The Soul of a Bishop...........................................................................................................................................1

H. G. Wells..............................................................................................................................................1

IT was a scene of bitter disputation. A hawknosed 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

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

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

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 symbolsome symbolalso? 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

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

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

"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

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

And presently a black sheep had got into the succession and was struggling violently with the crook about its

leg, a hawknosed black sheep full of reproof, with disordered hair and a pointing finger. A young man with

At which the other sheep took heart and, deserting the numbered succession, came and sat about the fire in a

big drawingroom 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

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 questionbegging question, was put quite suddenly, without

preparation or prelude, by surprise. "Why, Bishop, was the Spermaticos Logos identified with the Second and

It was indiscreet, it was silly, to turn upon the speaker and affect an air of disengagement and modernity and

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 dancerthough

she, it is true, did not say very mucha 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

tooManichaean dualism at some date after the time of St. John's Gospel. He maintained obstinately that that

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

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

The searching hand touched something. A waterbottle. The hand resumed its exploration. Here was

something metallic and smooth, a stem. Either above or below there must be a switch....

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 rightangled 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, cleanshaven, pale, with disordered brown hair and weary, paleblue 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 waterbottle and glass, a bunch of keys, a

congested pocket book, a goldbanded 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

chairback, 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

For a moment the tired gaze of the man in the bed rested upon these evidences of his episcopal dignity. Then

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

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

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 conscienceblanks; it

One might smoke up the chimney, he reflected. But he had no cigarettes! Perhaps if he were to slip

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 fingeran 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 Shopgirls' 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 valetbutler, out of the diningroom, had affected to

need a book from the bookcase 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 yewtree 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

His soul would not be more naked at the resurrection. The little boy had stared, realized the state of affairs

It seemed ages before the consciencestricken bishop could tear himself from the spot and walk back, with

And instead of the discourse he had prepared for the Shopgirls' 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

But the haunting thing in the bishop's memory was the face and gesture of the little boy. That grubby little

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 bedclothes off himself.

"I must go to BrightonPomfrey," he said. "And get a medical dispensation. If I do not smoke"

Then his voice sounded again in the darkness, speaking quietly, speaking with a note almost of satisfaction.

Fearful things came to him; things at once dreadfully blasphemous and entirely weakminded.

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

Then he perceived with surprise that he had not thought of praying. What should he say? To what could he

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 thatfor

protection against thathe was praying. It was by a great effort that at last he pronounced the words:

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

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

nervesheath or braincase 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 wellconnected 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

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 anda pleasant touch of the more secular

boywhich 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

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,

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, solvencyand compulsory Greek at the Little Goas 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

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 workingclass 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 Princhesterhe followed

Hood, the first bishop, as the reign of his Majesty King Edward the Peacemaker drew to its closeno

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

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 marketplace; 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 selfmade and inclined to nonconformity, the workingpeople 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 bluegreys to ashengreys, from smoke and soft smut to grime and

The bishop had been charmed by the historical associations of Princhester when first the see was put before

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....

"In London a bishop's a lord and a lark and nobody minds him," said Lord Gatling, "but Princhester is

Trouble began with a fearful row about the position of the bishop's palace. Hood had always evaded this

question, and a number of strongwilled selfmade 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

At first the magnates and influences seemed to be fighting only among themselves, and he was so illadvised

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

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

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 startingpoint for the subtle extravagance of The Snicker's

poisonous gift.... The thing came upon the bishop suddenly from the bookstall 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

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 sittingroom 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

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

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

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

socialismthe 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 steelyblue sky full of

colourless light filled a stiffnecked 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

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 paperweight 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 paperweight 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

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

And again: "They'll listen to youif 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

The bishop tried a few phrases. He thought there might be something in cooperation, in profitsharing, in

"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

"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 systemanyhow. I'm the

capitalist, and the capitalist has to go. I'm to be bundled out of my works, and somesome "he seemed to

be rejecting unsuitable words" confounded politician put in. Much good it would do them. But before that

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 newlymown 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

"We've got to mend things or end things," continued the big employer. "Nothing goes on for ever. Things

"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. Idealsexcellent. Butit 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."

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 somethingand 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,

It was probably the bright hard spring sunshine that emphasized the contrast between that dear England of

hedges and homes and the southwest 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

"Where are they going?" asked the bishop, leaning forward to look out of the window of the fly, and then:

And presently the road was under repair, and was being done at a great pace with a huge steamroller,

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

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 purpletrimmed 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

"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 bestread 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 workpeople, 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 wellintentioned 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

"There's not much of that in the Creeds," said a second labour leader who was a rationalist. "There's not much

The vicar spoke before his bishop, and indeed he had plenty of time to speak before his bishop. "Because you

"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.

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

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 tramlines 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

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."

The labour leader became impatient with the ritualistic controversy; he set his teacup 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

"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

The bishop had a bankrupt feeling. On the spur of the moment he could say no more than: "It offers its

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

He tried to think he was exercising selfcontrol, but indeed all his subconscious 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.

Was he to blame, was the church to blame, for its powerlessness in these social disputes? Could an abler man

He envied the cleverness of Cardinal Manning. Manning would have got right into the front of this affair. He

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,

signalboxes, huts, coalpits, electric standards, goods sheds, turntables, and enginehouses, that ends in a

bluish brickedup 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 beenif 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

He stood at the very end of the platform, with his gaitered legs wide apart and his hands folded behind him,

Should he do something very bold and striking? Should he invite both men and masters to the cathedral, and

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 stainedglass 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

Surely so one might call a halt to all these harsh conflicts. So one might lay hands afresh upon these stubborn

"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,

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

He discovered it when it was already in the station. He had to walk down the platform very quickly. He did

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

"I must have a wash," he said, though before he had thought of nothing but food. "I have had nothing to eat

Lady Ella considered. "There are cold things.... You shall have a tray in the study. Not in the diningroom.

Eleanor is there. I want to tell you something. But go upstairs first and wash your poor tired face."

"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

"You ought not to drink that Burgundy," she said. "I can see you are dogtired. 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

Lady Ella had come round to the marble fireplace. The mantelpiece was a handsome work by a Princhester

"She is in the diningroom now," she said, "having some dinner. She came in about a quarter past eight, half

"Her dress was tornin two places. Her wrist had been twisted and a little sprained."

Husband and wife stared at one another aghast. Neither of them said the horrid word that flamed between

"I didn't know she knew any of them. But it seems it is the second Walshingham girlPhoebe. It's

"She understands all sorts of things. She argues.... I am quite unable to argue with her."

