sat beside him. "You see it is so hard for them until they
+understand. It is easy enough when one understands. Easy--" He
+reflected for some moments--" It is as if they could not exist -
+- except in relationship to other definite people. I want them
+to exist--as now I exist--in relationship to God. Knowing
+God...."
+
+But now he was talking to himself again.
+
+"So far as one can know God," he said presently.
+
+For a while he remained frowning at the fire. Then he bent
+forward, turned out the gas, arose with the air of a man who
+relinquishes a difficult task. "One is limited," he said. "All
+one's ideas must fall within one's limitations. Faith is a sort
+of tour de force. A feat of the imagination. For such things as
+we are. Naturally--naturally.... One perceives it clearly only
+in rare moments.... That alters nothing...."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Soul of a Bishop, by H. G. Wells
+
+
+
+
+
+Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:
+LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
+KIPPS
+MR. POLLY
+THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
+THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
+ANN VERONICA
+TONO BUNGAY
+MARRIAGE
+BEALBY
+THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
+THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
+THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
+
+The following fantastic and imaginative romances:
+THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
+THE TIME MACHINE
+THE WONDERFUL VISIT
+THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
+THE SEA LADY
+THE SLEEPER AWAKES
+THE FOOD OF THE GODS
+THE WAR IN THE AIR
+THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
+IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
+THE WORLD SET FREE
+
+And numerous Short Stories now collected in
+One Volume under the title of
+THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
+
+A Series of books upon Social, Religious and
+Political questions:
+ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
+MANKIND IN THE MAKING
+FIRST AND LAST THINGS (RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY)
+NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
+A MODERN UTOPIA
+THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
+AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
+WHAT IS COMING?
+WAR AND THE FUTURE
+GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
+
+And two little books about children's play, called:
+FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Soul of a Bishop, by H. G. Wells
+
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