THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
BY
H. G. WELLS




CONTENTS
CHAPTER THE FIRST   -  THE DREAM
CHAPTER THE SECOND  -  THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY
CHAPTER THE THIRD   -  INSOMNIA
CHAPTER THE FOURTH  -  THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND
CHAPTER THE FIFTH   -  THE FIRST VISION
CHAPTER THE SIXTH   -  EXEGETICAL
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH -  THE SECOND VISION
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH  -  THE NEW WORLD
CHAPTER THE NINTH   -  THE THIRD VISION


"Man's true Environment is God"
J. H. OLDHAM in "The Christian Gospel"
(Tract of the N. M. R. and H.)




THE SOUL OF A BISHOP




CHAPTER THE FIRST  -  THE DREAM

(1)


IT was a scene of bitter disputation. A hawk-nosed young man
with a pointing finger was prominent. His face worked violently,
his lips moved very rapidly, but what he said was inaudible.

Behind him the little rufous man with the big eyes twitched at
his robe and offered suggestions.

And behind these two clustered a great multitude of heated,
excited, swarthy faces....

The emperor sat on his golden throne in the midst of the
gathering, commanding silence by gestures, speaking inaudibly to
them in a tongue the majority did not use, and then prevailing.
They ceased their interruptions, and the old man, Arius, took up
the debate. For a time all those impassioned faces were intent
upon him; they listened as though they sought occasion, and
suddenly as if by a preconcerted arrangement they were all
thrusting their fingers into their ears and knitting their brows
in assumed horror; some were crying aloud and making as if to
fly. Some indeed tucked up their garments and fled. They spread
out into a pattern. They were like the little monks who run from
St. Jerome's lion in the picture by Carpaccio. Then one zealot
rushed forward and smote the old man heavily upon the mouth....

The hall seemed to grow vaster and vaster, the disputing,
infuriated figures multiplied to an innumerable assembly, they
drove about like snowflakes in a gale, they whirled in
argumentative couples, they spun in eddies of contradiction, they
made extraordinary patterns, and then amidst the cloudy darkness
of the unfathomable dome above them there appeared and increased
a radiant triangle in which shone an eye. The eye and the
triangle filled the heavens, sent out flickering rays, glowed to
a blinding incandescence, seemed to be speaking words of thunder
that were nevertheless inaudible. It was as if that thunder
filled the heavens, it was as if it were nothing but the beating
artery in the sleeper's ear. The attention strained to hear and
comprehend, and on the very verge of comprehension snapped like a
fiddle-string.

"Nicoea!"

The word remained like a little ash after a flare.

The sleeper had awakened and lay very still, oppressed by a
sense of intellectual effort that had survived the dream in which
it had arisen. Was it so that things had happened? The slumber-
shadowed mind, moving obscurely, could not determine whether it
was so or not. Had they indeed behaved in this manner when the
great mystery was established? Who said they stopped their ears
with their fingers and fled, shouting with horror? Shouting? Was
it Eusebius or Athanasius? Or Sozomen.... Some letter or apology
by Athanasius?... And surely it was impossible that the Trinity
could have appeared visibly as a triangle and an eye. Above such
an assembly.

That was mere dreaming, of course. Was it dreaming after
Raphael? After Raphael? The drowsy mind wandered into a side
issue. Was the picture that had suggested this dream the one in
the Vatican where all the Fathers of the Church are shown
disputing together? But there surely God and the Son themselves
were painted with a symbol--some symbol--also? But was that
disputation about the Trinity at all? Wasn't it rather about a
chalice and a dove? Of course it was a chalice and a dove! Then
where did one see the triangle and the eye? And men disputing?
Some such picture there was....

What a lot of disputing there had been! What endless disputing!
Which had gone on. Until last night. When this very disagreeable
young man with the hawk nose and the pointing finger had tackled
one when one was sorely fagged, and disputed; disputed. Rebuked
and disputed. "Answer me this," he had said.... And still one's
poor brains disputed and would not rest.... About the Trinity....

The brain upon the pillow was now wearily awake. It was at once
hopelessly awake and active and hopelessly unprogressive. It was
like some floating stick that had got caught in an eddy in a
river, going round and round and round. And round. Eternally--
eternally--eternally begotten.

"But what possible meaning do you attach then to such a phrase
as eternally begotten?"

The brain upon the pillow stared hopelessly at this question,
without an answer, without an escape. The three repetitions spun
round and round, became a swiftly revolving triangle, like some
electric sign that had got beyond control, in the midst of which
stared an unwinking and resentful eye.

(2)


Every one knows that expedient of the sleepless, the counting
of sheep.

You lie quite still, you breathe regularly, you imagine sheep
jumping over a gate, one after another, you count them quietly
and slowly until you count yourself off through a fading string
of phantom numbers to number Nod....

But sheep, alas! suggest an episcopal crook.

And presently a black sheep had got into the succession and was
struggling violently with the crook about its leg, a hawk-nosed
black sheep full of reproof, with disordered hair and a pointing
finger. A young man with a most disagreeable voice.

At which the other sheep took heart and, deserting the numbered
succession, came and sat about the fire in a big drawing-room and
argued also. In particular there was Lady Sunderbund, a pretty
fragile tall woman in the corner, richly jewelled, who sat with
her pretty eyes watching and her lips compressed. What had she
thought of it? She had said very little.

It is an unusual thing for a mixed gathering of this sort to
argue about the Trinity. Simply because a tired bishop had fallen
into their party. It was not fair to him to pretend that the
atmosphere was a liberal and inquiring one, when the young man
who had sat still and dormant by the table was in reality a keen
and bitter Irish Roman Catholic. Then the question, a
question-begging question, was put quite suddenly, without
preparation or prelude, by surprise. "Why, Bishop, was the
Spermaticos Logos identified with the Second and not the Third
Person of the Trinity?"

It was indiscreet, it was silly, to turn upon the speaker and
affect an air of disengagement and modernity and to say: "Ah,
that indeed is the unfortunate aspect of the whole affair."

Whereupon the fierce young man had exploded with:
"To that, is it, that you Anglicans have come?"

The whole gathering had given itself up to the disputation,
Lady Sunderbund, an actress, a dancer--though she, it is true,
did not say very much--a novelist, a mechanical expert of some
sort, a railway peer, geniuses, hairy and Celtic, people of no
clearly definable position, but all quite unequal to the task of
maintaining that air of reverent vagueness, that tenderness of
touch, which is by all Anglican standards imperative in so deep,
so mysterious, and, nowadays, in mixed society at least, so
infrequent a discussion.

It was like animals breaking down a fence about some sacred
spot. Within a couple of minutes the affair had become highly
improper. They had raised their voices, they had spoken with the
utmost familiarity of almost unspeakable things. There had been
even attempts at epigram. Athanasian epigrams. Bent the novelist
had doubted if originally there had been a Third Person in the
Trinity at all. He suggested a reaction from a too-Manichaean
dualism at some date after the time of St. John's Gospel. He
maintained obstinately that that Gospel was dualistic.

The unpleasant quality of the talk was far more manifest in the
retrospect than it had been at the time. It had seemed then bold
and strange, but not impossible; now in the cold darkness it
seemed sacrilegious. And the bishop's share, which was indeed
only the weak yielding of a tired man to an atmosphere he had
misjudged, became a disgraceful display of levity and bad faith.
They had baited him. Some one had said that nowadays every one
was an Arian, knowingly or unknowingly. They had not concealed
their conviction that the bishop did not really believe in the
Creeds he uttered.

And that unfortunate first admission stuck terribly in his
throat.

Oh! Why had he made it?

(3)


Sleep had gone.

The awakened sleeper groaned, sat up in the darkness, and felt
gropingly in this unaccustomed bed and bedroom first for the edge
of the bed and then for the electric light that was possibly on
the little bedside table.

The searching hand touched something. A water-bottle. The hand
resumed its exploration. Here was something metallic and smooth,
a stem. Either above or below there must be a switch....

The switch was found, grasped, and turned.

The darkness fled.

In a mirror the sleeper saw the reflection of his face and a
corner of the bed in which he lay. The lamp had a tilted shade
that threw a slanting bar of shadow across the field of
reflection, lighting a right-angled triangle very brightly and
leaving the rest obscure. The bed was a very great one, a bed for
the Anakim. It had a canopy with yellow silk curtains, surmounted
by a gilded crown of carved wood. Between the curtains was a
man's face, clean-shaven, pale, with disordered brown hair and
weary, pale-blue eyes. He was clad in purple pyjamas, and the
hand that now ran its fingers through the brown hair was long and
lean and shapely.

Beside the bed was a convenient little table bearing the light,
a water-bottle and glass, a bunch of keys, a congested pocket-
book, a gold-banded fountain pen, and a gold watch that indicated
a quarter past three. On the lower edge of the picture in the
mirror appeared the back of a gilt chair, over which a garment of
peculiar construction had been carelessly thrown. It was in the
form of that sleeveless cassock of purple, opening at the side,
whose lower flap is called a bishop's apron; the corner of the
frogged coat showed behind the chair-back, and the sash lay
crumpled on the floor. Black doeskin breeches, still warmly lined
with their pants, lay where they had been thrust off at the
corner of the bed, partly covering black hose and silver-buckled
shoes.

For a moment the tired gaze of the man in the bed rested upon
these evidences of his episcopal dignity. Then he turned from
them to the watch at the bedside.

He groaned helplessly.

(4)


These country doctors were no good. There wasn't a physician in
the diocese. He must go to London.

He looked into the weary eyes of his reflection and said, as
one makes a reassuring promise, "London."

He was being worried. He was being intolerably worried, and he
was ill and unable to sustain his positions. This doubt, this
sudden discovery of controversial unsoundness, was only one
aspect of his general neurasthenia. It had been creeping into his
mind since the "Light Unden the Altar" controversy. Now suddenly
it had leapt upon him from his own unwary lips.

The immediate trouble arose from his loyalty. He had followed
the King's example; he had become a total abstainer and, in
addition, on his own account he had ceased to smoke. And his
digestion, which Princhester had first made sensitive, was
deranged. He was suffering chemically, suffering one of those
nameless sequences of maladjustments that still defy our ordinary
medical science. It was afflicting him with a general malaise, it
was affecting his energy, his temper, all the balance and comfort
of his nerves. All day he was weary; all night he was wakeful. He
was estranged from his body. He was distressed by a sense of
detachment from the things about him, by a curious intimation of
unreality in everything he experienced. And with that went this
levity of conscience, a heaviness of soul and a levity of
conscience, that could make him talk as though the Creeds did not
matter--as though nothing mattered....

If only he could smoke!

He was persuaded that a couple of Egyptian cigarettes, or three
at the outside, a day, would do wonders in restoring his nervous
calm. That, and just a weak whisky and soda at lunch and dinner.
Suppose now--!

His conscience, his sense of honour, deserted him. Latterly he
had had several of these conscience-blanks; it was only when they
were over that he realized that they had occurred.

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

Why had he given up smoking?

He groaned aloud. He and his reflection eyed one another in
mutual despair.

There came before his memory the image of a boy's face, a
swarthy little boy, grinning, grinning with a horrible
knowingness and pointing his finger--an accusing finger. It had
been the most exasperating, humiliating, and shameful incident in
the bishop's career. It was the afternoon for his fortnightly
address to the Shop-girls' Church Association, and he had been
seized with a panic fear, entirely irrational and unjustifiable,
that he would not be able to deliver the address. The fear had
arisen after lunch, had gripped his mind, and then as now had
come the thought, "If only I could smoke!" And he had smoked. It
seemed better to break a vow than fail the Association. He had
fallen to the temptation with a completeness that now filled him
with shame and horror. He had stalked Dunk, his valet-butler, out
of the dining-room, had affected to need a book from the
book-case
beyond the sideboard, had gone insincerely to the sideboard
humming "From Greenland's icy mountains," and then, glancing over
his shoulder, had stolen one of his own cigarettes, one of the
fatter sort. With this and his bedroom matches he had gone off to
the bottom of the garden among the laurels, looked everywhere
except above the wall to be sure that he was alone, and at last
lit up, only as he raised his eyes in gratitude for the first
blissful inhalation to discover that dreadful little boy peeping
at him from the crotch in the yew-tree in the next garden. As
though God had sent him to be a witness!

Their eyes had met. The bishop recalled with an agonized
distinctness every moment, every error, of that shameful
encounter. He had been too surprised to conceal the state of
affairs from the pitiless scrutiny of those youthful eyes. He had
instantly made as if to put the cigarette behind his back, and
then as frankly dropped it....

His soul would not be more naked at the resurrection. The
little boy had stared, realized the state of affairs slowly but
surely, pointed his finger....

Never had two human beings understood each other more
completely.

A dirty little boy! Capable no doubt of a thousand kindred
scoundrelisms.

It seemed ages before the conscience-stricken bishop could tear
himself from the spot and walk back, with such a pretence of
dignity as he could muster, to the house.

And instead of the discourse he had prepared for the
Shop-girls' Church Association, he had preached on temptation and
falling, and how he knew they had all fallen, and how he
understood and could sympathize with the bitterness of a secret
shame, a moving but unsuitable discourse that had already been
subjected to misconstruction and severe reproof in the local
press of Princhester.

But the haunting thing in the bishop's memory was the face and
gesture of the little boy. That grubby little finger stabbed him
to the heart.

"Oh, God!" he groaned. "The meanness of it! How did I bring
myself--?"

He turned out the light convulsively, and rolled over in the
bed, making a sort of cocoon of himself. He bored his head into
the pillow and groaned, and then struggled impatiently to throw
the bed-clothes off himself. Then he sat up and talked aloud.

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

He paused for a long time.

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

"I shall go mad. I must smoke or I shall go mad."

For a long time he sat up in the great bed with his arms about
his knees.

(5)


Fearful things came to him; things at once dreadfully
blasphemous and entirely weak-minded.

The triangle and the eye became almost visible upon the black
background of night. They were very angry. They were spinning
round and round faster and faster. Because he was a bishop and
because really he did not believe fully and completely in the
Trinity. At one and the same time he did not believe in the
Trinity and was terrified by the anger of the Trinity at his
unbelief.... He was afraid. He was aghast.... And oh! he was
weary....

He rubbed his eyes.

"If I could have a cup of tea!" he said.

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

He tried not to think of that whizzing Triangle, that seemed
now to be nailed like a Catherine wheel to the very centre of his
forehead, and yet at the same time to be at the apex of the
universe. Against that--for protection against that--he was
praying. It was by a great effort that at last he pronounced the
words:

"Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord ...."

Presently be had turned up his light, and was prowling about
the room. The clear inky dinginess that comes before the raw dawn
of a spring morning, found his white face at the window, looking
out upon the great terrace and the park.




CHAPTER THE SECOND  -  THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY

(1)


IT was only in the last few years that the bishop had
experienced these nervous and mental crises. He was a belated
doubter. Whatever questionings had marked his intellectual
adolescence had either been very slight or had been too
adequately answered to leave any serious scars upon his
convictions.

And even now he felt that he was afflicted physically rather
than mentally, that some protective padding of nerve-sheath or
brain-case had worn thin and weak, and left him a prey to strange
disturbances, rather than that any new process of thought was
eating into his mind. These doubts in his mind were still not
really doubts; they were rather alien and, for the first time,
uncontrolled movements of his intelligence. He had had a
sheltered upbringing; he was the well-connected son of a
comfortable rectory, the only son and sole survivor of a family
of three; he had been carefully instructed and he had been a
willing learner; it had been easy and natural to take many things
for granted. It had been very easy and pleasant for him to take
the world as he found it and God as he found Him. Indeed for all
his years up to manhood he had been able to take life exactly as
in his infancy he took his carefully warmed and prepared bottle
--unquestioningly and beneficially.

And indeed that has been the way with most bishops since
bishops began.

It is a busy continuous process that turns boys into bishops,
and it will stand few jars or discords. The student of
ecclesiastical biography will find that an early vocation has in
every age been almost universal among them; few are there among
these lives that do not display the incipient bishop from the
tenderest years. Bishop How of Wakefield composed hymns before he
was eleven, and Archbishop Benson when scarcely older possessed a
little oratory in which he conducted services and--a pleasant
touch of the more secular boy--which he protected from a too
inquisitive sister by means of a booby trap. It is rare that
those marked for episcopal dignities go so far into the outer
world as Archbishop Lang of York, who began as a barrister. This
early predestination has always been the common episcopal
experience. Archbishop Benson's early attempts at religious
services remind one both of St. Thomas a Becket, the "boy
bishop," and those early ceremonies of St. Athanasius which were
observed and inquired upon by the good bishop Alexander. (For
though still a tender infant, St. Athanasius with perfect
correctness and validity was baptizing a number of his innocent
playmates, and the bishop who "had paused to contemplate the
sports of the child remained to confirm the zeal of the
missionary.") And as with the bishop of the past, so with the
bishop of the future; the Rev. H. J. Campbell, in his story of
his soul's pilgrimage, has given us a pleasant picture of himself
as a child stealing out into the woods to build himself a little
altar.

Such minds as these, settled as it were from the outset, are
either incapable of real scepticism or become sceptical only
after catastrophic changes. They understand the sceptical mind
with difficulty, and their beliefs are regarded by the sceptical
mind with incredulity. They have determined their forms of belief
before their years of discretion, and once those forms are
determined they are not very easily changed. Within the shell it
has adopted the intelligence may be active and lively enough, may
indeed be extraordinarily active and lively, but only within the
shell.

There is an entire difference in the mental quality of those
who are converts to a faith and those who are brought up in it.
The former know it from outside as well as from within. They know
not only that it is, but also that it is not. The latter have a
confidence in their creed that is one with their apprehension of
sky or air or gravitation. It is a primary mental structure, and
they not only do not doubt but they doubt the good faith of those
who do. They think that the Atheist and Agnostic really believe
but are impelled by a mysterious obstinacy to deny. So it had
been with the Bishop of Princhester; not of cunning or design but
in simple good faith he had accepted all the inherited assurances
of his native rectory, and held by Church, Crown, Empire,
decorum, respectability, solvency--and compulsory Greek at the
Little Go--as his father had done before him. If in his
undergraduate days he had said a thing or two in the modern vein,
affected the socialism of William Morris and learnt some
Swinburne by heart, it was out of a conscious wildness. He did
not wish to be a prig. He had taken a far more genuine interest
in the artistry of ritual.

Through all the time of his incumbency of the church of the
Holy Innocents, St. John's Wood, and of his career as the bishop
suffragan of Pinner, he had never faltered from his profound
confidence in those standards of his home. He had been kind,
popular, and endlessly active. His undergraduate socialism had
expanded simply and sincerely into a theory of administrative
philanthropy. He knew the Webbs. He was as successful with
working-class audiences as with fashionable congregations. His
home life with Lady Ella (she was the daughter of the fifth Earl
of Birkenholme) and his five little girls was simple, beautiful,
and happy as few homes are in these days of confusion. Until he
became Bishop of Princhester--he followed Hood, the first
bishop, as the reign of his Majesty King Edward the Peacemaker
drew to its close--no anticipation of his coming distress fell
across his path.

(2)


He came to Princhester an innocent and trustful man. The home
life at the old rectory of Otteringham was still his standard of
truth and reality. London had not disillusioned him. It was a
strange waste of people, it made him feel like a missionary in
infidel parts, but it was a kindly waste. It was neither
antagonistic nor malicious. He had always felt there that if he
searched his Londoner to the bottom, he would find the completest
recognition of the old rectory and all its data and implications.

But Princhester was different.

Princhester made one think that recently there had been a
second and much more serious Fall.

Princhester was industrial and unashamed. It was a countryside
savagely invaded by forges and mine shafts and gaunt black
things. It was scarred and impeded and discoloured. Even before
that invasion, when the heather was not in flower it must have
been a black country. Its people were dour uncandid individuals,
who slanted their heads and knitted their brows to look at you.
Occasionally one saw woods brown and blistered by the gases from
chemical works. Here and there remained old rectories, closely
reminiscent of the dear old home at Otteringham, jostled and
elbowed and overshadowed by horrible iron cylinders belching
smoke and flame. The fine old abbey church of Princhester, which
was the cathedral of the new diocese, looked when first he saw it
like a lady Abbess who had taken to drink and slept in a coal
truck. She minced apologetically upon the market-place; the
parvenu Town Hall patronized and protected her as if she were a
poor relation....

The old aristocracy of the countryside was unpicturesquely
decayed. The branch of the Walshinghams, Lady Ella's cousins, who
lived near Pringle, was poor, proud and ignoble. And extremely
unpopular. The rich people of the country were self-made and
inclined to nonconformity, the working-people were not strictly
speaking a "poor," they were highly paid, badly housed, and
deeply resentful. They went in vast droves to football matches,
and did not care a rap if it rained. The prevailing wind was
sarcastic. To come here from London was to come from atmospheric
blue-greys to ashen-greys, from smoke and soft smut to grime and
black grimness.

The bishop had been charmed by the historical associations of
Princhester when first the see was put before his mind. His
realization of his diocese was a profound shock.

Only one hint had he had of what was coming. He had met during
his season of congratulations Lord Gatling dining unusually at
the Athenaeum. Lord Gatling and he did not talk frequently, but
on this occasion the great racing peer came over to him. "You
will feel like a cherub in a stokehole," Lord Gatling had
said....

"They used to heave lumps of slag at old Hood's gaiters," said
Lord Gatling.

"In London a bishop's a lord and a lark and nobody minds him,"
said Lord Gatling, "but Princhester is different. It isn't used
to bishops.... Well,--I hope you'll get to like 'em."

(3)


Trouble began with a fearful row about the position of the
bishop's palace. Hood had always evaded this question, and a
number of strong-willed self-made men of wealth and influence,
full of local patriotism and that competitive spirit which has
made England what it is, already intensely irritated by Hood's
prevarications, were resolved to pin his successor to an
immediate decision. Of this the new bishop was unaware. Mindful
of a bishop's constant need to travel, he was disposed to seek a
home within easy reach of Pringle Junction, from which nearly
every point in the diocese could be simply and easily reached.
This fell in with Lady Ella's liking for the rare rural quiet of
the Kibe valley and the neighbourhood of her cousins the
Walshinghams. Unhappily it did not fall in with the inflexible
resolution of each and every one of the six leading towns of the
see to put up, own, obtrude, boast, and swagger about the biggest
and showiest thing in episcopal palaces in all industrial
England, and the new bishop had already taken a short lease and
gone some way towards the acquisition of Ganford House, two miles
from Pringle, before he realized the strength and fury of these
local ambitions.

At first the magnates and influences seemed to be fighting only
among themselves, and he was so ill-advised as to broach the
Ganford House project as a compromise that would glorify no one
unfairly, and leave the erection of an episcopal palace for some
future date when he perhaps would have the good fortune to have
passed to "where beyond these voices there is peace," forgetting
altogether among other oversights the importance of architects
and builders in local affairs. His proposal seemed for a time to
concentrate the rich passions of the whole countryside upon
himself and his wife.

Because they did not leave Lady Ella alone. The Walshinghams
were already unpopular in their county on account of a poverty
and shyness that made them seem "stuck up" to successful captains
of industry only too ready with the hand of friendship, the iron
grip indeed of friendship, consciously hospitable and eager for
admission and endorsements. And Princhester in particular was
under the sway of that enterprising weekly, The White Blackbird,
which was illustrated by, which indeed monopolized the gifts of,
that brilliant young caricaturist "The Snicker."

It had seemed natural for Lady Ella to acquiesce in the
proposals of the leading Princhester photographer. She had always
helped where she could in her husband's public work, and she had
been popular upon her own merits in Wealdstone. The portrait was
abominable enough in itself; it dwelt on her chin, doubled her
age, and denied her gentleness, but it was a mere starting-point
for the subtle extravagance of The Snicker's poisonous gift....
The thing came upon the bishop suddenly from the book-stall at
Pringle Junction.

He kept it carefully from Lady Ella.... It was only later that
he found that a copy of The White Blackbird had been sent to her,
and that she was keeping the horror from him. It was in her vein
that she should reproach herself for being a vulnerable side to
him.

Even when the bishop capitulated in favour of Princhester, that
decision only opened a fresh trouble for him. Princhester wanted
the palace to be a palace; it wanted to combine all the best
points of Lambeth and Fulham with the marble splendours of a good
modern bank. The bishop's architectural tastes, on the other
hand, were rationalistic. He was all for building a useful palace
in undertones, with a green slate roof and long horizontal lines.
What he wanted more than anything else was a quite remote wing
with a lot of bright little bedrooms and a sitting-room and so
on, complete in itself, examination hall and everything, with a
long intricate connecting passage and several doors, to prevent
the ordination candidates straying all over the place and getting
into the talk and the tea. But the diocese wanted a proud archway
--and turrets, and did not care a rap if the ordination
candidates slept about on the carpets in the bishop's bedroom.
Ordination candidates were quite outside the sphere of its
imagination.

And he disappointed Princhester with his equipage. Princhester
had a feeling that it deserved more for coming over to the church
from nonconformity as it was doing. It wanted a bishop in a mitre
and a gilt coach. It wanted a pastoral crook. It wanted something
to go with its mace and its mayor. And (obsessed by The Snicker)
it wanted less of Lady Ella. The cruelty and unreason of these
attacks upon his wife distressed the bishop beyond measure, and
baffled him hopelessly. He could not see any means of checking
them nor of defending or justifying her against them.

The palace was awaiting its tenant, but the controversies and
bitternesses were still swinging and swaying and developing when
King George was being crowned. Close upon that event came a wave
of social discontent, the great railway strike, a curious sense
of social and political instability, and the first beginnings of
the bishop's ill health.

(4)


There came a day of exceptional fatigue and significance.

The industrial trouble was a very real distress to the bishop.
He had a firm belief that it is a function of the church to act
as mediator between employer and employed. It was a common saying
of his that the aim of socialism--the right sort of socialism
--was to Christianize employment. Regardless of suspicion on
either hand, regardless of very distinct hints that he should
"mind his own business," he exerted himself in a search for
methods of reconciliation. He sought out every one who seemed
likely to be influential on either side, and did his utmost to
discover the conditions of a settlement. As far as possible and
with the help of a not very efficient chaplain he tried to
combine such interviews with his more normal visiting.

At times, and this was particularly the case on this day, he
seemed to be discovering nothing but the incurable perversity and
militancy of human nature. It was a day under an east wind, when
a steely-blue sky full of colourless light filled a stiff-necked
world with whitish high lights and inky shadows. These bright
harsh days of barometric high pressure in England rouse and
thwart every expectation of the happiness of spring. And as the
bishop drove through the afternoon in a hired fly along a rutted
road of slag between fields that were bitterly wired against the
Sunday trespasser, he fell into a despondent meditation upon the
political and social outlook.

His thoughts were of a sort not uncommon in those days. The
world was strangely restless. Since the passing of Victoria the
Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national
life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had
been lifted from people's ideas, and as if at once they had begun
to blow about anyhow. Not that Queen Victoria had really been a
paper-weight or any weight at all, but it happened that she died
as an epoch closed, an epoch of tremendous stabilities. Her son,
already elderly, had followed as the selvedge follows the piece,
he had passed and left the new age stripped bare. In nearly every
department of economic and social life now there was upheaval,
and it was an upheaval very different in character from the
radicalism and liberalism of the Victorian days. There were not
only doubt and denial, but now there were also impatience and
unreason. People argued less and acted quicker. There was a pride
in rebellion for its own sake, an indiscipline and disposition to
sporadic violence that made it extremely hard to negotiate any
reconciliations or compromises. Behind every extremist it seemed
stood a further extremist prepared to go one better....

The bishop had spent most of the morning with one of the big
employers, a tall dark man, lean and nervous, and obviously tired
and worried by the struggle. He did not conceal his opinion that
the church was meddling with matters quite outside its sphere.
Never had it been conveyed to the bishop before how remote a rich
and established Englishman could consider the church from
reality.

"You've got no hold on them," he said. "It isn't your sphere."

And again: "They'll listen to you--if you speak well. But
they don't believe you know anything about it, and they don't
trust your good intentions. They won't mind a bit what you say
unless you drop something they can use against us."

The bishop tried a few phrases. He thought there might be
something in co-operation, in profit-sharing, in some more
permanent relationship between the business and the employee.

"There isn't," said the employer compactly. "It's just the
malice of being inferior against the man in control. It's just
the spirit of insubordination and boredom with duty. This
trouble's as old as the Devil."

"But that is exactly the business of the church," said the
bishop brightly, "to reconcile men to their duty."

"By chanting the Athanasian creed at 'em, I suppose," said the
big employer, betraying the sneer he had been hiding hitherto.

"This thing is a fight," said the big employer, carrying on
before the bishop could reply. "Religion had better get out of
the streets until this thing is over. The men won't listen to
reason. They don't mean to. They're bit by Syndicalism. They're
setting out, I tell you, to be unreasonable and impossible. It
isn't an argument; it's a fight. They don't want to make friends
with the employer. They want to make an end to the employer.
Whatever we give them they'll take and press us for more.
Directly we make terms with the leaders the men go behind it....
It's a raid on the whole system. They don't mean to work the
system--anyhow. I'm the capitalist, and the capitalist has to
go. I'm to be bundled out of my works, and some--some "--he
seemed to be rejecting unsuitable words--" confounded politician
put in. Much good it would do them. But before that happens I'm
going to fight. You would."

The bishop walked to the window and stood staring at the
brilliant spring bulbs in the big employer's garden, and at a
long vista of newly-mown lawn under great shapely trees just
budding into green.

"I can't admit," he said, "that these troubles lie outside the
sphere of the church."

The employer came and stood beside him. He felt he was being a
little hard on the bishop, but he could not see any way of making
things easier.

"One doesn't want Sacred Things," he tried, "in a scrap like
this.

"We've got to mend things or end things," continued the big
employer. "Nothing goes on for ever. Things can't last as they
are going on now...."

Then he went on abruptly to something that for a time he had
been keeping back.

"Of course just at present the church may do a confounded lot
of harm. Some of you clerical gentlemen are rather too fond of
talking socialism and even preaching socialism. Don't think I
want to be overcritical. I admit there's no end of things to be
said for a proper sort of socialism, Ruskin, and all that. We're
all Socialists nowadays. Ideals--excellent. But--it gets
misunderstood. It gives the men a sense of moral support. It
makes them fancy that they are It. Encourages them to forget
duties and set up preposterous claims. Class war and all that
sort of thing. You gentlemen of the clergy don't quite realize
that socialism may begin with Ruskin and end with Karl Marx. And
that from the Class War to the Commune is just one step."

(5)


From this conversation the bishop had made his way to the
vicarage of Mogham Banks. The vicar of Mogham Banks was a
sacerdotal socialist of the most advanced type, with the
reputation of being closely in touch with the labour extremists.
He was a man addicted to banners, prohibited ornaments, special
services at unusual hours, and processions in the streets. His
taste in chasubles was loud, he gardened in a cassock and, it was
said, he slept in his biretta; he certainly slept in a hair
shirt, and he littered his church with flowers, candles, side
altars, confessional boxes, requests for prayers for the
departed, and the like. There had already been two Kensitite
demonstrations at his services, and altogether he was a source of
considerable anxiety to the bishop. The bishop did his best not
to know too exactly what was going on at Mogham Banks. Sooner or
later he felt he would be forced to do something--and the
longer he could put that off the better. But the Rev. Morrice
Deans had promised to get together three or four prominent labour
leaders for tea and a frank talk, and the opportunity was one not
to be missed. So the bishop, after a hasty and not too digestible
lunch in the refreshment room at Pringle, was now in a fly that
smelt of straw and suggested infectious hospital patients, on his
way through the industry-scarred countryside to this second
conversation.

The countryside had never seemed so scarred to him as it did
that day.

It was probably the bright hard spring sunshine that emphasized
the contrast between that dear England of hedges and homes and
the south-west wind in which his imagination lived, and the crude
presences of a mechanical age. Never before had the cuttings and
heapings, the smashing down of trees, the obtrusion of corrugated
iron and tar, the belchings of smoke and the haste, seemed so
harsh and disregardful of all the bishop's world. Across the
fields a line of gaunt iron standards, abominably designed,
carried an electric cable to some unknown end. The curve of the
hill made them seem a little out of the straight, as if they
hurried and bent forward furtively.

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

And presently the road was under repair, and was being done at
a great pace with a huge steam-roller, mechanically smashed
granite, and kettles of stinking stuff, asphalt or something of
that sort, that looked and smelt like Milton's hell. Beyond, a
gaunt hoarding advertised extensively the Princhester Music Hall,
a mean beastly place that corrupted boys and girls; and also it
clamoured of tyres and potted meats....

The afternoon's conference gave him no reassuring answer to his
question, "Where is it all going?"

The afternoon's conference did no more than intensify the new
and strange sense of alienation from the world that the morning's
talk had evoked.

The three labour extremists that Morrice Deans had assembled
obviously liked the bishop and found him picturesque, and were
not above a certain snobbish gratification at the purple-trimmed
company they were in, but it was clear that they regarded his
intervention in the great dispute as if it were a feeble waving
from the bank across the waters of a great river.

"There's an incurable misunderstanding between the modern
employer and the modern employed," the chief labour spokesman
said, speaking in a broad accent that completely hid from him and
the bishop and every one the fact that he was by far the
best-read man of the party. "Disraeli called them the Two
Nations, but that was long ago. Now it's a case of two species.
Machinery has made them into different species. The employer
lives away from his work-people, marries a wife foreign, out of a
county family or suchlike, trains his children from their very
birth in a different manner. Why, the growth curve is different
for the two species. They haven't even a common speech between
them. One looks east and the other looks west. How can you expect
them to agree? Of course they won't agree. We've got to fight it
out. They say we're their slaves for ever. Have you ever read
Lady Bell's 'At the Works'? A well-intentioned woman, but she
gives the whole thing away. We say, No! It's our sort and not
your sort. We'll do without you. We'll get a little more
education and then we'll do without you. We're pressing for all
we can get, and when we've got that we'll take breath and press
for more. We're the Morlocks. Coming up. It isn't our fault that
we've differentiated."

"But you haven't understood the drift of Christianity," said
the bishop. "It's just to assert that men are One community and
not two."

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

The vicar spoke before his bishop, and indeed he had plenty of
time to speak before his bishop. "Because you will not set
yourselves to understand the symbolism of her ritual," he said.

"If the church chooses to speak in riddles," said the
rationalist.

"Symbols," said Morrice Deans, "need not be riddles," and for a
time the talk eddied about this minor issue and the chief labour
spokesman and the bishop looked at one another. The vicar
instanced and explained certain apparently insignificant
observances, his antagonist was contemptuously polite to these
explanations. "That's all very pratty," he said....

The bishop wished that fine points of ceremonial might have
been left out of the discussion.

Something much bigger than that was laying hold of his
intelligence, the realization of a world extravagantly out of
hand. The sky, the wind, the telegraph poles, had been jabbing in
the harsh lesson of these men's voices, that the church, as
people say, "wasn't in it." And that at the same time the church
held the one remedy for all this ugliness and contention in its
teaching of the universal fatherhood of God and the universal
brotherhood of men. Only for some reason he hadn't the phrases
and he hadn't the voice to assert this over their wrangling and
their stiff resolution. He wanted to think the whole business out
thoroughly, for the moment he had nothing to say, and there was
the labour leader opposite waiting smilingly to hear what he had
to say so soon as the bout between the vicar and the rationalist
was over.

(6)


That morning in the long galleries of the bishop's imagination
a fresh painting had been added. It was a big wall painting
rather in the manner of Puvis de Chavannes. And the central
figure had been the bishop of Princhester himself. He had been
standing upon the steps of the great door of the cathedral that
looks upon the marketplace where the tram-lines meet, and he had
been dressed very magnificently and rather after the older use.
He had been wearing a tunicle and dalmatic under a chasuble, a
pectoral cross, purple gloves, sandals and buskins, a mitre and
his presentation ring. In his hand he had borne his pastoral
staff. And the clustering pillars and arches of the great doorway
were painted with a loving flat particularity that omitted
nothing but the sooty tinge of the later discolourations.

On his right hand had stood a group of employers very richly
dressed in the fashion of the fifteenth century, and on the left
a rather more numerous group of less decorative artisans. With
them their wives and children had been shown, all greatly
impressed by the canonicals. Every one had been extremely
respectful.

He had been reconciling the people and blessing them and
calling them his "sheep" and his "little children."

But all this was so different.

Neither party resembled sheep or little children in the least
degree. .

The labour leader became impatient with the ritualistic
controversy; he set his tea-cup aside out of danger and leant
across the corner of the table to the bishop and spoke in a
sawing undertone. "You see," he said, "the church does not talk
our language. I doubt if it understands our language. I doubt if
we understand clearly where we are ourselves. These things have
to be fought out and hammered out. It's a big dusty dirty noisy
job. It may be a bloody job before it's through. You can't
suddenly call a halt in the middle of the scrap and have a sort
of millennium just because you want it....

"Of course if the church had a plan," he said, "if it had a
proposal to make, if it had anything more than a few pious
palliatives to suggest, that might be different. But has it?"

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

(7)


Full as he was with the preoccupation of these things and so a
little slow and inattentive in his movements, the bishop had his
usual luck at Pringle Junction and just missed the 7.27 for
Princhester. He might perhaps have got it by running through the
subway and pushing past people, but bishops must not run through
subways and push past people. His mind swore at the mischance,
even if his lips refrained.

He was hungry and, tired; he would not get to the palace now
until long after nine; dinner would be over and Lady Ella would
naturally suppose he had dined early with the Rev. Morrice Deans.
Very probably there would be nothing ready for him at all.

He tried to think he was exercising self-control, but indeed
all his sub-conscious self was busy in a manner that would not
have disgraced Tertullian with the eternal welfare of those city
fathers whose obstinacy had fixed the palace at Princhester. He
walked up and down the platform, gripping his hands very tightly
behind him, and maintaining a serene upcast countenance by a
steadfast effort. It seemed a small matter to him that the
placards of the local evening papers should proclaim "Lloyd
George's Reconciliation Meeting at Wombash Broken up by
Suffragettes." For a year now he had observed a strict rule
against buying the products of the local press, and he saw no
reason for varying this protective regulation.

His mind was full of angry helplessness.

Was he to blame, was the church to blame, for its powerlessness
in these social disputes? Could an abler man with a readier
eloquence have done more?

He envied the cleverness of Cardinal Manning. Manning would
have got right into the front of this affair. He would have
accumulated credit for his church and himself....

But would he have done much?...

The bishop wandered along the platform to its end, and stood
contemplating the convergent ways that gather together beyond the
station and plunge into the hillside and the wilderness of
sidings and trucks, signal-boxes, huts, coal-pits, electric
standards, goods sheds, turntables, and engine-houses, that ends
in a bluish bricked-up cliff against the hill. A train rushed
with a roar and clatter into the throat of the great tunnel and
was immediately silenced; its rear lights twinkled and vanished,
and then out of that huge black throat came wisps of white steam
and curled slowly upward like lazy snakes until they caught the
slanting sunshine. For the first time the day betrayed a softness
and touched this scene of black energy to gold. All late
afternoons are beautiful, whatever the day has been--if only
there is a gleam of sun. And now a kind of mechanical greatness
took the place of mere black disorder in the bishop's perception
of his see. It was harsh, it was vast and strong, it was no lamb
he had to rule but a dragon. Would it ever be given to him to
overcome his dragon, to lead it home, and bless it?

He stood at the very end of the platform, with his gaitered
legs wide apart and his hands folded behind him, staring beyond
all visible things.

Should he do something very bold and striking? Should he invite
both men and masters to the cathedral, and preach tremendous
sermons to them upon these living issues?

Short sermons, of course.

But stating the church's attitude with a new and convincing
vigour.

He had a vision of the great aisle strangely full and alive and
astir. The organ notes still echoed in the fretted vaulting, as
the preacher made his way from the chancel to the pulpit. The
congregation was tense with expectation, and for some reason his
mind dwelt for a long time upon the figure of the preacher
ascending the steps of the pulpit. Outside the day was dark and
stormy, so that the stained-glass windows looked absolutely dead.
For a little while the preacher prayed. Then in the attentive
silence the tenor of the preacher would begin, a thin jet of
sound, a ray of light in the darkness, speaking to all these men
as they had never been spoken to before....

Surely so one might call a halt to all these harsh conflicts.
So one might lay hands afresh upon these stubborn minds, one
might win them round to look at Christ the Master and Servant....

That, he thought, would be a good phrase: "Christ the Master
and Servant."....

"Members of one Body," that should be his text.... At last it
was finished. The big congregation, which had kept so still,
sighed and stirred. The task of reconciliation was as good as
done. "And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy
Ghost...."

Outside the day had become suddenly bright, the threatening
storm had drifted away, and great shafts of coloured light from
the pictured windows were smiting like arrows amidst his
hearers....

This idea of a great sermon upon capital and labour did so
powerfully grip the bishop's imagination that he came near to
losing the 8.27 train also.

He discovered it when it was already in the station. He had to
walk down the platform very quickly. He did not run, but his
gaiters, he felt, twinkled more than a bishop's should.

(8)


Directly he met his wife he realized that he had to hear
something important and unpleasant.

She stood waiting for him in the inner hall, looking very grave
and still. The light fell upon her pale face and her dark hair
and her long white silken dress, making her seem more delicate
and unworldly than usual and making the bishop feel grimy and
sordid.

"I must have a wash," he said, though before he had thought of
nothing but food. "I have had nothing to eat since tea-time--
and that was mostly talk."

Lady Ella considered. "There are cold things.... You shall have
a tray in the study. Not in the dining-room. Eleanor is there. I
want to tell you something. But go upstairs first and wash your
poor tired face."

"Nothing serious, I hope?" he asked, struck by an unusual
quality in her voice.

"I will tell you," she evaded, and after a moment of mutual
scrutiny he went past her upstairs.

Since they had come to Princhester Lady Ella had changed very
markedly. She seemed to her husband to have gained in dignity;
she was stiller and more restrained; a certain faint arrogance, a
touch of the "ruling class" manner had dwindled almost to the
vanishing point. There had been a time when she had inclined to
an authoritative hauteur, when she had seemed likely to develop
into one of those aggressive and interfering old ladies who play
so overwhelming a part in British public affairs. She had been
known to initiate adverse judgments, to exercise the snub, to cut
and humiliate. Princhester had done much to purge her of such
tendencies. Princhester had made her think abundantly, and had
put a new and subtler quality into her beauty. It had taken away
the least little disposition to rustle as she moved, and it had
softened her voice.

Now, when presently she stood in the study, she showed a new
circumspection in her treatment of her husband. She surveyed the
tray before him.

"You ought not to drink that Burgundy," she said. "I can see
you are dog-tired. It was uncorked yesterday, and anyhow it is
not very digestible. This cold meat is bad enough. You ought to
have one of those quarter bottles of champagne you got for my
last convalescence. There's more than a dozen left over."

The bishop felt that this was a pretty return of his own kindly
thoughts "after many days," and soon Dunk, his valet-butler, was
pouring out the precious and refreshing glassful....

"And now, dear?" said the bishop, feeling already much better.

Lady Ella had come round to the marble fireplace. The
mantel-piece was a handsome work by a Princhester artist in the
Gill style--with contemplative ascetics as supporters.

"I am worried about Eleanor," said Lady Ella.

"She is in the dining-room now," she said, "having some dinner.
She came in about a quarter past eight, half way through dinner."

"Where had she been?" asked the bishop.

"Her dress was torn--in two places. Her wrist had been
twisted and a little sprained."

"My dear!"

"Her face--Grubby! And she had been crying."

"But, my dear, what had happened to her? You don't mean--?"

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

"Merciful heaven!" said the bishop, and assumed an attitude of
despair.

"I didn't know she knew any of them. But it seems it is the
second Walshingham girl--Phoebe. It's impossible to trace a
girl's thoughts and friends. She persuaded her to go."

"But did she understand?"

"That's the serious thing," said Lady Ella.

She seemed to consider whether he could bear the blow.

