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+Project Gutenberg's The Inside of the Cup, Volume 5, by Winston Churchill
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Inside of the Cup, Volume 5
+
+Author: Winston Churchill
+
+Release Date: October 17, 2004 [EBook #5360]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INSIDE OF THE CUP, VOLUME 5 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE INSIDE OF THE CUP
+
+By Winston Churchill
+
+
+
+Volume 5.
+
+
+XVII.   RECONSTRUCTION
+XVIII.  THE RIDDLE OF CAUSATION
+XIX.    MR. GOODRICH BECOMES A PARTISAN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+RECONSTRUCTION
+
+
+I
+
+Life had indeed become complicated, paradoxical. He, John Hodder, a
+clergyman, rector of St. John's by virtue of not having resigned, had
+entered a restaurant of ill repute, had ordered champagne for an
+abandoned woman, and had no sense of sin when he awoke the next morning!
+The devil, in the language of orthodox theology, had led him there. He
+had fallen under the influence of the tempter of his youth, and all in
+him save the carnal had been blotted out.
+
+More paradoxes! If the devil had not taken possession of him and led him
+there, it were more than probable that he could never have succeeded in
+any other way in getting on a footing of friendship with this woman, Kate
+Marcy. Her future, to be sure, was problematical. Here was no simple,
+sentimental case he might formerly have imagined, of trusting innocence
+betrayed, but a mixture of good and evil, selfishness and unselfishness.
+And she had, in spite of all, known the love which effaces self! Could
+the disintegration, in her case, be arrested?
+
+Gradually Hodder was filled with a feeling which may be called amazement
+because, although his brain was no nearer to a solution than before, he
+was not despondent. For a month he had not permitted his mind to dwell
+on the riddle; yet this morning he felt stirring within him a new energy
+for which he could not account, a hope unconnected with any mental
+process! He felt in touch, once more, faintly but perceptibly, with
+something stable in the chaos. In bygone years he had not seen the
+chaos, but the illusion of an orderly world, a continual succession of
+sunrises, 'couleur de rose', from the heights above Bremerton. Now were
+the scales fallen from his eyes; now he saw the evil, the injustice, the
+despair; felt, in truth, the weight of the sorrow of it all, and yet that
+sorrow was unaccountably transmuted, as by a chemical process, into
+something which for the first time had a meaning--he could not say what
+meaning. The sting of despair had somehow been taken out of it, and it
+remained poignant!
+
+Not on the obsession of the night before, when he had walked down Dalton
+Street and beheld it transformed into a realm of adventure, but upon his
+past life did he look back now with horror, upon the even tenor of those
+days and years in the bright places. His had been the highroad of a
+fancied security, from which he had feared to stray, to seek his God
+across the rough face of nature, from black, forgotten capons to the
+flying peaks in space. He had feared reality. He had insisted upon
+gazing at the universe through the coloured glasses of an outworn
+theology, instead of using his own eyes.
+
+So he had left the highroad, the beaten way of salvation many others had
+deserted, had flung off his spectacles, had plunged into reality, to be
+scratched and battered, to lose his way. Not until now had something of
+grim zest come to him, of an instinct which was the first groping of a
+vision, as to where his own path might lie. Through what thickets and
+over what mountains he knew not as yet--nor cared to know. He felt
+resistance, whereas on the highroad he had felt none. On the highroad
+his cry had gone unheeded and unheard, yet by holding out his hand in the
+wilderness he had helped another, bruised and bleeding, to her feet!
+Salvation, Let it be what it might be, he would go on, stumbling and
+seeking, through reality.
+
+Even this last revelation, of Eldon Parr's agency in another tragedy,
+seemed to have no further power to affect him. . . Nor could Hodder
+think of Alison as in blood-relationship to the financier, or even to the
+boy, whose open, pleasure-loving face he had seen in the photograph.
+
+
+
+II
+
+A presage of autumn was in the air, and a fine, misty rain drifted in at
+his windows as he sat at his breakfast. He took deep breaths of the
+moisture, and it seemed to water and revive his parching soul. He found
+himself, to his surprise, surveying with equanimity the pile of books in
+the corner which had led him to the conviction of the emptiness of the
+universe--but the universe was no longer empty! It was cruel, but a
+warring force was at work in it which was not blind, but directed. He
+could not say why this was so, but he knew it, he felt it, sensed its
+energy within him as he set out for Dalton Street.