"About all sorts of things. Things I didn't imagine she had heard of. I knew she had been reading books. But I

"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

grownup person. Thisthis escapade is just an accident. But things have gone further than that. She seems

to thinkthat she is not being educated properly here, that she ought to go to a College. As if we were

"She says we get all round her," said Lady Ella, and left the implications of that phrase to unfold.

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

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 thinkingabout such

things as she had been thinking about. She had ranged in the library, and displayed a disposition to read the

"But I don't understand," said the bishop. "Why is she discontented? What is there that she wants different?"

"She has got this idea that life here is secluded in some way," she expanded. "She used words like 'secluded'

"'Out there,' she said, 'things are alive. Real things are happening.' It is almost as if she did not fully

"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

"With elopements in itand 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."

"I wonder if college can be much worse than school.... She's eighteen? But I will talk to her...."

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

He went into the diningroom. 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 armchair 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.

"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 womenroughly. I was indignant."

A pause followed. If they had been in a lawcourt, her barrister would have said, "That is my case, my lord."

"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

freedommore freedom than most girls getbecause we think you will use it wisely. You knew enough

The girl looked into the fire and spoke very carefully. "I don't think that I oughtn't to know the things that are

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

The girl knitted her brows and seemed to be reading her answer out of the depths of the coals. She was on the

"I think that every one must do their thinkinghis thinking foroneself," she said awkwardly.

"I want to find out for myself what all this trouble about votes and things means."

"Aren't you being perhaps a little impatient, Eleanor? After allyou are barely eighteen.... We have given

Her silence admitted it. "But still," she said after a long pause, "there are other girls, younger than I am, in

"You've been awfully good to me," she said irrelevantly. "And of course this meeting was all pure accident."

"I would like to go to Newnham or Somervilleand work. I feelso horribly ignorant. Of all sorts of

He had gone rather far in the direction of the Woman Suffrage people; he had advocated equality of standard

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 worldnot 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

differentatmospheres. 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 made no answer. She moved her head very slightly so that he could not see her face, and remained sitting

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 printingpress he thrust a new power between church and disciple and father and child.... And I am

The girl stood up. She took her father's hands. "Dear, dear Daddy," she said, "I am so sorry to be a bother. I

"We must talkproperly," said the bishop, patting one hand, then discovering from her wincing face that it

"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

The papers got hold of Eleanor's share in the suffragette disturbance. The White Blackbird said things about

THE night after his conversation with Eleanor was the first night of the bishop's insomnia. It was the definite

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

But this intellectual insecurity extended into his physical sensations. It affected his feeling in his skin, as if it

And as he lay there, a weak phantom mentally and bodily, an endless succession and recurrence of anxieties

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

He saw her very vividly as he had seen her in the diningroom, 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 waswhat was her phrase?a kind of magic world, not

He groaned and turned over and repeated the words: "A kind of magic worldnot really real!"

The wind blew through the door she opened, and scattered everything in the room. And still she held the door

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 wasindeed

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!"

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 teaparty 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 clergyunder Jove.

There are situations that must be grippedgripped firmly. And without delay. In the middle ages there had

From these belated seizures of the day's lost opportunities the bishop passed to such a pessimistic estimate of

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;

This was not as things should be. He struggled to recover a proper attitude. But he remained enormously

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

Well, if the people will not come to the bishop the bishop must go out to the people. Should he go outside the

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 booksand

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

The bishop tried not to heed these sounds, but they were by their very nature insistent sounds. He lay

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

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

No, he did not love the birds. It was useless to pretend. Whatever one may say about other birds a cuckoo is a

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 whoopingcough, that, he thought, was the

sort of whoop it would have. But even if it had whoopingcough he could not pity it. He hung in its intervals

And then that blackbird reasserted itself. It had a rich boastful note; it seemed proud of its noisy reiteration of

simple selfassertion. 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

Once during his summer holidays in Florence he and Lady Ella had subscribed to an association for the

protection of songbirds. He recalled this now with a mild wonder. It seemed to him that perhaps after all it

was as well to let fruitgrowers and Italians deal with singingbirds in their own way. Perhaps after all they

He passed his hands over his face. The world after all is not made entirely for singingbirds; there is such a

thing as proportion. Singingbirds may become a luxury, an indulgence, an excess.

Perhaps there they worked for some collective musical effect, had some sort of conductor in the place of

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

It was only after he had passed four similar nights, with intervening days of lassitude and afternoon siestas,

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

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

"When in the night I sleepless lie, My soul with heavenly thoughts supply; Let no ill dreams disturb my rest,

Almost immediately after these there floated into his mind, as if it were a message, the dear familiar words:

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

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

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 twentyfour hours they were all simply neophytes, without individuality to break up their uniformity

of selfdevotion. 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

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

The bishop glanced through this bale of papersit had of course no index and no synopsis, and some of the

pages were not numberedhanded 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

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

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

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;

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

He repeated, "He giveth his Beloved sleep," but all the conviction had gone out of the words.

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

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 bareminded 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

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 BrightonPomfrey too upon the score of his general health, and BrightonPomfrey 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 workingclass 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 figleaves; he was an illiterate, openeyed,

hardvoiced, freckled, rationalminded 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

"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

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 trueand 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

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

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

From the bishop's point of view Chasters was one of nature's ignoblemen. He seemed to have subscribed to

the ThirtyNine 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 ultraProtestant 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,'

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

greentea 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 thatexceeding the instructions of

BrightonPomfreyhe 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

He astonished himself by the cunning and the hypocritical dignity he could display in procuring these drugs.

He arranged to have a teamaking 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.

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

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,

Presently the smoke and dust of battle hid the great distances again, but they could not altogether destroy the

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 onlike 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

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 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 wayexcept that the canonicals seemed superfluous. Who indeed looked to the church for

The bishop's mind went hunting for an answer to that indictment. And came back and came back to the image

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,

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

Instead it kept a long way from the fighting, tucked up its vestments, and was rolling its local tubs quite

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 examplewhich unhappily was not very widely followedby 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

The cheroots, it seemed, he could better spare, but a cigarette became his symbol for his lost steadiness and

The reader has already been told the lamentable incident of the stolen cigarette and the small boy, and how

The bishop rolled his tub, and is there any tubrolling in the world more busy and exacting than a bishop's?

He rolled in it spite of illhealth 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,

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

beforebut 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 openair services at the front seemed merely to accentuate the tubrolling. It was rolling

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

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 practicalminded working

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 overfamiliar. Everything latterly in his theology

and beliefs had become overfamiliar. It had all become mechanical and dead and unmeaning to his tired

Whippham came with a reminder of more tubrolling, and the bishop's speculations were broken off.