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

"About this vote business?"

"About all sorts of things. Things I didn't imagine she had
heard of. I knew she had been reading books. But I never imagined
that she could have understood...."

The bishop laid down his knife and fork.

"One may read in books, one may even talk of things, without
fully understanding," he said.

Lady Ella tried to entertain this comforting thought. "It isn't
like that," she said at last. "She talks like a grown-up person.
This--this escapade is just an accident. But things have gone
further than that. She seems to think--that she is not being
educated properly here, that she ought to go to a College. As if
we were keeping things from her...."

The bishop reconsidered his plate.

"But what things?" he said.

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

(9)


For a time the bishop said very little.

Lady Ella had found it necessary to make her first announcement
standing behind him upon the hearthrug, but now she sat upon the
arm of the great armchair as close to him as possible, and spoke
in a more familiar tone.

The thing, she said, had come to her as a complete surprise.
Everything had seemed so safe. Eleanor had been thoughtful, it
was true, but it had never occurred to her mother that she had
really been thinking--about such things as she had been
thinking about. She had ranged in the library, and displayed a
disposition to read the weekly papers and the monthly reviews.
But never a sign of discontent.

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

"Exactly," said Lady Ella.

"She has got this idea that life here is secluded in some way,"
she expanded. "She used words like 'secluded' and 'artificial'
and--what was it?--'cloistered.' And she said--"

Lady Ella paused with an effect of exact retrospection.

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

Lady Ella paused again.

The bishop sat with his arm over the back of his chair, and his
face downcast.

"The ferment of youth," he said at last. "The ferment of youth.
Who has given her these ideas?"

Lady Ella did not know. She could have thought a school like
St. Aubyns would have been safe, but nowadays nothing was safe.
It was clear the girls who went there talked as girls a
generation ago did not talk. Their people at home encouraged them
to talk and profess opinions about everything. It seemed that
Phoebe Walshingham and Lady Kitty Kingdom were the leaders in
these premature mental excursions. Phoebe aired religious doubts.

"But little Phoebe!" said the bishop.

"Kitty," said Lady Ella, "has written a novel."

"Already! "

"With elopements in it--and all sorts of things. She's had it
typed. You'd think Mary Crosshampton would know better than to
let her daughter go flourishing the family imagination about in
that way."

"Eleanor told you?"

"By way of showing that they think of--things in general."

The bishop reflected. "She wants to go to College."

"They want to go in a set."

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

(10)


All our children are changelings. They are perpetually fresh
strangers. Every day they vanish and a new person masquerades as
yesterday's child until some unexpected development betrays the
cheat.

The bishop had still to learn this perennial newness of the
young. He learnt it in half an hour at the end of a fatiguing
day.

He went into the dining-room. He went in as carelessly as
possible and smoking a cigarette. He had an honourable dread of
being portentous in his family; almost ostentatiously he laid the
bishop aside. Eleanor had finished her meal, and was sitting in
the arm-chair by the fire with one hand holding her sprained
wrist.

"Well," he said, and strolled to the hearthrug. He had had an
odd idea that he would find her still dirty, torn, and tearful,
as her mother had described her, a little girl in a scrape. But
she had changed into her best white evening frock and put up her
hair, and became in the firelight more of a lady, a very young
lady but still a lady, than she had ever been to him before. She
was dark like her mother, but not of the same willowy type; she
had more of her father's sturdy build, and she had developed her
shoulders at hockey and tennis. The firelight brought out the
gracious reposeful lines of a body that ripened in adolescence.
And though there was a vibration of resolution in her voice she
spoke like one who is under her own control.

"Mother has told you that I have disgraced myself," she began.

"No," said the bishop, weighing it. "No. But you seem to have
been indiscreet, little Norah."

"I got excited," she said. "They began turning out the other
women--roughly. I was indignant."

"You didn't go to interrupt?" he asked.

She considered. "No," she said. "But I went."

He liked her disposition to get it right. "On that side," he
assisted.

"It isn't the same thing as really meaning, Daddy," she said.

"And then things happened?"

"Yes," she said to the fire.

A pause followed. If they had been in a law-court, her
barrister would have said, "That is my case, my lord." The bishop
prepared to open the next stage in the proceedings.

"I think, Norah, you shouldn't have been there at all," he
said.

"Mother says that."

"A man in my position is apt to be judged by his family. You
commit more than yourself when you commit an indiscretion. Apart
from that, it wasn't the place for a girl to be at. You are not a
child now. We give you freedom--more freedom than most girls
get--because we think you will use it wisely. You knew--
enough to know that there was likely to be trouble."

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

The bishop studied her face for an instant. It struck him that
they had reached something very fundamental as between parent and
child. His modernity showed itself in the temperance of his
reply.

"Don't you think, my dear, that on the whole your mother and I,
who have lived longer and know more, are more likely to know when
it is best that you should begin to know--this or that?"

The girl knitted her brows and seemed to be reading her answer
out of the depths of the coals. She was on the verge of speaking,
altered her mind and tried a different beginning.

"I think that every one must do their thinking--his thinking
--for--oneself," she said awkwardly.

"You mean you can't trust--?"

"It isn't trusting. But one knows best for oneself when one is
hungry."

"And you find yourself hungry?"

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

"And we starve you--intellectually?"

"You know I don't think that. But you are busy...."

"Aren't you being perhaps a little impatient, Eleanor? After
all--you are barely eighteen.... We have given you all sorts of
liberties."

Her silence admitted it. "But still," she said after a long
pause, "there are other girls, younger than I am, in these
things. They talk about--oh, all sorts of things. Freely...."

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

Father and daughter remained silent for awhile, seeking a
better grip.

"What exactly do you want, Eleanor? " he asked.

She looked up at him. "Generally?" she asked.

"Your mother has the impression that you are discontented."

"Discontented is a horrid word."

"Well--unsatisfied."

She remained still for a time. She felt the moment had come to
make her demand.

"I would like to go to Newnham or Somerville--and work. I
feel--so horribly ignorant. Of all sorts of things. If I were a
son I should go--"

"Ye--es," said the bishop and reflected.

He had gone rather far in the direction of the Woman Suffrage
people; he had advocated equality of standard in all sorts of
matters, and the memory of these utterances hampered him.

"You could read here," he tried.

"If I were a son, you wouldn't say that."

His reply was vague. "But in this home," he said, "we have a
certain atmosphere. .

He left her to imply her differences in sensibility and
response from the hardier male.

Her hesitation marked the full gravity of her reply. "It's just
that," she said. "One feels--" She considered it further. "As if
we were living in a kind of magic world--not really real. Out
there--" she glanced over her shoulder at the drawn blind that
hid the night. "One meets with different sorts of minds and
different--atmospheres. All this is very beautiful. I've had
the most wonderful home. But there's a sort of feeling as though
it couldn't really go on, as though all these strikes and doubts
and questionings--"

She stopped short at questionings, for the thing was said.

The bishop took her meaning gallantly and honestly.

"The church of Christ, little Norah, is built upon a rock."

She made no answer. She moved her head very slightly so that he
could not see her face, and remained sitting rather stiffly and
awkwardly with her eyes upon the fire.

Her silence was the third and greatest blow the bishop received
that day....

It seemed very long indeed before either of them spoke. At last
he said: "We must talk about these things again, Norah, when we
are less tired and have more time.... You have been reading
books.... When Caxton set up his printing-press he thrust a new
power between church and disciple and father and child.... And I
am tired. We must talk it over a little later."

The girl stood up. She took her father's hands. "Dear, dear
Daddy," she said, "I am so sorry to be a bother. I am so sorry I
went to that meeting.... You look tired out."

"We must talk--properly," said the bishop, patting
one hand, then discovering from her wincing face that it was the
sprained one. "Your poor wrist," he said.

"It's so hard to talk, but I want to talk to you, Daddy. It
isn't that I have hidden things...."

She kissed him, and the bishop had the odd fancy that she
kissed him as though she was sorry for him....

It occurred to him that really there could be no time like the
present for discussing these "questionings" of hers, and then his
fatigue and shyness had the better of him again.

(11)


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

It did not attack her. It did worse. It admired her
...impudently.

It spoke of her once as "Norah," and once as "the Scrope
Flapper."

Its headline proclaimed: "Plucky Flappers Hold Up L. G."




CHAPTER THE THIRD  -  INSOMNIA

(1)


THE night after his conversation with Eleanor was the first
night of the bishop's insomnia. It was the definite beginning of
a new phase in his life.

Doctors explain to us that the immediate cause of insomnia is
always some poisoned or depleted state of the body, and no doubt
the fatigues and hasty meals of the day had left the bishop in a
state of unprecedented chemical disorder, with his nerves
irritated by strange compounds and unsoothed by familiar
lubricants. But chemical disorders follow mental disturbances,
and the core and essence of his trouble was an intellectual
distress. For the first time in his life he was really in doubt,
about himself, about his way of living, about all his
persuasions. It was a general doubt. It was not a specific
suspicion upon this point or that. It was a feeling of detachment
and unreality at once extraordinarily vague and extraordinarily
oppressive. It was as if he discovered himself flimsy and
transparent in a world of minatory solidity and opacity. It was
as if he found himself made not of flesh and blood but of tissue
paper.

But this intellectual insecurity extended into his physical
sensations. It affected his feeling in his skin, as if it were
not absolutely his own skin.

And as he lay there, a weak phantom mentally and bodily, an
endless succession and recurrence of anxieties for which he could
find no reassurance besieged him.

Chief of this was his distress for Eleanor.

She was the central figure in this new sense of illusion in
familiar and trusted things. It was not only that the world of
his existence which had seemed to be the whole universe had
become diaphanous and betrayed vast and uncontrollable realities
beyond it, but his daughter had as it were suddenly opened a door
in this glassy sphere of insecurity that had been his abiding
refuge, a door upon the stormy rebel outer world, and she stood
there, young, ignorant, confident, adventurous, ready to step
out.

"Could it be possible that she did not believe?"

He saw her very vividly as he had seen her in the dining-room,
slender and upright, half child, half woman, so fragile and so
fearless. And the door she opened thus carelessly gave upon a
stormy background like one of the stormy backgrounds that were
popular behind portrait Dianas in eighteenth century paintings.
Did she believe that all be had taught her, all the life he led
was--what was her phrase?--a kind of magic world, not really
real?

He groaned and turned over and repeated the words:
"A kind of magic world--not really real!"

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

He was astonished at himself. He started up in swift
indignation. Had he not taught the child? Had he not brought her
up in an atmosphere of faith? What right had she to turn upon him
in this matter? It was--indeed it was--a sort of insolence, a
lack of reverence....

It was strange he had not perceived this at the time.

But indeed at the first mention of "questionings" he ought to
have thundered. He saw that quite clearly now. He ought to have
cried out and said, "On your knees, my Norah, and ask pardon of
God!"

Because after all faith is an emotional thing....

He began to think very rapidly and copiously of things he ought
to have said to Eleanor. And now the eloquence of reverie was
upon him. In a little time he was also addressing the tea-party
at Morrice Deans'. Upon them too he ought to have thundered. And
he knew now also all that he should have said to the recalcitrant
employer. Thunder also. Thunder is surely the privilege of the
higher clergy--under Jove.

But why hadn't he thundered?

He gesticulated in the darkness, thrust out a clutching hand.

There are situations that must be gripped--gripped firmly.
And without delay. In the middle ages there had been grip enough
in a purple glove.

(2)


From these belated seizures of the day's lost opportunities the
bishop passed to such a pessimistic estimate of the church as had
never entered his mind before.

It was as if he had fallen suddenly out of a spiritual balloon
into a world of bleak realism. He found himself asking
unprecedented and devastating questions, questions that implied
the most fundamental shiftings of opinion. Why was the church
such a failure? Why had it no grip upon either masters or men
amidst this vigorous life of modern industrialism, and why had it
no grip upon the questioning young? It was a tolerated thing, he
felt, just as sometimes he had felt that the Crown was a
tolerated thing. He too was a tolerated thing; a curious
survival....

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

The church was no Levite to pass by on the other side away from
the struggles and wrongs of the social conflict. It had no right
when the children asked for the bread of life to offer them
Gothic stone....

He began to make interminable weak plans for fulfilling his
duty to his diocese and his daughter.

What could he do to revivify his clergy? He wished he had more
personal magnetism, he wished he had a darker and a larger
presence. He wished he had not been saddled with Whippham's
rather futile son as his chaplain. He wished he had a dean
instead of being his own dean. With an unsympathetic rector. He
wished he had it in him to make some resounding appeal. He might
of course preach a series of thumping addresses and sermons,
rather on the lines of "Fors Clavigera," to masters and men, in
the Cathedral. Only it was so difficult to get either masters or
men into the Cathedral.

Well, if the people will not come to the bishop the bishop must
go out to the people. Should he go outside the Cathedral--to
the place where the trains met?

Interweaving with such thoughts the problem of Eleanor rose
again into his consciousness.

Weren't there books she ought to read? Weren't there books she
ought to be made to read? And books--and friends--that ought
to be imperatively forbidden? Imperatively!

But how to define the forbidden?

He began to compose an address on Modern Literature
(so-called).

It became acrimonious.

Before dawn the birds began to sing.

His mind had seemed to be a little tranquillized, there had
been a distinct feeling of subsidence sleepwards, when first one
and then another little creature roused itself and the bishop to
greet the gathering daylight.

It became a little clamour, a misty sea of sound in which
individuality appeared and disappeared. For a time a distant
cuckoo was very perceptible, like a landmark looming up over a
fog, like the cuckoo in the Pastoral Symphony.

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

Presently he pulled the coverlet over his ears.

A little later he sat up in bed.

Again in a slight detail he marked his strange and novel
detachment from the world of his upbringing. His hallucination of
disillusionment had spread from himself and his church and his
faith to the whole animate creation. He knew that these were the
voices of "our feathered songsters," that this was "a joyous
chorus" greeting the day. He knew that a wakeful bishop ought to
bless these happy creatures, and join with them by reciting Ken's
morning hymn. He made an effort that was more than half habit, to
repeat and he repeated with a scowling face and the voice of a
schoolmaster:


"Awake my soul, and with the sun

 Thy daily stage of duty run...."


He got no further. He stopped short, sat still, thinking what
utterly detestable things singing birds were. A. blackbird had
gripped his attention. Never had he heard such vain repetitions.
He struggled against the dark mood of criticism. "He prayeth best
who loveth best--"

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

Then the bishop began to be particularly tormented by a bird
that made a short, insistent, wheezing sound at regular intervals
of perhaps twenty seconds. If a bird could have whooping-cough,
that, he thought, was the sort of whoop it would have. But even
if it had whooping-cough he could not pity it. He hung in its
intervals waiting for the return of the wheeze.

And then that blackbird reasserted itself. It had a rich
boastful note; it seemed proud of its noisy reiteration of simple
self-assertion. For some obscure reason the phrase "oleographic
sounds" drifted into the bishop's thoughts. This bird produced
the peculiar and irrational impression that it had recently made
a considerable sum of money by shrewd industrialism. It was, he
thought grimly, a genuine Princhester blackbird.

This wickedly uncharitable reference to his diocese ran all
unchallenged through the bishop's mind. And others no less wicked
followed it.

Once during his summer holidays in Florence he and Lady Ella
had subscribed to an association for the protection of
song-birds. He recalled this now with a mild wonder. It seemed to
him that perhaps after all it was as well to let fruit-growers
and Italians deal with singing-birds in their own way. Perhaps
after all they had a wisdom....

He passed his hands over his face. The world after all is not
made entirely for singing-birds; there is such a thing as
proportion. Singing-birds may become a luxury, an indulgence, an
excess.

Did the birds eat the fruit in Paradise?

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

He decided to walk about the room for a time and then remake
his bed....

The sunrise found the bishop with his head and shoulders out of
the window trying to see that blackbird. He just wanted to look
at it. He was persuaded it was a quite exceptional blackbird.

Again came that oppressive sense of the futility of the
contemporary church, but this time it came in the most grotesque
form. For hanging half out of the casement he was suddenly
reminded of St. Francis of Assisi, and how at his rebuke the
wheeling swallow stilled their cries.

But it was all so different then.

(3)


It was only after he had passed four similar nights, with
intervening days of lassitude and afternoon siestas, that the
bishop realized that he was in the grip of insomnia.

He did not go at once to a doctor, but he told his trouble to
every one he met and received much tentative advice. He had meant
to have his talk with Eleanor on the morning next after their
conversation in the dining-room, but his bodily and spiritual
anaemia prevented him.

The fifth night was the beginning of the Whitsuntide Ember
week, and he wore a red cassock and had a distracting and rather
interesting day welcoming his ordination candidates. They had a
good effect upon him; we spiritualize ourselves when we seek to
spiritualize others, and he went to bed in a happier frame of
mind than he had done since the day of the shock. He woke in the
night, but he woke much more himself than he had been since the
trouble began. He repeated that verse of Ken's:

"When in the night I sleepless lie,
My soul with heavenly thoughts supply;
Let no ill dreams disturb my rest,
No powers of darkness me molest."


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

"He giveth his Beloved sleep."


These words irradiated and soothed him quite miraculously, the
clouds of doubt seemed to dissolve and vanish and leave him safe
and calm under a clear sky; he knew those words were a promise,
and very speedily he fell asleep and slept until he was called.

But the next day was a troubled one. Whippham had muddled his
timetable and crowded his afternoon; the strike of the transport
workers had begun, and the ugly noises they made at the tramway
depot, where they were booing some one, penetrated into the
palace. He had to snatch a meal between services, and the sense
of hurry invaded his afternoon lectures to the candidates. He
hated hurry in Ember week. His ideal was one of quiet serenity,
of grave things said slowly, of still, kneeling figures, of a
sort of dark cool spiritual germination. But what sort of dark
cool spiritual germination is possible with an ass like Whippham
about?

In the fresh courage of the morning the bishop had arranged for
that talk with Eleanor he had already deferred too long, and this
had proved less satisfactory than he had intended it to be.

The bishop's experience with the ordination candidates was
following the usual course. Before they came there was something
bordering upon distaste for the coming invasion; then always
there was an effect of surprise at the youth and faith of the
neophytes and a real response of the spirit to the occasion.
Throughout the first twenty-four hours they were all simply
neophytes, without individuality to break up their uniformity of
self-devotion. Then afterwards they began to develop little
personal traits, and scarcely ever were these pleasing traits.
Always one or two of them would begin haunting the bishop, giving
way to an appetite for special words, special recognitions. He
knew the expression of that craving on their faces. He knew the
way-laying movements in room and passage that presently began.

This time in particular there was a freckled underbred young
man who handed in what was evidently a carefully prepared
memorandum upon what he called "my positions." Apparently he had
a muddle of doubts about the early fathers and the dates of the
earlier authentic copies of the gospels, things of no conceivable
significance.

The bishop glanced through this bale of papers--it had of
course no index and no synopsis, and some of the pages were not
numbered--handed it over to Whippham, and when he proved, as
usual, a broken reed, the bishop had the brilliant idea of
referring the young man to Canon Bliss (of Pringle), "who has a
special knowledge quite beyond my own in this field."

But he knew from the young man's eye even as he said this that
it was not going to put him off for more than a day or so.

The immediate result of glancing over these papers was,
however, to enhance in the bishop's mind a growing disposition to
minimize the importance of all dated and explicit evidences and
arguments for orthodox beliefs, and to resort to vague symbolic
and liberal interpretations, and it was in this state that he
came to his talk with Eleanor.

He did not give her much time to develop her objections. He met
her half way and stated them for her, and overwhelmed her with
sympathy and understanding. She had been "too literal." "Too
literal" was his keynote. He was a little astonished at the
liberality of his own views. He had been getting along now for
some years without looking into his own opinions too closely and
he was by no means prepared to discover how far he had come to
meet his daughter's scepticisms. But he did meet them. He met
them so thoroughly that he almost conveyed that hers was a
needlessly conservative and oldfashioned attitude.

Occasionally he felt he was being a little evasive, but she did
not seem to notice it. As she took his drift, her relief and
happiness were manifest. And he had never noticed before how
clear and pretty her eyes were; they were the most honest eyes he
had ever seen. She looked at him very steadily as he explained,
and lit up at his points. She brightened wonderfully as she
realized that after all they were not apart, they had not
differed; simply they had misunderstood....

And before he knew where he was, and in a mere parenthetical
declaration of liberality, he surprised himself by conceding her
demand for Newnham even before she had repeated it. It helped his
case wonderfully.

"Call in every exterior witness you can. The church will
welcome them.... No, I want you to go, my dear...."

But his mind was stirred again to its depths by this
discussion. And in particular he was surprised and a little
puzzled by this Newnham concession and the necessity of making
his new attitude clear to Lady Ella....

It was with a sense of fatality that he found himself awake
again that night, like some one lying drowned and still and yet
perfectly conscious at the bottom of deep cold water.

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

(4)


Neither the bishop's insomnia nor his incertitudes about
himself and his faith developed in a simple and orderly manner.
There were periods of sustained suffering and periods of
recovery; it was not for a year or so that he regarded these
troubles as more than acute incidental interruptions of his
general tranquillity or realized that he was passing into a new
phase of life and into a new quality of thought. He told every
one of the insomnia and no one of his doubts; these he betrayed
only by an increasing tendency towards vagueness, symbolism,
poetry and toleration. Eleanor seemed satisfied with his
exposition; she did not press for further enlightenment. She
continued all her outward conformities except that after a time
she ceased to communicate; and in September she went away to
Newnham. Her doubts had not visibly affected Clementina or her
other sisters, and the bishop made no further attempts to explore
the spiritual life of his family below the surface of its formal
acquiescence.

As a matter of fact his own spiritual wrestlings were almost
exclusively nocturnal. During his spells of insomnia he led a
curiously double existence. In the daytime he was largely the
self he had always been, able, assured, ecclesiastical, except
that he was a little jaded and irritable or sleepy instead of
being quick and bright; he believed in God and the church and the
Royal Family and himself securely; in the wakeful night time he
experienced a different and novel self, a bare-minded self,
bleakly fearless at its best, shamelessly weak at its worst,
critical, sceptical, joyless, anxious. The anxiety was quite the
worst element of all. Something sat by his pillow asking grey
questions: "What are you doing? Where are you going? Is it really
well with the children? Is it really well with the church? Is it
really well with the country? Are you indeed doing anything at
all? Are you anything more than an actor wearing a costume in an
archaic play? The people turn their backs on you."

He would twist over on his pillow. He would whisper hymns and
prayers that had the quality of charms.

"He giveth his Beloved sleep"; that answered many times, and
many times it failed.

The labour troubles of 1912 eased off as the year wore on, and
the bitterness of the local press over the palace abated very
considerably. Indeed there was something like a watery gleam of
popularity when he brought down his consistent friend, the dear
old Princess Christiana of Hoch and Unter, black bonnet,
deafness, and all, to open a new wing of the children's hospital.
The Princhester conservative paper took the occasion to inform
the diocese that he was a fluent German scholar and consequently
a persona grata with the royal aunts, and that the Princess
Christiana was merely just one of a number of royalties now
practically at the beck and call of Princhester. It was not true,
but it was very effective locally, and seemed to justify a little
the hauteur of which Lady Ella was so unjustly suspected. Yet it
involved a possibility of disappointments in the future.

He went to Brighton-Pomfrey too upon the score of his general
health, and Brighton-Pomfrey revised his general regimen,
discouraged indiscreet fasting, and suggested a complete
abstinence from red wine except white port, if indeed that can be
called a red wine, and a moderate use of Egyptian cigarettes.

But 1913 was a strenuous year. The labour troubles revived, the
suffragette movement increased greatly in violence and
aggressiveness, and there sprang up no less than three
ecclesiastical scandals in the diocese. First, the Kensitites set
themselves firmly to make presentations and prosecutions against
Morrice Deans, who was reserving the sacrament, wearing, they
said, "Babylonish garments," going beyond all reason in the
matter of infant confession, and generally brightening up Mogham
Banks; next, a popular preacher in Wombash, published a book
under the exasperating title, "The Light Under the Altar," in
which he showed himself as something between an Arian and a
Pantheist, and treated the dogma of the Trinity with as little
respect as one would show to an intrusive cat; while thirdly, an
obscure but overworked missioner of a tin mission church in the
new working-class district at Pringle, being discovered in some
sort of polygamous relationship, had seen fit to publish in
pamphlet form a scandalous admission and defence, a pamphlet
entitled "Marriage True and False," taking the public needlessly
into his completest confidence and quoting the affairs of Abraham
and Hosea, reviving many points that are better forgotten about
Luther, and appealing also to such uncanonical authorities as
Milton, Plato, and John Humphrey Noyes. This abnormal concurrence
of indiscipline was extremely unlucky for the bishop. It plunged
him into strenuous controversy upon three fronts, so to speak,
and involved a great number of personal encounters far too vivid
for his mental serenity.

The Pringle polygamist was the most moving as Morrice Deans was
the most exacting and troublesome and the Wombash Pantheist the
most insidiously destructive figure in these three toilsome
disputes. The Pringle man's soul had apparently missed the normal
distribution of fig-leaves; he was an illiterate, open-eyed,
hard-voiced, freckled, rational-minded creature, with large
expository hands, who had come by a side way into the church
because he was an indefatigable worker, and he insisted upon
telling the bishop with an irrepressible candour and completeness
just exactly what was the matter with his intimate life. The
bishop very earnestly did not want these details, and did his
utmost to avoid the controversial questions that the honest man
pressed respectfully but obstinately upon him.

"Even St. Paul, my lord, admitted that it is better to marry
than burn," said the Pringle misdemeanant, "and here was I, my
lord, married and still burning!" and, "I think you would find,
my lord, considering all Charlotte's peculiarities, that the
situation was really much more trying than the absolute celibacy
St. Paul had in view."...

The bishop listened to these arguments as little as possible,
and did not answer them at all. But afterwards the offender came
and wept and said he was ruined and heartbroken and unfairly
treated because he wasn't a gentleman, and that was distressing.
It was so exactly true--and so inevitable. He had been
deprived, rather on account of his voice and apologetics than of
his offence, and public opinion was solidly with the sentence. He
made a gallant effort to found what he called a Labour Church in
Pringle, and after some financial misunderstandings departed with
his unambiguous menage to join the advanced movement on the
Clyde.

The Morrice Deans enquiry however demanded an amount of
erudition that greatly fatigued the bishop. He had a very fair
general knowledge of vestments, but he had never really cared for
anything but the poetry of ornaments, and he had to work
strenuously to master the legal side of the question. Whippham,
his chaplain, was worse than useless as a helper. The bishop
wanted to end the matter as quickly, quietly, and favourably to
Morrice Deans as possible; he thought Morrice Deans a thoroughly
good man in his parish, and he believed that the substitution of
a low churchman would mean a very complete collapse of church
influence in Mogham Banks, where people were now thoroughly
accustomed to a highly ornate service. But Morrice Deans was
intractable and his pursuers indefatigable, and on several
occasions the bishop sat far into the night devising compromises
and equivocations that should make the Kensitites think that
Morrice Deans wasn't wearing vestments when he was, and that
should make Morrice Deans think he was wearing vestments when he
wasn't. And it was Whippham who first suggested green tea as a
substitute for coffee, which gave the bishop indigestion, as his
stimulant for these nocturnal bouts.

Now green tea is the most lucid of poisons.

And while all this extra activity about Morrice Deans, these
vigils and crammings and writings down, were using all and more
energy than the bishop could well spare, he was also doing his
quiet utmost to keep "The Light under the Altar" ease from coming
to a head.

This man he hated.

And he dreaded him as well as hated him. Chasters, the author
of "The Light under the Altar," was a man who not only reasoned
closely but indelicately. There was a demonstrating, jeering, air
about his preaching and writing, and everything he said and did
was saturated by the spirit of challenge. He did not so much
imitate as exaggerate the style of Matthew Arnold. And whatever
was done publicly against him would have to be done very publicly
because his book had got him a London reputation.

From the bishop's point of view Chasters was one of nature's
ignoblemen. He seemed to have subscribed to the Thirty-Nine
Articles and passed all the tests and taken all the pledges that
stand on the way to ordination, chiefly for the pleasure of
attacking them more successfully from the rear; he had been given
the living of Wombash by a cousin, and filled it very largely
because it was not only more piquant but more remunerative and
respectable to be a rationalist lecturer in a surplice. And in a
hard kind of ultra-Protestant way his social and parochial work
was not badly done. But his sermons were terrible. "He takes a
text," said one informant, "and he goes on firstly, secondly,
thirdly, fourthly, like somebody tearing the petals from a
flower. 'Finally,' he says, and throws the bare stalk into the
dustbin."

The bishop avoided "The Light under the Altar" for nearly a
year. It was only when a second book was announced with the
winning title of "The Core of Truth in Christianity" that he
perceived he must take action. He sat up late one night with a
marked copy, a very indignantly marked copy, of the former work
that an elderly colonel, a Wombash parishioner, an orthodox
Layman of the most virulent type, had sent him. He perceived that
he had to deal with a dialectician of exceptional ability, who
had concentrated a quite considerable weight of scholarship upon
the task of explaining away every scrap of spiritual significance
in the Eucharist. From Chasters the bishop was driven by
reference to the works of Legge and Frazer, and for the first
time he began to measure the dimensions and power of the modern
criticism of church doctrine and observance. Green tea should
have lit his way to refutation; instead it lit up the whole
inquiry with a light of melancholy confirmation. Neither by night
nor by day could the bishop find a proper method of opening a
counter attack upon Chasters, who was indisputably an
intellectually abler man and a very ruthless beast indeed to
assail, and meanwhile the demand that action should be taken
increased.

The literature of church history and the controversies arising
out of doctrinal development became the employment of the
bishop's leisure and a commanding preoccupation. He would have
liked to discuss with some one else the network of perplexities
in which he was entangling himself, and more particularly with
Canon Bliss, but his own positions were becoming so insecure that
he feared to betray them by argument. He had grown up with a kind
of intellectual modesty. Some things he had never yet talked
about; it made his mind blench to think of talking about them.
And his great aching gaps of wakefulness began now, thanks to the
green tea, to be interspersed with theological dreams and visions
of an extravagant vividness. He would see Frazer's sacrificial
kings butchered picturesquely and terribly amidst strange and
grotesque rituals; he would survey long and elaborate processions
and ceremonials in which the most remarkable symbols were borne
high in the sight of all men; he would cower before a gigantic
and threatening Heaven. These green-tea dreams and visions were
not so much phases of sleep as an intensification and vivid
furnishing forth of insomnia. It added greatly to his disturbance
that--exceeding the instructions of Brighton-Pomfrey--he had
now experimented ignorantly and planlessly with one or two
narcotics and sleeping mixtures that friends and acquaintances
had mentioned in his hearing. For the first time in his life he
became secretive from his wife. He knew he ought not to take
these things, he knew they were physically and morally evil, but
a tormenting craving drove him to them. Subtly and insensibly his
character was being undermined by the growing nervous trouble.

He astonished himself by the cunning and the hypocritical
dignity he could display in procuring these drugs. He arranged to
have a tea-making set in his bedroom, and secretly substituted
green tea, for which he developed a powerful craving, in the
place of the delicate China tea Lady Ella procured him.

(5)


These doctrinal and physical anxieties and distresses were at
their worst in the spring and early summer of 1914. That was a
time of great mental and moral disturbance. There was premonition
in the air of those days. It was like the uneasiness sensitive
people experience before a thunderstorm. The moral atmosphere was
sullen and close. The whole world seemed irritable and
mischievous. The suffragettes became extraordinarily malignant;
the democratic movement went rotten with sabotage and with a cant
of being "rebels"; the reactionary Tories and a crew of noisy old
peeresses set themselves to create incurable confusion again in
the healing wounds of Ireland, and feuds and frantic folly broke
out at every point of the social and political edifice. And then
a bomb burst at Sarajevo that silenced all this tumult. The
unstable polity of Europe heeled over like a ship that founders.

Through the swiftest, tensest week in history Europe capsized
into war.

(6)


The first effect of the war upon the mind of the bishop, as
upon most imaginative minds, was to steady and exalt it.
Trivialities and exasperations seemed swept out of existence. Men
lifted up their eyes from disputes that had seemed incurable and
wrangling that promised to be interminable, and discovered a
plain and tragic issue that involved every one in a common call
for devotion. For a great number of men and women who had been
born and bred in security, the August and September of 1914 were
the supremely heroic period of their lives. Myriads of souls were
born again to ideas of service and sacrifice in those tremendous
days.

Black and evil thing as the war was, it was at any rate a great
thing; it did this much for countless minds that for the first
time they realized the epic quality of history and their own
relationship to the destinies of the race. The flimsy roof under
which we had been living our lives of comedy fell and shattered
the floor under our feet; we saw the stars above and the abyss
below. We perceived that life was insecure and adventurous, part
of one vast adventure in space and time....

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

For the first two months the bishop's attention was so detached
from his immediate surroundings and employments, so absorbed by
great events, that his history if it were told in detail would
differ scarcely at all from the histories of most comparatively
unemployed minds during those first dramatic days, the days when
the Germans made their great rush upon Paris and it seemed that
France was down, France and the whole fabric of liberal
civilization. He emerged from these stunning apprehensions after
the Battle of the Marne, to find himself busy upon a score of
dispersed and disconnected war jobs, and trying to get all the
new appearances and forces and urgencies of the war into
relations with himself. One thing became very vivid indeed, that
he wasn't being used in any real and effective way in the war.
There was a mighty going to and fro upon Red Cross work and
various war committees, a vast preparation for wounded men and
for the succour of dislocated families; a preparation, that
proved to be needless, for catastrophic unemployment. The war
problem and the puzzle of German psychology ousted for a time all
other intellectual interests; like every one else the bishop swam
deep in Nietzsche, Bernhardi, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and
the like; he preached several sermons upon German materialism and
the astonishing decay of the German character. He also read every
newspaper he could lay his hands on--like any secular man. He
signed an address to the Russian Orthodox church, beginning
"Brethren," and he revised his impressions of the Filioque
controversy. The idea of a reunion of the two great state
churches of Russia and England had always attracted him. But
hitherto it had been a thing quite out of scale, visionary,
utopian. Now in this strange time of altered perspectives it
seemed the most practicable of suggestions. The mayor and
corporation and a detachment of the special reserve in uniform
came to a great intercession service, and in the palace there
were two conferences of local influential people, people of the
most various types, people who had never met tolerantly before,
expressing now opinions of unprecedented breadth and liberality.

All this sort of thing was fresh and exciting at first, and
then it began to fall into a routine and became habitual, and as
it became habitual he found that old sense of detachment and
futility was creeping back again. One day he realized that indeed
the whole flood and tumult of the war would be going on almost
exactly as it was going on now if there had been neither
cathedral nor bishop in Princhester. It came to him that if
archbishops were rolled into patriarchs and patriarchs into
archbishops, it would matter scarcely more in the world process
that was afoot than if two men shook hands while their house was
afire. At times all of us have inappropriate thoughts. The
unfortunate thought that struck the bishop as a bullet might
strike a man in an exposed trench, as he was hurrying through the
cloisters to a special service and address upon that doubly
glorious day in our English history, the day of St. Crispin, was
of Diogenes rolling his tub.

It was a poisonous thought.

It arose perhaps out of an article in a weekly paper at which
he had glanced after lunch, an article written by one of those
sceptical spirits who find all too abundant expression in our
periodical literature. The writer boldly charged the "Christian
churches" with absolute ineffectiveness. This war, he declared,
was above all other wars a war of ideas, of material organization
against rational freedom, of violence against law; it was a war
more copiously discussed than any war had ever been before, the
air was thick with apologetics. And what was the voice of the
church amidst these elemental issues? Bishops and divines who
were patriots one heard discordantly enough, but where were the
bishops and divines who spoke for the Prince of Peace? Where was
the blessing of the church, where was the veto of the church?
When it came to that one discovered only a broad preoccupied back
busied in supplementing the Army Medical Corps with Red Cross
activities, good work in its way--except that the canonicals
seemed superfluous. Who indeed looked to the church for any voice
at all? And so to Diogenes.

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

It was with that image dangling like a barbed arrow from his
mind that the bishop went into the pulpit to preach upon St.
Crispin's day, and looked down upon a thin and scattered
congregation in which the elderly, the childless, and the
unoccupied predominated.

That night insomnia resumed its sway.

Of course the church ought to be controlling this great storm,
the greatest storm of war that had ever stirred mankind. It ought
to be standing fearlessly between the combatants like a figure in
a wall painting, with the cross of Christ uplifted and the
restored memory of Christendom softening the eyes of the armed
nations. "Put down those weapons and listen to me," so the church
should speak in irresistible tones, in a voice of silver
trumpets.

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

(7)


And then came the aggravation of all these distresses by an
abrupt abandonment of smoking and alcohol. Alcoholic relaxation,
a necessary mitigation of the unreality of peacetime politics,
becomes a grave danger in war, and it was with an understandable
desire to forward the interests of his realm that the King
decided to set his statesmen an example--which unhappily was
not very widely followed--by abstaining from alcohol during the
continuance of the struggle. It did however swing over the Bishop
of Princhester to an immediate and complete abandonment of both
drink and tobacco. At that time he was finding comfort for his
nerves in Manila cheroots, and a particularly big and heavy type
of Egyptian cigarette with a considerable amount of opium, and
his disorganized system seized upon this sudden change as a
grievance, and set all his jangling being crying aloud for one
cigarette--just one cigarette.

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

It brought him low.

The reader has already been told the lamentable incident of the
stolen cigarette and the small boy, and how the bishop, tormented
by that shameful memory, cried aloud in the night.

The bishop rolled his tub, and is there any tub-rolling in the
world more busy and exacting than a bishop's? He rolled in it
spite of ill-health and insomnia, and all the while he was
tormented by the enormous background of the world war, by his
ineffective realization of vast national needs, by his passionate
desire, for himself and his church, not to be ineffective.

The distressful alternation between nights of lucid doubt and
days of dull acquiescence was resumed with an intensification of
its contrasts. The brief phase of hope that followed the turn of
the fighting upon the Maine, the hope that after all the war
would end swiftly, dramatically, and justly, and everything be as
it had been before--but pleasanter, gave place to a phase that
bordered upon despair. The fall of Antwerp and the doubts and
uncertainties of the Flanders situation weighed terribly upon the
bishop. He was haunted for a time by nightmares of Zeppelins
presently raining fire upon London. These visions became
Apocalyptic. The Zeppelins came to England with the new year, and
with the close of the year came the struggle for Ypres that was
so near to being a collapse of the allied defensive. The events
of the early spring, the bloody failure of British generalship at
Neuve Chapelle, the naval disaster in the Dardanelles, the
sinking of the Falaba, the Russian defeat in the Masurian Lakes,
all deepened the bishop's impression of the immensity of the
nation's difficulties and of his own unhelpfulness. He was
ashamed that the church should hold back its curates from
enlistment while the French priests were wearing their uniforms
in the trenches; the expedition of the Bishop of London to hold
open-air services at the front seemed merely to accentuate the
tub-rolling. It was rolling the tub just where it was most in the
way.

What was wrong? What was wanting?

The Westminster Gazette, The Spectator, and several other of
the most trusted organs of public opinion were intermittently
discussing the same question. Their discussions implied at once
the extreme need that was felt for religion by all sorts of
representative people, and the universal conviction that the
church was in some way muddling and masking her revelation. "What
is wrong with the Churches?" was, for example, the general
heading of The Westminster Gazette's correspondence.

One day the bishop skimmed a brief incisive utterance by Sir
Harry Johnston that pierced to the marrow of his own shrinking
convictions. Sir Harry is one of those people who seem to write
as well as speak in a quick tenor. "Instead of propounding
plainly and without the acereted mythology of Asia Minor, Greece
and Rome, the pure Gospel of Christ.... they present it
overloaded with unbelievable myths (such as, among a thousand
others, that Massacre of the Innocents which never took
place).... bore their listeners by a Tibetan repetition of creeds
that have ceased to be credible.... Mutually contradictory
propositions.... Prayers and litanies composed in Byzantine and
mediaeval times.... the want of actuality, the curious silliness
which has, ever since the destruction of Jerusalem, hung about
the exposition of Christianity.... But if the Bishops continue
to fuss about the trappings of religion.... the maintenance of
codes compiled by people who lived sixteen hundred or two
thousand five hundred years ago.... the increasingly educated and
practical-minded working classes will not come to church, weekday
or Sunday."

The bishop held the paper in his hand, and with a mind that he
felt to be terribly open, asked himself how true that sharp
indictment might be, and, granting its general truth, what was
the duty of the church, that is to say of the bishops, for as
Cyprian says, ecelesia est in episcopo. We say the creeds; how
far may we unsay them?

So far be had taken no open action against Chasters. Suppose
now be were to side with Chasters and let the whole diocese, the
church of Princhester, drift as far as it chose under his
inaction towards an extreme modernism, risking a conflict with,
and if necessary fighting, the archbishop.... It was but for a
moment that his mind swung to this possibility and then recoiled.
The Laymen, that band of bigots, would fight. He could not
contemplate litigation and wrangling about the teaching of the
church. Besides, what were the "trappings of religion" and what
the essentials? What after all was "the pure gospel of Christ" of
which this writer wrote so glibly? He put the paper down and took
a New Testament from his desk and opened it haphazard. He felt a
curious wish that he could read it for the first time. It was
over-familiar. Everything latterly in his theology and beliefs
had become over-familiar. It had all become mechanical and dead
and unmeaning to his tired mind....

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




CHAPTER THE FOURTH  -  THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND

(1)


THAT night when he cried aloud at the memory of his furtive
cigarette, the bishop was staying with a rich man named Garstein
Fellows. These Garstein Fellows people were steel people with a
financial side to them; young Garstein Fellows had his fingers in
various chemical businesses, and the real life of the firm was in
various minor partners called Hartstein and Blumenhart and so
forth, who had acquired a considerable amount of ungentlemanly
science and energy in Germany and German Switzerland. But the
Fellows element was good old Princhester stuff. There had been a
Fellows firm in Princhester in 1819. They were not people the
bishop liked and it was not a house the bishop liked staying at,
but it had become part of his policy to visit and keep in touch
with as many of the local plutocracy as he could, to give and
take with them, in order to make the presence of the church a
reality to them. It had been not least among the negligences and
evasions of the sainted but indolent Hood that he had invariably
refused overnight hospitality whenever it was possible for him to
get back to his home. The morning was his working time. His books
and hymns had profited at the cost of missing many a generous
after-dinner subscription, and at the expense of social unity.
From the outset Scrope had set himself to alter this. A certain
lack of enthusiasm on Lady Ella's part had merely provoked him to
greater effort on his own. His ideal of what was needed with the
people was something rather jolly and familiar, something like a
very good and successful French or Irish priest, something that
came easily and readily into their homes and laid a friendly hand
on their shoulders. The less he liked these rich people naturally
the more familiar his resolution to be successfully intimate made
him. He put down the names and brief characteristics of their
sons and daughters in a little note-book and consulted it before
every visit so as to get his most casual enquiries right. And he
invited himself to the Garstein Fellows house on this occasion by
telegram.


"A special mission and some business in Wombash may I have a
scrap of supper and a bed?"


Now Mrs. Garstein Fellows was a thoroughly London woman; she
was one of the banking Grunenbaums, the fair tall sort, and she
had a very decided tendency to smartness. She had a little party
in the house, a sort of long week-end party, that made her
hesitate for a minute or so before she framed a reply to the
bishop's request.


