第24章 THE FOURTH - THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND(4)

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

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

She echoed his gesture.

"Probably I'm not alone among my brethren," he went on, and then: "But what is one to do?"With her hands she acted her sense of his difficulty.

"One may be precipitate," he said."There's a kind of loyalty and discipline that requires one to keep the ranks until one's course of action is perfectly clear.One owes so much to so many.

One has to consider how one may affect--oh! people one has never seen."He was lugging things now into speech that so far had been scarcely above the threshold of his conscious thought.He went on to discuss the entire position of the disbelieving cleric.He discovered a fine point.