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 afterdinner 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 notebook 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

"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 weekend party, that made her hesitate for a minute or so before she framed a reply to the bishop's

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

watercolour 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

hatbonnet 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 hatbonnet 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 firstnights 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

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 scantybut 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

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

musichall 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, romanticlooking 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

But of course if the party mustn't annoy the bishop, the bishop must do his duty by the party. There must be

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

The trouble began in the drawingroom 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."

"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."

"The first thing I began to read again," said Mrs. Garstein Fellows, "I'm not saying it for your sake,

"I've heard that before," said Ridgeway Kelso, in that slightly explosive manner of his. "All sorts of people

"I was thinking of Bent. But anyhow there's been a great wave of seriousness, a sudden turning to religion

He turned sideways to face the bishop. "I think we should be coming ifif it wasn't for old entangled

The bishop returned his frank glance. "I'd like to know above all things," he said. "If Mrs. Garstein Fellow

"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

"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, andI'll confess it Gibbon. I find all my old

wonder come back. Why are we pinned toto the amount of creed we are pinned to? Why for instance must

"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.

"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

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

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

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

To which the bishop, rising artlessly to the bait, replied, "Ah! that indeed is the unfortunate aspect of the

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. Travelledor 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

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 BrightonPomfrey 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 valetbutler, found him already bathed

and ready for a cup of tea and a Bradshaw at halfpast seven. He went on dressing although the good train for

Mrs. Garstein Fellows was by nature and principle a late riser; the breakfastroom 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

She did her very pretty best to convey what it was had been troubling her. 'iligion bad been worrying her for

years. Life was ohjust ornaments and games and so wea'isome, so wea'isome, unless it was 'iligious.

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

Christianityshe had gone away from Christianity, to the Theosophists and the Christian Scientistsshe

had felt she was only "st'aying fu'tha." And then suddenly when he was speaking last night, she had felt he

"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 encouraginglybut 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 oldfashioned 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"?

"It's wonde'ful stuff," said Lady Sunderbund. "It's spi'tually cold, but it's intellectually wonde'ful. But we

It would certainly be an astonishing end to the Chasters difficulty if the bishop went over to the heretic, the

"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 discontenthitherto. 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."

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

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

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

"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 clearspoken nor

quite so energetic as she seemed to be once. She's right, I feel sure. I've never doubted her fundamental

"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

organizationwhat 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

"Probably I'm not alone among my brethren," he went on, and then: "But what is one to do?"

"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

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

"One must hold fast to 'iligion," she said, and looked earnestly at him and gripped fiercely, pink thumbs out,

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 accentwho contradicted me so suddenly?" he asked.

"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

A deeptoned gong proclaimed breakfast over a square mile or so of territory, and Lady Sunderbund turned

She started indeed a new topic. "Shall we eva, do 'ou think, have a new 'iligiont'ua and betta?"

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 "Breakfast."

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

Lady Sunderbund entered the breakfast room in a gusty abundance like Botticelli's Primavera, and kissed

Mrs. Garstein Fellows goodmorning. She exhaled a glowing happiness. "He is wondyful," she panted. "He

"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 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 BrightonPomfrey 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 BrightonPomfrey'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. BrightonPomfrey was away at the frontof all places; he had gone

Seeing his old friend BrightonPomfrey 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

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

He began by understanding far too much of the bishop's illness, and he insisted on various familiarities with

"BrightonPomfrey talked of neurasthenia?" he asked. "That was his diagnosis," said the bishop.

"You don't of course want to break your vows about drinking and smoking," said the young man with the

"Not if it can possibly be avoided," the bishop asserted. "Without a loss, that is, of practical efficiency," he

"I think that it is possible to keep your vow," said the young man, and the bishop could have sworn at him. "I

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 BrightonPomfrey would return.

The young man stood upon BrightonPomfrey's hearthrug and was evidently contemplating dissertations.

"Of course," he said, as though he discussed a problem with himself, "you must have some sort of comfort.

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 borderline 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."

"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

"Go on," said the bishop, holding on to that promise of comfort. "The best thing is to thrash out the case in

"What is really the matter herethe 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 phrasewell, 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 follow you," said the bishop a little wearily, "I follow you. Phenomena and noumena and so on and so on.

"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

The bishop was reluctantly interested. "That does describe somethingof 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

"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 bothersI don't of course know what

they were, but I can, so to speak, see the marks all over you came into your life."

"You were uprooted. You moved from house to house, and failed to get that curled up safe feeling one has in

"If you saw the fireplaces and the general decoration of the new palace!" admitted the bishop. "I had

"That confirms me," said Dr. Dale. "Insomnia followed, and increased the feeling of physical strangeness by

"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 warmuch 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

"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

"And the sooner I go back to them the better," said the bishop brightly. "I quite see that."

"That," said Dr. Dale, "is just where my treatment of this case differs from the treatment of "he spoke the

"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

Dr. Dale's face betrayed a sudden sombre passion. "It won't do now," he said in a voice of quiet intensity. "It

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."

"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

The bishop was profoundly perplexed. He heard himself speaking. "It would be unworthy of my cloth," he

"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 itif

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

"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

trifletransparent, but you'd keep real. Instead of drugging oneself back to the old contentment"

"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 nowWhere 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 BrightonPomfrey 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

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 tonicwith 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.

"I can't give you a prescription. The essence of itIt's a distillate I have been trying. It isn't in the

But in the end he succumbed. He didn't want to take the stuff, but also he did not want to go without his

Presently Dale had given him a little phialand 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

"When you want more I will make you more. Later of course, it will be possible to write a prescription. Now

"I am still here," said the bishop, smiling, and feeling a joyous tingling throughout his body. "It stirs me."

The bishop stood on the pavement outside Dr. BrightonPomfrey's house. The massive door had closed

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

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 knewand 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

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.

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 peepshow. This

He passed a man in khaki who, he fancied, looked at him with an odd expression. He observed the next

passersby 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

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

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

All the way down Berkeley Square the bishop was in fullbodied 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

The feeling of largeness increased, and the feeling of transparency in things about him. He avoided collision

with passersbyexcessively. 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

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

He set out to cross the road just opposite Prince's, and jumping needlessly to give way to an omnibus had the

He paused on the pavement edge to recover himself. The shock of his near escape had, as people say, pulled

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 fullbodied as the rest of his being, they came

BrightonPomfrey ought never to have left his practice in the hands of this wildeyed experimenter.

Strange that after a lifetime of discretion and men's respect one should be standing on the Piccadilly

It came into his head that he was not so very far from the Athenaeum, and surely there if anywhere a bishop

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 beforebefore anything more

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 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."