It was the intention of Mrs. Garstein Fellows to succeed very
conspicuously in the British world, and the British world she
felt was a complicated one; it is really not one world but
several, and if you would surely succeed you must keep your peace
with all the systems and be a source of satisfaction to all of
them. So at least Mrs. Garstein Fellows saw it, and her method
was to classify her acquaintances according to their systems, to
keep them in their proper bundles, and to give every one the
treatment he or she was accustomed to receive. And since all
things British are now changing and passing away, it may not be
uninteresting to record the classification Mrs. Garstein Fellows
adopted. First she set apart as most precious and desirable, and
requiring the most careful treatment, the "court dowdies "--for
so it was that the dignity and quiet good taste that radiated
from Buckingham Palace impressed her restless, shallow mind--
the sort of people who prefer pair horse carriages to
automobiles, have quiet friendships in the highest quarters,
quietly do not know any one else, busy themselves with charities,
dress richly rather than impressively, and have either little
water-colour accomplishments or none at all, and no other
relations with "art." At the skirts of this crowning British
world Mrs. Garstein Fellows tugged industriously and expensively.
She did not keep a carriage and pair and an old family coachman
because that, she felt, would be considered pushing and
presumptuous; she had the sense to stick to her common
unpretending 80 h.p. Daimler; but she wore a special sort of
blackish hat-bonnet for such occasions as brought her near the
centre of honour, which she got from a little good shop known
only to very few outside the inner ring, which hat-bonnet she was
always careful to sit on for a few minutes before wearing. And it
was to this first and highest and best section of her social
scheme that she considered that bishops properly belonged. But
some bishops, and in particular such a comparatively bright
bishop as the Bishop of Princhester, she also thought of as being
just as comfortably accommodated in her second system, the
"serious liberal lot," which was more fatiguing and less boring,
which talked of books and things, visited the Bells, went to all
first-nights when Granville Barker was the producer, and knew and
valued people in the grey and earnest plains between the Cecils
and the Sidney Webbs. And thirdly there were the smart
intellectual lot, again not very well marked off, and on the
whole practicable to bishops, of whom fewer particulars are
needed because theirs is a perennial species, and then finally
there was that fourth world which was paradoxically at once very
brilliant and a little shady, which had its Night Club side, and
seemed to set no limit to its eccentricities. It seemed at times
to be aiming to shock and yet it had its standards, but here it
was that the dancers and actresses and forgiven divorcees came in
--and the bishops as a rule, a rule hitherto always respected,
didn't. This was the ultimate world of Mrs. Garstein Fellows; she
had no use for merely sporting people and the merely correct
smart and the duller county families, sets that led nowhere, and
it was from her fourth system of the Glittering Doubtfuls that
this party which made her hesitate over the bishop's telegram,
was derived.

She ran over their names as she sat considering her reply.

What was there for a bishop to object to? There was that
admirable American widow, Lady Sunderbund. She was enormously
rich, she was enthusiastic. She was really on probation for
higher levels; it was her decolletage delayed her. If only she
kept off theosophy and the Keltic renascence and her disposition
to profess wild intellectual passions, there would be no harm in
her. Provided she didn't come down to dinner in anything too
fantastically scanty--but a word in season was possible. No!
there was no harm in Lady Sunderbund. Then there were Ridgeway
Kelso and this dark excitable Catholic friend of his, Paidraig
O'Gorman. Mrs. Garstein Fellows saw no harm in them. Then one had
to consider Lord Gatling and Lizzie Barusetter. But nothing
showed, nothing was likely to show even if there was anything.
And besides, wasn't there a Church and Stage Guild?

Except for those people there seemed little reason for alarm.
Mrs. Garstein Fellows did not know that Professor Hoppart, who so
amusingly combined a professorship of political economy with the
writing of music-hall lyrics, was a keen amateur theologian, nor
that Bent, the sentimental novelist, had a similar passion. She
did not know that her own eldest son, a dark, romantic-looking
youngster from Eton, had also come to the theological stage of
development. She did however weigh the possibilities of too
liberal opinions on what are called social questions on the part
of Miss Sharsper, the novelist, and decided that if that lady was
watched nothing so terrible could be said even in an undertone;
and as for the Mariposa, the dancer, she had nothing but Spanish
and bad French, she looked all right, and it wasn't very likely
she would go out of her way to startle an Anglican bishop. Simply
she needn't dance. Besides which even if a man does get a glimpse
of a little something--it isn't as if it was a woman.

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

She wired back:


"A little party but it won't put you out send your man with
your change."

(2)


In making that promise Mrs. Garstein Fellows reckoned without
the morbid sensibility of the bishop's disorganized nervous
system and the unsuspected theological stirrings beneath the
apparent worldliness of Hoppart and Bent.

The trouble began in the drawing-room after dinner. Out of
deference to the bishop's abstinence the men did not remain to
smoke, but came in to find the Mariposa and Lady Sunderbund
smoking cigarettes, which these ladies continued to do a little
defiantly. They had hoped to finish them before the bishop came
up. The night was chilly, and a cheerful wood fire cracking and
banging on the fireplace emphasized the ordinary heating. Mrs.
Garstein Fellows, who had not expected so prompt an appearance of
the men, had arranged her chairs in a semicircle for a little
womanly gossip, and before she could intervene she found her
party, with the exception of Lord Gatling, who had drifted just a
little too noticeably with Miss Barnsetter into a window, sitting
round with a conscious air, that was perhaps just a trifle too
apparent, of being "good."

And Mr. Bent plunged boldly into general conversation.

"Are you reading anything now, Mrs. Garstein Fellows?" he
asked. "I'm an interested party."

She was standing at the side of the fireplace. She bit her lip
and looked at the cornice and meditated with a girlish
expression. "Yes," she said. "I am reading again. I didn't think
I should but I am."

"For a time," said Hoppart, "I read nothing but the papers. I
bought from a dozen to twenty a day."

"That is wearing off," said the bishop.

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

"I went to the Bible," said Bent as if he was surprised.

"I've heard that before," said Ridgeway Kelso, in that slightly
explosive manner of his. "All sorts of people who don't usually
read the Bible--"

"But Mr. Kelso!" protested their hostess with raised eyebrows.

"I was thinking of Bent. But anyhow there's been a great wave
of seriousness, a sudden turning to religion and religious
things. I don't know if it comes your way, Bishop...."

"I've had no rows of penitents yet."

"We may be coming," said Hoppart.

He turned sideways to face the bishop. "I think we should be
coming if--if it wasn't for old entangled difficulties. I don't
know if you will mind my saying it to you, but...."

The bishop returned his frank glance. "I'd like to know above
all things," he said. "If Mrs. Garstein Fellow will permit us.
It's my business to know."

"We all want to know," said Lady Sunderbund, speaking from the
low chair on the other side of the fireplace. There was a
vibration in her voice and a sudden gleam of enthusiasm in her
face. "Why shouldn't people talk se'iously sometimes?"

"Well, take my own case," said Hoppart. "In the last few weeks,
I've been reading not only in the Bible but in the Fathers. I've
read most of Athanasius, most of Eusebius, and--I'll confess it
--Gibbon. I find all my old wonder come back. Why are we pinned
to--to the amount of creed we are pinned to? Why for instance
must you insist on the Trinity?"

"Yes," said the Eton boy explosively, and flushed darkly to
find he had spoken.

"Here is a time when men ask for God," said Hoppart. "And you
give them three!" cried Bent rather cheaply. "I confess I find
the way encumbered by these Alexandrian elaborations," Hoppart
completed.

"Need it be?" whispered Lady Sunderbund very softly.

"Well," said the bishop, and leant back in his armchair and
knitted his brow at the fire. "I do not think," he said, "that
men coming to God think very much of the nature of God.
Nevertheless," he spoke slowly and patted the arm of his chair,
"nevertheless the church insists that certain vitally important
truths have to be conveyed, certain mortal errors are best
guarded against, by these symbols."

"You admit they are symbols."

"So the church has always called them."

Hoppart showed by a little movement and grimace that he thought
the bishop quibbled.

"In every sense of the word," the bishop hastened to explain,
"the creeds are symbolical. It is clear they seek to express
ineffable things by at least an extended use of familiar words. I
suppose we are all agreed nowadays that when we speak of the
Father and of the Son we mean something only in a very remote and
exalted way parallel with--with biological fatherhood and
sonship."

Lady Sunderbund nodded eagerly. "Yes," she said, "oh, yes," and
held up an expectant face for more.

"Our utmost words, our most elaborately phrased creeds, can at
the best be no better than the shadow of something unseen thrown
upon the screen of experience."

He raised his rather weary eyes to Hoppart as if he would know
what else needed explanation. He was gratified by Lady
Sunderbund's approval, but he affected not to see or hear it. But
it was Bent who spoke.

He spoke in the most casual way. He made the thing seem the
most incidental of observations.

"What puzzles me," he said, "is why the early Christians
identified the Spermaticos Logos of the Stoics with the second
and not with the third person of the Trinity."

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

And then the Irish Catholic came down on him....

(3)


How the bishop awakened in the night after this dispute has
been told already in the opening section of this story. To that
night of discomfort we now return after this comprehensive
digression. He awoke from nightmares of eyes and triangles to
bottomless remorse and perplexity. For the first time he fully
measured the vast distances he had travelled from the beliefs and
attitudes of his early training, since his coming to Princhester.
Travelled--or rather slipped and fallen down the long slopes of
doubt.

That clear inky dimness that comes before dawn found his white
face at the window looking out upon the great terrace and the
park.

(4)


After a bout of mental distress and sleeplessness the bishop
would sometimes wake in the morning not so much exhausted as in a
state of thin mental and bodily activity. This was more
particularly so if the night had produced anything in the nature
of a purpose. So it was on this occasion. The day was clear
before him; at least it could be cleared by sending three
telegrams; his man could go back to Princhester and so leave him
perfectly free to go to Brighton-Pomfrey in London and secure
that friendly dispensation to smoke again which seemed the only
alternative to a serious mental breakdown. He would take his bag,
stay the night in London, smoke, sleep well, and return the next
morning. Dunk, his valet-butler, found him already bathed and
ready for a cup of tea and a Bradshaw at half-past seven. He went
on dressing although the good train for London did not start
until 10.45.

Mrs. Garstein Fellows was by nature and principle a late riser;
the breakfast-room showed small promise yet of the repast, though
the table was set and bright with silver and fresh flowers, and a
wood fire popped and spurted to greet and encourage the March
sunshine. But standing in the doorway that led to the promise and
daffodils and crocuses of Mrs. Garstein Fellows' garden stood
Lady Sunderbund, almost with an effect of waiting, and she
greeted the bishop very cheerfully, doubted the immediate
appearance of any one else, and led him in the most natural
manner into the new but already very pleasant shrubbery.

In some indefinable special way the bishop had been aware of
Lady Sunderbund's presence since first he had met her, but it was
only now that he could observe her with any particularity. She
was tall like his own Lady Ella but not calm and quiet; she was
electric, her eyes, her smiles, her complexion had as it were an
established brightness that exceeded the common lustre of things.
This morning she was dressed in grey that was nevertheless not
grey but had an effect of colour, and there was a thread of black
along the lines of her body and a gleam of gold. She carried her
head back with less dignity than pride; there was a little frozen
movement in her dark hair as if it flamed up out of her head.
There were silver ornaments in her hair. She spoke with a pretty
little weakness of the r's that had probably been acquired
abroad. And she lost no time in telling him, she was eager to
tell him, that she had been waylaying him. "I did so want to talk
to you some maw," she said. "I was shy last night and they we'
all so noisy and eaga'. I p'ayed that you might come down early.

"It's an oppo'tunity I've longed for," she said.

She did her very pretty best to convey what it was had been
troubling her. 'iligion bad been worrying her for years. Life was
--oh--just ornaments and games and so wea'isome, so wea'isome,
unless it was 'iligious. And she couldn't get it 'iligious.

The bishop nodded his head gravely.

"You unde'stand?" she pressed.

"I understand too well--the attempt to get hold--and keep
hold."

"I knew you would!" she cried.

She went on with an impulsive rapidity. O'thodoxy had always
'ipelled her,--always. She had felt herself confronted by the
most insurmountable difficulties, and yet whenever she had gone
away from Christianity--she had gone away from Christianity, to
the Theosophists and the Christian Scientists--she had felt she
was only "st'aying fu'tha." And then suddenly when he was
speaking last night, she had felt he knew. It was so wonderful to
hear the "k'eed was only a symbol."

"Symbol is the proper name for it," said the bishop. "It wasn't
for centuries it was called the Creed."

Yes, and so what it really meant was something quite different
from what it did mean.

The bishop felt that this sentence also was only a symbol, and
nodded encouragingly--but gravely, warily.

And there she was, and the point was there were thousands and
thousands and thousands of educated people like her who were
dying to get through these old-fashioned symbols to the true
faith that lay behind them. That they knew lay behind them. She
didn't know if he had read "The Light under the Altar"?

"He's vicar of Wombash--in my diocese," said the bishop with
restraint.

"It's wonde'ful stuff," said Lady Sunderbund. "It's spi'tually
cold, but it's intellectually wonde'ful. But we want that with
spi'tuality. We want it so badly. If some one--"

She became daring. She bit her under lip and flashed her spirit
at him.

"If you--" she said and paused.

"Could think aloud," said the bishop.

"Yes," she said, nodding rapidly, and became breathless to
hear.

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

"My dear lady, I won't disguise," he began; "in fact I don't
see how I could, that for some years I have been growing more and
more discontented with some of our most fundamental formulae. But
it's been very largely a shapeless discontent--hitherto. I
don't think I've said a word to a single soul. No, not a word.
You are the first person to whom I've ever made the admission
that even my feelings are at times unorthodox."

She lit up marvellously at his words. "Go on," she whispered.

But she did not need to tell him to go on. Now that he had once
broached the casket of his reserves he was only too glad of a
listener. He talked as if they were intimate and loving friends,
and so it seemed to both of them they were. It was a wonderful
release from a long and painful solitude.

To certain types it is never quite clear what has happened to
them until they tell it. So that now the bishop, punctuated very
prettily by Lady Sunderbund, began to measure for the first time
the extent of his departure from the old innate convictions of
Otteringham Rectory. He said that it was strange to find doubt
coming so late in life, but perhaps it was only in recent years
that his faith had been put to any really severe tests. It had
been sheltered and unchallenged.

"This fearful wa'," Lady Sunderbund interjected.

But Princhester had been a critical and trying change, and "The
Light under the Altar" case had ploughed him deeply. It was
curious that his doubts always seemed to have a double strand;
there was a moral objection based on the church's practical
futility and an intellectual strand subordinated to this which
traced that futility largely to its unconvincing formulae.

"And yet you know," said the bishop, "I find I can't go with
Chasters. He beats at the church; he treats her as though she
were wrong. I feel like a son, growing up, who finds his mother
isn't quite so clear-spoken nor quite so energetic as she seemed
to be once. She's right, I feel sure. I've never doubted her
fundamental goodness."

"Yes," said Lady Sunderbund, very eagerly, "yes."

"And yet there's this futility.... You know, my dear lady, I
don't know what to do. One feels on the one hand, that here is a
cloud of witnesses, great men, sainted men, subtle men, figures
permanently historical, before whom one can do nothing but bow
down in the utmost humility, here is a great instrument and
organization--what would the world be without the witness of the
church?--and on the other hand here are our masses out of hand
and hostile, our industrial leaders equally hostile; there is a
failure to grip, and that failure to grip is so clearly traceable
to the fact that our ideas are not modern ideas, that when we
come to profess our faith we find nothing in our mouths but
antiquated Alexandrian subtleties and phrases and ideas that may
have been quite alive, quite significant, quite adequate in Asia
Minor or Egypt, among men essentially orientals, fifteen hundred
years ago, but which now--Ä

He expressed just what they came to now by a gesture.

She echoed his gesture.

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

With her hands she acted her sense of his difficulty.

"One may be precipitate," he said. "There's a kind of loyalty
and discipline that requires one to keep the ranks until one's
course of action is perfectly clear. One owes so much to so many.
One has to consider how one may affect--oh! people one has never
seen."

He was lugging things now into speech that so far had been
scarcely above the threshold of his conscious thought. He went on
to discuss the entire position of the disbelieving cleric. He
discovered a fine point.

"If there was something else, an alternative, another religion,
another Church, to which one could go, the whole case would be
different. But to go from the church to nothingness isn't to go
from falsehood to truth. It's to go from truth, rather badly
expressed, rather conservatively hidden by its protections, truth
in an antiquated costume, to the blackest lie--in the world."

She took that point very brightly.

"One must hold fast to 'iligion," she said, and looked
earnestly at him and gripped fiercely, pink thumbs out, with her
beautiful hands held up.

That was it, exactly. He too was gripping. But while on the
outside the Midianites of denial were prowling for these clinging
souls, within the camp they were assailed by a meticulous
orthodoxy that was only too eager to cast them forth. The bishop
dwelt for a time upon the curious fierceness orthodoxy would
sometimes display. Nowadays atheism can be civil, can be
generous; it is orthodoxy that trails a scurrilous fringe.

"Who was that young man with a strong Irish accent--who
contradicted me so suddenly?" he asked.

"The dark young man?"

"The noisy young man."

"That was Mist' Pat'ick O'Go'man. He is a Kelt and all that.
Spells Pat'ick with eva so many letters. You know. They say he
spends ouas and ouas lea'ning E'se. He wo'ies about it. They all
t'y to lea'n E'se, and it wo'ies them and makes them hate England
moa and moa."

"He is orthodox. He--is what I call orthodox to the
ridiculous extent."

"'idiculous."

A deep-toned gong proclaimed breakfast over a square mile or so
of territory, and Lady Sunderbund turned about mechanically
towards the house. But they continued their discussion.

She started indeed a new topic. "Shall we eva, do 'ou think,
have a new 'iligion--t'ua and betta?"

That was a revolutionary idea to him.

He was still fending it off from him when a gap in the shrubs
brought them within sight of the house and of Mrs. Garstein
Fellows on the portico waving a handkerchief and crying
"Break-fast."

"I wish we could talk for houas," said Lady Sunderbund.

"I've been glad of this talk," said the bishop. "Very glad."

She lifted her soft abundant skirts and trotted briskly across
the still dewy lawn towards the house door. The bishop followed
gravely and slowly with his hands behind his back and an
unusually peaceful expression upon his face. He was thinking how
rare and precious a thing it is to find intelligent friendship in
women. More particularly when they were dazzlingly charming and
pretty. It was strange, but this was really his first woman
friend. If, as he hoped, she became his friend.

Lady Sunderbund entered the breakfast room in a gusty abundance
like Botticelli's Primavera, and kissed Mrs. Garstein Fellows
good-morning. She exhaled a glowing happiness. "He is wondyful,"
she panted. "He is most wondyful."

"Mr. Hidgeway Kelso?"

"No, the dee' bishop! I love him. Are those the little sausages
I like? May I take th'ee? I've been up houas."

The dee' bishop appeared in the sunlit doorway.

(5)


The bishop felt more contentment in the London train than he
had felt for many weeks. He had taken two decisive and relieving
steps. One was that he had stated his case to another human
being, and that a very charming and sympathetic human being, he
was no longer a prey to a current of secret and concealed
thoughts running counter to all the appearances of his outward
life; and the other was that he was now within an hour or so of
Brighton-Pomfrey and a cigarette. He would lunch on the train,
get to London about two, take a taxi at once to the wise old
doctor, catch him over his coffee in a charitable and
understanding mood, and perhaps be smoking a cigarette publicly
and honourably and altogether satisfyingly before three.

So far as Brighton-Pomfrey's door this program was fulfilled
without a hitch. The day was fine and he had his taxi opened, and
noted with a patriotic satisfaction as he rattled through the
streets, the glare of the recruiting posters on every vacant
piece of wall and the increasing number of men in khaki in the
streets. But at the door he had a disappointment. Dr.
Brighton-Pomfrey was away at the front--of all places; he had
gone for some weeks; would the bishop like to see Dr. Dale?

The bishop hesitated. He had never set eyes on this Dr. Dale.

Indeed, he had never heard of Dr. Dale.

Seeing his old friend Brighton-Pomfrey and being gently and
tactfully told to do exactly what he was longing to do was one
thing; facing some strange doctor and going slowly and
elaborately through the whole story of his illness, his vow and
his breakdown, and perhaps having his reaction time tested and
all sorts of stripping and soundings done, was quite another. He
was within an ace of turning away.

If he had turned away his whole subsequent life would have been
different. It was the very slightest thing in the world tipped
the beam. It was the thought that, after all, whatever
inconvenience and unpleasantness there might be in this
interview, there was at the end of it a very reasonable prospect
of a restored and legitimate cigarette.




CHAPTER THE FIFTH  -  THE FIRST VISION

(1)


Dr. DALE exceeded the bishop's worst apprehensions. He was a
lean, lank, dark young man with long black hair and irregular,
rather prolonged features; his chin was right over to the left;
he looked constantly at the bishop's face with a distinctly
sceptical grey eye; he could not have looked harder if he had
been a photographer or a portrait painter. And his voice was
harsh, and the bishop was particularly sensitive to voices.

He began by understanding far too much of the bishop's illness,
and he insisted on various familiarities with the bishop's heart
and tongue and eye and knee that ruffled the bishop's soul.

"Brighton-Pomfrey talked of neurasthenia?" he asked. "That was
his diagnosis," said the bishop. "Neurasthenia," said the young
man as though he despised the word.

The bishop went on buttoning up his coat.

"You don't of course want to break your vows about drinking and
smoking," said the young man with the very faintest suggestion of
derision in his voice.

"Not if it can possibly be avoided," the bishop asserted.
"Without a loss, that is, of practical efficiency," he added.
"For I have much to do."

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

(2)


The bishop sat at the table resting his arm upon it and
awaiting the next development of this unsatisfactory interview.
He was on the verge of asking as unpleasantly as possible when
Brighton-Pomfrey would return.

The young man stood upon Brighton-Pomfrey's hearth-rug and was
evidently contemplating dissertations.

"Of course," he said, as though he discussed a problem with
himself, "you must have some sort of comfort. You must get out of
this state, one way or another."

The bishop nodded assent. He had faint hopes of this young
man's ideas of comfort.

Dr. Dale reflected. Then he went off away from the question of
comfort altogether. "You see, the trouble in such a case as this
is peculiarly difficult to trace to its sources because it comes
just upon the border-line of bodily and mental things. You may
take a drug or alter your regimen and it disturbs your thoughts,
you may take an idea and it disturbs your health. It is easy
enough to say, as some do, that all ideas have a physical
substratum; it is almost as easy to say with the Christian
Scientist that all bodily states are amenable to our ideas. The
truth doesn't, I think, follow the border between those opposite
opinions very exactly on either side. I can't, for instance, tell
you to go home and pray against these uncertainties and despairs,
because it is just these uncertainties and despairs that rob you
of the power of efficient prayer."

He did not seem to expect anything from the bishop.

"I don't see that because a case brings one suddenly right up
against the frontier of metaphysics, why a doctor should
necessarily pull up short at that, why one shouldn't go on into
either metaphysics or psychology if such an extension is
necessary for the understanding of the case. At any rate if
you'll permit it in this consultation...."

"Go on," said the bishop, holding on to that promise of
comfort. "The best thing is to thrash out the case in your own
way. And then come to what is practical."

"What is really the matter here--the matter with you that is
--is a disorganization of your tests of reality. It's one of a
group of states hitherto confused. Neurasthenia, that
comprehensive phrase--well, it is one of the neurasthenias.
Here, I confess, I begin to talk of work I am doing, work still
to be published, finished first and then published.... But I go
off from the idea that every living being lives in a state not
differing essentially from a state of hallucination concerning
the things about it. Truth, essential truth, is hidden. Always.
Of course there must be a measure of truth in our working
illusions, a working measure of truth, or the creature would
smash itself up and end itself, but beyond that discretion of the
fire and the pitfall lies a wide margin of error about which we
may be deceived for years. So long as it doesn't matter, it
doesn't matter. I don't know if I make myself clear."

"I follow you," said the bishop a little wearily, "I follow
you. Phenomena and noumena and so on and so on.  Kant and so
forth. Pragmatism. Yes."

With a sigh.

"And all that," completed Dr. Dale in a voice that suggested
mockery. "But you see we grow into a way of life, we settle down
among habits and conventions, we say 'This is all right' and
'That is always so.' We get more and more settled into our life
as a whole and more and more confident. Unless something happens
to shake us out of our sphere of illusion. That may be some
violent contradictory fact, some accident, or it may be some
subtle change in one's health and nerves that makes us feel
doubtful. Or a change of habits. Or, as I believe, some subtle
quickening of the critical faculty. Then suddenly comes the
feeling as though we were lost in a strange world, as though we
had never really seen the world before."

He paused.

The bishop was reluctantly interested. "That does describe
something--of the mental side," he admitted. "I never believe
in concealing my own thoughts from an intelligent patient," said
Dr. Dale, with a quiet offensiveness. "That sort of thing belongs
to the dark ages of the 'pothecary's art. I will tell you exactly
my guesses and suppositions about you. At the base of it all is a
slight and subtle kidney trouble, due I suggest to your going to
Princhester and drinking the local water--"

"But it's excellent water. They boast of it."

"By all the established tests. As a matter of fact many of our
best drinking waters have all sorts of unspecified qualities.
Burton water, for example, is radioactive by Beetham's standards
up to the ninth degree. But that is by the way. My theory about
your case is that this produced a change in your blood, that
quickened your sensibilities and your critical faculties just at
a time when a good many bothers--I don't of course know what
they were, but I can, so to speak, see the marks all over you--
came into your life."

The bishop nodded.

"You were uprooted. You moved from house to house, and failed
to get that curled up safe feeling one has in a real home in any
of them."

"If you saw the fireplaces and the general decoration of the
new palace!" admitted the bishop. "I had practically no control."

"That confirms me," said Dr. Dale. "Insomnia followed, and
increased the feeling of physical strangeness by increasing the
bodily disturbance. I suspect an intellectual disturbance."

He paused.

"There was," said the bishop.

"You were no longer at home anywhere. You were no longer at
home in your diocese, in your palace, in your body, in your
convictions. And then came the war. Quite apart from everything
else the mind of the whole world is suffering profoundly from the
shock of this war--much more than is generally admitted. One
thing you did that you probably did not observe yourself doing,
you drank rather more at your meals, you smoked a lot more. That
was your natural and proper response to the shock."

"Ah!" said the bishop, and brightened up.

"It was remarked by Tolstoy, I think, that few intellectual men
would really tolerate the world as it is if it were not for
smoking and drinking. Even novelists have their moments of
lucidity. Certainly these things soothe the restlessness in men's
minds, deaden their sceptical sensibilities. And just at the time
when you were getting most dislodged--you gave them up."

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

"I wouldn't say that," said Dr. Dale....

(3)


"That," said Dr. Dale, "is just where my treatment of this case
differs from the treatment of "--he spoke the name reluctantly
as if he disliked the mere sound of it--"Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey."

"Hitherto, of course," said the bishop, "I've been in his
hands."

"He," said Dr. Dale, "would certainly set about trying to
restore your old sphere of illusion, your old familiar sensations
and ideas and confidences. He would in fact turn you back. He
would restore all your habits. He would order you a rest. He
would send you off to some holiday resort, fresh in fact but
familiar in character, the High lands, North Italy, or
Switzerland for example. He would forbid you newspapers and order
you to botanize and prescribe tranquillizing reading; Trollope's
novels, the Life of Gladstone, the works of Mr. A. C. Benson,
memoirs and so on. You'd go somewhere where there was a good
Anglican chaplain, and you'd take some of the services yourself.
And we'd wash out the effects of the Princhester water with
Contrexeville, and afterwards put you on Salutaris or Perrier. I
don't know whether I shouldn't have inclined to some such
treatment before the war began. Only--"

He paused.

"You think--?"

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

He remained darkly silent for so long that at last the bishop
spoke. "Then what," he asked, "do you suggest?

"Suppose we don't try to go back," said Dr. Dale. "Suppose we
go on and go through."

"Where?"

"To reality.

"I know it's doubtful, I know it's dangerous," he went on, "but
I am convinced that now we can no longer keep men's minds and
souls in these feathered nests, these spheres of illusion. Behind
these veils there is either God or the Darkness.... Why should we
not go on?"

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

Dr. Dale completed the sentence: "to go back."

"Let me explain a little more," he said, "what I mean by 'going
on.' I think that this loosening of the ties of association that
bind a man to his everyday life and his everyday self is in nine
cases out of ten a loosening of the ties that bind him to
everyday sanity. One common form of this detachment is the form
you have in those cases of people who are found wandering unaware
of their names, unaware of their places of residence, lost
altogether from themselves. They have not only lost their sense
of identity with themselves, but all the circumstances of their
lives have faded out of their minds like an idle story in a book
that has been read and put aside. I have looked into hundreds of
such cases. I don't think that loss of identity is a necessary
thing; it's just another side of the general weakening of the
grip upon reality, a kind of anaemia of the brain so that
interest fades and fails. There is no reason why you should
forget a story because you do not believe it--if your brain is
strong enough to hold it. But if your brain is tired and weak,
then so soon as you lose faith in your records, your mind is glad
to let them go. When you see these lost identity people that is
always your first impression, a tired brain that has let go."

The bishop felt extremely like letting go.

"But how does this apply to my case?"

"I come to that," said Dr. Dale, holding up a long large hand.
"What if we treat this case of yours in a new way? What if we
give you not narcotics but stimulants and tonics? What if we so
touch the blood that we increase your sense of physical
detachment while at the same time feeding up your senses to a new
and more vivid apprehension of things about you?" He looked at
his patient's hesitation and added: "You'd lose all that craving
feeling, that you fancy at present is just the need of a smoke.
The world might grow a trifle--transparent, but you'd keep
real. Instead of drugging oneself back to the old contentment--"

"You'd drug me on to the new," said the bishop.

"But just one word more!" said Dr. Dale. "Hear why I would do
this! It was easy and successful to rest and drug people back to
their old states of mind when the world wasn't changing, wasn't
spinning round in the wildest tornado of change that it has ever
been in. But now--Where can I send you for a rest? Where can I
send you to get you out of sight and hearing of the Catastrophe?
Of course old Brighton-Pomfrey would go on sending people away
for rest and a nice little soothing change if the Day of Judgment
was coming in the sky and the earth was opening and the sea was
giving up its dead. He'd send 'em to the seaside. Such things as
that wouldn't shake his faith in the Channel crossing. My idea is
that it's not only right for you to go through with this, but
that it's the only thing to do. If you go right on and right
through with these doubts and intimations--"

He paused.

"You may die like a madman," he said, "but you won't die like a
tame rabbit."

(4)


The bishop sat reflecting. What fascinated and attracted him
was the ending of all the cravings and uneasinesses and
restlessness that had distressed his life for over four years;
what deterred him was the personality of this gaunt young man
with his long grey face, his excited manner, his shock of black
hair. He wanted that tonic--with grave misgivings. "If you
think this tonic is the wiser course," he began. "I'd give it you
if you were my father," said Dr. Dale. "I've got everything for
it," he added.

"You mean you can make it up--without a prescription."

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

Again the bishop had a twinge of misgiving.

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

Presently Dale had given him a little phial--and was holding
up to the window a small medicine glass into which he was pouring
very carefully twenty drops of the precious fluid. "Take it
only," he said, "when you feel you must."

"It is the most golden of liquids," said the bishop, peering at
it.

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

"It becomes opalescent. How beautifully the light plays in it!

"Take it."

The bishop dismissed his last discretion and drank.

"Well?" said Dr. Dale.

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

(5)


The bishop stood on the pavement outside Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's
house. The massive door had closed behind him.

It had been an act of courage, of rashness if you will, to take
this draught. He was acutely introspective, ready for anything,
for the most disagreeable or the most bizarre sensations. He was
asking himself, Were his feet steady? Was his head swimming?

His doubts glowed into assurance.

Suddenly he perceived that he was sure of God.

Not perhaps of the God of Nicaea, but what did these poor
little quibblings and definitions of the theologians matter? He
had been worrying about these definitions and quibblings for four
long restless years. Now they were just failures to express--
what surely every one knew--and no one would ever express
exactly. Because here was God, and the kingdom of God was
manifestly at hand. The visible world hung before him as a mist
might hang before the rising sun. He stood proudly and
masterfully facing a universe that had heretofore bullied him
into doubt and apologetics, a universe that had hitherto been
opaque and was now betrayed translucent.

That was the first effect of the new tonic, complete
reassurance, complete courage. He turned to walk towards Mount
Street and Berkeley Square as a sultan might turn to walk among
his slaves.

But the tonic was only beginning.

Before he had gone a dozen steps he was aware that he seemed
more solid and larger than the people about him. They had all a
curious miniature effect, as though he was looking at them
through the wrong end of an opera glass. The houses on either
side of the street and the traffic shared this quality in an
equal measure. It was as if he was looking at the world through
apertures in a miniature cinematograph peep-show. This surprised
him and a little dashed his first glow of satisfaction.

He passed a man in khaki who, he fancied, looked at him with an
odd expression. He observed the next passers-by narrowly and
suspiciously, a couple of smartish young men, a lady with a
poodle, a grocer's boy with a basket, but none seemed to observe
anything remarkable about him. Then he caught the eye of a taxi-
driver and became doubtful again.

He had a feeling that this tonic was still coming in like a
tide. It seemed to be filling him and distending him, in spite of
the fact that he was already full. After four years of flaccidity
it was pleasant to be distended again, but already he felt more
filled than he had ever been before. At present nothing was
showing, but all his body seemed braced and uplifted. He must be
careful not to become inflated in his bearing.

And yet it was difficult not to betray a little inflation. He
was so filled with assurance that things were right with him and
that God was there with him. After all it was not mere fancy; he
was looking through the peepholes of his eyes at the world of
illusion and appearance. The world that was so intent upon its
immediate business, so regardless of eternal things, that had so
dominated him but a little while ago, was after all a thing more
mortal than himself.

Another man in khaki passed him.

For the first time he saw the war as something measurable, as
something with a beginning and an end, as something less than the
immortal spirit in man. He had been too much oppressed by it. He
perceived all these people in the street were too much oppressed
by it. He wanted to tell them as much, tell them that all was
well with them, bid them be of good cheer. He wanted to bless
them. He found his arm floating up towards gestures of
benediction. Self-control became increasingly difficult.

All the way down Berkeley Square the bishop was in full-bodied
struggle with himself. He was trying to control himself, trying
to keep within bounds. He felt that he was stepping too high,
that his feet were not properly reaching the ground, that he was
walking upon cushions of air.

The feeling of largeness increased, and the feeling of
transparency in things about him. He avoided collision with
passers-by--excessively. And he felt his attention was being
drawn more and more to something that was going on beyond the
veil of visible things. He was in Piccadilly now, but at the same
time Piccadilly was very small and he was walking in the presence
of God.

He had a feeling that God was there though he could not see
him. And at the same time he was in this transitory world, with
people going to and fro, men with umbrellas tucked dangerously
under their arms, men in a hurry, policemen, young women rattling
Red Cross collecting boxes, smart people, loafers. They
distracted one from God.

He set out to cross the road just opposite Prince's, and
jumping needlessly to give way to an omnibus had the narrowest
escape from a taxicab.

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

What was he to do? Manifestly this opalescent draught was
overpowering him. He ought never to have taken it. He ought to
have listened to the voice of his misgivings. It was clear that
he was not in a fit state to walk about the streets. He was--
what had been Dr. Dale's term?--losing his sense of reality.
What was he to do? He was alarmed but not dismayed. His thoughts
were as full-bodied as the rest of his being, they came throbbing
and bumping into his mind. What was he to do?

Brighton-Pomfrey ought never to have left his practice in the
hands of this wild-eyed experimenter.

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

It came into his head that he was not so very far from the
Athenaeum, and surely there if anywhere a bishop may recover his
sense of being--ordinary.

And behind everything, behind the tall buildings and the
swarming people there was still the sense of a wide illuminated
space, of a light of wonder and a Presence. But he must not give
way to that again! He had already given way altogether too much.
He repeated to himself in a whisper, "I am in Piccadilly."

If he kept tight hold upon himself he felt he might get to the
Athenaeum before--before anything more happened.

He murmured directions to himself. "Keep along the pavement.
Turn to the right at the Circus. Now down the hill. Easily down
the hill. Don't float! Junior Army and Navy Stores. And the
bookseller."

And presently he had a doubt of his name and began to repeat
it.

"Edward Princhester. Edward Scrope, Lord Bishop of
Princhester."

And all the while voices within him were asserting, "You are in
the kingdom of Heaven. You are in the presence of God. Place and
time are a texture of illusion and dreamland. Even now, you are
with God."

(6)


The porter of the Athenaeum saw him come in, looking well--
flushed indeed--but queer in expression; his blue eyes were
wide open and unusually vague and blue.

He wandered across towards the dining-room, hesitated, went to
look at the news, seemed in doubt whether he would not go into
the smoking-room, and then went very slowly upstairs, past the
golden angel up to the great drawing-room.

In the drawing-room he found only Sir James Mounce, the man who
knew the novels of Sir Walter Scott by heart and had the minutest
and most unsparing knowledge of every detail in the life of that
supreme giant of English literature. He had even, it was said,
acquired a Scotch burr in the enthusiasm of his hero-worship. It
was usually sufficient only to turn an ear towards him for him to
talk for an hour or so. He was now studying Bradshaw.

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

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

"Eh!" said Sir James, "but I'd like to talk that over with ye.
Indeed I would. It would be depending very largely on what ye
called 'public.' But--"

He explained something about an engagement in Birmingham that
night, a train to catch. Reluctantly but relentlessly he
abandoned the proffered ear. But he promised that the next time
they met in the club he would go into the matter "exhausteevely."

The door closed upon him. The bishop was alone. He was flooded
with the light of the world that is beyond this world. The things
about him became very small and indistinct.

He would take himself into a quiet corner in the library of
this doll's house, and sit his little body down in one of the
miniature armchairs. Then if he was going to faint or if the
trancelike feeling was to become altogether a trance--well, a
bishop asleep in an armchair in the library of the Athenaeum is
nothing to startle any one.

He thought of that convenient hidden room, the North Library,
in which is the bust of Croker. There often one can be quite
alone.... It was empty, and he went across to the window that
looks out upon Pall Mall and sat down in the little uncomfortable
easy chair by the desk with its back to the Benvenuto Cellini.

And as he sat down, something snapped--like the snapping of a
lute string--in his brain.

(7)


With a sigh of deep relief the bishop realized that this world
had vanished.

He was in a golden light.

He perceived it as a place, but it was a place without
buildings or trees or any very definite features. There was a
cloudy suggestion of distant hills, and beneath his feet were
little gem-like flowers, and a feeling of divinity and infinite
friendliness pervaded his being. His impressions grew more
definite. His feet seemed to be bare. He was no longer a bishop
nor clad as a bishop. That had gone with the rest of the world.
He was seated on a slab of starry rock.

This he knew quite clearly was the place of God.

He was unable to disentangle thoughts from words. He seemed to
be speaking in his mind.

"I have been very foolish and confused and perplexed. I have
been like a creature caught among thorns."

"You served the purpose of God among those thorns." It seemed
to him at first that the answer also was among his thoughts.

"I seemed so silly and so little. My wits were clay."

"Clay full of desires."

"Such desires!"

"Blind desires. That will presently come to the light."

"Shall we come to the light?"

"But here it is, and you see it!"

(8)


It became clearer in the mind of the bishop that a figure sat
beside him, a figure of great strength and beauty, with a smiling
face and kindly eyes. A strange thought and a strange courage
came to the bishop.

"Tell me," he whispered, "are you God?"

"I am the Angel of God."

The bishop thought over that for some moments.

"I want," he said, "to know about God.

"I want," he said, with a deepening passion of the soul, "to
know about God. Slowly through four long years I have been
awakening to the need of God. Body and soul I am sick for the
want of God and the knowledge of God. I did not know what was the
matter with me, why my life had become so disordered and confused
that my very appetites and habits are all astray. But I am
perishing for God as a waterless man upon a raft perishes for
drink, and there is nothing but madness if I touch the seas about
me. Not only in my thoughts but in my under thoughts and in my
nerves and bones and arteries I have need of God. You see I grew
up in the delusion that I knew God, I did not know that I was
unprovisioned and unprovided against the tests and strains and
hardships of life. I thought that I was secure and safe. I was
told that we men--who were apes not a quarter of a million
years ago, who still have hair upon our arms and ape's teeth in
our jaws--had come to the full and perfect knowledge of God. It
was all put into a creed. Not a word of it was to be altered, not
a sentence was to be doubted any more. They made me a teacher of
this creed. They seemed to explain it to me. And when I came to
look into it, when my need came and I turned to my creed, it was
old and shrivelled up, it was the patched-up speculations of
vanished Greeks and Egyptians, it was a mummy of ancient
disputes, old and dry, that fell to dust as I unwrapped it. And I
was dressed up in the dress of old dead times and put before an
altar of forgotten sacrifices, and I went through ceremonies as
old as the first seedtime; and suddenly I knew clearly that God
was not there, God was not in my Creed, not in my cathedral, not
in my ceremonies, nowhere in my life. And at the same time I
knew, I knew as I had never known before, that certainly there
was God."

He paused. "Tell me," said the friend at his side; "tell me."

"It was as if a child running beside its mother, looked up and
saw that he had never seen her face before, that she was not his
mother, and that the words he had seemed to understand were--
now that he listened--words in an unknown tongue.

"You see, I am but a common sort of man, dear God; I have
neither lived nor thought in any way greatly, I have gone from
one day to the next day without looking very much farther than
the end of the day, I have gone on as life has befallen; if no
great trouble had come into my life, so I should have lived to
the end of my days. But life which began for me easily and safely
has become constantly more difficult and strange. I could have
held my services and given my benedictions, I could have believed
I believed in what I thought I believed.... But now I am lost and
astray--crying out for God...."

(9)


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

"I feel as though I had been struggling to this talk through
all the years--since my doubts began."

"The story your Creed is trying to tell is much the same story
that all religions try to tell. In your heart there is God,
beyond the stars there is God. Is it the same God?"

"I don't know," said the bishop.

"Does any one know?"

"I thought I knew."

"Your creed is full of Levantine phrases and images, full of
the patched contradictions of the human intelligence utterly
puzzled. It is about those two Gods, the God beyond the stars and
the God in your heart. It says that they are the same God, but
different. It says that they have existed together for all time,
and that one is the Son of the other. It has added a third Person
--but we won't go into that."

The bishop was reminded suddenly of the dispute at Mrs.
Garstein Fellows'. "We won't go into that," he agreed. "No!"

"Other religions have told the story in a different way. The
Cathars and Gnostics did. They said that the God in your heart is
a rebel against the God beyond the stars, that the Christ in your
heart is like Prometheus--or Hiawatha--or any other of the
sacrificial gods, a rebel. He arises out of man. He rebels
against that high God of the stars and crystals and poisons and
monsters and of the dead emptiness of space.... The Manicheans
and the Persians made out our God to be fighting eternally
against that Being of silence and darkness beyond the stars. The
Buddhists made the Lord Buddha the leader of men out of the
futility and confusion of material existence to the great peace
beyond. But it is all one story really, the story of the two
essential Beings, always the same story and the same perplexity
cropping up under different names, the story of one being who
stirs us, calls to us, and leads us, and of another who is above
and outside and in and beneath all things, inaccessible and
incomprehensible. All these religions are trying to tell
something they do not clearly know--of a relationship between
these two, that eludes them, that eludes the human mind, as water
escapes from the hand. It is unity and opposition they have to
declare at the same time; it is agreement and propitiation, it is
infinity and effort."

"And the truth?" said the bishop in an eager whisper. "You can
tell me the truth."

The Angel's answer was a gross familiarity. He thrust his hand
through the bishop's hair and ruffled it affectionately, and
rested for a moment holding the bishop's cranium in his great
palm.

"But can this hold it?" he said....

"Not with this little box of brains," said the Angel. "You
could as soon make a meal of the stars and pack them into your
belly. You haven't the things to do it with inside this."

He gave the bishop's head a little shake and relinquished it.

He began to argue as an elder brother might.

"Isn't it enough for you to know something of the God that
comes down to the human scale, who has been born on your planet
and arisen out of Man, who is Man and God, your leader? He's more
than enough to fill your mind and use up every faculty of your
being. He is courage, he is adventure, he is the King, he fights
for you and with you against death...."

"And he is not infinite? He is not the Creator?" asked the
bishop.

"So far as you are concerned, no," said the Angel.

"So far as I am concerned?"

"What have you to do with creation?"

And at that question it seemed that a great hand swept
carelessly across the blackness of the farther sky, and smeared
it with stars and suns and shining nebulas as a brush might smear
dry paint across a canvas.

The bishop stared in front of him. Then slowly he bowed his
head, and covered his face with his hands.

"And I have been in orders," he murmured; "I have been teaching
people the only orthodox and perfect truth about these things for
seven and twenty years."

And suddenly he was back in his gaiters and his apron and his
shovel hat, a little black figure exceedingly small in a very
great space....

(10)


It was a very great space indeed because it was all space, and
the roof was the ebony of limitless space from which the stars
swung flaming, held by invisible ties, and the soil beneath his
feet was a dust of atoms and the little beginnings of life. And
long before the bishop bared his face again, he knew that he was
to see his God.

He looked up slowly, fearing to be dazzled.

But he was not dazzled. He knew that he saw only the likeness
and bodying forth of a being inconceivable, of One who is greater
than the earth and stars and yet no greater than a man. He saw a
being for ever young, for ever beginning, for ever triumphant.
The quality and texture of this being was a warm and living light
like the effulgence at sunrise; He was hope and courage like a
sunlit morning in spring. He was adventure for ever, and His
courage and adventure flowed into and submerged and possessed the
being of the man who beheld him. And this presence of God stood
over the bishop, and seemed to speak to him in a wordless speech.

He bade him surrender himself. He bade him come out upon the
Adventure of Life, the great Adventure of the earth that will
make the atoms our bond-slaves and subdue the stars, that will
build up the white fires of ecstasy to submerge pain for ever,
that will overcome death. In Him the spirit of creation had
become incarnate, had joined itself to men, summoning men to Him,
having need of them, having need of them, having need of their
service, even as great kings and generals and leaders need and
use men. For a moment, for an endless age, the bishop bowed
himself in the being and glory of God, felI the glow of the
divine courage and confidence in his marrow, felt himself one
with God.

For a timeless interval....

Never had the bishop had so intense a sense of reality. It
seemed that never before had he known anything real. He knew
certainly that God was his King and master, and that his unworthy
service could be acceptable to God. His mind embraced that idea
with an absolute conviction that was also absolute happiness.

(11)


The thoughts and sensations of the bishop seemed to have lifted
for a time clean away from the condition of time, and then
through a vast orbit to be returning to that limitation.

He was aware presently that things were changing, that the
light was losing its diviner rays, that in some indescribable
manner the glory and the assurance diminished.

The onset of the new phase was by imperceptible degrees. From a
glowing, serene, and static realization of God, everything
relapsed towards change and activity. He was in time again and
things were happening, it was as if the quicksands of time poured
by him, and it was as if God was passing away from him. He fell
swiftly down from the heaven of self-forgetfulness to a
grotesque, pathetic and earthly self-consciousness.

He became acutely aware of his episcopal livery. And that God
was passing away from him.

It was as if God was passing, and as if the bishop was unable
to rise up and follow him.

Then it was as if God had passed, and as if the bishop was in
headlong pursuit of him and in a great terror lest he should be
left behind. And he was surely being left behind.

He discovered that in some unaccountable way his gaiters were
loose; most of their buttons seemed to have flown off, and his
episcopal sash had slipped down about his feet. He was sorely
impeded. He kept snatching at these things as he ran, in clumsy
attempts to get them off.

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

"Oh God!" he cried, "God my captain! Wait for me! Be patient
with me!"

And as he did so God turned back and reached out his hand. It
was indeed as if he stood and smiled. He stood and smiled as a
kind man might do; he dazzled and blinded his worshipper, and yet
it was manifest that he had a hand a man might clasp.

Unspeakable love and joy irradiated the whole being of the
bishop as he seized God's hand and clasped it desperately with
both his own. It was as if his nerves and arteries and all his
substance were inundated with golden light....

It was again as if he merged with God and became God....




CHAPTER THE SIXTH  -  EXEGETICAL

(1)


WITHOUT any sense of transition the bishop found himself
seated in the little North Library of the Athenaeum club and
staring at the bust of John Wilson Croker. He was sitting
motionless and musing deeply. He was questioning with a cool and
steady mind whether he had seen a vision or whether he had had a
dream. If it had been a dream it had been an extraordinarily
vivid and convincing dream. He still seemed to be in the presence
of God, and it perplexed him not at all that he should also be in
the presence of Croker. The feeling of mental rottenness and
insecurity that had weakened his thought through the period of
his illness, had gone. He was secure again within himself.

It did not seem to matter fundamentally whether it was an
experience of things without or of things within him that had
happened to him. It was clear to him that much that he had seen
was at most expressive, that some was altogether symbolical. For
example, there was that sudden absurd realization of his sash and
gaiters, and his perception of them as encumbrances in his
pursuit of God. But the setting and essential of the whole thing
remained in his mind neither expressive nor symbolical, but as
real and immediately perceived, and that was the presence and
kingship of God. God was still with him and about him and over
him and sustaining him. He was back again in his world and his
ordinary life, in his clothing and his body and his club, but God
had been made and remained altogether plain and manifest.

Whether an actual vision had made his conviction, or whether
the conviction of his own subconscious mind had made the dream,
seemed but a small matter beside the conviction that this was
indeed the God he had desired and the God who must rule his life.

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

(2)


For a long time as it seemed the bishop remained wrapped in
clouds of luminous meditation. Dream or vision it did not
matter; the essential thing was that he had made up his mind
about God, he had found God. Moreover, he perceived that his
theological perplexities had gone. God was higher and simpler and
nearer than any theological God, than the God of the Three
Creeds. Those creeds lay about in his mind now like garments
flung aside, no trace nor suspicion of divinity sustained them
any longer. And now--Now he would go out into the world.

The little Library of the Athenaeum has no visible door. He
went to the book-masked entrance in the corner, and felt among
the bookshelves for the hidden latch. Then he paused, held by a
curious thought. What exactly was the intention of that
symbolical struggle with his sash and gaiters, and why had they
impeded his pursuit of God?

To what particularly significant action was he going out?

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

After a long interval he walked into the big reading-room. He
ordered some tea and dry toast and butter, and sat down very
thoughtfully in a corner. He was still sitting and thinking at
half-past eight.

It may seem strange to the reader that this bishop who had been
doubting and criticizing the church and his system of beliefs for
four long years had never before faced the possibility of a
severance from his ecclesiastical dignity. But he had grown up in
the church, his life had been so entirely clerical and Anglican,
that the widest separation he had hitherto been able to imagine
from this past had left him still a bishop, heretical perhaps,
innovating in the broadening of beliefs and the liberalizing of
practice, defensive even as Chasters was defensive, but still
with the palace and his dignities, differing in opinion rather
than in any tangible reality from his previous self. For a
bishop, disbelief in the Church is a far profounder scepticism
than mere disbelief in God. God is unseen, and in daily things
unfelt; but the Church is with the predestined bishop always. His
concept of the extremest possible departure from orthodoxy had
been something that Chasters had phrased as "a restatement of
Christ." It was a new idea, an idea that had come with an immense
effect of severance and novelty, that God could be other than the
God of the Creed, could present himself to the imagination as a
figure totally unlike the white, gentle, and compromising
Redeemer of an Anglican's thought. That the bishop should treat
the whole teaching of the church and the church itself as wrong,
was an idea so new that it fell upon him now like a thunderbolt
out of a cloudless sky. But here, clear in his mind now, was a
feeling, amounting to conviction, that it was the purpose and
gesture of the true God that he should come right out of the
church and all his professions.

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

To begin with it seemed to him that an immediate renunciation
was demanded. But it was a momentous step. He wanted to think.
And to go on thinking. Rather than to act precipitately. Although
the imperative seemed absolute, some delaying and arresting
instinct insisted that he must "think" If he went back to
Princhester, the everyday duties of his position would confront
him at once with an effect of a definite challenge. He decided to
take one of the Reform club bedrooms for two or three days, and
wire to Princhester that he was "unavoidably delayed in town,"
without further explanations. Then perhaps this inhibitory force
would give way.

It did not, however, give way. His mind sat down for two days
in a blank amazement at the course before him, and at the end of
that time this reasonless and formless institution was as strong
as ever. During that time, except for some incidental exchanges
at his clubs, he talked to no one. At first he did not want to
talk to any one. He remained mentally and practically active,
with a still intensely vivid sense that God, the true God, stood
watching him and waiting for him to follow. And to follow meant
slipping right out of all the world he had ever known. To thrust
his foot right over the edge of a cliff would scarcely have
demanded more from the bishop's store of resolution. He stood on
the very verge. The chief secretion of his mind was a shadowy
experiment or so in explanation of why he did not follow.

(3)


Insensibly the extreme vividness of his sense of God's nearness
decreased. But he still retained a persuasion of the reality of
an immediate listener waiting, and of the need of satisfying him.

On the third day he found his mind still further changed. He no
longer felt that God was in Pall Mall or St. James's Park,
whither he resorted to walk and muse. He felt now that God was
somewhere about the horizon....

He felt too no longer that he thought straight into the mind of
God. He thought now of what he would presently say to God. He
turned over and rehearsed phrases. With that came a desire to try
them first on some other hearer. And from that to the attentive
head of Lady Sunderbund, prettily bent towards him, was no great
leap. She would understand, if any one could understand, the
great change that had happened in his mind.

He found her address in the telephone book. She could be quite
alone to him if he wouldn't mind "just me." It was, he said,
exactly what he desired.

But when he got to her great airy flat overlooking Hyde Park,
with its Omega Workshop furniture and its arresting decoration,
he was not so sure whether this encounter was so exactly the
thing he had desired as he had supposed.

The world had become opaque and real again as he walked up St.
James's Street and past the Ritz. He had a feeling that he was
taking an afternoon off from God. The adventurous modernity of
the room in which he waited intensified that. One whole white
wall was devoted to a small picture by Wyndham Lewis. It was like
a picture of an earthquake in a city of aniline pink and grey and
keen green cardboard, and he wished it had never existed.

He turned his back upon it and stared out of the window over
the trees and greenery. The balcony was decorated with white and
pink geraniums in pots painted black and gold, and the railings
of the balcony were black and gold with crimson shape like
squares wildly out of drawing.

Lady Sunderbund kept him waiting perhaps five minutes. Then she
came sailing in to him.

She was dressed in a way and moved across the room in a way
that was more reminiscent of Botticelli's Spring than ever--
only with a kind of superadded stiffish polonaise of lace--and
he did not want to be reminded of Botticelli's Spring or wonder
why she had taken to stiff lace polonaises. He did not enquire
whether he had met Lady Sunderbund to better advantage at Mrs.
Garstein Fellows' or whether his memory had overrated her or
whether anything had happened to his standard of taste, but his
feeling now was decidedly one of disappointment, and all the talk
and self-examination he had promised himself seemed to wither and
hide away within him. For a time he talked of her view, and then
admired her room and its arrangement, which he thought really
were quite unbecomingly flippant and undignified for a room. Then
came the black tea-things on their orange tray, and he searched
in his mind for small talk to sustain their interview.

But he had already betrayed his disposition to "go on with our
talk" in his telephone enquiry, and Lady Sunderbund, perceiving
his shyness, began to make openings for him, at first just little
hinting openings, and then larger and larger ones, until at last
one got him.

"I'm so glad," she said, "to see you again. I'm so glad to go
on with oua talk. I've thought about it and thought about it."

She beamed at him happily.

"I've thought ova ev'y wo'd you said," she went on, when she
had finished conveying her pretty bliss to him. "I've been so
helped by thinking the k'eeds are symbols. And all you said. And
I've felt time after time, you couldn't stay whe' you we'. That
what you we' saying to me, would have to be said 'ight out."

That brought him in. He could not very well evade that opening
without incivility. After all he had asked to see her, and it was
a foolish thing to let little decorative accidentals put him off
his friendly purpose. A woman may have flower-pots painted gold
with black checkers and still be deeply understanding. He
determined to tell her what was in his mind. But he found
something barred him from telling that he had had an actual
vision of God. It was as if that had been a private and
confidential meeting. It wasn't, he felt, for him either to boast
a privilege or tell others of things that God had not chosen to
show them.

"Since I saw you," he said, "I have thought a great deal--of
the subject of our conversation."

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

"My faith in God grows," he said.

She glowed. Her lips fell apart. She flamed attention.

"But it grows less like the faith of the church, less and less.
I was born and trained in Anglicanism, and it is with a sort of
astonishment I find myself passing now out of every sort of
Catholicism--seeing it from the outside...."

"Just as one might see Buddhism," she supplied.

"And yet feeling nearer Ä infinitely nearer to God," he said.

"Yes," she panted; "yes."

"I thought if one went out, one went out just to doubt and
darkness."

"And you don't?"

"No."

"You have gone at one step to a new 'iligion!"

He stared for a moment at the phrase.

"To religion," he said.

"It is so wondyful," she said, with her hands straight down
upon the couch upon which she was sitting, and leaning forward at
him, so as to seem almost as much out of drawing as a modern
picture.

"It seems," he reflected; "--as if it were a natural thing."

She came back to earth very slowly. She turned to the
tea-things with hushed and solemn movements as though she
administered a ceremony of peculiar significance. The bishop too
rose slowly out of the profundity of his confession. "No sugar
please," he said, arresting the lump in mid air.

It was only when they were embarked upon cups of tea and had a
little refreshed themselves, that she carried the talk further.

"Does it mean that you must leave the church?" she asked.

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

She awaited his next thought.

"It is as if one had lived in a room all one's life and thought
it the world--and then suddenly walked out through a door and
discovered the sea and the mountains and stars. So it was with me
and the Anglican Church. It seems so extraordinary now--and it
would have seemed the most natural thing a year ago--to think
that I ever believed that the Anglican Compromise was the final
truth of religion, that nothing more until the end of the world
could ever be known that Cosmo Gordon Lang did not know, that
there could be no conception of God and his quality that Randall
Davidson did not possess."

He paused.

"I did," he said.

"I did," she responded with round blue eyes of wonder.

"At the utmost the Church of England is a tabernacle on a
road."

"A 'oad that goes whe'?" she rhetorized.

"Exactly," said the bishop, and put down his cup.

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

She quoted aptly and softly: "The wo'ld was all befo' them whe'
to choose."

He was struck by the aptness of the words.

"I feel I have to come right out into the bare truth. What
exactly then do I become? Do I lose my priestly function because
I discover how great God is? But what am I to do?"

He opened a new layer of his thoughts to her.

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

"But o'thodox no maw," she said.

"Orthodox--self-satisfied, no longer. A priest who seeks, an
exploring priest."

"In a Chu'ch of P'og'ess and B'othe'hood," she carried him on.

"At any rate, in a progressive and learning church."

She flashed and glowed assent.

"I have been haunted," he said, "by those words spoken at
Athens. 'Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto
you.' That comes to me with an effect of--guidance is an
old-fashioned word--shall I say suggestion? To stand by the
altar bearing strange names and ancient symbols, speaking plainly
to all mankind of the one true God--!"

(4)


He did not get much beyond this point at the time, though he
remained talking with Lady Sunderbund for nearly an hour longer.
The rest was merely a beating out of what had already been said.
But insensibly she renewed her original charm, and as he became
accustomed to her he forgot a certain artificiality in her manner
and the extreme modernity of her costume and furniture. She was a
wonderful listener; nobody else could have helped him to
expression in quite the same way, and when he left her he felt
that now he was capable of stating his case in a coherent and
acceptable form to almost any intelligent hearer. He had a point
of view now that was no longer embarrassed by the immediate
golden presence of God; he was no longer dazzled nor ecstatic;
his problem had diminished to the scale of any other great human
problem, to the scale of political problems and problems of
integrity and moral principle, problems about which there is no
such urgency as there is about a house on fire, for example.

And now the desire for expression was running strong. He wanted
to state his situation; if he did not state he would have to act;
and as he walked back to the club dinner he turned over possible
interlocutors in his thoughts. Lord Rampound sat with him at
dinner, and he came near broaching the subject with him. But Lord
Rampound that evening had that morbid running of bluish legal
anecdotes which is so common an affliction with lawyers, and
theology sinks and dies in that turbid stream.

But as he lay in bed that night he thought of his old friend
and helper Bishop Likeman, and it was borne in upon him that he
should consult him. And this he did next day.

Since the days when the bishop had been only plain Mr. Scrope,
the youngest and most helpful of Likeman's historical band of
curates, their friendship had continued. Likeman had been a
second father to him; in particular his tact and helpfulness had
shone during those days of doubt and anxiety when dear old Queen
Victoria, God's representative on earth, had obstinately refused,
at the eleventh hour, to make him a bishop. She had those
pigheaded fits, and she was touchy about the bishops. She had
liked Scrope on account of the excellence of his German
pronunciation, but she had been irritated by newspaper paragraphs
--nobody could ever find out who wrote them and nobody could
ever find out who showed them to the old lady--anticipating his
elevation. She had gone very red in the face and stiffened in the
Guelphic manner whenever Scrope was mentioned, and so a rich
harvest of spiritual life had remained untilled for some months.
Likeman had brought her round.

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

He found Likeman perceptibly older and more shrivelled on
account of the war, but still as sweet and lucid and subtle as
ever. His voice sounded more than ever like a kind old woman's.

He sat buried in his cushions--for "nowadays I must save
every scrap of vitality"--and for a time contented himself with
drawing out his visitor's story.

Of course, one does not talk to Likeman of visions or
intuitions. "I am disturbed, I find myself getting out of touch;"
that was the bishop's tone.

Occasionally Likeman nodded slowly, as a physician might do at
the recital of familiar symptoms. "Yes," he said, "I have been
through most of this.... A little different in the
inessentials.... How clear you are!"

"You leave our stupid old Trinities--as I left them long
ago," said old Likeman, with his lean hand feeling and clawing at
the arm of his chair.

"But--!"

The old man raised his hand and dropped it. "You go away from
it all--straight as a line. I did. You take the wings of the
morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the earth. And there
you find--"

He held up a lean finger, and inclined it to tick off each
point.

"Fate--which is God the Father, the Power of the Heart, which
is God the Son, and that Light which comes in upon us from the
inaccessible Godhead, which is God the Holy Spirit."

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

Old Likeman stared. "You saw!"

The Bishop of Princhester had not meant to go so far. But he
stuck to his words. "As if I saw with my eyes. A God of light and
courage."

"You have had visions, Scrope?"

"I seemed to see."

"No, you have just been dreaming dreams."

"But why should one not see?"

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

"You talk like an agnostic."

"We are all agnostics. Our creeds are expressions of ourselves
and our attitude and relationship to the unknown. The triune God
is just the form of our need and disposition. I have always
assumed that you took that for granted. Who has ever really seen
or heard or felt God? God is neither of the senses nor of the
mind; he is of the soul. You are realistic, you are
materialistic...."

His voice expostulated.

The Bishop of Princhester reflected. The vision of God was far
off among his memories now, and difficult to recall. But he said
at last: "I believe there is a God and that he is as real a
person as you or I. And he is not the theological God we set out
before the world."

"Personification," said Likeman. "In the eighteenth century
they used to draw beautiful female figures as Science and
Mathematics. Young men have loved Science--and Freedom--as
Pygmalion loved Galatea. Have it so if you will. Have a visible
person for your Deity. But let me keep up my--spirituality."

"Your spirituality seems as thin as a mist. Do you really
believe--anything?"

"Everything!" said Likeman emphatically, sitting up with a
transitory vigour. "Everything we two have ever professed
together. I believe that the creeds of my church do express all
that can possibly be expressed in the relationship of--That "--
he made a comprehensive gesture with a twist of his hand upon its
wrist--"to the human soul. I believe that they express it as
well as the human mind can express it. Where they seem to be
contradictory or absurd, it is merely that the mystery is
paradoxical. I believe that the story of the Fall and of the
Redemption is a complete symbol, that to add to it or to subtract
from it or to alter it is to diminish its truth; if it seems
incredible at this point or that, then simply I admit my own
mental defect. And I believe in our Church, Scrope, as the
embodied truth of religion, the divine instrument in human
affairs. I believe in the security of its tradition, in the
complete and entire soundness of its teaching, in its essential
authority and divinity."

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

"But the historical Christ, the man Jesus?"

"A life may be a metaphor. Why not? Yes, I believe it all.
All."

The Bishop of Princhester was staggered by this complete
acceptance. "I see you believe all you profess," he said, and
remained for a moment or so rallying his forces.

"Your vision--if it was a vision--I put it to you, was just
some single aspect of divinity," said Likeman. "We make a mistake
in supposing that Heresy has no truth in it. Most heresies are
only a disproportionate apprehension of some essential truth.
Most heretics are men who have suddenly caught a glimpse through
the veil of some particular verity.... They are dazzled by that
aspect. All the rest has vanished.... They are obsessed. You are
obsessed clearly by this discovery of the militancy of God. God
the Son--as Hero. And you want to go out to the simple worship
of that one aspect. You want to go out to a Dissenter's tent in
the wilderness, instead of staying in the Great Temple of the
Ages."

Was that true?

For some moments it sounded true.

The Bishop of Princhester sat frowning and looking at that.
Very far away was the vision now of that golden Captain who bade
him come. Then at a thought the bishop smiled.

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

"Oh! I remember, I remember," said Likeman, smiling with
unshaken confidence. "Why not?"

"For sixty years all we bishops in what you call the Great
Temple of the Ages, were appointed and bullied and kept in our
places by that pink irascible bit of dignity. I remember how at
the time I didn't dare betray my boiling indignation even to you
--I scarcely dared admit it to myself...."

He paused.

"It doesn't matter at all," and old Likeman waved it aside.

"Not at all," he confirmed, waving again.

"I spoke of the whole church of Christ on earth," he went on.
"These things, these Victorias and Edwards and so on, are
temporary accidents--just as the severance of an Anglican from
a Roman communion and a Greek orthodox communion are temporary
accidents. You will remark that wise men in all ages have been
able to surmount the difficulty of these things. Why? Because
they knew that in spite of all these splits and irregularities
and defacements--like the cracks and crannies and lichens on a
cathedral wall--the building held good, that it was shelter and
security. There is no other shelter and security. And so I come
to your problem. Suppose it is true that you have this incidental
vision of the militant aspect of God, and he isn't, as you see
him now that is,--he isn't like the Trinity, he isn't like the
Creed, he doesn't seem to be related to the Church, then comes
the question, are you going out for that? And whither do you go
if you do go out? The Church remains. We alter doctrines not by
changing the words but by shifting the accent. We can
underÄaccentuate below the threshold of consciousness."

"But can we?"

"We do. Where's Hell now? Eighty years ago it warmed the whole
Church. It was--as some atheist or other put it the other day
--the central heating of the soul. But never mind that point
now. Consider the essential question, the question of breaking
with the church. Ask yourself, whither would you go? To become an
oddity! A Dissenter. A Negative. Self emasculated. The spirit
that denies. You would just go out. You would just cease to serve
Religion. That would be all. You wouldn't do anything. The Church
would go on; everything else would go on. Only you would be lost
in the outer wilderness.

"But then--"

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

There was a little pause.

"No man," the bishop thought aloud, "putteth new wine into old
bottles."

Old Likeman began to speak and had a fit of coughing. "Some of
these texts--whuff, whuff--like a conjuror's hat--whuff--
make 'em--fit anything."

A man-servant appeared and handed a silver box of lozenges into
which the old bishop dipped with a trembling hand.

"Tricks of that sort," he said, "won't do, Scrope--among
professionals.

"And besides," he was inspired; "true religion is old wine--
as old as the soul.

"You are a bishop in the Church of Christ on Earth," he summed
it up. "And you want to become a detached and wandering Ancient
Mariner from your shipwreck of faith with something to explain--
that nobody wants to hear. You are going out I suppose you have
means?"

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

"No," said the Bishop of Princhester, "practically--I
haven't."

"My dear boy!" it was as if they were once more rector and
curate. "My dear brother! do you know what the value of an
ex-bishop is in the ordinary labour market?"

"I have never thought of that."

"Evidently. You have a wife and children?"

"Five daughters."

"And your wife married you--I remember, she married you soon
after you got that living in St. John's Wood. I suppose she took
it for granted that you were fixed in an ecclesiastical career.
That was implicit in the transaction."

"I haven't looked very much at that side of the matter yet,"
said the Bishop of Princhester.

"It shouldn't be a decisive factor," said Bishop Likeman, "not
decisive. But it will weigh. It should weigh...."

The old man opened out fresh aspects of the case. His argument
was for delay, for deliberation. He went on to a wider set of
considerations. A man who has held the position of a bishop for
some years is, he held, no longer a free man in matters of
opinion. He has become an official part of a great edifice which
supports the faith of multitudes of simple and dependant
believers. He has no right to indulge recklessly in intellectual
and moral integrities. He may understand, but how is the flock to
understand? He may get his own soul clear, but what will happen
to them? He will just break away their supports, astonish them,
puzzle them, distress them, deprive them of confidence, convince
them of nothing.

"Intellectual egotism may be as grave a sin," said Bishop
Likeman, "as physical selfishness.

"Assuming even that you are absolutely right," said Bishop
Likeman, "aren't you still rather in the position of a man who
insists upon Swedish exercises and a strengthening dietary on a
raft?"

"I think you have made out a case for delay," said his hearer.

"Three months."

The Bishop of Princhester conceded three months.

"Including every sort of service. Because, after all, even
supposing it is damnable to repeat prayers and creeds you do not
believe in, and administer sacraments you think superstition,
nobody can be damned but yourself. On the other hand if you
express doubts that are not yet perfectly digested--you
experiment with the souls of others...."

(5)


The bishop found much to ponder in his old friend's counsels.
They were discursive and many-fronted, and whenever he seemed to
be penetrating or defeating the particular considerations under
examination the others in the background had a way of appearing
invincible. He had a strong persuasion that Likeman was wrong--
and unanswerable. And the true God now was no more than the
memory of a very vividly realized idea. It was clear to the
bishop that he was no longer a churchman or in the generally
accepted sense of the word a Christian, and that he was bound to
come out of the church. But all sense of urgency had gone. It was
a matter demanding deliberation and very great consideration for
others.

He took no more of Dale's stuff because he felt bodily sound
and slept well. And he was now a little shy of this potent fluid.
He went down to Princhester the next day, for his compromise of
an interval of three months made it seem possible to face his
episcopal routine again. It was only when he was back in his own
palace that the full weight of his domestic responsibilities in
the discussion of the course he had to take, became apparent.

Lady Ella met him with affection and solicitude.

"I was tired and mentally fagged," he said. "A day or so in
London had an effect of change."

She agreed that he looked much better, and remained for a
moment or so scrutinizing him with the faint anxiety of one
resolved to be completely helpful.

He regarded her with a renewed sense of her grace and dignity
and kindliness. She was wearing a grey dress of soft silky
material, touched with blue and covered with what seemed to him
very rich and beautiful lace; her hair flowed back very
graciously from her broad brow, and about her wrist and neck were
delicate lines of gold. She seemed tremendously at home and right
just where she was, in that big hospitable room, cultured but
Anglican, without pretensions or novelties, with a glow of bound
books, with the grand piano that Miriam, his third daughter, was
beginning to play so well, with the tea equipage of shining
silver and fine porcelain.

He sat down contentedly in the low armchair beside her.

It wasn't a setting that one would rashly destroy....

And that evening at dinner this sense of his home as a complex
of finely adjusted things not to be rashly disturbed was still
more in the mind of the bishop. At dinner he had all his
domesticities about him. It was the family time, from eight until
ten, at which latter hour he would usually go back from the
drawing-room to his study. He surveyed the table. Eleanor was at
home for a few days, looking a little thin and bright but very
keen and happy. She had taken a first in the first part of the
Moral Science Tripos, and she was working hard now for part two.
Clementina was to go back to Newnham with her next September. She
aspired to history. Miriam's bent was musical. She and Phoebe and
Daphne and Clementina were under the care of skilful Mademoiselle
Lafarge, most tactful of Protestant French-women, Protestant and
yet not too Protestant, one of those rare French Protestants in
whom a touch of Bergson and the Pasteur Monod


           "scarce suspected, animates the whole."

And also they had lessons, so high are our modern standards of
education, from Mr. Blent, a brilliant young mathematician in
orders, who sat now next to Lady Ella. Mr. Whippham, the
chaplain, was at the bishop's right hand, ready for any chance of
making arrangements to clear off the small arrears of duty the
little holiday in London had accumulated. The bishop surveyed all
these bright young people between himself and the calm beauty of
his wife. He spoke first to one and then another upon the things
that interested them. It rejoiced his heart to be able to give
them education and opportunity, it pleased him to see them in
clothes that he knew were none the less expensive because of
their complete simplicity. Miriam and Mr. Blent wrangled
pleasantly about Debussy, and old Dunk waited as though in orders
of some rare and special sort that qualified him for this
service.

All these people, the bishop reflected, counted upon him that
this would go on....

Eleanor was answering some question of her mother's. They were
so oddly alike and so curiously different, and both in their
several ways so fine. Eleanor was dark like his own mother.
Perhaps she did a little lack Lady Ella's fine reserves; she
could express more, she could feel more acutely, she might easily
be very unhappy or very happy....

All these people counted on him. It was indeed acutely true, as
Likeman had said, that any sudden breach with his position would
be a breach of faith--so far as they were concerned.

And just then his eye fell upon the epergne, a very old and
beautiful piece of silver, that graced the dinner-table. It had
been given him, together with an episcopal ring, by his curates
and choristers at the Church of the Holy Innocents, when he
became bishop of Pinner. When they gave it him, had any one of
them dreamt that some day he might be moved to strike an
ungracious blow at the mother church that had reared them all?

It was his custom to join the family in the drawing-room after
dinner. To-night he was a little delayed by Whippham, with some
trivialities about next month's confirmations in Pringle and
Princhester. When he came in he found Miriam playing, and playing
very beautifully one of those later sonatas of Beethoven, he
could never remember whether it was Of. 109 or Of. 111, but he
knew that he liked it very much; it was solemn and sombre with
phases of indescribable sweetness--while Clementina, Daphne
and Mademoiselle Lafarge went on with their war knitting and
Phoebe and Mr. Blent bent their brows over chess. Eleanor was
reading the evening paper. Lady Ella sat on a high chair by the
coffee things, and he stood in the doorway surveying the peaceful
scene for a moment or so, before he went across the room and sat
down on the couch close to her.

"You look tired," she whispered softly.

"Worries."

"That Chasters case?"

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

"Is the Chasters case coming on again, Daddy?" asked Eleanor.

He nodded.

"It's a pity," she said.

"What ?

"That he can't be left alone."

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

He seized the opportunity of the music ceasing to get away from
the subject. "Miriam dear," he asked, raising his voice; "is that
109 or 111? I can never tell."

"That is always 111, Daddy," said Miriam. "It's the other one
is 109." And then evidently feeling that she had been pert:
"Would you like me to play you 109, Daddy?"

"I should love it, my dear." And he leant back and prepared to
listen in such a thorough way that Eleanor would have no chance
of discussing the Chasters' heresies. But this was interrupted by
the consummation of the coffee, and Mr. Blent, breaking a long
silence with "Mate in three, if I'm not mistaken," leapt to his
feet to be of service. Eleanor, with the rough seriousness of
youth, would not leave the Chasters case alone.

"But need you take action against Mr. Chasters?" she asked at
once.

"It's a very complicated subject, my dear," he said.

"His arguments?"

"The practical considerations."

"But what are practical considerations in such a case?"

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

"But," began Eleanor, gathering fresh forces.

"Daddy is tired," Lady Ella intervened, patting him on the
head.

"Oh, terribly!--of that," he said, and so escaped Eleanor for
the evening.

But he knew that before very long he would have to tell his
wife of the changes that hung over their lives; it would be
shabby to let the avalanche fall without giving the longest
possible warning; and before they parted that night he took her
hands in his and said: "There is much I have to tell you, dear.
Things change, the whole world changes. The church must not live
in a dream....

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

(6)


But he did not sleep perfectly that night.

He did not sleep indeed very badly, but he lay for some time
thinking, thinking not onward but as if he pressed his mind
against very strong barriers that had closed again. His vision of
God which had filled the heavens, had become now gem-like, a
minute, hard, clear-cut conviction in his mind that he had to
disentangle himself from the enormous complications of symbolism
and statement and organization and misunderstanding in the church
and achieve again a simple and living worship of a simple and
living God. Likeman had puzzled and silenced him, only upon
reflection to convince him that amidst such intricacies of
explanation the spirit cannot live. Creeds may be symbolical, but
symbols must not prevaricate. A church that can symbolize
everything and anything means nothing.

It followed from this that he ought to leave the church. But
there came the other side of this perplexing situation. His
feelings as he lay in his bed were exactly like those one has in
a dream when one wishes to run or leap or shout and one can
achieve no movement, no sound. He could not conceive how he could
possibly leave the church.

His wife became as it were the representative of all that held
him helpless. She and he had never kept secret from one another
any plan of action, any motive, that affected the other. It was
clear to him that any movement towards the disavowal of doctrinal
Christianity and the renunciation of his see must be first
discussed with her. He must tell her before he told the world.

And he could not imagine his telling her except as an
incredibly shattering act.

So he left things from day to day, and went about his episcopal
routines. He preached and delivered addresses in such phrases as
he knew people expected, and wondered profoundly why it was that
it should be impossible for him to discuss theological points
with Lady Ella. And one afternoon he went for a walk with Eleanor
along the banks of the Prin, and found himself, in response to
certain openings of hers, talking to her in almost exactly the
same terms as Likeman had used to him.

Then suddenly the problem of this theological eclaircissement
was complicated in an unexpected fashion.

He had just been taking his Every Second Thursday Talk with
Diocesan Men Helpers. He had been trying to be plain and simple
upon the needless narrowness of enthusiastic laymen. He was still
in the Bishop Andrews cap and purple cassock he affected on these
occasions; the Men Helpers loved purple; and he was disentangling
himself from two or three resolute bores--for our loyal laymen
can be at times quite superlative bores--when Miriam came to
him.

"Mummy says, 'Come to the drawing-room if you can.' There is a
Lady Sunderbund who seems particularly to want to see you."

He hesitated for a moment, and then decided that this was a
conversation he ought to control.

He found Lady Sunderbund looking very tall and radiantly
beautiful in a sheathlike dress of bright crimson trimmed with
snow-white fur and a white fur toque. She held out a long
white-gloved hand to him and cried in a tone of comradeship and
profound understanding: "I've come, Bishop!"

"You've come to see me?" he said without any sincerity in his
polite pleasure.

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

She evidently considered Lady Ella a mere conversational
stop-gap, to be dropped now that the real business could be
commenced. She turned her pretty profile to that lady, and
obliged the bishop with a compact summary of all that had
preceded his arrival. "I have been telling Lady Ella," she said,
"I've taken a house, fu'nitua and all! Hea. In P'inchesta! I've
made up my mind to sit unda you--as they say in Clapham. I've
come 'ight down he' fo' good. I've taken a little house--oh! a
sweet little house that will be all over 'oses next month. I'm
living f'om 'oom to 'oom and having the othas done up. It's in
that little quiet st'eet behind you' ga'den wall. And he' I am!"

"Is it the old doctor's house?" asked Lady Ella.

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

She concentrated upon the bishop.

"Oh, I've been thinking all the time of all the things you told
me. Ova and ova. It's all so wondyful and so--so like a G'ate
Daw opening. New light. As if it was all just beginning."

She clasped her hands.

The bishop felt that there were a great number of points to
this situation, and that it was extremely difficult to grasp them
all at once. But one that seemed of supreme importance to his
whirling intelligence was that Lady Ella should not know that he
had gone to relieve his soul by talking to Lady Sunderbund in
London. It had never occurred to him at the time that there was
any shadow of disloyalty to Lady Ella in his going to Lady
Sunderbund, but now he realized that this was a thing that would
annoy Lady Ella extremely. The conversation had in the first
place to be kept away from that. And in the second place it had
to be kept away from the abrupt exploitation of the new
theological developments.

He felt that something of the general tension would be relieved
if they could all three be got to sit down.

"I've been talking for just upon two hours," he said to Lady
Ella. "It's good to see the water boiling for tea."

He put a chair for Lady Sunderbund to the right of Lady Ella,
got her into it by infusing an ecclesiastical insistence into his
manner, and then went and sat upon the music-stool on his wife's
left, so as to establish a screen of tea-things and cakes and so
forth against her more intimate enthusiasm. Meanwhile he began to
see his way clearer and to develop his line.

"Well, Lady Sunderbund," he said, "I can assure you that I
think you will be no small addition to the church life of
Princhester. But I warn you this is a hard-working and exacting
diocese. We shall take your money, all we can get of it, we shall
take your time, we shall work you hard."

"Wo'k me hard!" cried Lady Sunderbund with passion.

"We will, we will," said the bishop in a tone that ignored her
passionate note.

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

Lady Sunderbund beamed an acknowledgment. "I shall exact a
'eturn," she said. "I don't mind wo'king, but I shall wo'k like
the poo' students in the Middle Ages did, to get my teaching.
I've got my own soul to save as well as help saving othas. Since
oua last talk--"

She found the bishop handing her bread and butter. For a time
the bishop fought a delaying action with the tea-things, while he
sought eagerly and vainly in his mind for some good practical
topic in which he could entangle and suppress Lady Sunderbund's
enthusiasms. From this she broke away by turning suddenly to Lady
Ella.

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

Lady Ella was always pleased to hear her husband praised. Her
colour brightened a little. "They seem very ordinary views," she
said modestly.

"You share them?" cried Lady Sunderbund.

"But of course," said Lady Ella.

"Wondyful!" cried Lady Sunderbund.

"Tell me, Lady Sunderbund," said the bishop, "are you going to
alter the outer appearance of the old doctor's house?" And found
that at last he had discovered the saving topic.

"Ha'dly at all," she said. "I shall just have it pointed white
and do the doa--I'm not su' how I shall do the doa. Whetha I
shall do the doa gold or a vehy, vehy 'itch blue."

For a time she and Lady Ella, to whom these ideas were novel,
discussed the animation of grey and sombre towns by house
painting. In such matter Lady Sunderbund had a Russian mind. "I
can't bea' g'ey," she said. "Not in my su'oundings, not in my
k'eed, nowhe'e." She turned to the bishop. "If I had my way I
would paint you' cathed'al inside and out."

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

From that to the end there was no real danger, and at last the
bishop found himself alone with his wife again.

"Remarkable person," he said tentatively. "I never met any one
whose faults were more visible. I met her at Wimbush House."

He glanced at his watch.

"What did she mean," asked Lady Ella abruptly, "by talking of
your new views? And about revelations?"

"She probably misunderstood something I said at the Garstein
Fellows'," he said. "She has rather a leaping mind."

He turned to the window, looked at his nails, and appeared to
be suddenly reminded of duties elsewhere....

It was chiefly manifest to him that the difficulties in
explaining the changes of his outlook to Lady Ella had now
increased enormously.

(7)


A day or so after Lady Sunderbund's arrival in Princhester the
bishop had a letter from Likeman. The old man was manifestly in
doubt about the effect of their recent conversation.

"My dear Scrope," it began. "I find myself thinking continually
about our interview and the difficulties you laid bare so frankly
to me. We touched upon many things in that talk, and I find
myself full of afterthoughts, and not perfectly sure either quite
of what I said or of what I failed to say. I feel that in many
ways I was not perhaps so clear and convincing as the justice of
my case should have made me, and you are one of my own particular
little company, you were one of the best workers in that band of
good workers, your life and your career are very much my concern.
I know you will forgive me if I still mingle something of the
paternal with my fraternal admonitions. I watched you closely. I
have still my old diaries of the St. Matthew's days, and I have
been looking at them to remind me of what you once were. It was
my custom to note my early impressions of all the men who worked
with me, because I have a firm belief in the soundness of first
impressions and the considerable risk one runs of having them
obscured by the accidents and habituations of constant
intercourse. I found that quite early in your days at St.
Matthew's I wrote against your name 'enthusiastic, but a saving
delicacy.' After all our life-long friendship I would not write
anything truer. I would say of you to-day, 'This man might have
been a revivalist, if he were not a gentleman.' There is the
enthusiast, there is the revivalist, in you. It seems to me that
the stresses and questions of this great crisis in the world's
history have brought it nearer to the surface than I had ever
expected it to come.

"I quite understand and I sympathize with your impatience with
the church at the present time; we present a spectacle of pompous
insignificance hard to bear with. We are doing very little, and
we are giving ourselves preposterous airs. There seems to be an
opinion abroad that in some quasi-automatic way the country is
going to collapse after the war into the arms of the church and
the High Tories; a possibility I don't accept for a moment. Why
should it? These forcible-feeble reactionaries are much more
likely to explode a revolution that will disestablish us. And I
quite understand your theological difficulties--quite. The
creeds, if their entire symbolism is for a moment forgotten, if
they are taken as opaque statements of fact, are inconsistent,
incredible. So incredible that no one believes them; not even the
most devout. The utmost they do is to avert their minds--
reverentially. Credo quia impossibile. That is offensive to a
Western mind. I can quite understand the disposition to cry out
at such things, 'This is not the Church of God!'--to run out
from it--

"You have some dream, I suspect, of a dramatic dissidence.

"Now, my dear Brother and erstwhile pupil, I ask you not to do
this thing. Wait, I implore you. Give me--and some others, a
little time. I have your promise for three months, but even after
that, I ask you to wait. Let the reform come from within the
church. The church is something more than either its creeds, its
clergy, or its laymen. Look at your cathedral rising out of and
dominating Princhester. It stands not simply for Athanasius; it
stands but incidentally for Athanasius; it stands for all
religion. Within that fabric--let me be as frank here as in our
private conversation--doctrine has altered again and again.
To-day two distinct religions worship there side by side; one
that fades and one that grows brighter. There is the old
quasi-materialistic belief of the barbarians, the belief in such
things, for example, as that Christ the physical Son of God
descended into hell and stayed there, seeing the sights I suppose
like any tourist and being treated with diplomatic civilities for
three terrestrial days; and on the other hand there is the truly
spiritual belief that you and I share, which is absolutely
intolerant of such grotesque ideas. My argument to you is that
the new faith, the clearer vision, gains ground; that the only
thing that can prevent or delay the church from being altogether
possessed by what you call and I admit is, the true God, is that
such men as yourself, as the light breaks upon you, should be
hasty and leave the church. You see my point of view, do you not?
It is not one that has been assumed for our discussion; it is one
I came to long years ago, that I was already feeling my way to in
my St. Matthew's Lenton sermons.

"A word for your private ear. I am working. I cannot tell you
fully because I am not working alone. But there are movements
afoot in which I hope very shortly to be able to ask you to
share. That much at least I may say at this stage. Obscure but
very powerful influences are at work for the liberalizing of the
church, for release from many narrow limitations, for the
establishment of a modus vivendi with the nonconformist and
dissentient bodies in Britain and America, and with the churches
of the East. But of that no more now.

"And in conclusion, my dear Scrope, let me insist again upon
the eternal persistence of the essential Religious Fact:


            (Greek Letters Here)

(Rev. i. 18. "Fear not. I am the First and Last thing, the Living
thing.")

And these promises which, even if we are not to take them as
promises in the exact sense in which, let us say, the payment of
five sovereigns is promised by a five-pound note, are yet
assertions of practically inevitable veracity:


            (Greek Letters Here)

(Phil. i. 6. "He who began... will perfect."
 Eph. v. 14. "He will illuminate.")