The porter of the Athenaeum saw him come in, looking well flushed indeedbut queer in expression; his

He wandered across towards the diningroom, hesitated, went to look at the news, seemed in doubt whether

he would not go into the smokingroom, and then went very slowly upstairs, past the golden angel up to the

In the drawingroom 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 heroworship. It

was usually sufficient only to turn an ear towards him for him to talk for an hour or so. He was now studying

The bishop snatched at him desperately. He felt that if he went away there would be no hold left upon the

"Sir James," he said, "I was wondering the other day when was the exact date of the earliest public ascription

"Eh!" said Sir James, "but I'd like to talk that over with ye. Indeed I would. It would be depending very

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

The door closed upon him. The bishop was alone. He was flooded with the light of the world that is beyond

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 trancewell, 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 snappedlike the snapping of a lute stringin his brain.

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 gemlike 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

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

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.

"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 menwho were apes not

a quarter of a million years ago, who still have hair upon our arms and ape's teeth in our jawshad 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 patchedup 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

"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 listenedwords

"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

"Let us talk a little about your troubles," said the Angel. "Let us talk about God and this creed that worries

"I feel as though I had been struggling to this talk through all the yearssince 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

"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

"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 Prometheusor

Hiawathaor 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

knowof 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

"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.

"Not with this little box of brains," said the Angel. "You could as soon make a meal of the stars and pack

"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

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

And suddenly he was back in his gaiters and his apron and his shovel hat, a little black figure exceedingly

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.

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 bondslaves 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

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.

The thoughts and sensations of the bishop seemed to have lifted for a time clean away from the condition of

He was aware presently that things were changing, that the light was losing its diviner rays, that in some

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 selfforgetfulness to a grotesque, pathetic and earthly selfconsciousness.

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 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 last he had to stop altogether and kneel down and fumble with the last obstinate button.

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

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

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.

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

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

"The stuff? The stuff had little to do with it. It just cleared my head.... I have seen. I have seen really. I

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 nowNow he would

The little Library of the Athenaeum has no visible door. He went to the bookmasked 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

The Three Creeds were like garments flung aside. But he was still wearing the uniform of a priest in the

After a long interval he walked into the big readingroom. He ordered some tea and dry toast and butter, and

sat down very thoughtfully in a corner. He was still sitting and thinking at halfpast 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

And in the first glow of his vision he felt this gesture imperative. He must step right out.... Whither? how?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 laceand 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 selfexamination 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 teathings on their orange tray, and he searched in his mind for small talk to sustain their

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

"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

"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 flowerpots 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 dealof the subject of our conversation."

"I have been t'ying to think," she said in a confirmatory tone, as if she had cooperated.

"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 Catholicismseeing it from the

"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.

She came back to earth very slowly. She turned to the teathings 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

"It seemed so at first," he said. "But now I do not know. I do not know what I ought to do."

"It is as if one had lived in a room all one's life and thought it the worldand 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 nowand it would have seemed the most natural thing a year agoto

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

"You see, my dear Lady Sunderbund," he resumed, "I am exactly in the same position of that man at the

"I feel I have to come right out into the bare truth. What exactly then do I become? Do I lose my priestly

"There is a saying," he remarked, "once a priest, always a priest. I cannot imagine myself as other than what I

"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 ofguidance is an oldfashioned wordshall I

say suggestion? To stand by the altar bearing strange names and ancient symbols, speaking plainly to all

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

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

But as he lay in bed that night he thought of his old friend and helper Bishop Likeman, and it was borne in

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 ladyanticipating

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

It seemed arguable that Scrope owed some explanation to Likeman before he came to any open breach with

He found Likeman perceptibly older and more shrivelled on account of the war, but still as sweet and lucid

He sat buried in his cushionsfor "nowadays I must save every scrap of vitality"and for a time contented

Of course, one does not talk to Likeman of visions or intuitions. "I am disturbed, I find myself getting out of

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 Trinitiesas I left them long ago," said old Likeman, with his lean hand feeling

The old man raised his hand and dropped it. "You go away from it allstraight 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"

"Fatewhich is God the Father, the Power of the Heart, which is God the Son, and that Light which comes

"But I know of no God the Holy Spirit, and Fate is not God at all. I saw in my vision one sole God,

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

"See! The things of the spirit. These symbols as realities! These metaphors as men walking!"

"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;

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

"Personification," said Likeman. "In the eighteenth century they used to draw beautiful female figures as

Science and Mathematics. Young men have loved Scienceand Freedomas Pygmalion loved Galatea.

Have it so if you will. Have a visible person for your Deity. But let me keep up myspirituality."

"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 ofThat " 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

He paused, and put his head a little on one side and smiled sweetly. "And now can you say I do not believe?"

The Bishop of Princhester was staggered by this complete acceptance. "I see you believe all you profess," he

"Your visionif it was a visionI 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 Sonas 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

The Bishop of Princhester sat frowning and looking at that. Very far away was the vision now of that golden

"The Great Temple of the Ages," he repeated. "But do you remember the trouble we had when the little old

"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

"I spoke of the whole church of Christ on earth," he went on. "These things, these Victorias and Edwards and

so on, are temporary accidentsjust 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 defacementslike the cracks and crannies and lichens on a cathedral wallthe 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

"We do. Where's Hell now? Eighty years ago it warmed the whole Church. It wasas 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;

Old Likeman leant forward and pointed a bony finger. "Stay in the Church and modify it. Bring this new light

Old Likeman began to speak and had a fit of coughing. "Some of these textswhuff, whufflike a

A manservant appeared and handed a silver box of lozenges into which the old bishop dipped with a

"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

The old man awaited the answer to his abrupt enquiry with a handful of lozenges.

"My dear boy!" it was as if they were once more rector and curate. "My dear brother! do you know what the

"And your wife married youI 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

"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,

"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?"

"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 digestedyou experiment with the souls of

The bishop found much to ponder in his old friend's counsels. They were discursive and manyfronted, 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

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

"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

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

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 drawingroom 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 Frenchwomen, Protestant and yet not too Protestant, one

of those rare French Protestants in whom a touch of Bergson and the Pasteur Monod

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

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

All these people counted on him. It was indeed acutely true, as Likeman had said, that any sudden breach

And just then his eye fell upon the epergne, a very old and beautiful piece of silver, that graced the

dinnertable. 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

It was his custom to join the family in the drawingroom after dinner. Tonight 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 sweetnesswhile 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

"Things developing out of that. I must tell you later." It would be, he felt, a good way of breaking the matter

"It's Sir Reginald Phipps. The Church would be much more tolerant if it wasn't for the House of Laymen. But

He seized the opportunity of the music ceasing to get away from the subject. "Miriam dear," he asked, raising

"That is always 111, Daddy," said Miriam. "It's the other one is 109." And then evidently feeling that she had

"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.