The old man had written his Greek tags in shakily resolute
capitals. It was his custom always to quote the Greek Testament
in his letters, never the English version. It is a practice not
uncommon with the more scholarly of our bishops. It is as if some
eminent scientific man were to insist upon writing H20 instead of
"water," and "sodium chloride" instead of "table salt" in his
private correspondence. Or upon hanging up a stuffed crocodile in
his hall to give the place tone. The Bishop of Princhester
construed these brief dicta without serious exertion, he found
them very congenial texts, but there were insuperable
difficulties in the problem why Likeman should suppose they had
the slightest weight upon his side of their discussion. The more
he thought the less they seemed to be on Likeman's side, until at
last they began to take on a complexion entirely opposed to the
old man's insidious arguments, until indeed they began to bear
the extraordinary interpretation of a special message,
unwittingly delivered.

(8)


The bishop was still thinking over this communication when he
was interrupted by Lady Ella. She came with a letter in her hand
to ask him whether she might send five-and-twenty pounds to a
poor cousin of his, a teacher in a girls' school, who had been
incapacitated from work by a dislocation of the cartilage of her
knee. If she could go to that unorthodox but successful
practitioner, Mr. Barker, the bone-setter, she was convinced she
could be restored to efficiency. But she had no ready money. The
bishop agreed without hesitation. His only doubt was the
certainty of the cure, but upon that point Lady Ella was
convinced; there had been a great experience in the Walshingham
family.

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

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




CHAPTER THE SEVENTH  -  THE SECOND VISION

(1)


A MONTH later found the bishop's original state of perplexity
and insomnia returned and intensified. He had done none of all
the things that had seemed so manifestly needing to be done after
his vision in the Athenaeum. All the relief and benefit of his
experience in London had vanished out of his life. He was afraid
of Dr. Dale's drug; he knew certainly that it would precipitate
matters; and all his instincts in the state of moral enfeeblement
to which he had relapsed, were to temporize.

Although he had said nothing further about his changed beliefs
to Lady Ella, yet he perceived clearly that a shadow had fallen
between them. She had a wife's extreme sensitiveness to fine
shades of expression and bearing, and manifestly she knew that
something was different. Meanwhile Lady Sunderbund had become a
frequent worshipper in the cathedral, she was a figure as
conspicuous in sombre Princhester as a bird of paradise would
have been; common people stood outside her very very rich blue
door on the chance of seeing her; she never missed an opportunity
of hearing the bishop preach or speak, she wrote him several
long and thoughtful letters with which he did not bother Lady
Ella, she communicated persistently, and manifestly intended to
become a very active worker in diocesan affairs.

It was inevitable that she and the bishop should meet and talk
occasionally in the cathedral precincts, and it was inevitable
that he should contrast the flexibility of her rapid and very
responsive mind with a certain defensiveness, a stoniness, in the
intellectual bearing of Lady Ella.

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

And since his mind was rehearsing explanations it was not
unnatural they should overflow into this eagerly receptive
channel, and that the less he told Lady Ella the fuller became
his spiritual confidences to Lady Sunderbund.

She was clever in realizing that they were confidences and
treating them as such, more particularly when it chanced that she
and Lady Ella and the bishop found themselves in the same
conversation.

She made great friends with Miriam, and initiated her by a
whole collection of pretty costume plates into the mysteries of
the "Ussian Ballet" and the works of Mousso'gski and "Imsky
Ko'zakof."

The bishop liked a certain religiosity in the texture of
Moussorgski's music, but failed to see the "significance "--of
many of the costumes.

(2)


It was on a Sunday night--the fourth Sunday after Easter--
that the supreme crisis of the bishop's life began. He had had a
feeling all day of extreme dulness and stupidity; he felt his
ministrations unreal, his ceremonies absurd and undignified. In
the night he became bleakly and painfully awake. His mind
occupied itself at first chiefly with the tortuousness and
weakness of his own character. Every day he perceived that the
difficulty of telling Lady Ella of the change in his faith became
more mountainous. And every day he procrastinated. If he had told
her naturally and simply on the evening of his return from London
--before anything material intervened--everything would have
been different, everything would have been simpler....

He groaned and rolled over in his bed.

There came upon him the acutest remorse and misery. For he saw
that amidst these petty immediacies he had lost touch with God.
The last month became incredible. He had seen God. He had touched
God's hand. God had been given to him, and he had neglected the
gift. He was still lost amidst the darkness and loneliness, the
chaotic ends and mean shifts, of an Erastian world. For a month
now and more, after a vision of God so vivid and real and
reassuring that surely no saint nor prophet had ever had a
better, he had made no more than vague responsive movements; he
had allowed himself to be persuaded into an unreasonable and
cowardly delay, and the fetters of association and usage and
minor interests were as unbroken as they had been before ever the
vision shone. Was it credible that there had ever been such a
vision in a life so entirely dictated by immediacy and instinct
as his? We are all creatures of the dark stream, we swim in needs
and bodily impulses and small vanities; if ever and again a
bubble of spiritual imaginativeness glows out of us, it breaks
and leaves us where we were.

"Louse that I am!" he cried.

He still believed in God, without a shadow of doubt; he
believed in the God that he had seen, the high courage, the
golden intention, the light that had for a moment touched him.
But what had he to do with God, he, the loiterer, the little
thing?

He was little, he was funny. His prevarications with his wife,
for example, were comic. There was no other word for him but
"funny."

He rolled back again and lay staring.

"Who will deliver me from the body of this death?" What right
has a little bishop in a purple stock and doeskin breeches, who
hangs back in his palace from the very call of God, to a phrase
so fine and tragic as "the body of this death?"

He was the most unreal thing in the universe. He was a base
insect giving himself airs. What advantage has a bishop over the
Praying Mantis, that cricket which apes the attitude of piety?
Does he matter more--to God?

"To the God of the Universe, who can tell? To the God of man,--
yes."

He sat up in bed struck by his own answer, and full of an
indescribable hunger for God and an indescribable sense of his
complete want of courage to make the one simple appeal that would
satisfy that hunger. He tried to pray. "O God! "he cried,
"forgive me! Take me!" It seemed to him that he was not really
praying but only making believe to pray. It seemed to him that he
was not really existing but only seeming to exist. He seemed to
himself to be one with figures on a china plate, with figures
painted on walls, with the flimsy imagined lives of men in
stories of forgotten times. "O God!" he said, "O God," acting a
gesture, mimicking appeal.

"Anaemic," he said, and was given an idea.

He got out of bed, he took his keys from the night-table at the
bed head and went to his bureau.

He stood with Dale's tonic in his hand. He remained for some
time holding it, and feeling a curious indisposition to go on
with the thing in his mind.

He turned at last with an effort. He carried the little phial
to his bedside, and into the tumbler of his water-bottle he let
the drops fall, drop by drop, until he had counted twenty. Then
holding it to the bulb of his reading lamp he added the water and
stood watching the slow pearly eddies in the mixture mingle into
an opalescent uniformity. He replaced the water-bottle and stood
with the glass in his hand. But he did not drink.

He was afraid.

He knew that he had only to drink and this world of confusion
would grow transparent, would roll back and reveal the great
simplicities behind. And he was afraid.

He was afraid of that greatness. He was afraid of the great
imperatives that he knew would at once take hold of his life. He
wanted to muddle on for just a little longer. He wanted to stay
just where he was, in his familiar prison-house, with the key of
escape in his hand. Before he took the last step into the very
presence of truth, he would--think.

He put down the glass and lay down upon his bed....

(3)


He awoke in a mood of great depression out of a dream of
wandering interminably in an endless building of innumerable
pillars, pillars so vast and high that the ceiling was lost in
darkness. By the scale of these pillars he felt himself scarcely
larger than an ant. He was always alone in these wanderings, and
always missing something that passed along distant passages,
something desirable, something in the nature of a procession or
of a ceremony, something of which he was in futile pursuit, of
which he heard faint echoes, something luminous of which he
seemed at times to see the last fading reflection, across vast
halls and wildernesses of shining pavement and through Cyclopaean
archways. At last there was neither sound nor gleam, but the
utmost solitude, and a darkness and silence and the uttermost
profundity of sorrow....

It was bright day. Dunk had just come into the room with his
tea, and the tumbler of Dr. Dale's tonic stood untouched upon the
night-table. The bishop sat up in bed. He had missed his
opportunity. To-day was a busy day, he knew.

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

Dunk found room for it upon the tea-tray, and vanished softly
with the bishop's evening clothes.

The bishop remained motionless facing the day. There stood the
draught of decision that he had lacked the decision even to
touch.

From his bed he could just read the larger items that figured
upon the engagement tablet which it was Whippham's business to
fill over-night and place upon his table. He had two confirmation
services, first the big one in the cathedral and then a second
one in the evening at Pringle, various committees and an
interview with Chasters. He had not yet finished his addresses
for these confirmation services....

The task seemed mountainous--overwhelming.

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

(4)


For some moments nothing seemed to happen.

Then he began to feel stronger and less wretched, and then came
a throbbing and tingling of artery and nerve.

He had a sense of adventure, a pleasant fear in the thing that
he had done. He got out of bed, leaving his cup of tea untasted,
and began to dress. He had the sensation of relief a prisoner may
feel who suddenly tries his cell door and finds it open upon
sunshine, the outside world and freedom.

He went on dressing although he was certain that in a few
minutes the world of delusion about him would dissolve, and that
he would find himself again in the great freedom of the place of
God.

This time the transition came much sooner and much more
rapidly. This time the phases and quality of the experience were
different. He felt once again that luminous confusion between the
world in which a human life is imprisoned and a circumambient and
interpenetrating world, but this phase passed very rapidly; it
did not spread out over nearly half an hour as it had done
before, and almost immediately he seemed to plunge away from
everything in this life altogether into that outer freedom he
sought. And this time there was not even the elemental scenery of
the former vision. He stood on nothing; there was nothing below
and nothing above him. There was no sense of falling, no terror,
but a feeling as though he floated released. There was no light,
but as it were a clear darkness about him. Then it was manifest
to him that he was not alone, but that with him was that same
being that in his former vision had called himself the Angel of
God. He knew this without knowing why he knew this, and either he
spoke and was answered, or he thought and his thought answered
him back. His state of mind on this occasion was altogether
different from the first vision of God; before it had been
spectacular, but now his perception was altogether
super-sensuous.

(And nevertheless and all the time it seemed that very faintly
he was still in his room.)

It was he who was the first to speak. The great Angel whom he
felt rather than saw seemed to be waiting for him to speak.

"I have come," he said, "because once more I desire to see
God."

"But you have seen God."

"I saw God. God was light, God was truth. And I went back to my
life, and God was hidden. God seemed to call me. He called. I
heard him, I sought him and I touched his hand. When I went back
to my life I was presently lost in perplexity. I could not tell
why God had called me nor what I had to do."

"And why did you not come here before?"

"Doubt and fear. Brother, will you not lay your hand on mine?"

The figure in the darkness became distincter. But nothing
touched the bishop's seeking hands.

"I want to see God and to understand him. I want reassurance. I
want conviction. I want to understand all that God asks me to do.
The world is full of conflict and confusion and the spirit of
war. It is dark and dreadful now with suffering and bloodshed. I
want to serve God who could save it, and I do not know how."

It seemed to the bishop that now he could distinguish dimly but
surely the form and features of the great Angel to whom he
talked. For a little while there was silence, and then the Angel
spoke.

"It was necessary first," said the Angel, "that you should
apprehend God and desire him. That was the purport of your first
vision. Now, since you require it, I will tell you and show you
certain things about him, things that it seems you need to know,
things that all men need to know. Know then first that the time
is at hand when God will come into the world and rule it, and
when men will know what is required of them. This time is close
at hand. In a little while God will be made manifest throughout
the earth. Men will know him and know that he is King. To you
this truth is to be shown--that you may tell it to others."

"This is no vision?" said the bishop, "no dream that will pass
away?"

"Am I not here beside you?"

(5)


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

"The God I saw in my vision--He is not yet manifest in the
world?"

"He comes. He is in the world, but he is not yet manifested. He
whom you saw in your vision will speedily be manifest in the
world. To you this vision is given of the things that come. The
world is already glowing with God. Mankind is like a smouldering
fire that will presently, in quite a little time, burst out into
flame.

"In your former vision I showed you God," said the Angel. "This
time I will show you certain signs of the coming of God. And then
you will understand the place you hold in the world and the task
that is required of you."

(6)


And as the Angel spoke he lifted up his hands with the palms
upward, and there appeared above them a little round cloud, that
grew denser until it had the likeness of a silver sphere. It was
a mirror in the form of a ball, but a mirror not shining
uniformly; it was discoloured with greyish patches that had a
familiar shape. It circled slowly upon the Angel's hands. It
seemed no greater than the compass of a human skull, and yet it
was as great as the earth. Indeed it showed the whole earth. It
was the earth. The hands of the Angel vanished out of sight,
dissolved and vanished, and the spinning world hung free. All
about the bishop the velvet darkness broke into glittering points
that shaped out the constellations, and nearest to them, so near
as to seem only a few million miles away in the great emptiness
into which everything had resolved itself, shone the sun, a ball
of red-tongued fires. The Angel was but a voice now; the bishop
and the Angel were somewhere aloof from and yet accessible to the
circling silver sphere.

At the time all that happened seemed to happen quite naturally,
as things happen in a dream. It was only later, when all this was
a matter of memory, that the bishop realized how strange and
incomprehensible his vision had been. The sphere was the earth
with all its continents and seas, its ships and cities, its
country-sides and mountain ranges. It was so small that he could
see it all at once, and so great and full that he could see
everything in it. He could see great countries like little
patches upon it, and at the same time he could see the faces of
the men upon the highways, he could see the feelings in men s
hearts and the thoughts in their minds. But it did not seem in
any way wonderful to the bishop that so he should see those
things, or that it was to him that these things were shown.

"This is the whole world," he said.

"This is the vision of the world," the Angel answered.

"It is very wonderful," said the bishop, and stood for a moment
marvelling at the compass of his vision. For here was India, here
was Samarkand, in the light of the late afternoon; and China and
the swarming cities upon her silvery rivers sinking through
twilight to the night and throwing a spray and tracery of lantern
spots upon the dark; here was Russia under the noontide, and so
great a battle of artillery raging on the Dunajec as no man had
ever seen before; whole lines of trenches dissolved into clouds
of dust and heaps of blood-streaked earth; here close to the
waiting streets of Constantinople were the hills of Gallipoli,
the grave of British Imperialism, streaming to heaven with the
dust and smoke of bursting shells and rifle fire and the smoke
and flame of burning brushwood. In the sea of Marmora a big ship
crowded with Turkish troops was sinking; and, purple under the
clear water, he could see the shape of the British submarine
which had torpedoed her and had submerged and was going away.
Berlin prepared its frugal meals, still far from famine. He saw
the war in Europe as if he saw it on a map, yet every human
detail showed. Over hundreds of miles of trenches east and west
of Germany he could see shells bursting and the men below
dropping, and the stretcher-bearers going back with the wounded.
The roads to every front were crowded with reserves and
munitions. For a moment a little group of men indifferent to all
this struggle, who were landing amidst the Antarctic wilderness,
held his attention; and then his eyes went westward to the dark
rolling Atlantic across which, as the edge of the night was drawn
like a curtain, more and still more ships became visible beating
upon their courses eastward or westward under the overtaking day.

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

"So God perhaps sees it," he whispered.

(7)


"Look at this man," said the Angel, and the black shadow of a
hand seemed to point.

It was a Chinaman sitting with two others in a little low room
separated by translucent paper windows from a noisy street of
shrill-voiced people. The three had been talking of the ultimatum
that Japan had sent that day to China, claiming a priority in
many matters over European influences they were by no means sure
whether it was a wrong or a benefit that had been done to their
country. From that topic they had passed to the discussion of the
war, and then of wars and national aggressions and the perpetual
thrusting and quarrelling of mankind. The older man had said that
so life would allways be; it was the will of Heaven. The little,
very yellow-faced, emaciated man had agreed with him. But now
this younger man, to whose thoughts the Angel had so particularly
directed the bishop's attention, was speaking. He did not agree
with his companion.

"War is not the will of Heaven," he said; "it is the blindness
of men."

"Man changes," he said, "from day to day and from age to age.
The science of the West has taught us that. Man changes and war
changes and all things change. China has been the land of flowery
peace, and she may yet give peace to all the world. She has put
aside that puppet Emperor at Peking, she turns her face to the
new learning of the West as a man lays aside his heavy robes, in
order that her task may be achieved."

The older man spoke, his manner was more than a little
incredulous, and yet not altogether contemptuous. "You believe
that someday there will be no more war in the world, that a time
will come when men will no longer plot and plan against the
welfare of men?"

"Even that last," said the younger man. "Did any of us dream
twenty-five years ago that here in China we should live to see a
republic? The age of the republics draws near, when men in every
country of the world will look straight up to the rule of Right
and the empire of Heaven."

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

The two other Chinamen questioned their companion, but without
hostility.

"This war," said the Chinaman, "will end in a great harvesting
of kings."

"But Japan--" the older man began.

The bishop would have liked to hear more of that conversation,
but the dark hand of the Angel motioned him to another part of
the world. "Listen to this," said the Angel.

He pointed the bishop to where the armies of Britain and Turkey
lay in the heat of Mesopotamia. Along the sandy bank of a wide,
slow-flowing river rode two horsemen, an Englishman and a Turk.
They were returning from the Turkish lines, whither the
Englishman had been with a flag of truce. When Englishmen and
Turks are thrown together they soon become friends, and in this
case matters had been facilitated by the Englishman's command of
the Turkish language. He was quite an exceptional Englishman. The
Turk had just been remarking cheerfully that it wouldn't please
the Germans if they were to discover how amiably he and his
charge had got on. "It's a pity we ever ceased to be friends," he
said.

"You Englishmen aren't like our Christians," he went on.

The Engiishmen wanted to know why.

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

"We worship the same God as you do," said the Englishman.

"Then why do we fight?"

"That's what we want to know."

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

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

"If it weren't for religions all men would serve God together,"
he said. "And then there would be no wars--only now and then
perhaps just a little honest fighting...."

"And see here," said the Angel. "Here close behind this
frightful battle, where the German phalanx of guns pounds its way
through the Russian hosts. Here is a young German talking to two
wounded Russian prisoners, who have stopped to rest by the
roadside. He is a German of East Prussia; he knows and thinks a
little Russian. And they too are saying, all three of them, that
the war is not God's will, but the confusion of mankind.

"Here," he said, and the shadow of his hand hovered over the
burning-ghats of Benares, where a Brahmin of the new persuasion
watched the straight spires of funereal smoke ascend into the
glow of the late afternoon, while he talked to an English
painter, his friend, of the blind intolerance of race and caste
and custom in India.

"Or here."

The Angel pointed to a group of people who had gathered upon a
little beach at the head of a Norwegian fiord. There were three
lads, an old man and two women, and they stood about the body of
a drowned German sailor which had been washed up that day. For a
time they had talked in whispers, but now suddenly the old man
spoke aloud.

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

"But folks go to church and pray enough," said one of the
women.

"They do not serve God," said the old man. "They just pray to
him as one nods to a beggar. They do not serve God who is their
King. They set up their false kings and emperors, and so all
Europe is covered with dead, and the seas wash up these dead to
us. Why does the world suffer these things? Why did we
Norwegians, who are a free-spirited people, permit the Germans
and the Swedes and the English to set up a king over us? Because
we lack faith. Kings mean secret counsels, and secret counsels
bring war. Sooner or later war will come to us also if we give
the soul of our nation in trust to a king.... But things will not
always be thus with men. God will not suffer them for ever. A day
comes, and it is no distant day, when God himself will rule the
earth, and when men will do, not what the king wishes nor what is
expedient nor what is customary, but what is manifestly
right."....

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

His pointing hand went southward until they saw the Africanders
riding down to Windhuk. Two men, Boer farmers both, rode side by
side and talked of the German officer they brought prisoner with
them. He had put sheep-dip in the wells of drinking-water; his
life was fairly forfeit, and he was not to be killed. "We want no
more hate in South Africa," they agreed. "Dutch and English and
German must live here now side by side. Men cannot always be
killing."

"And see his thoughts," said the Angel.

The German's mind was one amazement. He had been sure of being
shot, he had meant to make a good end, fierce and scornful, a
relentless fighter to the last; and these men who might have shot
him like a man were going to spare him like a dog. His mind was a
tumbled muddle of old and new ideas. He had been brought up in an
atmosphere of the foulest and fiercest militarism; he had been
trained to relentlessness, ruthlessness and so forth; war was war
and the bitterer the better, frightfulness was your way to
victory over every enemy. But these people had found a better
way. Here were Dutch and English side by side; sixteen years ago
they had been at war together and now they wore the same uniform
and rode together, and laughed at him for a queer fellow because
he was for spitting at them and defying them, and folding his
arms and looking level at the executioners' rifles. There were to
be no executioners' rifles.... If it was so with Dutch and
English, why shouldn't it be so presently with French and
Germans? Why someday shouldn't French, German, Dutch and English,
Russian and Pole, ride together under this new star of mankind,
the Southern Cross, to catch whatever last mischief-maker was
left to poison the wells of goodwill?

His mind resisted and struggled against these ideas. "Austere,"
he whispered. "The ennobling tests of war." A trooner rode up
alongside, and offered him a drink of water

"Just a mouthful," he said apologetically. "We've had to go
rather short."...

"There's another brain busy here with the same idea," the Angel
interrupted. And the bishop found himself looking into the
bedroom of a young German attache in Washington, sleepless in the
small hours.

"Ach!" cried the young man, and sat up in bed and ran his hands
through his fair hair.

He had been working late upon this detestable business of the
Lusitania; the news of her sinking had come to hand two days
before, and all America was aflame with it. It might mean war.
His task had been to pour out explanations and justifications to
the press; to show that it was an act of necessity, to pretend a
conviction that the great ship was loaded with munitions, to
fight down the hostility and anger that blazed across a
continent. He had worked to his limit. He had taken cup after cup
of coffee, and had come to bed worked out not two hours ago. Now
here he was awake after a nightmare of drowning women and
children, trying to comfort his soul by recalling his own
arguments. Never once since the war began had he doubted the
rightness of the German cause. It seemed only a proof of his
nervous exhaustion that he could doubt it now. Germany was the
best organized, most cultivated, scientific and liberal nation
the earth had ever seen, it was for the good of mankind that she
should be the dominant power in the world; his patriotism had had
the passion of a mission. The English were indolent, the French
decadent, the Russians barbaric, the Americans basely democratic;
the rest of the world was the "White man's Burthen"; the clear
destiny of mankind was subservience to the good Prussian eagle.
Nevertheless--those wet draggled bodies that swirled down in
the eddies of the sinking Titan--Ach! He wished it could have
been otherwise. He nursed his knees and prayed that there need
not be much more of these things before the spirit of the enemy
was broken and the great Peace of Germany came upon the world.

And suddenly he stopped short in his prayer.

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

Was there any other way?

It was the most awful doubt he had ever had, for it smote at
the training of all his life. "Could it be possible that after
all our old German God is not the proper style and title of the
true God? Is our old German God perhaps only the last of a long
succession of bloodstained tribal effigies--and not God at
all?"

For a long time it seemed that the bishop watched the thoughts
that gathered in the young attache's mind. Until suddenly he
broke into a quotation, into that last cry of the dying Goethe,
for "Light. More Light!"...

"Leave him at that," said the Angel. "I want you to hear these
two young women."

The hand came back to England and pointed to where Southend at
the mouth of the Thames was all agog with the excitement of an
overnight Zeppelin raid. People had got up hours before their
usual time in order to look at the wrecked houses before they
went up to their work in town. Everybody seemed abroad. Two
nurses, not very well trained as nurses go nor very well-educated
women, were snatching a little sea air upon the front after an
eventful night. They were too excited still to sleep. They were
talking of the horror of the moment when they saw the nasty thing
"up there," and felt helpless as it dropped its bombs. They had
both hated it.

"There didn't ought to be such things," said one.

"They don't seem needed," said her companion.

"Men won't always go on like this--making wars and all such
wickedness."

"It's 'ow to stop them?"

"Science is going to stop them."

"Science?"

"Yes, science. My young brother--oh, he's a clever one--he
says such things! He says that it's science that they won't
always go on like this. There's more sense coming into the world
and more--my young brother says so. Says it stands to reason;
it's Evolution. It's science that men are all brothers; you can
prove it. It's science that there oughtn't to be war. Science is
ending war now by making it horrible like this, and making it so
that no one is safe. Showing it up. Only when nobody is safe will
everybody want to set up peace, he says. He says it's proved
there could easily be peace all over the world now if it wasn't
for flags and kings and capitalists and priests. They still
manage to keep safe and out of it. He says the world ought to be
just one state. The World State, he says it ought to be."

("Under God," said the bishop, "under God.")

"He says science ought to be King of the whole world."

"Call it Science if you will," said the bishop. "God is
wisdom."

"Out of the mouths of babes and elementary science students,"
said the Angel. "The very children in the board schools are
turning against this narrowness and nonsense and mischief of
nations and creeds and kings. You see it at a thousand points, at
ten thousand points, look, the world is all flashing and
flickering; it is like a spinthariscope; it is aquiver with the
light that is coming to mankind. It is on the verge of blazing
even now."

"Into a light."

"Into the one Kingdom of God. See here! See here! And here!
This brave little French priest in a helmet of steel who is
daring to think for the first time in his life; this
gentle-mannered emir from Morocco looking at the grave-diggers on
the battlefield; this mother who has lost her son....

"You see they all turn in one direction, although none of them
seem to dream yet that they are all turning in the same
direction. They turn, every one, to the rule of righteousness,
which is the rule of God. They turn to that communism of effort
in the world which alone permits men to serve God in state and
city and their economic lives.... They are all coming to the
verge of the same salvation, the salvation of one human
brotherhood under the rule of one Righteousness, one Divine
will.... Is that the salvation your church offers?"

(8)


"And now that we have seen how religion grows and spreads in
men's hearts, now that the fields are white with harvest, I want
you to look also and see what the teachers of religion are
doing," said the Angel.

He smiled. His presence became more definite, and the earthly
globe about them and the sun and the stars grew less distinct and
less immediately there. The silence invited the bishop to speak.

"In the light of this vision, I see my church plainly for the
little thing it is," he said.

He wanted to be perfectly clear with the Angel and himself.

"This church of which I am a bishop is just a part of our poor
human struggle, small and pitiful as one thinks of it here in the
light of the advent of God's Kingdom, but very great, very great
indeed, ancient and high and venerable, in comparison with me.
But mostly it is human. It is most human. For my story is the
church's story, and the church's story is mine. Here I could
almost believe myself the church itself. The world saw a light,
the nations that were sitting in darkness saw a great light. Even
as I saw God. And then the church began to forget and lose itself
among secondary things. As I have done.... It tried to express
the truth and lost itself in a maze of theology. It tried to
bring order into the world and sold its faith to Constantine.
These men who had professed the Invisible King of the World,
shirked his service. It is a most terrible disaster that
Christianity has sold itself to emperors and kings. They forged a
saying of the Master's that we should render unto Ceasar the
things that are Ceasar's and unto God the things that are
God's....

"Who is this Ceasar to set himself up to share mankind with
God? Nothing that is Ceasar's can be any the less God's. But
Constantine Caesar sat in the midst of the council, his guards
were all about it, and the poor fanatics and trimmers and
schemers disputed nervously with their eyes on him, disputed
about homoousian and homoiousian, and grimaced and pretended to
be very very fierce and exact to hide how much they were
frightened and how little they knew, and because they did not
dare to lay violent hands upon that usurper of the empire of the
world....

"And from that day forth the Christian churches have been
damned and lost. Kept churches. Lackey churches. Roman, Russian,
Anglican; it matters not. My church indeed was twice sold, for it
doubled the sin of Nicaea and gave itself over to Henry and
Elizabeth while it shammed a dispute about the sacraments. No one
cared really about transubstantiation any more than the earlier
betrayers cared about consubstantiality; that dispute did but
serve to mask the betrayal."

He turned to the listening Angel. "What can you show me of my
church that I do not know? Why! we Anglican bishops get our sees
as footmen get a job. For months Victoria, that old German Frau,
delayed me--because of some tittle-tattle.... The things we
are! Snape, who afterwards became Bishop of Burnham, used to
waylay the Prince Consort when he was riding in Hyde Park and
give him, he boasts, 'a good loud cheer,' and then he would run
very fast across the park so as to catch him as he came round,
and do it again.... It is to that sort of thing we bearers of the
light have sunken....

"I have always despised that poor toady," the bishop went on.
"And yet here am I, and God has called me and shown me the light
of his countenance, and for a month I have faltered. That is the
mystery of the human heart, that it can and does sin against the
light. What right have I, who have seen the light--and failed,
what right have I--to despise any other human being? I seem to
have been held back by a sort of paralysis.

"Men are so small, so small still, that they cannot keep hold
of the vision of God. That is why I want to see God again.... But
if it were not for this strange drug that seems for a little
while to lift my mind above the confusion and personal
entanglements of every day, I doubt if even now I could be here.
I am here, passionate to hold this moment and keep the light. As
this inspiration passes, I shall go back, I know, to my home and
my place and my limitations. The littleness of men! The
forgetfulness of men! I want to know what my chief duty is, to
have it plain, in terms so plain that I can never forget.

"See in this world," he said, turning to the globe, "while
Chinese merchants and Turkish troopers, school-board boys and
Norwegian fishermen, half-trained nurses and Boer farmers are
full of the spirit of God, see how the priests of the churches of
Nicaea spend their time."

And now it was the bishop whose dark hands ran over the great
silver globe, and it was the Angel who stood over him and
listened, as a teacher might stand over a child who is learning a
lesson. The bishop's hand rested for a second on a cardinal who
was planning a political intrigue to produce a reaction in
France, then for a moment on a Pomeranian pastor who was going
out to his well-tilled fields with his Sunday sermon, full of
fierce hatred of England, still echoing in his head. Then he
paused at a Mollah preaching the Jehad, in doubt whether he too
wasn't a German pastor, and then at an Anglican clergyman still
lying abed and thinking out a great mission of Repentance and
Hope that should restore the authority of the established church
--by incoherent missioning--without any definite sin indicated
for repentance nor any clear hope for anything in particular
arising out of such activities. The bishop's hand went seeking to
and fro, but nowhere could he find any religious teacher, any
religious body rousing itself to meet the new dawn of faith in
the world. Some few men indeed seemed thoughtful, but within the
limitation of their vows. Everywhere it was church and creed and
nation and king and property and partisanship, and nowhere was it
the True God that the priests and teachers were upholding. It was
always the common unhampered man through whom the light of God
was breaking; it was always the creed and the organization of the
religious professionals that stood in the way to God....

"God is putting the priests aside," he cried, "and reaching out
to common men. The churches do not serve God. They stand between
man and God. They are like great barricades on the way to God."

The bishop's hand brushed over Archbishop Pontifex, who was
just coming down to breakfast in his palace. This pompous old man
was dressed in a purple garment that set off his tall figure very
finely, and he was holding out his episcopal ring for his guests
to kiss, that being the customary morning greeting of Archbishop
Pontifex. The thought of that ring-kissing had made much hard
work at lower levels "worth while" to Archbishop Pontifex. And
seventy miles away from him old Likeman breakfasted in bed on
Benger's food, and searched his Greek Testament for tags to put
to his letters. And here was the familiar palace at Princhester,
and in an armchair in his bed-room sat Bishop Scrope insensible
and motionless, in a trance in which he was dreaming of the
coming of God.

"I see my futility. I see my vanity. But what am I to do?" he
said, turning to the darkness that now wrapped about the Angel
again, fold upon fold. "The implications of yesterday bind me for
the morrow. This is my world. This is what I am and what I am in.
How can I save myself? How can I turn from these habits and
customs and obligations to the service of the one true God? When
I see myself, then I understand how it is with the others. All we
priests and teachers are men caught in nets. I would serve God.
Easily said! But how am I to serve God? How am I to help and
forward His coming, to make myself part of His coming?"

He perceived that he was returning into himself, and that the
vision of the sphere and of the starry spaces was fading into
non-existence.

He struggled against this return. He felt that his demand was
still unanswered. His wife's face had suddenly come very close to
him, and he realized she intervened between him and that
solution.

What was she doing here?

(9)


The great Angel seemed still to be near at hand, limitless
space was all about him, and yet the bishop perceived that he was
now sitting in the arm-chair in his bedroom in the palace of
Princhester. He was both there and not there. It seemed now as if
he had two distinct yet kindred selves, and that the former
watched the latter. The latter was now awakening to the things
about him; the former marked his gestures and listened with an
entire detachment to the words he was saying. These words he was
saying to Lady Ella: "God is coming to rule the world, I tell
you. We must leave the church."

Close to him sat Lady Ella, watching him with an expression in
which dismay and resolution mingled. Upon the other side of him,
upon a little occasional table, was a tray with breakfast things.
He was no longer the watcher now, but the watched.

Lady Ella bent towards him as he spoke. She seemed to struggle
with and dismiss his astonishing statement.

"Edward," she said, "you have been taking a drug." He looked
round at his night table to see the little phial. It had gone.
Then he saw that Lady Ella held it very firmly in her hand.

"Dunk came to me in great distress. He said you were insensible
and breathing heavily. I came. I realized. I told him to say
nothing to any one, but to fetch me a tray with your breakfast. I
have kept all the other servants away and I have waited here by
you.... Dunk I think is safe.... You have been muttering and
moving your head from side to side...."

The bishop's mind was confused. He felt as though God must be
standing just outside the room. "I have failed in my duty," he
said. "But I am very near to God." He laid his hand on her arm.
"You know, Ella, He is very close to us...."

She looked perplexed.

He sat up in his chair.

"For some months now," he said, "there have been new forces at
work in my mind. I have been invaded by strange doubts and still
stranger realizations. This old church of ours is an empty mask.
God is not specially concerned in it."

"Edward!" she cried, "what are you saying?"

"I have been hesitating to tell you. But I see now I must tell
you plainly. Our church is a cast hull. It is like the empty skin
of a snake. God has gone out of it."

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

He was astonished at her distress. He stood up also.

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

She looked at him wild-eyed. Then she glanced at the phial,
gripped in her hand.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, and going swiftly to the window emptied
out the contents of the little bottle. He realized what she was
doing too late to prevent her.

"Don't waste that!" he cried, and stepping forward caught hold
of her wrist. The phial fell from her white fingers, and crashed
upon the rough paved garden path below.

"My dear," he cried, "my dear. You do not understand."

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

"It is a drug," she answered. "You have been uttering
blasphemies."

He dropped her arm and walked half-way across the room. Then he
turned and faced her.

"They are not blasphemies," he said. "But I ought not to have
surprised you and shocked you as I have done. I want to tell you
of changes that have happened to my mind."

"Now!" she exclaimed, and then: "I will not hear them now.
Until you are better. Until these fumes--"

Her manner changed. "Oh, Edward!" she cried, "why have you done
this? Why have you taken things secretly? I know you have been
sleepless, but I have been so ready to help you. I have been
willing--you know I have been willing--for any help. My life
is all to be of use to you...."

"Is there any reason," she pleaded, "why you should have hidden
things from me?"

He stood remorseful and distressed. "I should have talked to
you," he said lamely.

"Edward," she said, laying her hands on his shoulders, "will
you do one thing for me? Will you try to eat a little breakfast?
And stay here? I will go down to Mr. Whippham and arrange
whatever is urgent with him. Perhaps if you rest--There is
nothing really imperative until the confirmation in the
afternoon.... I do not understand all this. For some time--I
have felt it was going on. But of that we can talk. The thing now
is that people should not know, that nothing should be seen....
Suppose for instance that horrible White Blackbird were to hear
of it.... I implore you. If you rest here--And if I were to
send for that young doctor who attended Miriam."

"I don't want a doctor," said the bishop.

"But you ought to have a doctor."

"I won't have a doctor," said the bishop.

It was with a perplexed but powerless dissent that the
externalized perceptions of the bishop witnessed his agreement
with the rest of Lady Ella's proposals so soon as this point
about the doctor was conceded.

(10)


For the rest of that day until his breakdown in the cathedral
the sense of being in two places at the same time haunted the
bishop's mind. He stood beside the Angel in the great space
amidst the stars, and at the same time he was back in his
ordinary life, he was in his palace at Princhester, first resting
in his bedroom and talking to his wife and presently taking up
the routines of his duties again in his study downstairs.

His chief task was to finish his two addresses for the
confirmation services of the day. He read over his notes, and
threw them aside and remained for a time thinking deeply. The
Greek tags at the end of Likeman's letter came into his thoughts;
they assumed a quality of peculiar relevance to this present
occasion. He repeated the words: "Epitelesei. Epiphausei."

He took his little Testament to verify them. After some slight
trouble he located the two texts. The first, from Philippians,
ran in the old version, "He that hath begun a good work in you
will perform it"; the second was expressed thus: "Christ shall
give thee light." He was dissatisfied with these renderings and
resorted to the revised version, which gave "perfect" instead of
"perform," and "shall shine upon you" for "give thee light." He
reflected profoundly for a time.

Then suddenly his addresses began to take shape in his mind,
and these little points lost any significance. He began to write
rapidly, and as he wrote he felt the Angel stood by his right
hand and read and approved what he was writing. There were
moments when his mind seemed to be working entirely beyond his
control. He had a transitory questioning whether this curious
intellectual automatism was not perhaps what people meant by
"inspiration."

(11)


The bishop had always been sensitive to the secret fount of
pathos that is hidden in the spectacle of youth. Long years ago
when he and Lady Ella had been in Florence he had been moved to
tears by the beauty of the fresh-faced eager Tobit who runs
beside the great angel in the picture of Botticelli. And suddenly
and almost as uncontrollably, that feeling returned at the sight
of the young congregation below him, of all these scores of
neophytes who were gathered to make a public acknowledgment of
God. The war has invested all youth now with the shadow of
tragedy; before it came many of us were a little envious of youth
and a little too assured of its certainty of happiness. All that
has changed. Fear and a certain tender solicitude mingle in our
regard for every child; not a lad we pass in the street but may
presently be called to face such pain and stress and danger as no
ancient hero ever knew. The patronage, the insolent condescension
of age, has vanished out of the world. It is dreadful to look
upon the young.

He stood surveying the faces of the young people as the rector
read the Preface to the confirmation service. How simple they
were, how innocent! Some were a little flushed by the excitement
of the occasion; some a little pallid. But they were all such
tender faces, so soft in outline, so fresh and delicate in
texture and colour. They had soft credulous mouths. Some glanced
sideways at one another; some listened with a forced intentness.
The expression of one good-looking boy, sitting in a corner scat,
struck the bishop as being curiously defiant. He stood very
erect, he blinked his eyes as though they smarted, his lips were
compressed bitterly. And then it seemed to the bishop that the
Angel stood beside him and gave him understanding.

"He is here," the bishop knew, "because he could not avoid
coming. He tried to excuse himself. His mother wept. What could
he do? But the church's teaching nowadays fails even to grip the
minds of boys."

The rector came to the end of his Preface: "They will evermore
endeavour themselves faithfully to observe such things as they by
their own confession have assented unto."

"Like a smart solicitor pinning them down," said the bishop to
himself, and then roused himself, unrolled the little paper in
his hand, leant forward, and straightway began his first address.

Nowadays it is possible to say very unorthodox things indeed in
an Anglican pulpit unchallenged. There remains no alert doctrinal
criticism in the church congregations. It was possible,
therefore, for the bishop to say all that follows without either
hindrance or disturbance. The only opposition, indeed, came from
within, from a sense of dreamlike incongruity between the place
and the occasion and the things that he found himself delivering.

"All ceremonies," he began, "grow old. All ceremonies are
tainted even from the first by things less worthy than their
first intention, and you, my dear sons and daughters, who have
gathered to-day in this worn and ancient building, beneath these
monuments to ancient vanities and these symbols of forgotten or
abandoned theories about the mystery of God, will do well to
distinguish in your minds between what is essential and what is
superfluous and confusing in this dedication you make of
yourselves to God our Master and King. For that is the real thing
you seek to do today, to give yourselves to God. This is your
spiritual coming of age, in which you set aside your childish
dependence upon teachers and upon taught phrases, upon rote and
direction, and stand up to look your Master in the face. You
profess a great brotherhood when you do that, a brotherhood that
goes round the earth, that numbers men of every race and nation
and country, that aims to bring God into all the affairs of this
world and make him not only the king of your individual lives but
the king--in place of all the upstarts, usurpers, accidents,
and absurdities who bear crowns and sceptres today--of an
united mankind."

He paused, and in the pause he heard a little rustle as though
the congregation before him was sitting up in its places, a sound
that always nerves and reassures an experienced preacher.

"This, my dear children, is the reality of this grave business
to-day, as indeed it is the real and practical end of all true
religion. This is your sacrament urn, your soldier's oath. You
salute and give your fealty to the coming Kingdom of God. And
upon that I would have you fix your minds to the exclusion of
much that, I know only too well, has been narrow and evil and
sectarian in your preparation for this solemn rite. God is like a
precious jewel found among much rubble; you must cast the rubble
from you. The crowning triumph of the human mind is simplicity;
the supreme significance of God lies in his unity and
universality. The God you salute to-day is the God of the Jews
and Gentiles alike, the God of Islam, the God of the Brahmo
Somaj, the unknown God of many a righteous unbeliever. He is not
the God of those felted theologies and inexplicable doctrines
with which your teachers may have confused your minds. I would
have it very clear in your minds that having drunken the draught
you should not reverence unduly the cracked old vessel that has
brought it to your lips. I should be falling short of my duty if
I did not make that and everything I mean by that altogether
plain to you."

He saw the lad whose face of dull defiance he had marked
before, sitting now with a startled interest in his eyes. The
bishop leant over the desk before him, and continued in the
persuasive tone of a man who speaks of things too manifest for
laboured argument.

"In all ages religion has come from God through broad-minded
creative men, and in all ages it has fallen very quickly into the
hands of intense and conservative men. These last--narrow,
fearful, and suspicious--have sought in every age to save the
precious gift of religion by putting it into a prison of formulae
and asseverations. Bear that in mind when you are pressed to
definition. It is as if you made a box hermetically sealed to
save the treasure of a fresh breeze from the sea. But they have
sought out exact statements and tortuous explanations of the
plain truth of God, they have tried to take down God in writing,
to commit him to documents, to embalm his living faith as though
it would otherwise corrupt. So they have lost God and fallen into
endless differences, disputes, violence, and darkness about
insignificant things. They have divided religion between this
creed and teacher and that. The corruption of the best is the
worst, said Aristotle; and the great religions of the world, and
especially this Christianity of ours, are the ones most darkened
and divided and wasted by the fussings and false exactitudes of
the creed-monger and the sectary. There is no lie so bad as a
stale disfigured truth. There is no heresy so damnable as a
narrow orthodoxy. All religious associations carry this danger of
the over-statement that misstates and the over-emphasis that
divides and betrays. Beware of that danger. Do not imagine,
because you are gathered in this queerly beautiful old building
today, because I preside here in this odd raiment of an odder
compromise, because you see about you in coloured glass and
carven stone the emblems of much vain disputation, that thereby
you cut yourselves off and come apart from the great world of
faith, Catholic, Islamic, Brahministic, Buddhistic, that grows
now to a common consciousness of the near Advent of God our King.
You enter that waiting world fraternity now, you do not leave it.
This place, this church of ours, should be to you not a seclusion
and a fastness but a door.

"I could quote you a score of instances to establish that this
simple universalism was also the teaching of Christ. But now I
will only remind you that it was Mary who went to her lord
simply, who was commended, and not Martha who troubled about many
things. Learn from the Mary of Faith and not from these Marthas
of the Creeds. Let us abandon the presumptions of an ignorant
past. The perfection of doctrine is not for finite men. Give
yourselves to God. Give yourselves to God. Not to churches and
uses, but to God. To God simply. He is the first word of religion
and the last. He is Alpha; he is Omega. Epitelesei; it is He who
will finish the good work begun."

The bishop ended his address in a vivid silence. Then he began
his interrogation.

"Do you here, in the presence of God, and of this congregation,
renew the solemn promise and vow that was made in your name at
your Baptism; ratifying and confirming the same in your own
persons, and acknowledging yourselves--"

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

He could not stand those words. He hesitated, and then
substituted: "acknowledge yourselves to be the true servants of
the one God, who is the Lord of Mankind?"

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

Then the bishop: "Our help is in the Name of the Lord."

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

The bishop: "Blessed be the name of the Lord."

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

(12)


Before his second address the bishop had to listen to Veni
Creator Spiritus, in its English form, and it seemed to him the
worst of all possible hymns. Its defects became monstrously
exaggerated to his hypersensitive mind. It impressed him in its
Englished travesty as a grotesque, as a veritable Charlie Chaplin
among hymns, and in truth it does stick out most awkward feet, it
misses its accusatives, it catches absurdly upon points of
abstruse doctrine. The great Angel stood motionless and ironical
at the bishop's elbow while it was being sung. "Your church," he
seemed to say.

"We must end this sort of thing," whispered the bishop. "We
must end this sort of thing--absolutely." He glanced at the
faces of the singers, and it became beyond all other things
urgent, that he should lift them once for all above the sectarian
dogmatism of that hymn to a simple vision of God's light....

He roused himself to the touching business of the laying on of
hands. While he did so the prepared substance of his second
address was running through his mind. The following prayer and
collects he read without difficulty, and so came to his second
address. His disposition at first was explanatory.

"When I spoke to you just now," he began, "I fell
unintentionally into the use of a Greek word, epitelesei. It was
written to me in a letter from a friend with another word that
also I am now going to quote to you. This letter touched very
closely upon the things I want to say to you now, and so these
two words are very much in my mind. The former one was taken from
the Epistle to the Philippians; it signifies, 'He will complete
the work begun'; the one I have now in mind comes from the
Epistle to the Ephesians; it is Epiphausei--or, to be fuller,
epiphausei soi ho Christos, which signifies that He will shine
upon us. And this is very much in my thoughts now because I do
believe that this world, which seemed so very far from God a
little while ago, draws near now to an unexampled dawn. God is at
hand.

"It is your privilege, it is your grave and terrible position,
that you have been born at the very end and collapse of a
negligent age, of an age of sham kingship, sham freedom,
relaxation, evasion, greed, waste, falsehood, and sinister
preparation. Your lives open out in the midst of the breakdown
for which that age prepared. To you negligence is no longer
possible. There is cold and darkness, there is the heat of the
furnace before you; you will live amidst extremes such as our
youth never knew; whatever betide, you of your generation will
have small chance of living untempered lives. Our country is at
war and half mankind is at war; death and destruction trample
through the world; men rot and die by the million, food
diminishes and fails, there is a wasting away of all the hoarded
resources, of all the accumulated well-being of mankind; and
there is no clear prospect yet of any end to this enormous and
frightful conflict. Why did it ever arise? What made it possible?
It arose because men had forgotten God. It was possible because
they worshipped simulacra, were loyal to phantoms of race and
empire, permitted themselves to be ruled and misled by idiot
princes and usurper kings. Their minds were turned from God, who
alone can rule and unite mankind, and so they have passed from
the glare and follies of those former years into the darkness and
anguish of the present day. And in darkness and anguish they will
remain until they turn to that King who comes to rule them, until
the sword and indignation of God have overthrown their misleaders
and oppressors, and the Justice of God, the Kingdom of God set
high over the republics of mankind, has brought peace for ever to
the world. It is to this militant and imminent God, to this
immortal Captain, this undying Law-giver, that you devote
yourselves to-day.

"For he is imminent now. He comes. I have seen in the east and
in the west, the hearts and the minds and the wills of men
turning to him as surely as when a needle is magnetized it turns
towards the north. Even now as I preach to you here, God stands
over us all, ready to receive us...."

And as he said these words, the long nave of the cathedral, the
shadows of its fretted roof, the brown choir with its golden
screen, the rows of seated figures, became like some picture cast
upon a flimsy and translucent curtain. Once more it seemed to the
bishop that he saw God plain. Once more the glorious effulgence
poured about him, and the beautiful and wonderful conquest of
men's hearts and lives was manifest to him.

He lifted up his hands and cried to God, and with an emotion so
profound, an earnestness so commanding, that very many of those
who were present turned their faces to see the figure to which he
looked and spoke. And some of the children had a strange
persuasion of a presence there, as of a divine figure militant,
armed, and serene....

"Oh God our Leader and our Master and our Friend," the bishop
prayed, "forgive our imperfection and our little motives, take us
and make us one with thy great purpose, use us and do not reject
us, make us all here servants of thy kingdom, weave our lives
into thy struggle to conquer and to bring peace and union to the
world. We are small and feeble creatures, we are feeble in
speech, feebler still in action, nevertheless let but thy light
shine upon us and there is not one of us who cannot be lit by thy
fire, and who cannot lose himself in thy salvation. Take us into
thy purpose, O God. Let thy kingdom come into our hearts and into
this world."

His voice ceased, and he stood for a measurable time with his
arms extended and his face upturned....

The golden clouds that whirled and eddied so splendidly in his
brain thinned out, his sense of God's immediacy faded and passed,
and he was left aware of the cathedral pulpit in which he stood
so strangely posed, and of the astonished congregation below him.
His arms sank to his side. His eyes fell upon the book in front
of him and he felt for and gripped the two upper corners of it
and, regardless of the common order and practice, read out the
Benediction, changing the words involuntarily as he read:

"The Blessing of God who is the Father, the Son, the Spirit and
the King of all Mankind, be upon you and remain with you for
ever. Amen."

Then he looked again, as if to look once more upon that radiant
vision of God, but now he saw only the clear cool space of the
cathedral vault and the coloured glass and tracery of the great
rose window. And then, as the first notes of the organ came
pealing above the departing stir of the congregation, he turned
about and descended slowly, like one who is still half dreaming,
from the pulpit.

(13)


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

"You are ill," said the canon, scrutinizing his face.

"Not ill. But the word was taken out of my mouth. I perceive
now that I have been in a trance, a trance in which the truth is
real. It is a fearful thing to find oneself among realities. It
is a dreadful thing when God begins to haunt a priest.... I can
never minister in the church again."

Whippham thrust forward a chair for the bishop to sit down. The
bishop felt now extraordinarily fatigued. He sat down heavily,
and
rested his wrists on the arms of the chair. "Already," he resumed
presently, "I begin to forget what it was I said."

"You became excited," said Bliss, "and spoke very loudly and
clearly."

"What did I say?"

"I don't know what you said; I have forgotten. I never want to
remember. Things about the Second Advent. Dreadful things. You
said God was close at hand. Happily you spoke partly in Greek. I
doubt if any of those children understood. And you had a kind of
lapse--an aphasia. You mutilated the interrogation and you did
not pronounce the benediction properly. You changed words and you
put in words. One sat frozen--waiting for what would happen
next."

"We must postpone the Pringle confirmation," said Whippham. "I
wonder to whom I could telephone."

Lady Ella appeared, and came and knelt down by the bishop's
chair. "I never ought to have let this happen," she said, taking
his wrists in her hands. "You are in a fever, dear."

"It seemed entirely natural to say what I did," the bishop
declared.

Lady Ella looked up at Bliss.

"A doctor has been sent for," said the canon to Lady Ella.

"I must speak to the doctor," said Lady Ella as if her husband
could not hear her. "There is something that will make things
clearer to the doctor. I must speak to the doctor for a moment
before he sees him."

Came a gust of pretty sounds and a flash of bright colour that
shamed the rich vestments at hand. Over the shoulder of the
rector and quite at the back, appeared Lady Sunderbund resolutely
invading the vestry. The rector intercepted her, stood broad with
extended arms.

"I must come in and speak to him. If it is only fo' a moment."

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

A vague horror and a passionate desire to prevent the entry of
Lady Sunderbund at any cost, seized upon the bishop. She would,
he felt, be the last overwhelming complication. He descended to a
base subterfuge. He lay back in his chair slowly as though he
unfolded himself, he covered his eyes with his hand and then
groaned aloud.

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

There was a momentous silence, and then the tumult of Lady
Sunderbund receded.




CHAPTER THE EIGHTH  -  THE NEW WORLD

(1)


THAT night the bishop had a temperature of a hundred and a
half. The doctor pronounced him to be in a state of intense
mental excitement, aggravated by some drug. He was a doctor
modern and clear-minded enough to admit that he could not
identify the drug. He overruled, every one overruled, the
bishop's declaration that he had done with the church, that he
could never mock God with his episcopal ministrations again, that
he must proceed at once with his resignation. "Don't think of
these things," said the doctor. "Banish them from your mind until
your temperature is down to ninety-eight. Then after a rest you
may go into them."

Lady Ella insisted upon his keeping his room. It was with
difficulty that he got her to admit Whippham, and Whippham was
exasperatingly in order. "You need not trouble about anything
now, my lord," he said. "Everything will keep until you are ready
to attend to it. It's well we're through with Easter. Bishop
Buncombe of Eastern Blowdesia was coming here anyhow. And there
is Canon Bliss. There's only two ordination candidates because of
the war. We'll get on swimmingly."

The bishop thought he would like to talk to those two
ordination candidates, but they prevailed upon him not to do so.
He lay for the best part of one night confiding remarkable things
to two imaginary ordination candidates.

He developed a marked liking for Eleanor's company. She was
home again now after a visit to some friends. It was decided that
the best thing to do with him would be to send him away in her
charge. A journey abroad was impossible. France would remind him
too dreadfully of the war. His own mind turned suddenly to the
sweet air of Hunstanton. He had gone there at times to read, in
the old Cambridge days. "It is a terribly ugly place," he said,
"but it is wine in the veins."

Lady Ella was doubtful about Zeppelins. Thrice they had been
right over Hunstanton already. They came in by the easy landmark
of the Wash.

"It will interest him," said Eleanor, who knew her father
better.

(2)


One warm and still and sunny afternoon the bishop found himself
looking out upon the waters of the Wash. He sat where the highest
pebble layers of the beach reached up to a little cliff of sandy
earth perhaps a foot high, and he looked upon sands and sea and
sky and saw that they were beautiful.

He was a little black-gaitered object in a scene of the most
exquisite and delicate colour. Right and left of him stretched
the low grey salted shore, pale banks of marly earth surmounted
by green-grey wiry grass that held and was half buried in fine
blown sand. Above, the heavens made a complete hemisphere of blue
in which a series of remote cumulus clouds floated and dissolved.
Before him spread the long levels of the sands, and far away at
its utmost ebb was the sea. Eleanor had gone to explore the black
ribs of a wrecked fishing-boat that lay at the edge of a shallow
lagoon. She was a little pink-footed figure, very bright and
apparently transparent. She had reverted for a time to shameless
childishness; she had hidden her stockings among the reeds of the
bank, and she was running to and fro, from star-fish to razor
shell and from cockle to weed. The shingle was pale drab and
purple close at hand, but to the westward, towards Hunstanton,
the sands became brown and purple, and were presently broken up
into endless skerries of low flat weed-covered boulders and
little intensely blue pools. The sea was a band of sapphire that
became silver to the west; it met the silver shining sands in one
delicate breathing edge of intensely white foam. Remote to the
west, very small and black and clear against the afternoon sky,
was a cart, and about it was a score or so of mussel-gatherers. A
little nearer, on an apparently empty stretch of shining wet
sand, a multitude of gulls was mysteriously busy. These two
groups of activities and Eleanor's flitting translucent movements
did but set off and emphasize the immense and soothing
tranquillity.

For a long time the bishop sat passively receptive to this
healing beauty. Then a little flow of thought began and gathered
in his mind. He had come out to think over two letters that he
had brought with him. He drew these now rather reluctantly from
his pocket, and after a long pause over the envelopes began to
read them.

He reread Likeman's letter first.

Likeman could not forgive him.

"My dear Scrope," he wrote, "your explanation explains nothing.
This sensational declaration of infidelity to our mother church,
made under the most damning and distressing circumstances in the
presence of young and tender minds entrusted to your
ministrations, and in defiance of the honourable engagements
implied in the confirmation service, confirms my worst
apprehensions of the weaknesses of your character. I have always
felt the touch of theatricality in your temperament, the peculiar
craving to be pseudo-deeper, pseudo-simpler than us all, the need
of personal excitement. I know that you were never quite
contented to believe in God at second-hand. You wanted to be
taken notice of--personally. Except for some few hints to you,
I have never breathed a word of these doubts to any human being;
I have always hoped that the ripening that comes with years and
experience would give you an increasing strength against the
dangers of emotionalism and against your strong, deep, quiet
sense of your exceptional personal importance...."

The bishop read thus far, and then sat reflecting.

Was it just?

He had many weaknesses, but had he this egotism? No; that
wasn't the justice of the case. The old man, bitterly
disappointed, was endeavouring to wound. Scrope asked himself
whether he was to blame for that disappointment. That was a more
difficult question....

He dismissed the charge at last, crumpled up the letter in his
hand, and after a moment's hesitation flung it away.... But he
remained acutely sorry, not so much for himself as for the
revelation of Likeman this letter made. He had had a great
affection for Likeman and suddenly it was turned into a wound.

(3)


The second letter was from Lady Sunderbund, and it was an
altogether more remarkable document. Lady Sunderbund wrote on a
notepaper that was evidently the result of a perverse research,
but she wrote a letter far more coherent than her speech, and
without that curious falling away of the r's that flavoured even
her gravest observations with an unjust faint aroma of absurdity.
She wrote with a thin pen in a rounded boyish handwriting. She
italicized with slashes of the pen.

He held this letter in both hands between his knees, and
considered it now with an expression that brought his eyebrows
forward until they almost met, and that tucked in the corners of
his mouth.

"My dear Bishop," it began.

"I keep thinking and thinking and thinking of that wonderful
service, of the wonderful, wonderful things you said, and the
wonderful choice you made of the moment to say them--when all
those young lives were coming to the great serious thing in life.
It was most beautifully done. At any rate, dear Bishop and
Teacher, it was most beautifully begun. And now we all stand to
you like creditors because you have given us so much that you owe
us ever so much more. You have started us and you have to go on
with us. You have broken the shell of the old church, and here we
are running about with nowhere to go. You have to make the
shelter of a new church now for us, purged of errors, looking
straight to God. The King of Mankind!--what a wonderful,
wonderful phrase that is. It says everything. Tell us more of him
and more. Count me first--not foremost, but just the little one
that runs in first--among your disciples. They say you are
resigning your position in the church. Of course that must be
true. You are coming out of it--what did you call it?--coming
out of the cracked old vessel from which you have poured the
living waters. I called on Lady Ella yesterday. She did not tell
me very much; I think she is a very reserved as well as a very
dignified woman, but she said that you intended to go to London.
In London then I suppose you will set up the first altar to the
Divine King. I want to help.

"Dear Bishop and Teacher, I want to help tremendously--with
all my heart and all my soul. I want to be let do things for
you." (The "you" was erased by three or four rapid slashes, and
"our King" substituted.) "I want to be privileged to help build
that First Church of the World Unified under God. It is a
dreadful thing to says but, you see, I am very rich; this
dreadful war has made me ever so much richer--steel and
shipping and things--it is my trustees have done it. I am
ashamed to be so rich. I want to give. I want to give and help
this great beginning of yours. I want you to let me help on the
temporal side, to make it easy for you to stand forth and deliver
your message, amidst suitable surroundings and without any horrid
worries on account of the sacrifices you have made. Please do not
turn my offering aside. I have never wanted anything so much in
all my life as I want to make this gift. Unless I can make it I
feel that for me there is no salvation! I shall stick with my
loads and loads of stocks and shares and horrid possessions
outside the Needle's Eye. But if I could build a temple for God,
and just live somewhere near it so as to be the poor woman who
sweeps out the chapels, and die perhaps and be buried under its
floor! Don't smile at me. I mean every word of it. Years ago I
thought of such a thing. After I had visited the Certosa di Pavia
--do you know it? So beautiful, and those two still alabaster
figures--recumbent. But until now I could never see my way to
any such service. Now I do. I am all afire to do it. Help me!
Tell me! Let me stand behind you and make your mission possible.
I feel I have come to the most wonderful phase in my life. I feel
my call has come....


"I have written this letter over three times, and torn each of
them up. I do so want to say all this, and it is so desperately
hard to say. I am full of fears that you despise me. I know there
is a sort of high colour about me. My passion for brightness. I
am absurd. But inside of me is a soul, a real, living, breathing
soul. Crying out to you: 'Oh, let me help! Let me help!' I will
do anything, I will endure anything if only I can keep hold of
the vision splendid you gave me in the cathedral. I see it now
day and night, the dream of the place I can make for you--and
you preaching! My fingers itch to begin. The day before yesterday
I said to myself, 'I am quite unworthy, I am a worldly woman, a
rich, smart, decorated woman. He will never accept me as I am.' I
took off all my jewels, every one, I looked through all my
clothes, and at last I decided I would have made for me a very
simple straight grey dress, just simple and straight and grey.
Perhaps you will think that too is absurd of me, too
self-conscious. I would not tell of it to you if I did not want
you to understand how alive I am to my utter impossibilities, how
resolved I am to do anything so that I may be able to serve. But
never mind about silly me; let me tell you how I see the new
church.


"I think you ought to have some place near the centre of
London; not too west, for you might easily become fashionable,
not too east because you might easily be swallowed up in merely
philanthropic work, but somewhere between the two. There must be
vacant sites still to be got round about Kingsway. And there we
must set up your tabernacle, a very plain, very simple, very
beautifully proportioned building in which you can give your
message. I know a young man, just the very young man to do
something of the sort, something quite new, quite modern, and yet
solemn and serious. Lady Ella seemed to think you wanted to live
somewhere in the north-west of London--but she would tell me
very little. I seem to see you not there at all, not in anything
between west-end and suburb, but yourself as central as your
mind, in a kind of clergy house that will be part of the
building. That is how it is in my dream anyhow. All that though
can be settled afterwards. My imagination and my desire is
running away with me. It is no time yet for premature plans. Not
that I am not planning day and night. This letter is simply to
offer. I just want to offer. Here I am and all my worldly goods.
Take me, I pray you. And not only pray you. Take me, I demand of
you, in the name of God our king. I have a right to be used. And
you have no right to refuse me. You have to go on with your
message, and it is your duty to take me--just as you are
obliged to step on any steppingstone that lies on your way to do
God service.... And so I am waiting. I shall be waiting--on
thorns. I know you will take your time and think. But do not take
too much time. Think of me waiting.

"Your servant, your most humble helper in God (your God),

                              "AGATHA SUNDERBUND."


And then scrawled along the margin of the last sheet:


"If, when you know--a telegram. Even if you cannot say so
much as 'Agreed,' still such a word as 'Favourable.' I just hang
over the Void until I hear.

                                     "AGATHA S."



A letter demanding enormous deliberation. She argued closely in
spite of her italics. It had never dawned upon the bishop before
how light is the servitude of the disciple in comparison with the
servitude of the master. In many ways this proposal repelled and
troubled him, in many ways it attracted him. And the argument of
his clear obligation to accept her co-operation gripped him; it
was a good argument.

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

(4)


The bishop became aware that Eleanor was returning to him
across the sands. She had made an end to her paddling, she had
put on her shoes and stockings and become once more the grave and
responsible young woman who had been taking care of him since his
flight from Princhester. He replaced the two letters in his
pocket, and sat ready to smile as she drew near; he admired her
open brow, the toss of her hair, and the poise of her head upon
her neck. It was good to note that her hard reading at Cambridge
hadn't bent her shoulders in the least....

"Well, old Dad! " she said as she drew near. "You've got back a
colour."

"I've got back everything. It's time I returned to
Princhester."

"Not in this weather. Not for a day or so." She flung herself
at his feet. "Consider your overworked little daughter. Oh,how
good this is!"

"No," said the bishop in a grave tone that made her look up
into his face. "I must go hack."

He met her clear gaze. "What do you think of all this business,
Eleanor?" he asked abruptly. "Do you think I had a sort of fit in
the cathedral?"

He winced as he asked the question.

"Daddy," she said, after a little pause; "the things you said
and did that afternoon were the noblest you ever did in your
life. I wish I had been there. It must have been splendid to be
there. I've not told you before--I've been dying to.... I'd
promised not to say a word--not to remind you. I promised the
doctor. But now you ask me, now you are well again, I can tell
you. Kitty Kingdom has told me all about it, how it felt. It was
like light and order coming into a hopeless dark muddle. What you
said was like what we have all been trying to think--I mean all
of us young people. Suddenly it was all clear."

She stopped short. She was breathless with the excitement of
her confession.

Her father too remained silent for a little while. He was
reminded of his weakness; he was, he perceived, still a little
hysterical. He felt that he might weep at her youthful enthusiasm
if he did not restrain himself.

I'm glad," he said, and patted her shoulder. "I'm glad, Norah."

She looked away from him out across the lank brown sands and
water pools to the sea. "It was what we have all been feeling our
way towards, the absolute simplification of religion, the
absolute simplification of politics and social duty; just God,
just God the King."

"But should I have said that--in the cathedral?"

She felt no scruples. "You had to," she said.

"But now think what it means," he said. "I must leave the
church."

"As a man strips off his coat for a fight."

"That doesn't dismay you?"

She shook her head, and smiled confidently to sea and sky.

"I'm glad if you're with me," he said. "Sometimes--I think--
I'm not a very self-reliant man."

"You'll have all the world with you," she was convinced, "in a
little time."

"Perhaps rather a longer time than you think, Norah. In the
meantime--"

She turned to him once more.

"In the meantime there are a great many things to consider.
Young people, they say, never think of the transport that is
needed to win a battle. I have it in my mind that I should leave
the church. But I can't just walk out into the marketplace and
begin preaching there. I see the family furniture being carried
out of the palace and put into vans. It has to go somewhere...."

"I suppose you will go to London."

"Possibly. In fact certainly. I have a plan. Or at least an
opportunity.... But that isn't what I have most in mind. These
things are not done without emotion and a considerable strain
upon one's personal relationships. I do not think this--I do
not think your mother sees things as we do."

"She will," said young enthusiasm, "when she understands."

"I wish she did. But I have been unlucky in the circumstances
of my explanations to her. And of course you understand all this
means risks--poverty perhaps--going without things--travel,
opportunity, nice possessions--for all of us. A loss of
position too. All this sort of thing," he stuck out a gaitered
calf and smiled, "will have to go. People, some of them, may be
disasagreeable to us...."

"After all, Daddy," she said, smiling, "it isn't so bad as the
cross and the lions and burning pitch. And you have the Truth."

"You do believe--?" He left his sentence unfinished.

She nodded, her face aglow. "We know you have the Truth."

"Of course in my own mind now it is very clear. I had a kind of
illumination...." He would have tried to tell her of his vision,
and he was too shy. "It came to me suddenly that the whole world
was in confusion because men followed after a thousand different
immediate aims, when really it was quite easy, if only one could
be simple it was quite easy, to show that nearly all men could
only be fully satisfied and made happy in themselves by one
single aim, which was also the aim that would make the whole
world one great order, and that aim was to make God King of one's
heart and the whole world. I saw that all this world, except for
a few base monstrous spirits, was suffering hideous things
because of this war, and before the war it was full of folly,
waste, social injustice and suspicion for the same reason,
because it had not realized the kingship of God. And that is so
simple; the essence of God is simplicity. The sin of this war
lies with men like myself, men who set up to tell people about
God, more than it lies with any other class--"

"Kings?" she interjected. "Diplomatists? Finance?"

"Yes. Those men could only work mischief in the world because
the priests and teachers let them. All things human lie at last
at the door of the priest and teacher. Who differentiate, who
qualify and complicate, who make mean unnecessary elaborations,
and so divide mankind. If it were not for the weakness and
wickedness of the priests, every one would know and understand
God. Every one who was modest enough not to set up for particular
knowledge. Men disputed whether God is Finite or Infinite,
whether he has a triple or a single aspect. How should they know?
All we need to know is the face he turns to us. They impose their
horrible creeds and distinctions. None of those things matter.
Call him Christ the God or call him simply God, Allah, Heaven; it
does not matter. He comes to us, we know, like a Helper and
Friend; that is all we want to know. You may speculate further if
you like, but it is not religion. They dispute whether he can set
aside nature. But that is superstition. He is either master of
nature and he knows that it is good, or he is part of nature and
must obey. That is an argument for hair-splitting metaphysicians.
Either answer means the same for us. It does not matter which way
we come to believe that he does not idly set the course of things
aside. Obviously he does not set the course of things aside. What
he does do for certain is to give us courage and save us from our
selfishness and the bitter hell it makes for us. And every one
knows too what sort of things we want, and for what end we want
to escape from ourselves. We want to do right. And right, if you
think clearly, is just truth within and service without, the
service of God's kingdom, which is mankind, the service of human
needs and the increase of human power and experience. It is all
perfectly plain, it is all quite easy for any one to understand,
who isn't misled and chattered at and threatened and poisoned by
evil priests and teachers."

"And you are going to preach that, Daddy?"

"If I can. When I am free--you know I have still to resign
and give up--I shall make that my message."

"And so God comes."

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

She looked out to sea in silence for awhile.

Then she turned to her father. "And you think that His Kingdom
will come--perhaps in quite a little time--perhaps in our
lifetimes? And that all these ridiculous or wicked little kings
and emperors, and these political parties, and these policies and
conspiracies, and this nationalist nonsense and all the
patriotism and rowdyism, all the private profit-seeking and every
baseness in life, all the things that it is so horrible and
disgusting to be young among and powerless among, you think they
will fade before him?"

The bishop pulled his faith together.

"They will fade before him--but whether it will take a
lifetime or a hundred lifetimes or a thousand lifetimes, my Norah
--"

He smiled and left his sentence unfinished, and she smiled back
at him to show she understood.

And then he confessed further, because he did not want to seem
merely sentimentally hopeful.

"When I was in the cathedral, Norah--and just before that
service, it seemed to me--it was very real.... It seemed that
perhaps the Kingdom of God is nearer than we suppose, that it
needs but the faith and courage of a few, and it may be that we
may even live to see the dawning of his kingdom, even--who
knows?--the sunrise. I am so full of faith and hope that I fear
to be hopeful with you. But whether it is near or far--"

"We work for it," said Eleanor.

Eleanor thought, eyes downcast for a little while, and then
looked up.

"It is so wonderful to talk to you like this, Daddy. In the old
days, I didn't dream--Before I went to Newnham. I misjudged
you. I thought Never mind what I thought. It was silly. But now I
am so proud of you. And so happy to be back with you, Daddy, and
find that your religion is after all just the same religion that
I have been wanting."




CHAPTER THE NINTH  -  THE THIRD VISION

(1)


ONE afternoon in October, four months and more after that
previous conversation, the card of Mr. Edward Scrope was brought
up to Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey. The name awakened no memories. The
doctor descended to discover a man so obviously in unaccustomed
plain clothes that he had a momentary disagreeable idea that he
was facing a detective. Then he saw that this secular disguise
draped the familiar form of his old friend, the former Bishop of
Princhester. Scrope was pale and a little untidy; he had already
acquired something of the peculiar, slightly faded quality one
finds in a don who has gone to Hampstead and fallen amongst
advanced thinkers and got mixed up with the Fabian Society. His
anxious eyes and faintly propitiatory manner suggested an
impending appeal.

Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey had the savoir-faire of a successful
consultant; he prided himself on being all things to all men; but
just for an instant he was at a loss what sort of thing he had to
be here. Then he adopted the genial, kindly, but by no means
lavishly generous tone advisable in the case of a man who has
suffered considerable social deterioration without being very
seriously to blame.

Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was a little round-faced man with
defective eyesight and an unsuitable nose for the glasses he
wore, and he flaunted--God knows why--enormous side-whiskers.

"Well," he said, balancing the glasses skilfully by throwing
back his head, "and how are you? And what can I do for you?
There's no external evidence of trouble. You're looking lean and
a little pale, but thoroughly fit."

"Yes," said the late bishop, "I'm fairly fit--"

"Only--?" said the doctor, smiling his teeth, with something of
the manner of an old bathing woman who tells a child to jump.

"Well, I'm run down and--worried."

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

The ex-bishop sat down, and the doctor placed himself between
his patient and the light.

"This business of resigning my bishopric and so forth has
involved very considerable strains," Scrope began. "That I think
is the essence of the trouble. One cuts so many associations....
I did not realize how much feeling there would be....
Difficulties too of readjusting one's position."

"Zactly. Zactly. Zactly," said the doctor, snapping his face
and making his glasses vibrate. "Run down. Want a tonic or a
change?"

"Yes. In fact--I want a particular tonic."

Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey made his eyes and mouth round and
interrogative.

"While you were away last spring--"

"Had to go," said the doctor, "unavoidable. Gas gangrene.
Certain enquiries. These young investigators all very well in
their way. But we older reputations--Experience. Maturity of
judgment. Can't do without us. Yes?"

"Well, I came here last spring and saw, an assistant I suppose
he was, or a supply,--do you call them supplies in your
profession?--named, I think--Let me see--D--?"

"Dale!"

The doctor as he uttered this word set his face to the
unaccustomed exercise of expressing malignity. His round blue
eyes sought to blaze, small cherubic muscles exerted themselves
to pucker his brows. His colour became a violent pink. "Lunatic!"
he said. "Dangerous Lunatic! He didn't do anything--anything
bad in your case, did he?"

He was evidently highly charged with grievance in this matter.
"That man was sent to me from Cambridge with the highest
testimonials. The very highest. I had to go at twenty-four hours'
notice. Enquiry--gas gangrene. There was nothing for it but to
leave things in his hands."

Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey disavowed responsibility with an open,
stumpy-fingered hand.

"He did me no particular harm," said Scrope.

"You are the first he spared," said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.

"Did he--? Was he unskilful?"

"Unskilful is hardly the word."

"Were his methods peculiar?"

The little doctor sprang to his feet and began to pace about
the room. "Peculiar!" he said. "It was abominable that they
should send him to me. Abominable!"

He turned, with all the round knobs that constituted his face,
aglow. His side-whiskers waved apart like wings about to flap. He
protruded his face towards his seated patient. "I am glad that he
has been killed," he said. "Glad! There!"

His glasses fell off--shocked beyond measure. He did not heed
them. They swnng about in front of him as if they sought to
escape while he poured out his feelings.

"Fool!" he spluttered with demonstrative gestures. "Dangerous
fool! His one idea--to upset everybody. Drugs, Sir! The most
terrible drugs! I come back. Find ladies. High social position.
Morphine-maniacs. Others. Reckless use of the most dangerous
expedients.... Cocaine not in it. Stimulants--violent
stimulants. In the highest quarters. Terrible. Exalted persons.
Royalty! Anxious to be given war work and become anonymous....
Horrible! He's been a terrible influence. One idea--to disturb
soul and body. Minds unhinged. Personal relations deranged.
Shattered the practice of years. The harm he has done! The harm!"

He looked as though he was trying to burst--as a final
expression of wrath. He failed. His hands felt trembling to
recover his pince-nez. Then from his tail pocket he produced a
large silk handkerchief and wiped the glasses. Replaced them.
Wriggled his head in his collar, running his fingers round his
neck. Patted his tie.

"Excuse this outbreak!" he said. "But Dr. Dale has inflicted
injuries "

Scrope got up, walked slowly to the window, clasping his hands
behind his back, and turned. His manner still retained much of
his episcopal dignity. "I am sorry. But still you can no doubt
tell from your books what it was he gave me. It was a tonic that
had a very great effect on me. And I need it badly now."

Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was quietly malignant. "He kept no diary
at all," he said. "No diary at all."

"But

"If he did," said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey, holding up a flat hand
and wagging it from side to side, "I wouldn't follow his
treatment." He intensified with the hand going faster. "I
wouldn't follow his treatment. Not under any circumstances."

"Naturally," said Scrope, "if the results are what you say. But
in my case it wasn't a treatment. I was sleepless, confused in my
mind, wretched and demoralized; I came here, and he just produced
the stuff--It clears the head, it clears the mind. One seems to
get away from the cloud of things, to get through to essentials
and fundamentals. It straightened me out.... You must know such a
stuff. Just now, confronted with all sorts of problems arising
out of my resignation, I want that tonic effect again. I must
have it. I have matters to decide--and I can't decide. I find
myself uncertain, changeable from hour to hour. I don't ask you
to take up anything of this man Dale's. This is a new occasion.
But I want that drug."

At the beginning of this speech Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's hands
had fallen to his hips. As Scrope went on the doctor's pose had
stiffened. His head had gone a little on one side; he had begun
to play with his glasses. At the end he gave vent to one or two
short coughs, and then pointed his words with his glasses held
out.

"Tell me," he said, "tell me." (Cough.) "Had this drug that
cleared your head--anything to do with your resignation?"

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

"It did help to clear up the situation."

"Exactly," said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey in a tone that defined his
own position with remorseless clearness. "Exactly." And he held
up a flat, arresting hand. .

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

"But it was not disastrous to me," said Scrope.

"Your extraordinary resignation--your still more
extraordinary way of proclaiming it!"

"I don't think those were disasters."

"But my dear Sir!"

"You don't want to discuss theology with me, I know. So let me
tell you simply that from my point of view the illumination that
came to me--this drug of Dr. Dale's helping--has been the
great release of my life. It crystallized my mind. It swept aside
the confusing commonplace things about me. Just for a time I saw
truth clearly.... I want to do so again."

"Why?"

"There is a crisis in my affairs--never mind what. But I
cannot see my way clear."

Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was meditating now with his eyes on his
carpet and the corners of his mouth tucked in. He was swinging
his glasses pendulum-wise. "Tell me," he said, looking sideways
at Scrope, "what were the effects of this drug? It may have been
anything. How did it give you this--this vision of the truth--
that led to your resignation?"

Scrope felt a sudden shyness. But he wanted Dale's drug again
so badly that he obliged himself to describe his previous
experiences to the best of his ability.

"It was," he said in a matter-of-fact tone, "a golden,
transparent liquid. Very golden, like a warm-tinted Chablis. When
water was added it became streaked and opalescent, with a kind of
living quiver in it. I held it up to the light."

"Yes? And when you took it?"

"I felt suddenly clearer. My mind--I had a kind of exaltation
and assurance."

"Your mind," Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey assisted, "began to go
twenty-nine to the dozen."

"It felt stronger and clearer," said Scrope, sticking to his
quest.

"And did things look as usual?" asked the doctor, protruding
his knobby little face like a clenched fist.

"No," said Scrope and regarded him. How much was it possible to
tell a man of this type?

"They differed?" said the doctor, relaxing.

"Yes.... Well, to be plain.... I had an immediate sense of God.
I saw the world--as if it were a transparent curtain, and then
God became--evident.... Is it possible for that to determine
the drug?"

"God became--evident," the doctor said with some distaste,
and shook his head slowly. Then in a sudden sharp cross-examining
tone: "You mean you had a vision? Actually saw 'um?"

"It was in the form of a vision." Scrope was now mentally very
uncomfortable indeed.

The doctor's lips repeated these words noiselessly, with an
effect of contempt. "He must have given you something--It's a
little like morphia. But golden--opalescent? And it was this
vision made you astonish us all with your resignation?"

"That was part of a larger process," said Scrope patiently. "I
had been drifting into a complete repudiation of the Anglican
positions long before that. All that this drug did was to make
clear what was already in my mind. And give it value. Act as a
developer."

The doctor suddenly gave way to a botryoidal hilarity. "To
think that one should be consulted about visions of God--in
Mount Street!" he said. "And you know, you know you half want to
believe that vision was real. You know you do."

So far Scrope had been resisting his realization of failure.
Now he gave way to an exasperation that made him reckless of
Brighton-Pomfrey's opinion. "I do think," he said, "that that
drug did in some way make God real to me. I think I saw God."

Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey shook his head in a way that made Scrope
want to hit him.

"I think I saw God," he repeated more firmly. "I had a sudden
realization of how great he was and how great life was, and how
timid and mean and sordid were all our genteel, professional
lives. I was seized upon, for a time I was altogether possessed
by a passion to serve him fitly and recklessly, to make an end to
compromises with comfort and self-love and secondary things. And
I want to hold to that. I want to get back to that. I am given to
lassitudes. I relax. I am by temperament an easy-going man. I
want to buck myself up, I want to get on with my larger purposes,
and I find myself tired, muddled, entangled.... The drug was a
good thing. For me it was a good thing. I want its help again."

"I know no more than you do what it was."

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

"You'd get visions. They wouldn't be divine visions. If you
took small quantities very discreetly you might get a temporary
quickening. But the swift result of all repeated drug-taking is,
I can assure you, moral decay--rapid moral decay. To touch drugs
habitually is to become hopelessly unpunctual, untruthful,
callously selfish and insincere. I am talking mere textbook, mere
everyday common-places, to you when I tell you that."

"I had an idea. I had a hope...."

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

"You won't help me?"

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

"I wouldn't if I could. For your good I wouldn't. And even if I
would I couldn't, for I don't know the drug. One of his infernal
brews, no doubt. Something--accidental. It's lost--for good--
for your good, anyhow...."

(2)


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

"That door closes," he said. "There's no getting back that
way."...

He stood for a time on the kerb. He turned at last towards Park
Lane and Hyde Park. He walked along thoughtfully, inattentively
steering a course for his new home in Pembury Road, Notting Hill.

(3)


At the outset of this new phase in Scrope's life that had
followed the crisis of the confirmation service, everything had
seemed very clear before him. He believed firmly that he had been
shown God, that he had himself stood in the presence of God, and
that there had been a plain call to him to proclaim God to the
world. He had realized God, and it was the task of every one who
had realized God to help all mankind to the same realization. The
proposal of Lady Sunderbund had fallen in with that idea. He had
been steeling himself to a prospect of struggle and dire poverty,
but her prompt loyalty had come as an immense relief to his
anxiety for his wife and family. When he had talked to Eleanor
upon the beach at Hunstanton it had seemed to him that his course
was manifest, perhaps a little severe but by no means impossible.
They had sat together in the sunshine, exalted by a sense of fine
adventure and confident of success, they had looked out upon the
future, upon the great near future in which the idea of God was
to inspire and reconstruct the world.

It was only very slowly that this pristine clearness became
clouded and confused. It had not been so easy as Eleanor had
supposed to win over the sympathy of Lady Ella with his
resignation. Indeed it had not been won over. She had become a
stern and chilling companion, mute now upon the issue of his
resignation, but manifestly resentful. He was secretly
disappointed and disconcerted by her tone. And the same
hesitation of the mind, instinctive rather than reasoned, that
had prevented a frank explanation of his earlier doubts to her,
now restrained him from telling her naturally and at once of the
part that Lady Sunderbund was to play in his future ministry. In
his own mind he felt assured about that part, but in order to
excuse his delay in being frank with his wife, he told himself
that he was not as yet definitely committed to Lady Sunderbund's
project. And in accordance with that idea he set up housekeeping
in London upon a scale that implied a very complete cessation of
income. "As yet," he told Lady Ella, "we do not know where we
stand. For a time we must not so much house ourselves as camp. We
must take some quite small and modest house in some less
expensive district. If possible I would like to take it for a
year, until we know better how things are with us."

He reviewed a choice of London districts.

Lady Ella said her bitterest thing. "Does it matter where we
hide our heads?"

That wrung him to: "We are not hiding our heads."

She repented at once. "I am sorry, Ted," she said. "It slipped
from me."...

He called it camping, but the house they had found in Pembury
Road, Notting Hill, was more darkened and less airy than any
camp. Neither he nor his wife had ever had any experience of
middle-class house-hunting or middle-class housekeeping before,
and they spent three of the most desolating days of their lives
in looking for this cheap and modest shelter for their household
possessions. Hitherto life had moved them from one established
and comfortable home to another; their worst affliction had been
the modern decorations of the Palace at Princhester, and it was
altogether a revelation to them to visit house after house,
ill-lit, ill-planned, with dingy paint and peeling wallpaper,
kitchens for the most part underground, and either without
bathrooms or with built-out bathrooms that were manifestly
grudging afterthoughts, such as harbour the respectable middle
classes of London. The house agents perceived intimations of
helplessness in their manner, adopted a "rushing" method with
them strange to people who had hitherto lived in a glowing halo
of episcopal dignity. "Take it or leave it," was the note of
those gentlemen; "there are always people ready for houses." The
line that property in land and houses takes in England, the
ex-bishop realized, is always to hold up and look scornful. The
position of the land-owning, house-owning class in a crowded
country like England is ultra-regal. It is under no obligation to
be of use, and people are obliged to get down to the land
somewhere. They cannot conduct business and rear families in the
air. England's necessity is the landlord's opportunity....

Scrope began to generalize about this, and develop a new and
sincerer streak of socialism in his ideas. "The church has been
very remiss," he said, as he and Lady Ella stared at the basement
"breakfast room" of their twenty-seventh dismal possibility. "It
should have insisted far more than it has done upon the
landlord's responsibility. No one should tolerate the offer of
such a house as this--at such a rent--to decent people. It is
unrighteous."

At the house agent's he asked in a cold, intelligent ruling-
class voice, the name of the offending landlord.

"It's all the property of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners that
side of the railway," said the agent, picking his teeth with a
pin. "Lazy lot. Dreadfully hard to get 'em to do anything. Own
some of the worst properties in London."

Lady Ella saw things differently again. "If you had stayed in
the church," she said afterwards, "you might have helped to alter
such things as that."

At the time he had no answer.

"But," he said presently as they went back in the tube to their
modest Bloomsbury hotel, "if I had stayed in the church I should
never have realized things like that."

(4)


But it does no justice to Lady Ella to record these two
unavoidable expressions of regret without telling also of the
rallying courage with which she presently took over the task of
resettling herself and her stricken family. Her husband's change
of opinion had fallen upon her out of a clear sky, without any
premonition, in one tremendous day. In one day there had come
clamouring upon her, with an effect of revelation after
revelation, the ideas of drugs, of heresy and blasphemy, of an
alien feminine influence, of the entire moral and material
breakdown of the man who had been the centre of her life. Never
was the whole world of a woman so swiftly and comprehensively
smashed. All the previous troubles of her life seemed
infinitesimal in comparison with any single item in this
dismaying debacle. She tried to consolidate it in the idea that
he was ill, "disordered." She assured herself that he would
return from Hunstanton restored to health and orthodoxy, with all
his threatenings of a resignation recalled; the man she had loved
and trusted to succeed in the world and to do right always
according to her ideas. It was only with extreme reluctance that
she faced the fact that with the fumes of the drug dispelled and
all signs of nervous exhaustion gone, he still pressed quietly
but resolutely toward a severance from the church. She tried to
argue with him and she found she could not argue. The church was
a crystal sphere in which her life was wholly contained, her mind
could not go outside it even to consider a dissentient
proposition.

While he was at Hunstanton, every day she had prayed for an
hour, some days she had prayed for several hours, in the
cathedral, kneeling upon a harsh hassock that hurt her knees.
Even in her prayers she could not argue nor vary. She prayed over
and over again many hundreds of times: "Bring him back, dear
Lord. Bring him back again."

In the past he had always been a very kind and friendly mate to
her, but sometimes he had been irritable about small things,
especially during his seasons of insomnia; now he came back
changed, a much graver man, rather older in his manner, carefully
attentive to her, kinder and more watchful, at times
astonishingly apologetic, but rigidly set upon his purpose of
leaving the church. "I know you do not think with me in this," he
said. "I have to pray you to be patient with me. I have struggled
with my conscience.... For a time it means hardship, I know.
Poverty. But if you will trust me I think I shall be able to pull
through. There are ways of doing my work. Perhaps we shall not
have to undergo this cramping in this house for very long...."

"It is not the poverty I fear," said Lady Ella.