"That's a postgraduate subject, Norah," her father said with a smile and a sigh.

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

"No," she whispered. "I hope you will sleep tonight," and held up her grave sweet face to be kissed.

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 gemlike, a minute, hard, clearcut 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

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

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

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

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 boresfor our loyal laymen can be at times quite

"Mummy says, 'Come to the drawingroom if you can.' There is a Lady Sunderbund who seems particularly

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 snowwhite fur and a white fur toque. She held out a long whitegloved hand to him and cried

"I've come to P'inchesta to stay!" she cried with a bright triumphant rising note.

She evidently considered Lady Ella a mere conversational stopgap, 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 youas they say in Clapham. I've

come 'ight down he' fo' good. I've taken a little houseoh! 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'

"Was it an old docta?" cried Lady Sunderbund. "How delightful! And now I shall be a patient!"

"Oh, I've been thinking all the time of all the things you told me. Ova and ova. It's all so wondyful and

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

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 musicstool on his wife's left, so as to establish a

screen of teathings and cakes and so forth against her more intimate enthusiasm. Meanwhile he began to see

"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 hardworking and exacting diocese. We shall take your money, all

"I am sure Lady Sunderbund will be a great help to us," said Lady Ella. "We want brightening. There's a

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

She found the bishop handing her bread and butter. For a time the bishop fought a delaying action with the

teathings, 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

"Youa husband's views," she said, "we'e a 'eal 'evelation to me. It was like not being blindall at once."

Lady Ella was always pleased to hear her husband praised. Her colour brightened a little. "They seem very

"Tell me, Lady Sunderbund," said the bishop, "are you going to alter the outer appearance of the old doctor's

"Ha'dly at all," she said. "I shall just have it pointed white and do the doaI'm not su' how I shall do the doa.

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

"They used to be painted," said the bishop. "I don't know if you have seen Ely. There the old painting has

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

"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

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

A day or so after Lady Sunderbund's arrival in Princhester the bishop had a letter from Likeman. The old man

"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 lifelong friendship I would not write anything truer. I

would say of you today, '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 quasiautomatic 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 forciblefeeble reactionaries are much more likely to explode a revolution

that will disestablish us. And I quite understand your theological difficultiesquite. 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

"Now, my dear Brother and erstwhile pupil, I ask you not to do this thing. Wait, I implore you. Give

meand 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 fabriclet me be

as frank here as in our private conversationdoctrine has altered again and again. Today two distinct

religions worship there side by side; one that fades and one that grows brighter. There is the old

quasimaterialistic 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

"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

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 fivepound note, are yet assertions of practically inevitable

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

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 fiveandtwenty 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 bonesetter, 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

"It is pleasant to be able to do things like this," said Lady Ella, standing over him when this matter was

"Yes," the bishop agreed; "it is pleasant to be in a position to do things like this...."

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

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

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

If it had been Lady Sunderbund he had had to explain to, instead of Lady Ella, he could have explained a

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

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

It was on a Sunday nightthe 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

intervenedeverything would have been different, everything would have been simpler....

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

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 was little, he was funny. His prevarications with his wife, for example, were comic. There was no other

"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

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 moreto God?

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.

He got out of bed, he took his keys from the nighttable 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

He turned at last with an effort. He carried the little phial to his bedside, and into the tumbler of his

waterbottle 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 waterbottle and stood with the glass in his hand. But he did not

He knew that he had only to drink and this world of confusion would grow transparent, would roll back and

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 prisonhouse, with the key of escape in his hand. Before he took the last step into the very presence

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 nighttable. The bishop sat up in bed. He had missed his opportunity. Today was a busy

"No," he said, as Dunk hesitated whether to remove or leave the tumbler. "Leave that."

Dunk found room for it upon the teatray, 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

From his bed he could just read the larger items that figured upon the engagement tablet which it was

Whippham's business to fill overnight 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....

With a gesture of desperation he seized the tumblerful of tonic and drank it off at a gulp.

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

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 supersensuous.

(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

"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."

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 shownthat you may tell it to others."

The bishop was anxious to be very clear. Things that had been shapelessly present in his mind now took form

"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

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 redtongued fires. The Angel was but a voice now; the bishop and the Angel were somewhere aloof from

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 countrysides 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

"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

bloodstreaked 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

stretcherbearers 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

The wonder increased; the wonder of the single and infinitely multitudinous adventure of mankind.

"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 shrillvoiced 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

yellowfaced, 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.

"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

"Even that last," said the younger man. "Did any of us dream twentyfive 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

(" And God will be King of the World," said the Angel. "Is not that faith exactly the faith that is coming to

The bishop would have liked to hear more of that conversation, but the dark hand of the Angel motioned him

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, slowflowing 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

"You haven't priests in robes. You don't chant and worship crosses and pictures, and quarrel among

"Why do you call yourselves Christians? And take part against us? All who worship the One God are

"They ought to be," said the Englishman, and thought. He was struck by what seemed to him an amazingly

"If it weren't for religions all men would serve God together," he said. "And then there would be no

"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

"Here," he said, and the shadow of his hand hovered over the burningghats 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

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

"This is the fourth that has come ashore," he said. "Poor drowned souls! Because men will not serve God."

"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 freespirited 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

"But men are saying that now in a thousand places," said the Angel. "Here is something that goes a little

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

sheepdip in the wells of drinkingwater; 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.

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

His mind resisted and struggled against these ideas. "Austere," he whispered. "The ennobling tests of war." A

"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. Neverthelessthose wet draggled bodies that swirled down in the

eddies of the sinking TitanAch! 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

Suddenly out of the nothingness and darkness about him came the conviction that God did not listen to his

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 effigiesand 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 welleducated 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

"Yes, science. My young brotheroh, he's a clever onehe 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 moremy 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

"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

"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 gentlemannered emir from Morocco looking at

"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?"

"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.

"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

"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

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

mebecause of some tittletattle.... 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....

"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 lightand failed, what

right have Ito 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

"See in this world," he said, turning to the globe, "while Chinese merchants and Turkish troopers,

schoolboard boys and Norwegian fishermen, halftrained nurses and Boer farmers are full of the spirit of

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 welltilled 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 missioningwithout 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 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 ringkissing 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 bedroom sat Bishop Scrope insensible and motionless, in a trance in

"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

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.

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 armchair 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

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

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

"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

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

"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

"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

She rose to her feet. She was so horrified that she staggered backward, pushing her chair behind her. "But you

"My dear," he said, "I can assure you I am not mad. I should have prepared you, I know...."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, and going swiftly to the window emptied out the contents of the little bottle. He

"Don't waste that!" he cried, and stepping forward caught hold of her wrist. The phial fell from her white

They stood face to face. "It was a tonic," he said. "I have been ill. I need it."

He dropped her arm and walked halfway 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

"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 willingyou

"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 restThere is nothing really imperative until the confirmation in the afternoon.... I do not

understand all this. For some timeI 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 hereAnd if I were to send for that young doctor who

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.

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

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."

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

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

freshfaced 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

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 goodlooking 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

"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

"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 today 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

kingin place of all the upstarts, usurpers, accidents, and absurdities who bear crowns and sceptres

He paused, and in the pause he heard a little rustle as though the congregation before him was sitting up in its

"This, my dear children, is the reality of this grave business today, 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 today 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

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

"In all ages religion has come from God through broadminded creative men, and in all ages it has fallen

very quickly into the hands of intense and conservative men. These lastnarrow, fearful, and

suspicioushave 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 creedmonger 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 overstatement that misstates and the overemphasis 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

"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

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

He stopped short. The next words were: "bound to believe and do all those things, which your Godfathers and

He could not stand those words. He hesitated, and then substituted: "acknowledge yourselves to be the true

For a moment silence hung in the cathedral. Then one voice, a boy's voice, led a ragged response. "I do."

The congregation answered doubtfully, with a glance at its prayer books: "Who hath made heaven and earth."

The congregation said with returning confidence: "Henceforth, world without end."

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

"We must end this sort of thing," whispered the bishop. "We must end this sort of thingabsolutely." 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 Epiphauseior, 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,

"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 wellbeing 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 Lawgiver, that you devote

"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

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

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,

"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

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

In the vestry he found Canon Bliss. "Help me to take off these garments," the bishop said. "I shall never wear

"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

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

"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 lapsean aphasia. You mutilated the interrogation and you did

not pronounce the benediction properly. You changed words and you put in words. One sat frozenwaiting

"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,"

"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

The bishop looked up and saw Lady Ella's expression. Lady Ella was sitting up very stiffly, listening but not

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

"Leave me alone!" he cried in a voice of agony. "Leave me alone! I can see no one.... I canno more."

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 clearminded 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 ninetyeight. 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

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

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

Lady Ella was doubtful about Zeppelins. Thrice they had been right over Hunstanton already. They came in

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 blackgaitered 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 greengrey 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

fishingboat that lay at the edge of a shallow lagoon. She was a little pinkfooted 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 starfish 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

weedcovered 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

musselgatherers. 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

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.

"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 pseudodeeper, pseudosimpler

than us all, the need of personal excitement. I know that you were never quite contented to believe in God at

secondhand. You wanted to be taken notice ofpersonally. 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

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

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.

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

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.

"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 themwhen 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 firstnot foremost, but

just the little one that runs in firstamong your disciples. They say you are resigning your position in the

church. Of course that must be true. You are coming out of itwhat 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

"Dear Bishop and Teacher, I want to help tremendouslywith 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 richersteel and shipping and

thingsit 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 figuresrecumbent. 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

"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 youand 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 selfconscious. 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

"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 northwest of Londonbut she would tell me very little. I seem to see you not there at all,

not in anything between westend 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 mejust 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 waitingon thorns. I know you will take your time

"If, when you knowa telegram. Even if you cannot say so much as 'Agreed,' still such a word as

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 cooperation gripped him; it was a good argument.

And besides it worked in very conveniently with certain other difficulties that perplexed him.

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

"Not in this weather. Not for a day or so." She flung herself at his feet. "Consider your overworked little

"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

"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 beforeI've

been dying to.... I'd promised not to say a wordnot 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

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.

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

"I'm glad if you're with me," he said. "SometimesI think I'm not a very selfreliant man."

"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

"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

"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 riskspoverty perhapsgoing without thingstravel, opportunity, nice

possessionsfor 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

"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"

"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 hairsplitting 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."

"If I can. When I am freeyou know I have still to resign and give upI shall make that my message."

"God comes as men perceive him in his simplicity.... Let men but see God simply, and forthwith God and his

Then she turned to her father. "And you think that His Kingdom will comeperhaps in quite a little

timeperhaps 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 profitseeking 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?"

"They will fade before himbut whether it will take a lifetime or a hundred lifetimes or a thousand lifetimes,

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, Norahand just before that service, it seemed to meit 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, evenwho 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"

"It is so wonderful to talk to you like this, Daddy. In the old days, I didn't dreamBefore 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

ONE afternoon in October, four months and more after that previous conversation, the card of Mr. Edward

Scrope was brought up to Dr. BrightonPomfrey. 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

Dr. BrightonPomfrey had the savoirfaire 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

Dr. BrightonPomfrey was a little roundfaced man with defective eyesight and an unsuitable nose for the

"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."

"Only?" said the doctor, smiling his teeth, with something of the manner of an old bathing woman who

"We'd better sit down," said the great doctor professionally, and looked hard at him. Then he pulled at the

The exbishop 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

"Zactly. Zactly. Zactly," said the doctor, snapping his face and making his glasses vibrate. "Run down. Want

"Had to go," said the doctor, "unavoidable. Gas gangrene. Certain enquiries. These young investigators all

very well in their way. But we older reputationsExperience. Maturity of judgment. Can't do without us.

"Well, I came here last spring and saw, an assistant I suppose he was, or a supply,do you call them

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 anythinganything bad in your

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 twentyfour hours' notice. Enquirygas

The little doctor sprang to his feet and began to pace about the room. "Peculiar!" he said. "It was abominable

He turned, with all the round knobs that constituted his face, aglow. His sidewhiskers waved apart like

wings about to flap. He protruded his face towards his seated patient. "I am glad that he has been killed," he

His glasses fell offshocked beyond measure. He did not heed them. They swnng about in front of him as if

"Fool!" he spluttered with demonstrative gestures. "Dangerous fool! His one ideato upset everybody.

Drugs, Sir! The most terrible drugs! I come back. Find ladies. High social position. Morphinemaniacs.

Others. Reckless use of the most dangerous expedients.... Cocaine not in it. Stimulantsviolent 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 ideato 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 burstas a final expression of wrath. He failed. His hands felt

trembling to recover his pincenez. 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

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. BrightonPomfrey was quietly malignant. "He kept no diary at all," he said. "No diary at all."

"If he did," said Dr. BrightonPomfrey, 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

"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 stuffIt

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 decideand 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. BrightonPomfrey'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 headanything to do with your

And he put on his glasses disconcertingly, and threw his head back to watch the reply.

"Exactly," said Dr. BrightonPomfrey in a tone that defined his own position with remorseless clearness.