And she did face the worldly situation, if a little sadly, at
any rate with the courage of practical energy. It was she who
stood in one ungainly house after another and schemed how to make
discomforts tolerable, while Scrope raged unhelpfully at
landlordism and the responsibility of the church for economic
disorder. It was she who at last took decisions into her hands
when he was too jaded to do anything but generalize weakly, and
settled upon the house in Pembury Road which became their London
home. She got him to visit Hunstanton again for half a week while
she and Miriam, who was the practical genius of the family, moved
in and made the new home presentable. At the best it was barely
presentable. There were many plain hardships. The girls had to
share one of the chief bedrooms in common instead of their jolly
little individual dens at Princhester.... One little room was all
that could be squeezed out as a study for "father"; it was not
really  a separate room, it was merely cut off by closed folding
doors from the dining-room, folding doors that slowly transmitted
the dinner flavours to a sensitive worker, and its window looked
out upon a blackened and uneventful yard and the skylights of a
populous, conversational, and high-spirited millinery
establishment that had been built over the corresponding garden
of the house in Restharrow Street. Lady Ella had this room lined
with open shelves, and Clementina (in the absence of Eleanor at
Newuham) arranged the pick of her father's books. It is to be
noted as a fact of psychological interest that this cramped, ill-
lit little room distressed Lady Ella more than any other of the
discomforts of their new quarters. The bishop's writing-desk
filled a whole side of it. Parsimony ruled her mind, but she
could not resist the impulse to get him at least a seemly
reading-lamp.

He came back from Hunstanton full of ideas for work in London.
He was, he thought, going to "write something" about his views.
He was very grateful and much surprised at what she had done to
that forbidding house, and full of hints and intimations that it
would not be long before they moved to something roomier. She was
disposed to seek some sort of salaried employment for Clementina
and Miriam at least, but he would not hear of that. "They must go
on and get educated," he said, "if I have to give up smoking to
do it. Perhaps I may manage even without that." Eleanor, it
seemed, had a good prospect of a scholarship at the London School
of Economics that would practically keep her. There would be no
Cambridge for Clementina, but London University might still be
possible with a little pinching, and the move to London had
really improved the prospects of a good musical training for
Miriam. Phoebe and Daphne, Lady Ella believed, might get in on
special terms at the Notting Hill High School.

Scrope found it difficult to guess at what was going on in the
heads of his younger daughters. None displayed such sympathy as
Eleanor had confessed. He had a feeling that his wife had
schooled them to say nothing about the change in their fortunes
to him. But they quarrelled a good deal, he could hear, about the
use of the one bathroom--there was never enough hot water after
the second bath. And Miriam did not seem to enjoy playing the new
upright piano in the drawing-room as much as she had done the
Princhester grand it replaced. Though she was always willing to
play that thing he liked; he knew now that it was the Adagio of
Of. 111; whenever he asked for it.

London servants, Lady Ella found, were now much more difficult
to get than they had been in the Holy Innocents' days in St.
John's Wood. And more difficult to manage when they were got. The
households of the more prosperous clergy are much sought after by
domestics of a serious and excellent type; an unfrocked
clergyman's household is by no means so attractive. The first
comers were young women of unfortunate dispositions; the first
cook was reluctant and insolent, she went before her month was
up; the second careless; she made burnt potatoes and cindered
chops, underboiled and overboiled eggs; a "dropped" look about
everything, harsh coffee and bitter tea seemed to be a natural
aspect of the state of being no longer a bishop. He would often
after a struggle with his nerves in the bedroom come humming
cheerfully to breakfast, to find that Phoebe, who was a delicate
eater, had pushed her plate away scarcely touched, while Lady
Ella sat at the end of the table in a state of dangerous calm,
framing comments for delivering downstairs that would be sure to
sting and yet leave no opening for repartee, and trying at the
same time to believe that a third cook, if the chances were
risked again, would certainly be "all right."

The drawing-room was papered with a morose wallpaper that the
landlord, in view of the fact that Scrope in his optimism would
only take the house on a yearly agreement, had refused to
replace; it was a design of very dark green leaves and grey
gothic arches; and the apartment was lit by a chandelier, which
spilt a pool of light in the centre of the room and splashed
useless weak patches elsewhere. Lady Ella had to interfere to
prevent the monopolization of this centre by Phoebe and Daphne
for their home work. This light trouble was difficult to arrange;
the plain truth was that there was not enough illumination to go
round. In the Princhester drawing-room there had been a number of
obliging little electric pushes. The size of the dining-room, now
that the study was cut off from it, forbade hospitality. As it
was, with only the family at home, the housemaid made it a
grievance that she could scarcely squeeze by on the sideboard
side to wait.

The house vibrated to the trains in the adjacent underground
railway. There was a lady next door but one who was very pluckily
training a contralto voice that most people would have gladly
thrown away. At the end of Restharrow Street was a garage, and a
yard where chauffeurs were accustomed to "tune up" their engines.
All these facts were persistently audible to any one sitting down
in the little back study to think out this project of "writing
something," about a change in the government of the whole world.
Petty inconveniences no doubt all these inconveniences were, but
they distressed a rather oversensitive mind which was also
acutely aware that even upon this scale living would cost
certainly two hundred and fifty pounds if not more in excess of
the little private income available.


(5)


These domestic details, irrelevant as they may seem in a
spiritual history, need to be given because they added an
intimate keenness to Scrope's readiness for this private chapel
enterprise that he was discussing with Lady Sunderbund. Along
that line and along that line alone, he saw the way of escape
from the great sea of London dinginess that threatened to
submerge his family. And it was also, he felt, the line of his
duty; it was his "call."

At least that was how he felt at first. And then matters began
to grow complicated again.

Things had gone far between himself and Lady Sunderbund since
that letter he had read upon the beach at Old Hunstanton. The
blinds of the house with the very very blue door in Princhester
had been drawn from the day when the first vanload of the
renegade bishop's private possessions had departed from the
palace. The lady had returned to the brightly decorated flat
overlooking Hyde Park. He had seen her repeatedly since then,
and always with a fairly clear understanding that she was to
provide the chapel and pulpit in which he was to proclaim to
London the gospel of the Simplicity and Universality of God. He
was to be the prophet of a reconsidered faith, calling the whole
world from creeds and sects, from egotisms and vain loyalties,
from prejudices of race and custom, to the worship and service of
the Divine King of all mankind. That in fact had been the ruling
resolve in his mind, the resolve determining his relations not
only with Lady Sunderbund but with Lady Ella and his family, his
friends, enemies and associates. He had set out upon this course
unchecked by any doubt, and overriding the manifest disapproval
of his wife and his younger daughters. Lady Sunderbund's
enthusiasm had been enormous and sustaining....

Almost imperceptibly that resolve had weakened. Imperceptibly
at first. Then the decline had been perceived as one sometimes
perceives a thing in the background out of the corner of one's
eye.

In all his early anticipations of the chapel enterprise, he had
imagined himself in the likeness of a small but eloquent figure
standing in a large exposed place and calling this lost misled
world back to God. Lady Sunderbund, he assumed, was to provide
the large exposed place (which was dimly paved with pews) and
guarantee that little matter which was to relieve him of sordid
anxieties for his family, the stipend. He had agreed in an
inattentive way that this was to be eight hundred a year, with a
certain proportion of the subscriptions. "At fl'st, I shall be
the chief subsc'iber," she said. "Before the 'ush comes." He had
been so content to take all this for granted and think no more
about it--more particularly to think no more about it--that
for a time he entirely disregarded the intense decorative
activities into which Lady Sunderbund incontinently plunged. Had
he been inclined to remark them he certainly might have done so,
even though a considerable proportion was being thoughtfully
veiled for a time from his eyes.

For example, there was the young architect with the wonderful
tie whom he met once or twice at lunch in the Hyde Park flat.
This young man pulled the conversation again and again, Lady
Sunderbund aiding and abetting, in the direction of the "ideal
church." It was his ambition, he said, someday, to build an ideal
church, "divorced from tradition."

Scrope had been drawn at last into a dissertation. He said that
hitherto all temples and places of worship had been conditioned
by orientation due to the seasonal aspects of religion, they
pointed to the west or--as in the case of the Egyptian temples
--to some particular star, and by sacramentalism, which centred
everything on a highly lit sacrificial altar. It was almost
impossible to think of a church built upon other lines than that.
The architect would be so free that--"

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

"Or like some wondyful casket," said Lady Sunderbund....

And also there was a musician with fuzzy hair and an impulsive
way of taking the salted almonds, who wanted to know about
religious music.

Scrope hazarded the idea that a chanting people was a religious
people. He said, moreover, that there was a fine religiosity
about Moussorgski, but that the most beautiful single piece of
music in the world was Beethoven's sonata, Opus 111,--he was
thinking, he said, more particularly of the Adagio at the end,
molto semplice e cantabile. It had a real quality of divinity.

The musician betrayed impatience at the name of Beethoven, and
thought, with his mouth appreciatively full of salted almonds,
that nowadays we had got a little beyond that anyhow.

"We shall be superhuman before we get beyond either Purcell or
Beethoven," said Scrope.

Nor did he attach sufficient importance to Lady Sunderbund's
disposition to invite Positivists, members of the Brotherhood
Church, leaders among the Christian Scientists, old followers of
the Rev. Charles Voysey, Swedenborgians, Moslem converts, Indian
Theosophists, psychic phenomena and so forth, to meet him.
Nevertheless it began to drift into his mind that he was by no
means so completely in control of the new departure as he had
supposed at first. Both he and Lady Sunderbund professed
universalism; but while his was the universalism of one who would
simplify to the bare fundamentals of a common faith, hers was the
universalism of the collector. Religion to him was something that
illuminated the soul, to her it was something that illuminated
prayer-books. For a considerable time they followed their
divergent inclinations without any realization of their
divergence. None the less a vague doubt and dissatisfaction with
the prospect before him arose to cloud his confidence.

At first there was little or no doubt of his own faith. He was
still altogether convinced that he had to confess and proclaim
God in his life. He was as sure that God was the necessary king
and saviour of mankind and of a man's life, as he was of the
truth of the Binomial Theorem. But what began first to fade was
the idea that he had been specially called to proclaim the True
God to all the world. He would have the most amiable conference
with Lady Sunderbund, and then as he walked back to Notting Hill
he would suddenly find stuck into his mind like a challenge,
Heaven knows how: "Another prophet?" Even if he succeeded in this
mission enterprise, he found himself asking, what would he be but
just a little West-end Mahomet? He would have founded another
sect, and we have to make an end to all sects. How is there to be
an end to sects, if there are still to be chapels--richly
decorated chapels--and congregations, and salaried specialists
in God?

That was a very disconcerting idea. It was particularly active
at night. He did his best to consider it with a cool detachment,
regardless of the facts that his private income was just under
three hundred pounds a year, and that his experiments in cultured
journalism made it extremely improbable that the most sedulous
literary work would do more than double this scanty sum. Yet for
all that these nasty, ugly, sordid facts were entirely
disregarded, they did somehow persist in coming in and squatting
down, shapeless in a black corner of his mind--from which their
eyes shone out, so to speak--whenever his doubt whether he
ought to set up as a prophet at all was under consideration.

(6)


Then very suddenly on this October afternoon the situation had
come to a crisis.

He had gone to Lady Sunderbund's flat to see the plans and
drawings for the new church in which he was to give his message
to the world. They had brought home to him the complete
realization of Lady Sunderbund's impossibility. He had attempted
upon the spur of the moment an explanation of just how much they
differed, and he had precipitated a storm of extravagantly
perplexing emotions....

She kept him waiting for perhaps ten minutes before she brought
the plans to him. He waited in the little room with the Wyndham
Lewis picture that opened upon the balcony painted with crazy
squares of livid pink. On a golden table by the window a number
of recently bought books were lying, and he went and stood over
these, taking them up one after another. The first was "The
Countess of Huntingdon and Her Circle," that bearder of
lightminded archbishops, that formidable harbourer of Wesleyan
chaplains. For some minutes he studied the grim portrait of this
inspired lady standing with one foot ostentatiously on her
coronet and then turned to the next volume. This was a life of
Saint Teresa, that energetic organizer of Spanish nunneries. The
third dealt with Madame Guyon. It was difficult not to feel that
Lady Sunderbund was reading for a part.

She entered.

She was wearing a long simple dress of spangled white with a
very high waist; she had a bracelet of green jade, a waistband of
green silk, and her hair was held by a wreath of artificial
laurel, very stiff and green. Her arms were full of big rolls of
cartridge paper and tracing paper. "I'm so pleased," she said.
"It's 'eady at last and I can show you."

She banged the whole armful down upon a vivid little table of
inlaid black and white wood. He rescued one or two rolls and a
sheet of tracing paper from the floor.

"It's the Temple," she panted in a significant whisper. "It's
the Temple of the One T'ue God!"

She scrabbled among the papers, and held up the elevation of a
strange square building to his startled eyes. "Iszi't it just
pe'fect?" she demanded.

He took the drawing from her. It represented a building,
manifestly an enormous building, consisting largely of two great,
deeply fluted towers flanking a vast archway approached by a long
flight of steps. Between the towers appeared a dome. It was as if
the Mosque of Saint Sophia had produced this offspring in a
mesalliance with the cathedral of Wells. Its enormity was made
manifest by the minuteness of the large automobiles that were
driving away in the foreground after "setting down." "Here is the
plan," she said, thrusting another sheet upon him before he could
fully take in the quality of the design. "The g'eat Hall is to be
pe'fectly 'ound, no aisle, no altar, and in lettas of sapphiah,
'God is ev'ywhe'.'"

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

"But--!" said Scrope.

"The'e's a sort of g'andeur," she said. "It's young Venable's
wo'k. It's his fl'st g'ate oppo'tunity."

"But--is this to go on that little site in Aldwych?"

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

"But--if it is to be this little simple chapel we proposed,
then wasn't our idea to be central?"

"But if the' isn't 'oem! "she said--conclusively. "And isn't
this--isn't it rather a costly undertaking, rather more costly--"

"That docsn't matta. I'm making heaps and heaps of money. Half
my p'ope'ty is in shipping and a lot of the 'eat in munitions.
I'm 'icher than eva. Isn't the' a sort of g'andeur?" she pressed.

He put the elevation down. He took the plan from her hands and
seemed to study it. But he was really staring blankly at the
whole situation.

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

"Won't do!"

"No. It isn't in the spirit of my intention. It isn't in a
great building of this sort--so--so ornate and imposing, that
the simple gospel of God's Universal Kingdom can be preached."

"But oughtn't so gate a message to have as g'ate a pulpit?"

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

"But look," she said. "It has ev'ything! It's not only a
p'eaching place; it's a headquarters for ev'ything."

With the rapid movements of an excited child she began to
thrust the remarkable features and merits of the great project
upon him. The preaching dome was only the heart of it. There were
to be a library, "'efecto'ies," consultation rooms, classrooms, a
publication department, a big underground printing establishment.
"Nowadays," she said, "ev'y gate movement must p'int." There was
to be music, she said, "a gate invisible o'gan," hidden amidst
the architectural details, and pouring out its sounds into the
dome, and then she glanced in passing at possible "p'ocessions"
round the preaching dome. This preaching dome was not a mere
shut-in drum for spiritual reverberations, around it ran great
open corridors, and in these corridors there were to be
"chapels."

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

"No," she said, "but they are to be chapels for special
int'ests; a chapel for science, a chapel for healing, a chapel
for gov'ment. Places for peoples to sit and think about those
things--with paintings and symbols."

"I see your intention," he admitted. "I see your intention."

"The' is to be a gate da'k blue 'ound chapel for sta's and
atoms and the myst'ry of matta." Her voice grew solemn. "All
still and deep and high. Like a k'ystal in a da'k place. You will
go down steps to it. Th'ough a da'k 'ounded a'ch ma'ked with
mathematical symbols and balances and scientific app'atus.... And
the ve'y next to it, the ve'y next, is to be a little b'ight
chapel for bi'ds and flowas!"

"Yes," he said, "it is all very fine and expressive. It is, I
see, a symbolical building, a great artistic possibility. But is
it the place for me? What I have to say is something very simple,
that God is the king of the whole world, king of the ha'penny
newspaper and the omnibus and the vulgar everyday things, and
that they have to worship him and serve him as their leader in
every moment of their lives. This isn't that. This is the old
religions over again. This is taking God apart. This is putting
him into a fresh casket instead of the old one. And.... I don't
like it."

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

"I can't do the work I want to do with this."

"But--Isn't it you' idea?"

"No. It is not in the least my idea. I want to tell the whole
world of the one God that can alone unite it and save it--and
you make this extravagant toy."

He felt as if he had struck her directly he uttered that last
word.

"Toy!" she echoed, taking it in, "you call it a Toy!"

A note in her voice reminded him that there were two people who
might feel strongly in this affair.

"My dear Lady Sunderbund," he said with a sudden change of
manner, "I must needs follow the light of my own mind. I have had
a vision of God, I have seen him as a great leader towering over
the little lives of men, demanding the little lives of men,
prepared to take them and guide them to the salvation of mankind
and the conquest of pain and death. I have seen him as the God of
the human affair, a God of politics, a God of such muddy and
bloody wars as this war, a God of economics, a God of railway
junctions and clinics and factories and evening schools, a God in
fact of men. This God--this God here, that you want to worship,
is a God of artists and poets--of elegant poets, a God of
bric-a-brac, a God of choice allusions. Oh, it has its grandeur!
I don't want you to think that what you are doing may not be
altogether fine and right for you to do. But it is not what I
have to do.... I cannot--indeed I cannot--go on with this
project--upon these lines."

He paused, flushed and breathless. Lady Sunderbund had heard
him to the end. Her bright face was brightly flushed, and there
were tears in her eyes. It was like her that they should seem
tears of the largest, most expensive sort, tears of the first
water.

"But," she cried, and her red delicate mouth went awry with
dismay and disappointment, and her expression was the half
incredulous expression of a child suddenly and cruelly
disappointed: "You won't go on with all this?"

"No," he said. "My dear Lady Sunderbund--"

"Oh! don't Lady Sunderbund me!" she cried with a novel
rudeness. "Don't you see I've done it all for you?"

He winced and felt boorish. He had never liked and disapproved
of Lady Sunderbund so much as he did at that moment. And he had
no words for her.

"How can I stop it all at once like this?"

And still he had no answer.

She pursued her advantage. "What am I to do?" she cried.

She turned upon him passionately. "Look what you've done!" She
marked her points with finger upheld, and gave odd suggestions in
her face of an angry coster girl. "Eva' since I met you, I've
wo'shipped you. I've been 'eady to follow you anywhe'--to do
anything. Eva' since that night when you sat so calm and
dignified, and they baited you and wo'id you. When they we' all
vain and cleva, and you--you thought only of God and 'iligion
and didn't mind fo' you'self.... Up to then--I'd been living--
oh! the emptiest life..."

The tears ran. "Pe'haps I shall live it again...." She dashed
her grief away with a hand beringed with stones as big as
beetles.

"I said to myself, this man knows something I don't know. He's
got the seeds of ete'nal life su'ely. I made up my mind then and
the' I'd follow you and back you and do all I could fo' you. I've
lived fo' you. Eve' since. Lived fo' you. And now when all my
little plans are 'ipe, you--! Oh!"

She made a quaint little gesture with pink fists upraised, and
then stood with her hand held up, staring at the plans and
drawings that were littered over the inlaid table. "I've planned
and planned. I said, I will build him a temple. I will be his
temple se'vant.... Just a me' se'vant...."

She could not go on.

"But it is just these temples that have confused mankind," he
said.

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

"Oh!" she said petulantly, and thrust them away from her so
that they went sliding one after the other on to the floor. For
some long-drawn moments there was no sound in the room but the
slowly accelerated slide and flop of one sheet of cartridge paper
after another.

"We could have been so happy," she wailed, "se'ving oua God."

And then this disconcerting lady did a still more disconcerting
thing. She staggered a step towards Scrape, seized the lapels of
his coat, bowed her head upon his shoulder, put her black hair
against his cheek, and began sobbing and weeping.

"My dear lady! " he expostulated, trying weakly to disengage
her.

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

His resistance ceased. One hand supported her, the other patted
her shining hair. "My dear child!" he said. "My dear child! I had
no idea. That you would take it like this...."

(7)


That was but the opening of an enormous interview. Presently he
had contrived in a helpful and sympathetic manner to seat the
unhappy lady on a sofa, and when after some cramped discourse she
stood up before him, wiping her eyes with a wet wonder of lace,
to deliver herself the better, a newborn appreciation of the
tactics of the situation made him walk to the other side of the
table under colour of picking up a drawing.

In the retrospect he tried to disentangle the threads of a
discussion that went to and fro and contradicted itself and began
again far back among things that had seemed forgotten and
disposed of. Lady Sunderbund's mind was extravagantly untrained,
a wild-grown mental thicket. At times she reproached him as if he
were a heartless God; at times she talked as if he were a
recalcitrant servant. Her mingling of utter devotion and the
completest disregard for his thoughts and wishes dazzled and
distressed his mind. It was clear that for half a year her clear,
bold, absurd will had been crystallized upon the idea of giving
him exactly what she wanted him to want. The crystal sphere of
those ambitions lay now shattered between them.

She was trying to reconstruct it before his eyes.

She was, she declared, prepared to alter her plans in any way
that would meet his wishes. She had not understood. "If it is a
Toy," she cried, "show me how to make it not a Toy! Make it
'eal!"

He said it was the bare idea of a temple that made it
impossible. And there was this drawing here; what did it mean? He
held it out to her. It represented a figure, distressingly like
himself, robed as a priest in vestments.

She snatched the offending drawing from him and tore it to
shreds.

"If you don't want a Temple, have a meeting-house. You wanted a
meeting-house anyhow."

"Just any old meeting-house," he said. "Not that special one. A
place without choirs and clergy."

"If you won't have music," she responded, "don't have music. If
God doesn't want music it can go. I can't think God does not
app'ove of music, but--that is for you to settle. If you don't
like the' being o'naments, we'll make it all plain. Some g'ate
g'ey Dome--all g'ey and black. If it isn't to be beautiful, it
can be ugly. Yes, ugly. It can be as ugly "--she sobbed--" as
the City Temple. We will get some otha a'chitect--some City
a'chitect. Some man who has built B'anch Banks or 'ailway
stations. That's if you think it pleases God.... B'eak young
Venable's hea't.... Only why should you not let me make a place
fo' you' message? Why shouldn't it be me? You must have a place.
You've got 'to p'each somewhe'."

"As a man, not as a priest."

"Then p'each as a man. You must still wea' something."

"Just ordinary clothes."

"O'dina'y clothes a' clothes in the fashion," she said. "You
would have to go to you' taila for a new p'eaching coat with
b'aid put on dif'ently, or two buttons instead of th'ee...."

"One needn't be fashionable."

"Ev'ybody is fash'nable. How can you help it? Some people wea'
old fashions; that's all.... A cassock's an old fashion. There's
nothing so plain as a cassock."

"Except that it's a clerical fashion. I want to be just as I am
now."

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

"A cassock," she cried with passion. "Just a pe'fectly plain
cassock. Fo' deecency!... Oh, if you won't--not even that!"

(8)


As he walked now after his unsuccessful quest of Dr.
Brighton-Pomfrey towards the Serpentine he acted that stormy
interview with Lady Sunderbund over again. At the end, as a
condition indeed of his departure, he had left things open. He
had assented to certain promises. He was to make her understand
better what it was he needed. He was not to let anything that
had happened affect that "spi'tual f'enship." She was to abandon
all her plans, she was to begin again "at the ve'y beginning."
But he knew that indeed there should be no more beginning again
with her. He knew that quite beyond these questions of the
organization of a purified religion, it was time their
association ended. She had wept upon him; she had clasped both
his hands at parting and prayed to be forgiven. She was drawing
him closer to her by their very dissension. She had infected him
with the softness of remorse; from being a bright and spirited
person, she had converted herself into a warm and touching
person. Her fine, bright black hair against his cheek and the
clasp of her hand on his shoulder was now inextricably in the
business. The perplexing, the astonishing thing in his situation
was that there was still a reluctance to make a conclusive
breach.

He was not the first of men who have tried to find in vain how
and when a relationship becomes an entanglement. He ought to
break off now, and the riddle was just why he should feel this
compunction in breaking off now. He had disappointed her, and he
ought not to have disappointed her; that was the essential
feeling. He had never realized before as he realized now this
peculiar quality of his own mind and the gulf into which it was
leading him. It came as an illuminating discovery.

He was a social animal. He had an instinctive disposition to
act according to the expectations of the people about him,
whether they were reasonable or congenial expectations or whether
they were not. That, he saw for the first time, had been the
ruling motive of his life; it was the clue to him. Man is not a
reasonable creature; he is a socially responsive creature trying
to be reasonable in spite of that fact. From the days in the
rectory nursery when Scrope had tried to be a good boy on the
whole and just a little naughty sometimes until they stopped
smiling, through all his life of school, university, curacy,
vicarage and episcopacy up to this present moment, he perceived
now that he had acted upon no authentic and independent impulse.
His impulse had always been to fall in with people and satisfy
them. And all the painful conflicts of those last few years had
been due to a growing realization of jarring criticisms, of
antagonized forces that required from him incompatible things.
From which he had now taken refuge--or at any rate sought
refuge--in God. It was paradoxical, but manifestly in God he
not only sank his individuality but discovered it.

It was wonderful how much he had thought and still thought of
the feelings and desires of Lady Sunderbund, and how little he
thought of God. Her he had been assiduously propitiating,
managing, accepting, for three months now. Why? Partly because
she demanded it, and there was a quality in her demand that had
touched some hidden spring--of vanity perhaps it was--in him,
that made him respond. But partly also it was because after the
evacuation of the palace at Princhester he had felt more and
more, felt but never dared to look squarely in the face, the
catastrophic change in the worldly circumstances of his family.
Only this chapel adventure seemed likely to restore those fallen
and bedraggled fortunes. He had not anticipated a tithe of the
dire quality of that change. They were not simply uncomfortable
in the Notting Hill home. They were miserable. He fancied they
looked to him with something between reproach and urgency. Why
had he brought them here? What next did he propose to do? He
wished at times they would say it out instead of merely looking
it. Phoebe's failing appetite chilled his heart.

That concern for his family, he believed, had been his chief
motive in clinging to Lady Sunderbund's projects long after he
had realized how little they would forward the true service of
God. No doubt there had been moments of flattery, moments of
something, something rather in the nature of an excited
affection; some touch of the magnificent in her, some touch of
the infantile,--both appealed magnetically to his imagination;
but the real effective cause was his habitual solicitude for his
wife and children and his consequent desire to prosper
materially. As his first dream of being something between
Mohammed and Peter the Hermit in a new proclamation of God to the
world lost colour and life in his mind, he realized more and more
clearly that there was no way of living in a state of material
prosperity and at the same time in a state of active service to
God. The Church of the One True God (by favour of Lady
Sunderbund) was a gaily-coloured lure.

And yet he wanted to go on with it. All his imagination and
intelligence was busy now with the possibility of in some way
subjugating Lady Sunderbund, and modifying her and qualifying her
to an endurable proposition. Why?

Why?

There could be but one answer, he thought. Brought to the test
of action, he did not really believe in God! He did not believe
in God as he believed in his family. He did not believe in the
reality of either his first or his second vision; they had been
dreams, autogenous revelations, exaltations of his own
imaginations. These beliefs were upon different grades of
reality. Put to the test, his faith in God gave way; a sword of
plaster against a reality of steel.

And yet he did believe in God. He was as persuaded that there
was a God as he was that there was another side to the moon. His
intellectual conviction was complete. Only, beside the living,
breathing--occasionally coughing--reality of Phoebe, God was
something as unsubstantial as the Binomial Theorem....

Very like the Binomial Theorem as one thought over that
comparison.

By this time he had reached the banks of the Serpentine and was
approaching the grey stone bridge that crosses just where Hyde
Park ends and Kensington Gardens begins. Following upon his
doubts of his religious faith had come another still more
extraordinary question: "Although there is a God, does he indeed
matter more in our ordinary lives than that same demonstrable
Binomial Theorem? Isn't one's duty to Phoebe plain and clear?"
Old Likeman's argument came back to him with novel and enhanced
powers. Wasn't he after all selfishly putting his own salvation
in front of his plain duty to those about him? What did it matter
if he told lies, taught a false faith, perjured and damned
himself, if after all those others were thereby saved and
comforted?

"But that is just where the whole of this state of mind is
false and wrong," he told himself. "God is something more than a
priggish devotion, an intellectual formula. He has a hold and a
claim--he should have a hold and a claim--exceeding all the
claims of Phoebe, Miriam, Daphne, Clementina--all of them....

But he hasn't'!...

It was to that he had got after he had left Lady Sunderbund,
and to that he now returned. It was the thinness and unreality of
his thought of God that had driven him post-haste to
Brighton-Pomfrey in search for that drug that had touched his
soul to belief.

Was God so insignificant in comparison with his family that
after all with a good conscience he might preach him every Sunday
in Lady Sunderbund's church, wearing Lady Sunderbund's vestments?

Before him he saw an empty seat. The question was so immense
and conclusive, it was so clearly a choice for all the rest of
his life between God and the dear things of this world, that he
felt he could not decide it upon his legs. He sat down, threw an
arm along the back of the seat and drummed with his fingers.

If the answer was "yes" then it was decidedly a pity that he
had not stayed in the church. It was ridiculous to strain at the
cathedral gnat and then swallow Lady Sunderbund's decorative
Pantechnicon.

For the first time, Scrope definitely regretted his apostasy.

A trivial matter, as it may seem to the reader, intensified
that regret. Three weeks ago Borrowdale, the bishop of Howeaster,
had died, and Scrope would have been the next in rotation to
succeed him on the bench of bishops. He had always looked forward
to the House of Lords, intending to take rather a new line, to
speak more, and to speak more plainly and fully upon social
questions than had hitherto been the practice of his brethren.
Well, that had gone....

(9)


Regrets were plain now. The question before his mind was
growing clear; whether he was to persist in this self-imposed
martyrdom of himself and his family or whether he was to go back
upon his outbreak of visionary fanaticism and close with this
last opportunity that Lady Sunderbund offered of saving at least
the substance of the comfort and social status of his wife and
daughters. In which case it was clear to him he would have to go
to great lengths and exercise very considerable subtlety--and
magnetism--in the management of Lady Sunderbund....

He found himself composing a peculiar speech to her, very frank
and revealing, and one that he felt would dominate her
thoughts.... She attracted him oddly.... At least this afternoon
she had attracted him....

And repelled him....

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

No. He did not like it....

A torn sunset of purple and crimson streamed raggedly up above
and through the half stripped trecs of Kensington Gardens, and he
found himself wishing that Heaven would give us fewer sublimities
in sky and mountain and more in our hearts. Against the
background of darkling trees and stormily flaming sky a girl was
approaching him. There was little to be seen of her but her
outline. Something in her movement caught his eye and carried his
memory back to a sundown at Hunstanton. Then as she came nearer
he saw that it was Eleanor.

It was odd to see her here. He had thought she was at Newnham.

But anyhow it was very pleasant to see her. And there was
something in Eleanor that promised an answer to his necessity.
The girl had a kind of instinctive wisdom. She would understand
the quality of his situation better perhaps than any one. He
would put the essentials of that situation as fully and plainly
as he could to her. Perhaps she, with that clear young idealism
of hers, would give him just the lift and the light of which he
stood in need. She would comprehend both sides of it, the points
about Phoebe as well as the points about God.

When first he saw her she seemed to be hurrying, but now she
had fallen to a loitering pace. She looked once or twice behind
her and then ahead, almost as though she expected some one and
was not sure whether this person would approach from east or
west. She did not observe her father until she was close upon
him.

Then she was so astonished that for a moment she stood
motionless, regarding him. She made an odd movement, almost as if
she would have walked on, that she checked in its inception. Then
she came up to him and stood before him. "It's Dad," she said.

"I didn't know you were in London, Norah," he began.

"I came up suddenly."

"Have you been home?"

"No. I wasn't going home. At least--not until afterwards."

Then she looked away from him, east and then west, and then met
his eye again.

"Won't you sit down, Norah?"

"I don't know whether I can."

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

She sat down. For a moment neither of them spoke....

"What are you doing here, little Norah?"

She gathered her wits. Then she spoke rather volubly. "I know
it looks bad, Daddy. I came up to meet a boy I know, who is going
to France to-morrow. I had to make excuses--up there. I hardly
remember what excuses I made."

"A boy you know?"

"Yes."

"Do we know him? "

"Not yet."

For a time Scrope forgot the Church of the One True God
altogether. "Who is this boy?" he asked.

With a perceptible effort Eleanor assumed a tone of commonsense
conventionality. "He's a boy I met first when we were skating
last year. His sister has the study next to mine."

Father looked at daughter, and she met his eyes. "Well? "

"It's all happened so quickly, Daddy," she said, answering all
that was implicit in that "Well?" She went on, "I would have told
you about him if he had seemed to matter. But it was just a
friendship. It didn't seem to matter in any serious way. Of
course we'd been good friends--and talked about all sorts of
things. And then suddenly you see,"--her tone was offhand and
matter-of-fact--" he has to go to France."

She stared at her father with the expression of a hostess who
talks about the weather. And then the tears gathered and ran down
her cheek.

She turned her face to the Serpentine and clenched her fist.

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

His next question took a little time in coming.

"And it's love, little Norah?" he asked.

She was comfortably crying now, the defensive altogether
abandoned. "It's love, Daddy.... Oh! love!.... He's going
tomorrow." For a minute or so neither spoke. Scrope's mind was
entirely made up in the matter. He approved altogether of his
daughter. But the traditions of parentage, his habit of
restrained decision, made him act a judicial part. "I'd like just
to see this boy," he said, and added: "If it isn't rather
interfering...."

"Dear Daddy!" she said. "Dear Daddy!" and touched his hand.
"He'll be coming here...."

"If you could tell me a few things about him," said Scrope. "Is
he an undergraduate?"

"You see," began Eleanor and paused to marshal her facts. "He
graduated this year. Then he's been in training at Cambridge.
Properly he'd have a fellowship. He took the Natural Science
tripos, zoology chiefly. He's good at philosophy, but of course
our Cambridge philosophy is so silly--McTaggart blowing
bubbles.... His father's a doctor, Sir Hedley Riverton."

As she spoke her eyes had been roving up the path and down.
"He's coming," she interrupted. She hesitated. "Would you mind if
I went and spoke to him first, Daddy?"

"Of course go to him. Go and warn him I'm here," said Scrope.

Eleanor got up, and was immediately greeted with joyful
gestures by an approaching figure in khaki. The two young people
quickened their paces as they drew nearer one another. There was
a rapid greeting; they stood close together and spoke eagerly.
Scrope could tell by their movements when he became the subject
of their talk. He saw the young man start and look over Eleanor's
shoulder, and he assumed an attitude of philosophical
contemplation of the water, so as to give the young man the
liberty of his profile.

He did not look up until they were quite close to him, and when
he did he saw a pleasant, slightly freckled fair face a little
agitated, and very honest blue eyes. "I hope you don't think,
Sir, that it's bad form of me to ask Eleanor to come up and see
me as I've done. I telegraphed to her on an impulse, and it's
been very kind of her to come up to me."

"Sit down," said Scrope, "sit down. You're Mr. Riverton?"

"Yes, Sir," said the young man. He had the frequent "Sir" of
the subaltern. Scrope was in the centre of the seat, and the
young officer sat down on one side of him while Eleanor took up a
watching position on her father's other hand. "You see, Sir,
we've hardly known each other--I mean we've been associated
over a philosophical society and all that sort of thing, but in a
more familiar way, I mean...."

He hung for a moment, just a little short of breath. Scrope
helped him with a grave but sympathetic movement of the head.
"It's a little difficult to explain," the young man apologized.

"We hadn't understood, I think, either of us very much. We'd
just been friendly--and liked each other. And so it went on
even when I was training. And then when I found I had to go out
--I'm going out a little earlier than I expected--I thought
suddenly I wouldn't ever go to Cambridge again at all perhaps--
and there was something in one of her letters.... I thought of it
a lot, Sir, I thought it all over, and I thought it wasn't right
for me to do anything and I didn't do anything until this
morning. And then I sort of had to telegraph. I know it was
frightful cheek and bad form and all that, Sir. It is. It would
be worse if she wasn't different--I mean, Sir, if she was just
an ordinary girl.... But I had a sort of feeling--just wanting
to see her. I don't suppose you've ever felt anything, Sir, as I
felt I wanted to see her--and just hear her speak to me...."

He glanced across Scrope at Eleanor. It was as if he justified
himself to them both.

Scrope glanced furtively at his daughter who was leaning
forward with tender eyes on her lover, and his heart went out to
her. But his manner remained judicial.

"All this is very sudden," he said.

"Or you would have heard all about it, Sir," said young
Riverton. "It's just the hurry that has made this seem furtive.
All that there is between us, Sir, is just the two telegrams
we've sent, hers and mine. I hope you won't mind our having a
little time together. We won't do anything very committal. It's
as much friendship as anything. I go by the evening train
to-morrow."

"Mm," said Serope with his eye on Eleanor.

"In these uncertain times," he began.

"Why shouldn't I take a risk too, Daddy?" said Eleanor sharply.

"I know there's that side of it," said the young man. "I
oughtn't to have telegraphed," he said.

"Can't I take a risk?" exclaimed Eleanor. "I'm not a doll. I
don't want to live in wadding until all the world is safe for
me."

Scrope looked at the glowing face of the young man.

"Is this taking care of her?" he asked.

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

"Perhaps I feel about her--rather as if she was as strong as
I am--in those ways. Perhaps I shouldn't. I could hardly endure
myself, Sir--cut off from her. And a sort of blank. Nothing
said."

"You want to work out your own salvation," said Scrope to his
daughter.

"No one else can," she answered. "I'm--I'm grown up."

"Even if it hurts?"

"To live is to be hurt somehow," she said. "This--This--" She
flashed her love. She intimated by a gesture that it is better to
be stabbed with a clean knife than to be suffocated or poisoned
or to decay....

Scrope turned his eyes to the young man again. He liked him. He
liked the modelling of his mouth and chin and the line of his
brows. He liked him altogether. He pronounced his verdict slowly.
"I suppose, after all," he said, "that this is better than the
tender solicitude of a safe and prosperous middleaged man.
Eleanor, my dear, I've been thinking to-day that a father who
stands between his children and hardship, by doing wrong, may
really be doing them a wrong. You are a dear girl to me.

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

"I can assure you, Sir," the young man began.

Scrope held his hand out. "Take your life in your own way," he
said.

He turned to Eleanor. "Talk as you will," he said.

She clasped his hand with emotion. Then she turned to the
waiting young man, who saluted.

"You'll come back to supper?" Scrope said, without thinking out
the implications of that invitation.

She assented as carelessly. The fact that she and her lover
were to go, with their meeting legalized and blessed, excluded
all other considerations. The two young people turned to each
other.

Scrope stood for a moment or so and then sat down again.

For a time he could think only of Eleanor.... He watched the
two young people as they went eastward. As they walked their
shoulders and elbows bumped amicably together.

(10)


Presently he sought to resume the interrupted thread of his
thoughts. He knew that he had been dealing with some very
tremendous and urgent problem when Eleanor had appeared. Then he
remembered that Eleanor at the time of her approach had seemed to
be a solution rather than an interruption. Well, she had her own
life. She was making her own life. Instead of solving his
problems she was solving her own. God bless those dear grave
children! They were nearer the elemental things than he was. That
eastward path led to Victoria--and thence to a very probable
death. The lad was in the infantry and going straight into the
trenches.

Love, death, God; this war was bringing the whole world back to
elemental things, to heroic things. The years of comedy and
comfort were at an end in Europe; the age of steel and want was
here. And he had been thinking--What had he been thinking?

He mused, and the scheme of his perplexities reshaped itself in
his mind. But at that time he did not realize that a powerful new
light was falling upon it now, cast by the tragic illumination of
these young lovers whose love began with a parting. He did not
see how reality had come to all things through that one intense
reality. He reverted to the question as he had put it to himself,
before first he recoguized Eleanor. Did he believe in God? Should
he go on with this Sunderbund adventure in which he no longer
believed? Should he play for safety and comfort, trusting to
God's toleration? Or go back to his family and warn them of the
years of struggle and poverty his renunciation cast upon them?

Somehow Lady Sunderbund's chapel was very remote and flimsy
now, and the hardships of poverty seemed less black than the
hardship of a youthful death.

Did he believe in God? Again he put that fundamental question
to himself.

He sat very still in the sunset peace, with his eyes upon the
steel mirror of the waters. The question seemed to fill the whole
scene, to wait, even as the water and sky and the windless trees
were waiting....

And then by imperceptible degrees there grew in Scrope's mind
the persuasion that he was in the presence of the living God.
This time there was no vision of angels nor stars, no snapping of
bow-strings, no throbbing of the heart nor change of scene, no
magic and melodramatic drawing back of the curtain from the
mysteries; the water and the bridge, the ragged black trees, and
a distant boat that broke the silvery calm with an arrow of black
ripples, all these things were still before him. But God was
there too. God was everywhere about him. This persuasion was over
him and about him; a dome of protection, a power in his nerves, a
peace in his heart. It was an exalting beauty; it was a perfected
conviction.... This indeed was the coming of God, the real coming
of God. For the first time Scrope was absolutely sure that for
the rest of his life he would possess God. Everything that had so
perplexed him seemed to be clear now, and his troubles lay at the
foot of this last complete realization like a litter of dust and
leaves in the foreground of a sunlit, snowy mountain range.

It was a little incredible that he could ever have doubted.

(11)


It was a phase of extreme intellectual clairvoyance. A
multitude of things that hitherto had been higgledy-piggledy,
contradictory and incongruous in his mind became lucid, serene,
full and assured. He seemed to see all things plainly as one sees
things plainly through perfectly clear still water in the shadows
of a summer noon. His doubts about God, his periods of complete
forgetfulness and disregard of God, this conflict of his
instincts and the habits and affections of his daily life with
the service of God, ceased to be perplexing incompatibilities and
were manifest as necessary, understandable aspects of the
business of living.

It was no longer a riddle that little immediate things should
seem of more importance than great and final things. For man is a
creature thrusting his way up from the beast to divinity, from
the blindness of individuality to the knowledge of a common end.
We stand deep in the engagements of our individual lives looking
up to God, and only realizing in our moments of exaltation that
through God we can escape from and rule and alter the whole
world-wide scheme of individual lives. Only in phases of
illumination do we realize the creative powers that lie ready to
man's hand. Personal affections, immediate obligations,
ambitions, self-seeking, these are among the natural and
essential things of our individual lives, as intimate almost as
our primordial lusts and needs; God, the true God, is a later
revelation, a newer, less natural thing in us; a knowledge still
remote, uncertain, and confused with superstition; an
apprehension as yet entangled with barbaric traditions of fear
and with ceremonial surgeries, blood sacrifices, and the maddest
barbarities of thought. We are only beginning to realize that God
is here; so far as our minds go he is still not here continually;
we perceive him and then again we are blind to him. God is the
last thing added to the completeness of human life. To most His
presence is imperceptible throughout their lives; they know as
little of him as a savage knows of the electric waves that beat
through us for ever from the sun. All this appeared now so clear
and necessary to Scrope that he was astonished he had ever found
the quality of contradiction in these manifest facts.

In this unprecedented lucidity that had now come to him, Scrope
saw as a clear and simple necessity that there can be no such
thing as a continuous living presence of God in our lives. That
is an unreasonable desire. There is no permanent exaltation of
belief. It is contrary to the nature of life. One cannot keep
actively believing in and realizing God round all the twenty-four
hours any more than one can keep awake through the whole cycle of
night and day, day after day. If it were possible so to apprehend
God without cessation, life would dissolve in religious ecstasy.
But nothing human has ever had the power to hold the curtain of
sense continually aside and retain the light of God always. We
must get along by remembering our moments of assurance. Even
Jesus himself, leader of all those who have hailed the coming
kingdom of God, had cried upon the cross, "My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me?" The business of life on earth, life
itself, is a thing curtained off, as it were, from such immediate
convictions. That is in the constitution of life. Our ordinary
state of belief, even when we are free from doubt, is necessarily
far removed from the intuitive certainty of sight and hearing. It
is a persuasion, it falls far short of perception....