"My dear Sir," he said. "How can you expect me to help you to a drug so disastrous?even if I could tell

"Your extraordinary resignationyour still more extraordinary way of proclaiming it!"

"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 methis drug of Dr. Dale's helpinghas 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

"There is a crisis in my affairsnever mind what. But I cannot see my way clear."

Dr. BrightonPomfrey was meditating now with his eyes on his carpet and the corners of his mouth tucked

in. He was swinging his glasses pendulumwise. "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 thisthis vision of the truth that

Scrope felt a sudden shyness. But he wanted Dale's drug again so badly that he obliged himself to describe

"It was," he said in a matteroffact tone, "a golden, transparent liquid. Very golden, like a warmtinted

Chablis. When water was added it became streaked and opalescent, with a kind of living quiver in it. I held it

"Your mind," Dr. BrightonPomfrey assisted, "began to go twentynine to the dozen."

"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?

"Yes.... Well, to be plain.... I had an immediate sense of God. I saw the worldas if it were a transparent

curtain, and then God becameevident.... Is it possible for that to determine the drug?"

"God becameevident," the doctor said with some distaste, and shook his head slowly. Then in a sudden

"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

somethingIt's a little like morphia. But goldenopalescent? And it was this vision made you astonish us

"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

The doctor suddenly gave way to a botryoidal hilarity. "To think that one should be consulted about visions

of Godin Mount Street!" he said. "And you know, you know you half want to believe that vision was real.

So far Scrope had been resisting his realization of failure. Now he gave way to an exasperation that made him

reckless of BrightonPomfrey's opinion. "I do think," he said, "that that drug did in some way make God real

"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 selflove 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 easygoing 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

"Are there no other drugs that you do know, that have a kindred effect? If for example I tried morphia in

"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 drugtaking is, I can assure you, moral

decayrapid moral decay. To touch drugs habitually is to become hopelessly unpunctual, untruthful,

callously selfish and insincere. I am talking mere textbook, mere everyday commonplaces, to you when I

"You've a stiff enough fight before you," said the doctor, "without such a handicap as that."

The doctor walked up and down his hearthrug, and then delivered himself with an extended hand and

"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. Somethingaccidental. It's lostfor good for your good,

Scrope halted outside the stucco portals of the doctor's house. He hesitated whether he should turn to the east

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.

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 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 middleclass househunting

or middleclass 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, illlit,

illplanned, with dingy paint and peeling wallpaper, kitchens for the most part underground, and either

without bathrooms or with builtout 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 exbishop realized, is always to hold

up and look scornful. The position of the landowning, houseowning class in a crowded country like

England is ultraregal. 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

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

twentyseventh 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 thisat such a rentto decent people. It

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

Lady Ella saw things differently again. "If you had stayed in the church," she said afterwards, "you might

"But," he said presently as they went back in the tube to their modest Bloomsbury hotel, "if I had stayed in

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

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

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...."

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 diningroom, 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 highspirited 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 writingdesk

filled a whole side of it. Parsimony ruled her mind, but she could not resist the impulse to get him at least a

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

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 bathroomthere was never enough hot water after the second bath. And Miriam did not seem to enjoy

playing the new upright piano in the drawingroom 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

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

The drawingroom 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

drawingroom there had been a number of obliging little electric pushes. The size of the diningroom, 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

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

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

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 itmore particularly to think no more about

itthat 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

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,

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 oras 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

"Absolutely free," interrupted the young architect. "He might, for example, build a temple like a star."

And also there was a musician with fuzzy hair and an impulsive way of taking the salted almonds, who

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

The musician betrayed impatience at the name of Beethoven, and thought, with his mouth appreciatively full

"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 prayerbooks. 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

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 Westend 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 chapelsrichly decorated chapelsand 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

mindfrom which their eyes shone out, so to speakwhenever his doubt whether he ought to set up as a

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,

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 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

She banged the whole armful down upon a vivid little table of inlaid black and white wood. He rescued one

"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.

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

She added with a note of solemnity, "It will hold th'ee thousand people sitting down."

"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."

"He says the' isn't 'oom the'!" she explained. "He wants to put it out at Golda's G'een."

"Butif 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 saidconclusively. "And isn't thisisn't it rather a costly undertaking, rather

"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

"Lady Sunderbund," he said at last, with an effort, "I am afraid all this won't do."

"No. It isn't in the spirit of my intention. It isn't in a great building of this sortsoso ornate and imposing,

And then as if she would seize him before he could go on to further repudiations, she sought hastily among

"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 shutin

drum for spiritual reverberations, around it ran great open corridors, and in these corridors there were to be

"But what for?" he asked, stemming the torrent. "What need is there for chapels? There are to be no altars, no

"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 thingswith paintings and symbols."

"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

"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.

"Don't like it," she cried, and stood apart from him with her chin in the air, a tall astonishment and dismay.

"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

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 Godthis God here, that you want to worship, is a God of

artists and poetsof elegant poets, a God of bricabrac, 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 cannotindeed I cannotgo on with this projectupon 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

"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

"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

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 youyou thought only of God and

'iligion and didn't mind fo' you'self.... Up to thenI'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

"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.

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

"Not my temple," she said presently, now openly weeping over the gay rejected drawings. "You could have

"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 longdrawn moments there was no sound in the room but the slowly accelerated slide and

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

"Let me k'y," she insisted, gripping more resolutely, and following his backward pace. "You must let me k'y.

His resistance ceased. One hand supported her, the other patted her shining hair. "My dear child!" he said.

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 wildgrown 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, 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.

"If you don't want a Temple, have a meetinghouse. You wanted a meetinghouse anyhow."

"Just any old meetinghouse," 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, butthat 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 Domeall 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'chitectsome

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

"O'dina'y clothes a' clothes in the fashion," she said. "You would have to go to you' taila for a new p'eaching

"Ev'ybody is fash'nable. How can you help it? Some people wea' old fashions; that's all.... A cassock's an old

"If you think thatthat owoble suit is o'dina'y clothes!" she said, and stared at him and gave way to tears of

"A cassock," she cried with passion. "Just a pe'fectly plain cassock. Fo' deecency!... Oh, if you won'tnot

As he walked now after his unsuccessful quest of Dr. BrightonPomfrey 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

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

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 refugeor at any rate sought refugein 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 springof vanity perhaps it wasin 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

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 gailycoloured 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

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

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, breathingoccasionally

coughingreality of Phoebe, God was something as unsubstantial as the Binomial Theorem....

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

"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 claimhe should have a hold and

a claimexceeding all the claims of Phoebe, Miriam, Daphne, Clementinaall of them....

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 posthaste to BrightonPomfrey in search for that

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.

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

Regrets were plain now. The question before his mind was growing clear; whether he was to persist in this

selfimposed 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 subtletyand magnetismin the

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....

A wholesome gust of moral impatience stirred him. He smacked the back of the seat hard, as though he

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

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

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

She consulted the view again and seemed to come to a decision. "At least, I will for a minute."

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 tomorrow. I had to make excusesup there. I hardly remember what excuses

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

"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 friendsand talked about all sorts of things. And then

suddenly you see,"her tone was offhand and matteroffact" 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

But she was now fairly weeping. "I didn't know he cared. I didn't know I cared."

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 sillyMcTaggart blowing bubbles.... His

As she spoke her eyes had been roving up the path and down. "He's coming," she interrupted. She hesitated.

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

"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 otherI 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 friendlyand 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 expectedI 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 differentI mean,

Sir, if she was just an ordinary girl.... But I had a sort of feelingjust wanting to see her. I don't suppose

you've ever felt anything, Sir, as I felt I wanted to see herand 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

"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

"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

"If you hadn't telegraphed!" she cried with a threat in her voice, and left it at that.

"Perhaps I feel about herrather as if she was as strong as I amin those ways. Perhaps I shouldn't. I could

"To live is to be hurt somehow," she said. "ThisThis" 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 today that a father who stands between his children and hardship, by doing wrong, may

I won't stand between you two. Find your own salvation." He got up. "I go west," he said, "presently. You, I

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.

For a time he could think only of Eleanor.... He watched the two young people as they went eastward. As

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 Victoriaand

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

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

Somehow Lady Sunderbund's chapel was very remote and flimsy now, and the hardships of poverty seemed

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 bowstrings, 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 phase of extreme intellectual clairvoyance. A multitude of things that hitherto had been

higgledypiggledy, 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 worldwide 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,

selfseeking, 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

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 twentyfour 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

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 drugquickened 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 acidclear 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

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

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

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 thisor be no more than fetishism, Obi, Orphic mysteries or ceremonies of Demeter, a legacy of

mental dirtiness, a residue of selfmutilation and superstitious sacrifices from the cunning, fearhaunted,

apedog 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

He sat with his hands gripping his knees, as if he were holding on to his idea. "And now for my part," he

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

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 himselfonly that he was a weak and commonplace man with

no creative force, and they had been great men of enormous initiativemen 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

"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

He thought on. He had a feeling of temerity, but then it seemed as if God within him bade him be of good

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 Godbut 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

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

"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...."

He had come round at last through the long clearingup of his mind, to his fundamental problem again. He

"I must not play priest or providence to them," he admitted at last. "I must not even stand between God and

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....

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 selfidentifications. 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

farreaching 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

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 selfassertion, 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 selfsatisfaction 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 wellbeing 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 evasionsand his eyes went eastward into

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 chaosbecause of the

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

As he walked he rearranged in his mind this longoverdue 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

Tea had been finished and put away, and the family was disposed about the diningroom 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 diningroom because the evening was

chilly, and there were no fires upstairs yet in the drawingroom. 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 roughknit

washingcloths upon the sidetable, 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

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 readinglamp and pulled down the blindpausing 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

But he wanted their talk to begin in a naturalseeming 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

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

Swiftlike hatred of weaklythinking 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 acidbit 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

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

His thoughts came back with a start to his wife. The evening was slipping by and he had momentous things to

She put a liberal interpretation upon that "presently," so that after what seemed to him a long interval he had

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

"I wanted to talk to youabout some things. I've done something rather serious today. I've made an

"You see," he said, leaning upon the mantelshelf and looking down at the gas flames, "I've never thought that

"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 thought I should have found something to do that would have enabled us to live in better style. I'd had a

"I thought I should be able to set up a sort of broad church chapel. I had a promise."

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

"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

"Then, Teddy!"she was a woman groping for flight amidst intolerable perplexities"why did you ever

"You mean," he said, beginning for the first time to comprehend her, "that you don't mind the poverty?"

Instead of a woman stunned by a life sentence of poverty, he saw his wife rejoicing as if she had heard good

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

"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

"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.

"I promised you I'd come back to supper here, Daddy," she said. "But I don't want to have supper here. I want

Eleanor became aware of a broad chink in the folding doors that was making the diningroom an auditorium

"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,"

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?"

"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

"And he goes tomorrowperhaps 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 seewhen I see thatsee those two, those children of oneand twenty, wrenched by tragedy,

beginning with a parting.... It's like a knife slashing at all our appearances and discretions.... Think of our

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 diningroom hearthrug as his family resumed their various occupations.

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

He looked at Phoebe. He saw Lady Ella's hand go out and touch the girl's hand gently to make her desist.

"I want to tell you that today I refused an income that would certainly have exceeded fifteen hundred

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.

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

"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 comethe relative discomfort. Compared with Princhester this is dark and crowded and

povertystricken. 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

dugout 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 convictionand 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

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 timeit's a lesson I'm

still only learninghow 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

profitseekers 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 twentyseven 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

He paused and looked at them. They were all listening to him now. But he was still haunted by a dread of

"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 today. 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

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

"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,

"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 dayEvery 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

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?"

"But I mean," said Miriam, "are wesomething 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."

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.'"

"I am not Chasters," said Scrope stiffly, and then relenting: "What he does may be right for him. But I could

"I would be ashamed," she said quietly, "if you had not done as you have done. I don't mindThe girls don't

"Not now that we understand, Daddy," said Clementina, and a faint flavour of Lady Sunderbund seemed to

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

"We didn't understand properly," said Clementina, in the tone of one who explains away muchthat had

"Daddy," said Miriam with an inspiration, "may I play something to you presently?"

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. Tonight it would be impossible. Tomorrow 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 aftersupper talk. He had been

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

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

He tried to tell her rather more plainly what he felt about the whole question of religion in their lives, but

"You see, Ella, life cannot get out of tragedyand sordid tragedyuntil we bring about the Kingdom of

"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"

"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 nowbut I was wretched. And there

was nothing I could say.... I prayed.... It isn't the poverty I feared ever, but the disgrace. NowI'm happy.

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....

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.

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

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....

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 cooperations. 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. Tomorrow 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

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.

"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, povertystruck 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

dugouts 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....

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

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

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,

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 questionas 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

"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

"And let thy light shine upon all those who are so dear to me.... Save them from me. Take their dear

He paused. A flushed, childishly miserable face that stared indignantly through glittering tears, rose before

"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 meand wasted yourself. It was impossible.... And yet you are so

"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 existas now I existin relationship to God.

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.

Naturallynaturally.... One perceives it clearly only in rare moments.... That alters nothing...."