"We don't know directly," Scrope said to himself with a
checking gesture of the hand, "we don't see. We can't. We hold on
to the remembered glimpse, we go over our reasons."...

And it was clear too just because God is thus manifest like the
momentary drawing of a curtain, sometimes to this man for a time
and sometimes to that, but never continuously to any, and because
the perception of him depends upon the ability and quality of the
perceiver, because to the intellectual man God is necessarily a
formula, to the active man a will and a commandment, and to the
emotional man love, there can be no creed defining him for all
men, and no ritual and special forms of service to justify a
priesthood. "God is God," he whispered to himself, and the phrase
seemed to him the discovery of a sufficient creed. God is his own
definition; there is no other definition of God. Scrope had
troubled himself with endless arguments whether God was a person,
whether he was concerned with personal troubles, whether he
loved, whether he was finite. It were as reasonable to argue
whether God was a frog or a rock or a tree. He had imagined God
as a figure of youth and courage, had perceived him as an
effulgence of leadership, a captain like the sun. The vision of
his drug-quickened mind had but symbolized what was otherwise
inexpressible. Of that he was now sure. He had not seen the
invisible but only its sign and visible likeness. He knew now
that all such presentations were true and that all such
presentations were false. Just as much and just as little was God
the darkness and the brightness of the ripples under the bows of
the distant boat, the black beauty of the leaves and twigs of
those trees now acid-clear against the flushed and deepening sky.
These riddles of the profundities were beyond the compass of
common living. They were beyond the needs of common living. He
was but a little earth parasite, sitting idle in the darkling
day, trying to understand his infinitesimal functions on a minor
planet. Within the compass of terrestrial living God showed
himself in its own terms. The life of man on earth was a struggle
for unity of spirit and for unity with his kind, and the aspect
of God that alone mattered to man was a unifying kingship without
and within. So long as men were men, so would they see God. Only
when they reached the crest could they begin to look beyond. So
we knew God, so God was to us; since we struggled, he led our
struggle, since we were finite and mortal he defined an aim, his
personality was the answer to our personality; but God, except in
so far as he was to us, remained inaccessible, inexplicable,
wonderful, shining through beauty, shining beyond research,
greater than time or space, above good and evil and pain and
pleasure.

(12)


Serope's mind was saturated as it had never been before by his
sense of the immediate presence of God. He floated in that
realization. He was not so much thinking now as conversing
starkly with the divine interlocutor, who penetrated all things
and saw into and illuminated every recess of his mind. He spread
out his ideas to the test of this presence; he brought out his
hazards and interpretations that this light might judge them.

There came back to his mind the substance of his two former
visions; they assumed now a reciprocal quality, they explained
one another and the riddle before him. The first had shown him
the personal human aspect of God, he had seen God as the unifying
captain calling for his personal service, the second had set the
stage for that service in the spectacle of mankind's adventure.
He had been shown a great multitude of human spirits reaching up
at countless points towards the conception of the racial unity
under a divine leadership, he had seen mankind on the verge of
awakening to the kingdom of God. "That solves no mystery," he
whispered, gripping the seat and frowning at the water;
"mysteries remain mysteries; but that is the reality of religion.
And now, now, what is my place? What have I to do? That is the
question I have been asking always; the question that this moment
now will answer; what have I to do?...

God was coming into the life of all mankind in the likeness of
a captain and a king; all the governments of men, all the leagues
of men, their debts and claims and possessions, must give way to
the world republic under God the king. For five troubled years he
had been staring religion in the face, and now he saw that it
must mean this--or be no more than fetishism, Obi, Orphic
mysteries or ceremonies of Demeter, a legacy of mental dirtiness,
a residue of self-mutilation and superstitious sacrifices from
the cunning, fear-haunted, ape-dog phase of human development.
But
it did mean this. And every one who apprehended as much was
called by that very apprehension to the service of God's kingdom.
To live and serve God's kingdom on earth, to help to bring it
about, to propagate the idea of it, to establish the method of
it, to incorporate all that one made and all that one did into
its growing reality, was the only possible life that could be
lived, once that God was known.

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

Ever since he had given his confirmation addresses he had been
clear that his task, or at least a considerable portion of his
task, was to tell of this faith in God and of this conception of
service in his kingdom as the form and rule of human life and
human society. But up to now he had been floundering hopelessly
in his search for a method and means of telling. That, he saw,
still needed to be thought out. For example, one cannot run
through the world crying, "The Kingdom of God is at hand." Men's
minds were still so filled with old theological ideas that for
the most part they would understand by that only a fantasy of
some great coming of angels and fiery chariots and judgments, and
hardly a soul but would doubt one's sanity and turn scornfully
away. But one must proclaim God not to confuse but to convince
men's minds. It was that and the habit of his priestly calling
that had disposed him towards a pulpit. There he could reason and
explain. The decorative genius of Lady Sunderbund had turned that
intention into a vast iridescent absurdity.

This sense he had of thinking openly in the sight of God,
enabled him to see the adventure of Lady Sunderbund without
illusion and without shame. He saw himself at once honest and
disingenuous, divided between two aims. He had no doubt now of
the path he had to pursue. A stronger man of permanently clear
aims might possibly turn Lady Sunderbund into a useful
opportunity, oblige her to provide the rostrum he needed; but for
himself, he knew he had neither the needed strength nor
clearness; she would smother him in decoration, overcome him by
her picturesque persistence. It might be ridiculous to run away
from her, but it was necessary. And he was equally clear now that
for him there must be no idea of any pulpit, of any sustained
mission. He was a man of intellectual moods; only at times, he
realized, had he the inspiration of truth; upon such uncertain
snatches and glimpses he must live; to make his life a ministry
would be to face phases when he would simply be "carrying on,"
with his mind blank and his faith asleep.

His thought spread out from this perennial decision to more
general things again. Had God any need of organized priests at
all? Wasn't that just what had been the matter with religion for
the last three thousand years?

His vision and his sense of access to God had given a new
courage to his mind; in these moods of enlightenment he could see
the world as a comprehensible ball, he could see history as an
understandable drama. He had always been on the verge of
realizing before, he realized now, the two entirely different and
antagonistic strands that interweave in the twisted rope of
contemporary religion; the old strand of the priest, the
fetishistic element of the blood sacrifice and the obscene rite,
the element of ritual and tradition, of the cult, the caste, the
consecrated tribe; and interwoven with this so closely as to be
scarcely separable in any existing religion was the new strand,
the religion of the prophets, the unidolatrous universal worship
of the one true God. Priest religion is the antithesis to prophet
religion. He saw that the founders of all the great existing
religions of the world had been like himself--only that he was
a weak and commonplace man with no creative force, and they had
been great men of enormous initiative--men reaching out, and
never with a complete definition, from the old kind of religion
to the new. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus, whom the priests killed
when Pilate would have spared him, Mohammed, Buddha, had this
much in common that they had sought to lead men from temple
worship, idol worship, from rites and ceremonies and the rule of
priests, from anniversaryism and sacramentalism, into a direct
and simple relation to the simplicity of God. Religious progress
had always been liberation and simplification. But none of these
efforts had got altogether clear. The organizing temper in men,
the disposition to dogmatic theorizing, the distrust of the
discretion of the young by the wisdom of age, the fear of
indiscipline which is so just in warfare and so foolish in
education, the tremendous power of the propitiatory tradition,
had always caught and crippled every new gospel before it had run
a score of years. Jesus for example gave man neither a theology
nor a church organization; His sacrament was an innocent feast of
memorial; but the fearful, limited, imitative men he left to
carry on his work speedily restored all these three abominations
of the antiquated religion, theology, priest, and sacrifice.
Jesus indeed, caught into identification with the ancient victim
of the harvest sacrifice and turned from a plain teacher into a
horrible blood bath and a mock cannibal meal, was surely the
supreme feat of the ironies of chance....

"It is curious how I drift back to Jesus," said Scrope. "I have
never seen how much truth and good there was in his teaching
until I broke away from Christianity and began to see him plain.
If I go on as I am going, I shall end a Nazarene...."

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

Already in a glow of inspiration he had said practically as
much as he was now thinking in his confirmation address, but now
he realized completely what it was he had then said. There could
be no priests, no specialized ministers of the one true God,
because every man to the utmost measure of his capacity was bound
to be God's priest and minister. Many things one may leave to
specialists: surgery, detailed administration, chemistry, for
example; but it is for every man to think his own philosophy and
think out his own religion. One man may tell another, but no man
may take charge of another. A man may avail himself of
electrician or gardener or what not, but he must stand directly
before God; he may suffer neither priest nor king. These other
things are incidental, but God, the kingdom of God, is what he is
for.

"Good," he said, checking his reasoning. "So I must bear
witness to God--but neither as priest nor pastor. I must write
and talk about him as I can. No reason why I should not live by
such writing and talking if it does not hamper my message to do
so. But there must be no high place, no ordered congregation. I
begin to see my way....

The evening was growing dark and chill about him now, the sky
was barred with deep bluish purple bands drawn across a chilly
brightness that had already forgotten the sun, the trees were
black and dim, but his understanding of his place and duty was
growing very definite.

"And this duty to bear witness to God's kingdom and serve it is
so plain that I must not deflect my witness even by a little,
though to do so means comfort and security for my wife and
children. God comes first...."

"They must not come between God and me...."

"But there is more in it than that."

He had come round at last through the long clearing-up of his
mind, to his fundamental problem again. He sat darkly reluctant.

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

He saw now what he had been doing; it had been the flaw in his
faith that he would not trust his family to God. And he saw too
that this distrust has been the flaw in the faith of all
religious systems hitherto....

(13)


In this strange voyage of the spirit which was now drawing to
its end, in which Scrope had travelled from the confused,
unanalyzed formulas and assumptions and implications of his
rectory upbringing to his present stark and simple realization of
God, he had at times made some remarkable self-identifications.
He was naturally much given to analogy; every train of thought in
his mind set up induced parallel currents. He had likened himself
to the Anglican church, to the whole Christian body, as, for
example, in his imagined second conversation with the angel of
God. But now he found himself associating himself with a still
more far-reaching section of mankind. This excess of solicitude
was traceable perhaps in nearly every one in all the past of
mankind who had ever had the vision of God. An excessive
solicitude to shield those others from one's own trials and
hardships, to preserve the exact quality of the revelation, for
example, had been the fruitful cause of crippling errors,
spiritual tyrannies, dogmatisms, dissensions, and futilities.
"Suffer little children to come unto me"; the text came into his
head with an effect of contribution. The parent in us all flares
out at the thought of the younger and weaker minds; we hide
difficulties, seek to spare them from the fires that temper the
spirit, the sharp edge of the truth that shapes the soul.
Christian is always trying to have a carriage sent back from the
Celestial City for his family. Why, we ask, should they flounder
dangerously in the morasses that we escaped, or wander in the
forest in which we lost ourselves? Catch these souls young,
therefore, save them before they know they exist, kidnap them to
heaven; vaccinate them with a catechism they may never
understand, lull them into comfort and routine. Instinct plays us
false here as it plays the savage mother false when she snatches
her fevered child from the doctor's hands. The last act of faith
is to trust those we love to God....

Hitherto he had seen the great nets of theological
overstatement and dogma that kept mankind from God as if they
were the work of purely evil things in man, of pride, of
self-assertion, of a desire to possess and dominate the minds and
souls of others. It was only now that he saw how large a share in
the obstruction of God's Kingdom had been played by the love of
the elder and the parent, by the carefulness, the fussy care, of
good men and women. He had wandered in wildernesses of unbelief,
in dangerous places of doubt and questioning, but he had left his
wife and children safe and secure in the self-satisfaction of
orthodoxy. To none of them except to Eleanor had he ever talked
with any freedom of his new apprehensions of religious reality.
And that had been at Eleanor's initiative. There was, he saw now,
something of insolence and something of treachery in this
concealment. His ruling disposition throughout the crisis had
been to force comfort and worldly well-being upon all those
dependants even at the price of his own spiritual integrity. In
no way had he consulted them upon the bargain.... While we have
pottered, each for the little good of his own family, each for
the lessons and clothes and leisure of his own children,
assenting to this injustice, conforming to that dishonest custom,
being myopically benevolent and fundamentally treacherous, our
accumulated folly has achieved this catastrophe. It is not so
much human wickedness as human weakness that has permitted the
youth of the world to go through this hell of blood and mud and
fire. The way to the kingdom of God is the only way to the true
safety, the true wellbeing of the children of men....

It wasn't fair to them. But now he saw how unfair it was to
them in a light that has only shone plainly upon European life
since the great interlude of the armed peace came to an end in
August, 1914. Until that time it had been the fashion to ignore
death and evade poverty and necessity for the young. We can
shield our young no longer, death has broken through our
precautions and tender evasions--and his eyes went eastward
into the twilight that had swallowed up his daughter and her
lover.

The tumbled darkling sky, monstrous masses of frowning blue,
with icy gaps of cold light, was like the great confusions of the
war. All our youth has had to go into that terrible and
destructive chaos--because of the kings and churches and
nationalities sturdier-souled men would have set aside.

Everything was sharp and clear in his mind now. Eleanor after
all had brought him his solution.

He sat quite still for a little while, and then stood up and
turned northward towards Notting Hill.

The keepers were closing Kensington Gardens, and he would have
to skirt the Park to Victoria Gate and go home by the Bayswater
Road....

(14)


As he walked he rearranged in his mind this long-overdue
apology for his faith that he was presently to make to his
family. There was no one to interrupt him and nothing to
embarrass him, and so he was able to set out everything very
clearly and convincingly. There was perhaps a disposition to
digress into rather voluminous subordinate explanations, on such
themes, for instance, as sacramentalism, whereon he found himself
summarizing Frazer's Golden Bough, which the Chasters'
controversy had first obliged him to read, and upon the
irrelevance of the question of immortality to the process of
salvation. But the reality of his eclaircissement was very
different from anything he prepared in these anticipations.

Tea had been finished and put away, and the family was disposed
about the dining-room engaged in various evening occupations;
Phoebe sat at the table working at some mathematical problem,
Clementina was reading with her chin on her fist and a frown on
her brow; Lady Ella, Miriam and Daphne were busy making soft
washing cloths for the wounded; Lady Ella had brought home the
demand for them from the Red Cross centre in Burlington House.
The family was all downstairs in the dining-room because the
evening was chilly, and there were no fires upstairs yet in the
drawing-room. He came into the room and exchanged greetings with
Lady Ella. Then he stood for a time surveying his children.
Phoebe, he noted, was a little flushed; she put passion into her
work; on the whole she was more like Eleanor than any other of
them. Miriam knitted with a steady skill. Clementina's face too
expressed a tussle. He took up one of the rough-knit
washing-cloths upon the side-table, and asked how many could be
made in an hour. Then he asked some idle obvious question about
the fire upstairs. Clementina made an involuntary movement; he
was disturbing her. He hovered for a moment longer. He wanted to
catch his wife's eye and speak to her first. She looked up, but
before he could convey his wish for a private conference with
her, she smiled at him and then bent over her work again.

He went into the back study and lit his gas fire. Hitherto he
had always made a considerable explosion when he did so, but this
time by taking thought and lighting his match before he turned on
the gas he did it with only a gentle thud. Then he lit his
reading-lamp and pulled down the blind--pausing for a time to
look at the lit dressmaker's opposite. Then he sat down
thoughtfully before the fire. Presently Ella would come in and he
would talk to her. He waited a long time, thinking only weakly
and inconsecutively, and then he became restless. Should he call
her?

But he wanted their talk to begin in a natural-seeming way. He
did not want the portentousness of "wanting to speak" to her and
calling her out to him. He got up at last and went back into the
other room. Clementina had gone upstairs, and the book she had
been reading was lying closed on the sideboard. He saw it was one
of Chasters' books, he took it up, it was "The Core of Truth in
Christianity," and he felt an irrational shock at the idea of
Clementina reading it. In spite of his own immense changes of
opinion he had still to revise his conception of the polemical
Chasters as an evil influence in religion. He fidgeted past his
wife to the mantel in search of an imaginary mislaid pencil.
Clementina came down with some bandage linen she was cutting out.
He hung over his wife in a way that he felt must convey his
desire for a conversation. Then he picked up Chasters' book
again. "Does any one want this?" he asked.

"Not if I may have it again," consented Clementina.

He took it back with him and began to read again those familiar
controversial pages. He read for the best part of an hour with
his knees drying until they smoked over the gas. What curious
stuff it was! How it wrangled! Was Chasters a religious man? Why
did he write these books? Had he really a passion for truth or
only a Swift-like hatred of weakly-thinking people? None of this
stuff in his books was really wrong, provided it was religious-
spirited. Much of it had been indeed destructively illuminating
to its reader. It let daylight through all sorts of walls.
Indeed, the more one read the more vividly true its acid-bit
lines became.... And yet, and yet, there was something hateful in
the man's tone. Scrope held the book and thought. He had seen
Chasters once or twice. Chasters had the sort of face, the sort
of voice, the sort of bearing that made one think of his possibly
saying upon occasion, rudely and rejoicing, "More fool you!"
Nevertheless Scrope perceived now with an effort of discovery
that it was from Chasters that he had taken all the leading ideas
of the new faith that was in him. Here was the stuff of it. He
had forgotten how much of it was here. During those months of
worried study while the threat of a Chasters prosecution hung
over him his mind had assimilated almost unknowingly every
assimilable element of the Chasters doctrine; he had either
assimilated and transmuted it by the alchemy of his own
temperament, or he had reacted obviously and filled in Chasters'
gaps and pauses. Chasters could beat a road to the Holy of
Holies, and shy at entering it. But in spite of all the man's
roughness, in spite of a curious flavour of baseness and malice
about him, the spirit of truth had spoken through him. God has a
use for harsh ministers. In one man God lights the heart, in
another the reason becomes a consuming fire. God takes his own
where he finds it. He does not limit himself to nice people. In
these matters of evidence and argument, in his contempt for
amiable, demoralizing compromise, Chasters served God as Scrope
could never hope to serve him. Scrope's new faith had perhaps
been altogether impossible if the Chasters controversy had not
ploughed his mind.

For a time Scrope dwelt upon this remarkable realization. Then
as he turned over the pages his eyes rested on a passage of
uncivil and ungenerous sarcasm. Against old Likeman of all
people!...

What did a girl like Clementina make of all this? How had she
got the book? From Eleanor? The stuff had not hurt Eleanor.
Eleanor had been able to take the good that Chasters taught, and
reject the evil of his spirit....

He thought of Eleanor, gallantly working out her own salvation.
The world was moving fast to a phase of great freedom--for the
young and the bold.... He liked that boy....

His thoughts came back with a start to his wife. The evening
was slipping by and he had momentous things to say to her. He
went and just opened the door.

"Ella!" he said.

"Did you want me?"

"Presently."

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

"Just a minute," she answered.

(15)


Lady Ella was still, so to speak, a little in the other room
when she came to him.

"Shut that door, please," he said, and felt the request had
just that flavour of portentousness he wished to avoid.

"What is it? " she asked.

"I wanted to talk to you--about some things. I've done
something rather serious to-day. I've made an important
decision."

Her face became anxious. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"You see," he said, leaning upon the mantelshelf and looking
down at the gas flames, "I've never thought that we should all
have to live in this crowded house for long."

"All!" she interrupted in a voice that made him look up
sharply. "You're not going away, Ted?"

"Oh, no. But I hoped we should all be going away in a little
time. It isn't so."

"I never quite understood why you hoped that."

"It was plain enough."

"How? "

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

"What plan?

"It's fallen through."

"But what plan was it?"

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

Her voice was rich with indignation. "And she has betrayed
you?"

"No," he said, "I have betrayed her."

Lady Ella's face showed them still at cross purposes. He looked
down again and frowned. "I can't do that chapel business," he
said. "I've had to let her down. I've got to let you all down.
There's no help for it. It isn't the way. I can't have anything
to do with Lady Sunderbund and her chapel."

"But," Lady Ella was still perplexed.

"It's too great a sacrifice."

"Of us?"

"No, of myself. I can't get into her pulpit and do as she wants
and keep my conscience. It's been a horrible riddle for me. It
means plunging into all this poverty for good. But I can't work
with her, Ella. She's impossible."

"You mean--you're going to break with Lady Sunderbund?"

"I must."

"Then, Teddy!"--she was a woman groping for flight amidst
intolerable perplexities--"why did you ever leave the church?"

"Because I have ceased to believe--"

"But had it nothing to do with Lady Sunderbund?"

He stared at her in astonishment.

"If it means breaking with that woman," she said.

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

"Poverty!" she cried. "I cared for nothing but the disgrace."

"Disgrace?"

"Oh, never mind, Ted! If it isn't true, if I've been
dreaming...."

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

Their minds were held for a minute by the sound of some one
knocking at the house door; one of the girls opened the door,
there was a brief hubbub in the passage and then they heard a cry
of "Eleanor!" through the folding doors.

"There's Eleanor," he said, realizing he had told his wife
nothing of the encounter in Hyde Park.

They heard Eleanor's clear voice: "Where's Mummy? Or Daddy?"
and then: "Can't stay now, dears. Where's Mummy or Daddy?"

"I ought to have told you," said Scrope quickly. "I met Eleanor
in the Park. By accident. She's come up unexpectedly. To meet a
boy going to the front. Quite a nice boy. Son of Riverton the
doctor. The parting had made them understand one another. It's
all right, Ella. It's a little irregular, but I'd stake my life
on the boy. She's very lucky."

Eleanor appeared through the folding doors. She came to
business at once.

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

She saw her mother look perplexed. "Hasn't Daddy told you?"

"But where is young Riverton?"

"He's outside."

Eleanor became aware of a broad chink in the folding doors that
was making the dining-room an auditorium for their dialogue. She
shut them deftly.

"I have told Mummy," Scrope explained. "Bring him in to supper.
We ought to see him."

Eleanor hesitated. She indicated her sisters beyond the folding
doors. "They'll all be watching us, Mummy," she said. "We'd be
uncomfortable. And besides

"But you can't go out and dine with him alone!"

"Oh, Mummy! It's our only chance."

"Customs are changing," said Scrope.

"But can they?" asked Lady Ella.

"I don't see why not."

The mother was still doubtful, but she was in no mood to cross
her husband that night. "It's an exceptional occasion," said
Scrope, and Eleanor knew her point was won. She became radiant.
"I can be late?"

Scrope handed her his latch-key without a word.

"You dear kind things," she said, and went to the door. Then
turned and came back and kissed her father. Then she kissed her
mother. "It is so kind of you," she said, and was gone. They
listened to her passage through a storm of questions in the
dining-room.

"Three months ago that would have shocked me," said Lady Ella.

"You haven't seen the boy," said Scrope.

"But the appearances!"

"Aren't we rather breaking with appearances?" he said.

"And he goes to-morrow--perhaps to get killed," he added. "A
lad like a schoolboy. A young thing. Because of the political
foolery that we priests and teachers have suffered in the place
of the Kingdom of God, because we have allowed the religion of
Europe to become a lie; because no man spoke the word of God. You
see--when I see that--see those two, those children of one-and-
twenty, wrenched by tragedy, beginning with a parting.... It's
like a knife slashing at all our appearances and discretions....
Think of our lovemaking...."

The front door banged.

He had some idea of resuming their talk. But his was a
scattered mind now.

"It's a quarter to eight," he said as if in explanation.

"I must see to the supper," said Lady Ella.

(16)


There was an air of tension at supper as though the whole
family felt that momentous words impended. But Phoebe had emerged
victorious from her mathematical struggle, and she seemed to eat
with better appetite than she had shown for some time. It was a
cold meat supper; Lady Ella had found it impossible to keep up
the regular practice of a cooked dinner in the evening, and now
it was only on Thursdays that the Scropes, to preserve their
social tradition, dressed and dined; the rest of the week they
supped. Lady Ella never talked very much at supper; this evening
was no exception. Clementina talked of London University and
Bedford College; she had been making enquiries; Daphne described
some of the mistresses at her new school. The feeling that
something was expected had got upon Scrope's nerves. He talked a
little in a flat and obvious way, and lapsed into thoughtful
silences. While supper was being cleared away he went back into
his study.

Thence he returned to the dining-room hearthrug as his family
resumed their various occupations.

He tried to speak in a casual conversational tone.

"I want to tell you all," he said, "of something that has
happened to-day."

He waited. Phoebe had begun to figure at a fresh sheet of
computations. Miriam bent her head closer over her work, as
though she winced at what was coming. Daphne and Clementina
looked at one another. Their eyes said "Eleanor!" But he was too
full of his own intention to read that glance. Only his wife
regarded him attentively.

"It concerns you all," he said.

He looked at Phoebe. He saw Lady Ella's hand go out and touch
the girl's hand gently to make her desist. Phoebe obeyed, with a
little sigh.

"I want to tell you that to-day I refused an income that would
certainly have exceeded fifteen hundred pounds a year."

Clementina looked up now. This was not what she expected. Her
expression conveyed protesting enquiry.

"I want you all to understand why I did that and why we are in
the position we are in, and what lies before us. I want you to
know what has been going on in my mind."

He looked down at the hearthrug, and tried to throw off a
memory of his Princhester classes for young women, that oppressed
him. His manner he forced to a more familiar note. He stuck his
hands into his trouser pockets.

"You know, my dears, I had to give up the church. I just simply
didn't believe any more in orthodox Church teaching. And I feel
I've never explained that properly to you. Not at all clearly. I
want to explain that now. It's a queer thing, I know, for me to
say to you, but I want you to understand that I am a religious
man. I believe that God matters more than wealth or comfort or
position or the respect of men, that he also matters more than
your comfort and prosperity. God knows I have cared for your
comfort and prosperity. I don't want you to think that in all
these changes we have been through lately, I haven't been aware
of all the discomfort into which you have come--the relative
discomfort. Compared with Princhester this is dark and crowded
and poverty-stricken. I have never felt crowded before, but in
this house I know you are horribly crowded. It is a house that
seems almost contrived for small discomforts. This narrow passage
outside; the incessant going up and down stairs. And there are
other things. There is the blankness of our London Sundays. What
is the good of pretending? They are desolating. There's the
impossibility too of getting good servants to come into our
dug-out kitchen. I'm not blind to all these sordid consequences.
But all the same, God has to be served first. I had to come to
this. I felt I could not serve God any longer as a bishop in the
established church, because I did not believe that the
established church was serving God. I struggled against that
conviction--and I struggled against it largely for your sakes.
But I had to obey my conviction.... I haven't talked to you about
these things as much as I should have done, but partly at least
that is due to the fact that my own mind has been changing and
reconsidering, going forward and going back, and in that fluid
state it didn't seem fair to tell you things that I might
presently find mistaken. But now I begin to feel that I have
really thought out things, and that they are definite enough to
tell you....

He paused and resumed. "A number of things have helped to
change the opinions in which I grew up and in which you have
grown up. There were worries at Princhester; I didn't let you
know much about them, but there were. There was something harsh
and cruel in that atmosphere. I saw for the first time--it's a
lesson I'm still only learning--how harsh and greedy rich
people and employing people are to poor people and working
people, and how ineffective our church was to make things better.
That struck me. There were religious disputes in the diocese too,
and they shook me. I thought my faith was built on a rock, and I
found it was built on sand. It was slipping and sliding long
before the war. But the war brought it down. Before the war such
a lot of things in England and Europe seemed like a comedy or a
farce, a bad joke that one tolerated. One tried half consciously,
half avoiding the knowledge of what one was doing, to keep one's
own little circle and life civilized. The war shook all those
ideas of isolation, all that sort of evasion, down. The world is
the rightful kingdom of God; we had left its affairs to kings and
emperors and suchlike impostors, to priests and profit-seekers
and greedy men. We were genteel condoners. The war has ended
that. It thrusts into all our lives. It brings death so close--
A fortnight ago twenty-seven people were killed and injured
within a mile of this by Zeppelin bombs.... Every one loses some
one.... Because through all that time men like myself were going
through our priestly mummeries, abasing ourselves to kings and
politicians, when we ought to have been crying out: 'No! No!
There is no righteousness in the world, there is no right
government, except it be the kingdom of God.'"

He paused and looked at them. They were all listening to him
now. But he was still haunted by a dread of preaching in his own
family. He dropped to the conversational note again.

"You see what I had in mind. I saw I must come out of this, and
preach the kingdom of God. That was my idea. I don't want to
force it upon you, but I want you to understand why I acted as I
did. But let me come to the particular thing that has happened
to-day. I did not think when I made my final decision to leave
the church that it meant such poverty as this we are living in--
permanently. That is what I want to make clear to you. I thought
there would be a temporary dip into dinginess, but that was all.
There was a plan; at the time it seemed a right and reasonable
plan; for setting up a chapel in London, a very plain and simple
undenominational chapel, for the simple preaching of the world
kingdom of God. There was some one who seemed prepared to meet
all the immediate demands for such a chapel."

"Was it Lady Sunderbund?" asked Clementina.

Scrope was pulled up abruptly. "Yes," he said. "It seemed at
first a quite hopeful project."

"We'd have hated that," said Clementina, with a glance as if
for assent, at her mother. "We should all have hated that."

"Anyhow it has fallen through."

"We don't mind that," said Clementina, and Daphne echoed her
words.

"I don't see that there is any necessity to import this note of
--hostility to Lady Sunderbund into this matter." He addressed
himself rather more definitely to Lady Ella. "She's a woman of a
very extraordinary character, highly emotional, energetic,
generous to an extraordinary extent...."

Daphne made a little noise like a comment.

A faint acerbity in her father's voice responded.

"Anyhow you make a mistake if you think that the personality of
Lady Sunderbund has very much to do with this thing now. Her
quality may have brought out certain aspects of the situation
rather more sharply than they might have been brought out under
other circumstances, but if this chapel enterprise had been
suggested by quite a different sort of person, by a man, or by a
committee, in the end I think I should have come to the same
conclusion. Leave Lady Sunderbund out. Any chapel was impossible.
It is just this specialization that has been the trouble with
religion. It is just this tendency to make it the business of a
special sort of man, in a special sort of building, on a special
day--Every man, every building, every day belongs equally to God.
That is my conviction. I think that the only possible existing
sort of religions meeting is something after the fashion of the
Quaker meeting. In that there is no professional religious man at
all; not a trace of the sacrifices to the ancient gods.... And no
room for a professional religions man...." He felt his argument
did a little escape him. He snatched, "That is what I want to
make clear to you. God is not a speciality; he is a universal
interest."

He stopped. Both Daphne and Clementina seemed disposed to say
something and did not say anything.

Miriam was the first to speak. "Daddy," she said, "I know I'm
stupid. But are we still Christians?"

"I want you to think for yourselves."

"But I mean," said Miriam, "are we--something like Quakers--
a sort of very broad Christians?"

"You are what you choose to be. If you want to keep in the
church, then you must keep in the church. If you feel that the
Christian doctrine is alive, then it is alive so far as you are
concerned."

"But the creeds?" asked Clementina.

He shook his head. "So far as Christianity is defined by its
creeds, I am not a Christian. If we are going to call any sort of
religious feeling that has a respect for Jesus, Christianity,
then no doubt I am a Christian. But so was Mohammed at that rate.
Let me tell you what I believe. I believe in God, I believe in
the immediate presence of God in every human life, I believe that
our lives have to serve the Kingdom of God...."

"That practically is what Mr. Chasters calls 'The Core of Truth
in Chrlstianity.'"

"You have been reading him?"

"Eleanor lent me the book. But Mr. Chasters keeps his living."

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

Lady Ella had said no word for some time.

"I would be ashamed," she said quietly, "if you had not done as
you have done. I don't mind--The girls don't mind--all this....
Not when we understand--as we do now.

That was the limit of her eloquence.

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

There was a queer little pause. He stood rather distressed and
perplexed, because the talk had not gone quite as he had intended
it to go. It had deteriorated towards personal issues. Phoebe
broke the awkwardness by jumping up and coming to her father.
"Dear Daddy," she said, and kissed him.

"We didn't understand properly," said Clementina, in the tone
of one who explains away much--that had never been spoken....

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

"But the fire!" interjected Lady Ella, disposing of that idea.

"I want you to know, all of you, the faith I have," he said.

Daphne had remained seated at the table.

"Are we never to go to church again?" she asked, as if at a
loss.

(17)


Scrope went back into his little study. He felt shy and awkward
with his daughters now. He felt it would be difficult to get back
to usualness with them. To-night it would be impossible.
To-morrow he must come down to breakfast as though their talk had
never occurred.... In his rehearsal of this deliverance during
his walk home he had spoken much more plainly of his sense of the
coming of God to rule the world and end the long age of the
warring nations and competing traders, and he had intended to
speak with equal plainness of the passionate subordination of the
individual life to this great common purpose of God and man, an
aspect he had scarcely mentioned at all. But in that little room,
in the presence of those dear familiar people, those great
horizons of life had vanished. The room with its folding doors
had fixed the scale. The wallpaper had smothered the Kingdom of
God; he had been, he felt, domestic; it had been an after-supper
talk. He had been put out, too, by the mention of Lady Sunderbund
and the case of Chasters....

In his study he consoled himself for this diminution of his
intention. It had taken him five years, he reflected, to get to
his present real sense of God's presence and to his personal
subordination to God's purpose. It had been a little absurd, he
perceived, to expect these girls to leap at once to a complete
understanding of the halting hints, the allusive indications of
the thoughts that now possessed his soul. He tried like some
maiden speaker to recall exactly what it was he had said and what
it was he had forgotten to say.... This was merely a beginning,
merely a beginning.

After the girls had gone to bed, Lady Ella came to him and she
was glowing and tender; she was in love again as she had not been
since the shadow had first fallen between them. "I was so glad
you spoke to them," she said. "They had been puzzled. But they
are dear loyal girls."

He tried to tell her rather more plainly what he felt about the
whole question of religion in their lives, but eloquence had
departed from him.

"You see, Ella, life cannot get out of tragedy--and sordid
tragedy--until we bring about the Kingdom of God. It's no
unreality that has made me come out of the church."

"No, dear. No," she said soothingly and reassuringly. "With all
these mere boys going to the most dreadful deaths in the
trenches, with death, hardship and separation running amok in the
world--"

"One has to do something," she agreed.

"I know, dear," he said, "that all this year of doubt and
change has been a dreadful year for you."

"It was stupid of me," she said, "but I have been so unhappy.
It's over now--but I was wretched. And there was nothing I could
say.... I prayed.... It isn't the poverty I feared ever, but the
disgrace. Now--I'm happy. I'm happy again.

"But how far do you come with me?"

"I'm with you."

"But," he said, "you are still a churchwoman?"

"I don't know," she said. "I don't mind."

He stared at her.

"But I thought always that was what hurt you most, my breach
with the church."

"Things are so different now," she said.

Her heart dissolved within her into tender possessiveness.
There came flooding into her mind the old phrases of an ancient
story: "Whither thou goest I will go... thy people shall be my
people and thy God my God.... The Lord do so to me and more also
if aught but death part thee and me."

Just those words would Lady Ella have said to her husband now,
but she was capable of no such rhetoric.

"Whither thou goest," she whispered almost inaudibly, and she
could get no further. "My dear," she said.

(18)


At two o'clock the next morning Scrope was still up. He was
sitting over the snoring gas fire in his study. He did not want
to go to bed. His mind was too excited, he knew, for any hope of
sleep. In the last twelve hours, since he had gone out across the
park to his momentous talk with Lady Sunderbund, it seemed to him
that his life had passed through its cardinal crisis and come to
its crown and decision. The spiritual voyage that had begun five
years ago amidst a stormy succession of theological nightmares
had reached harbour at last. He was established now in the sure
conviction of God's reality, and of his advent to unify the lives
of men and to save mankind. Some unobserved process in his mind
had perfected that conviction, behind the cloudy veil of his
vacillations and moods. Surely that work was finished now, and
the day's experience had drawn the veil and discovered God
established for ever.

He contrasted this simple and overruling knowledge of God as
the supreme fact in a practical world with that vague and
ineffective subject for sentiment who had been the "God" of his
Anglican days. Some theologian once spoke of God as "the friend
behind phenomena"; that Anglican deity had been rather a vague
flummery behind court and society, wealth, "respectability," and
the comfortable life. And even while he had lived in lipservice
to that complaisant compromise, this true God had been here, this
God he now certainly professed, waiting for his allegiance,
waiting to take up the kingship of this distraught and
bloodstained earth. The finding of God is but the stripping of
bandages from the eyes. Seek and ye shall find....

He whispered four words very softly: "The Kingdom of God!"

He was quite sure he had that now, quite sure.

The Kingdom of God!

That now was the form into which all his life must fall. He
recalled his vision of the silver sphere and of ten thousand
diverse minds about the world all making their ways to the same
one conclusion. Here at last was a king and emperor for mankind
for whom one need have neither contempt nor resentment; here was
an aim for which man might forge the steel and wield the scalpel,
write and paint and till and teach. Upon this conception he must
model all his life. Upon this basis he must found friendships and
co-operations. All the great religions, Christianity, Islam, in
the days of their power and honesty, had proclaimed the advent of
this kingdom of God. It had been their common inspiration. A
religion surrenders when it abandons the promise of its
Millennium. He had recovered that ancient and immortal hope. All
men must achieve it, and with their achievement the rule of God
begins. He muttered his faith. It made it more definite to put it
into words and utter it. "It comes. It surely comes. To-morrow I
begin. I will do no work that goes not Godward. Always now it
shall be the truth as near as I can put it. Always now it shall
be the service of the commonweal as well as I can do it. I will
live for the ending of all false kingship and priestcraft, for
the eternal growth of the spirit of man...."

He was, he knew clearly, only one common soldier in a great
army that was finding its way to enlistment round and about the
earth. He was not alone. While the kings of this world fought for
dominion these others gathered and found themselves and one
another, these others of the faith that grows plain, these men
who have resolved to end the bloodstained chronicles of the
Dynasts and the miseries of a world that trades in life, for
ever. They were many men, speaking divers tongues. He was but one
who obeyed the worldwide impulse. He could smile at the artless
vanity that had blinded him to the import of his earlier visions,
that had made him imagine himself a sole discoverer, a new
Prophet, that had brought him so near to founding a new sect.
Every soldier in the new host was a recruiting sergeant according
to his opportunity.... And none was leader. Only God was
leader....

"The achievement of the Kingdom of God;" this was his calling.
Henceforth this was his business in life....

For a time he indulged in vague dreams of that kingdom of God
on earth of which he would be one of the makers; it was a dream
of a shadowy splendour of cities, of great scientific
achievements, of a universal beauty, of beautiful people living
in the light of God, of a splendid adventure, thrusting out at
last among the stars. But neither his natural bent nor his mental
training inclined him to mechanical or administrative
explicitness. Much more was his dream a vision of men inwardly
ennobled and united in spirit. He saw history growing reasonable
and life visibly noble as mankind realized the divine aim. All
the outward peace and order, the joy of physical existence finely
conceived, the mounting power and widening aim were but the
expression and verification of the growth of God within. Then we
would bear children for finer ends than the blood and mud of
battlefields. Life would tower up like a great flame. By faith we
reached forward to that. The vision grew more splendid as it grew
more metaphorical. And the price one paid for that; one gave sham
dignities, false honour, a Levitical righteousness, immediate
peace, one bartered kings and churches for God.... He looked at
the mean, poverty-struck room, he marked the dinginess and
tawdriness of its detail and all the sordid evidences of
ungracious bargaining and grudging service in its appointments.
For all his life now he would have to live in such rooms. He who
had been one of the lucky ones.... Well, men were living in
dug-outs and dying gaily in muddy trenches, they had given limbs
and lives, eyes and the joy of movement, prosperity and pride,
for a smaller cause and a feebler assurance than this that he had
found....

(19)


Presently his thoughts were brought back to his family by the
sounds of Eleanor's return. He heard her key in the outer door;
he heard her move about in the hall and then slip lightly up to
bed. He did not go out to speak to her, and she did not note the
light under his door.

He would talk to her later when this discovery of her own
emotions no longer dominated her mind. He recalled her departing
figure and how she had walked, touching and looking up to her
young mate, and he a little leaning to her....

"God bless them and save them," he said....

He thought of her sisters. They had said but little to his
clumsy explanations. He thought of the years and experience that
they must needs pass through before they could think the fulness
of his present thoughts, and so he tempered his disappointment.
They were a gallant group, he felt. He had to thank Ella and good
fortune that so they were. There was Clementina with her odd
quick combatant sharpness, a harder being than Eleanor, but
nevertheless a finespirited and even more independent. There was
Miriam, indefatigably kind. Phoebe too had a real passion of the
intellect and Daphne an innate disposition to service. But it was
strange how they had taken his proclamation of a conclusive
breach with the church as though it was a command they must, at
least outwardly, obey. He had expected them to be more deeply
shocked; he had thought he would have to argue against objections
and convert them to his views. Their acquiescence was strange.
They were content he should think all this great issue out and
give his results to them. And his wife, well as he knew her, had
surprised him. He thought of her words: "Whither thou goest--"

He was dissatisfied with this unconditional agreement. Why
could not his wife meet God as he had met God? Why must Miriam
put the fantastic question--as though it was not for her to
decide: "Are we still Christians?" And pursuing this thought, why
couldn't Lady Sunderbund set up in religion for herself without
going about the world seeking for a priest and prophet. Were
women Undines who must get their souls from mortal men? And who
was it tempted men to set themselves up as priests? It was the
wife, the disciple, the lover, who was the last, the most fatal
pitfall on the way to God.

He began to pray, still sitting as he prayed.

"Oh God!" he prayed. "Thou who has shown thyself to me, let me
never forget thee again. Save me from forgetfulness. And show
thyself to those I love; show thyself to all mankind. Use me, O
God, use me; but keep my soul alive. Save me from the presumption
of the trusted servant; save me from the vanity of authority....

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

He paused. A flushed, childishly miserable face that stared
indignantly through glittering tears, rose before his eyes. He
forgot that he had been addressing God.

"How can I help you, you silly thing?" he said. "I would give
my own soul to know that God had given his peace to you. I could
not do as you wished. And I have hurt you!... You hurt
yourself.... But all the time you would have hampered me and
tempted me--and wasted yourself. It was impossible.... And yet
you are so fine!"

He was struck by another aspect.

"Ella was happy--partly because Lady Sunderbund was hurt and
left desolated...."

"Both of them are still living upon nothings. Living for
nothings. A phantom way of living...."

He stared blankly at the humming blue gas jets amidst the
incandescent asbestos for a space.

"Make them understand," he pleaded, as though he spoke
confidentially of some desirable and reasonable thing to a friend
who sat beside him. "You see it is so hard for them until they
understand. It is easy enough when one understands. Easy--" He
reflected for some moments--" It is as if they could not exist -
- except in relationship to other definite people. I want them
to exist--as now I exist--in relationship to God. Knowing
God...."

But now he was talking to himself again.

"So far as one can know God," he said presently.

For a while he remained frowning at the fire. Then he bent
forward, turned out the gas, arose with the air of a man who
relinquishes a difficult task. "One is limited," he said. "All
one's ideas must fall within one's limitations. Faith is a sort
of tour de force. A feat of the imagination. For such things as
we are. Naturally--naturally.... One perceives it clearly only
in rare moments.... That alters nothing...."





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Soul of a Bishop, by H. G. Wells





Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:
LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
KIPPS
MR. POLLY
THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
ANN VERONICA
TONO BUNGAY
MARRIAGE
BEALBY
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH

The following fantastic and imaginative romances:
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
THE TIME MACHINE
THE WONDERFUL VISIT
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
THE SEA LADY
THE SLEEPER AWAKES
THE FOOD OF THE GODS
THE WAR IN THE AIR
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
THE WORLD SET FREE

And numerous Short Stories now collected in
One Volume under the title of
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

A Series of books upon Social, Religious and
Political questions:
ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
MANKIND IN THE MAKING
FIRST AND LAST THINGS (RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY)
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
A MODERN UTOPIA
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
WHAT IS COMING?
WAR AND THE FUTURE
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING

And two little books about children's play, called:
FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Soul of a Bishop, by H. G. Wells