+
+He was neither happy nor unhappy, but in equilibrium, walking with sure
+steps, and the anxiety in which he had fallen asleep the night before was
+gone: anxiety lest the woman should have fled, or changed her mind, or
+committed some act of desperation.
+
+In Dalton Street a thin coat of yellow mud glistened on the asphalt, but
+even the dreariness of this neighbourhood seemed transient. He rang the
+bell of the flat, the door swung open, and in the hall above a woman
+awaited him. She was clad in black.
+
+"You wouldn't know me, would you?" she inquired. "Say, I scarcely know
+myself. I used to wear this dress at Pratt's, with white collars and
+cuffs and--well, I just put it on again. I had it in the bottom of my
+trunk, and I guessed you'd like it."
+
+"I didn't know you at first," he said, and the pleasure in his face was
+her reward.
+
+The transformation, indeed, was more remarkable than he could have
+believed possible, for respectability itself would seem to have been
+regained by a costume, and the abundance of her remarkable hair was now
+repressed. The absence of paint made her cheeks strangely white, the
+hollows under the eyes darker. The eyes themselves alone betrayed the
+woman of yesterday; they still burned.
+
+"Why," he exclaimed, looking around him, "you have been busy, haven't
+you?"
+
+"I've been up since six," she told him proudly. The flat had been
+dismantled of its meagre furniture, the rug was rolled up and tied, and a
+trunk strapped with rope was in the middle of the floor. Her next remark
+brought home to him the full responsibility of his situation. She led
+him to the window, and pointed to a spot among the drenched weeds and
+rubbish in the yard next door. "Do you see that bottle? That's the
+first thing I did--flung it out there. It didn't break," she added
+significantly, "and there are three drinks in it yet."
+
+Once more he confined his approval to his glance.
+
+"Now you must come and have some breakfast," he said briskly. "If I had
+thought about it I should have waited to have it with you."
+
+"I'm not hungry." In the light of his new knowledge, he connected her
+sudden dejection with the sight of the bottle.
+
+"But you must eat. You're exhausted from all this work. And a cup of
+coffee will make all the difference in the world."
+
+She yielded, pinning on her hat. And he led her, holding the umbrella
+over her, to a restaurant in Tower Street, where a man in a white cap and
+apron was baking cakes behind a plate-glass window. She drank the
+coffee, but in her excitement left the rest of the breakfast almost
+untasted.
+
+"Say," she asked him once, "why are you doing this?"
+
+"I don't know," he answered, "except that it gives me pleasure."
+
+"Pleasure?"
+
+"Yes. It makes me feel as if I were of some use."
+
+She considered this.
+
+"Well," she observed, reviled by the coffee, "you're the queerest
+minister I ever saw."
+
+When they had reached the pavement she asked him where they were going.
+
+"To see a friend of mine, and a friend of yours," he told her. "He does
+net live far from here."
+
+She was silent again, acquiescing. The rain had stopped, the sun was
+peeping out furtively through the clouds, the early loiterers in Dalton
+Street stared at them curiously. But Hodder was thinking of that house
+whither they were bound with a new gratitude, a new wonder that it should
+exist. Thus they came to the sheltered vestibule with its glistening
+white paint, its polished name plate and doorknob. The grinning,
+hospitable darky appeared in answer to the rector's ring.
+
+"Good morning, Sam," he said; "is Mr. Bentley in?"
+
+Sam ushered them ceremoniously into the library, and gate Marcy gazed
+about her with awe, as at something absolutely foreign to her experience:
+the New Barrington Hotel, the latest pride of the city, recently erected
+at the corner of Tower and Jefferson and furnished in the French style,
+she might partially have understood. Had she been marvellously and
+suddenly transported and established there, existence might still have
+evinced a certain continuity. But this house! . .
+
+Mr. Bentley rose from the desk in the corner.
+
+"Oh, it's you, Hodder," he said cheerfully, laying his hand on the
+rector's arm. "I was just thinking about you."
+
+"This is Miss Marcy, Mr. Bentley," Hodder said.
+
+Mr. Bentley took her hand and led her to a chair.
+
+"Mr. Hodder knows how fond I am of young women," he said. "I have six of
+them upstairs,--so I am never lonely."
+
+Mr. Bentley did not appear to notice that her lips quivered.
+
+Hodder turned his eyes from her face. "Miss Marcy has been lonely," he
+explained, "and I thought we might get her a room near by, where she
+might see them often. She is going to do embroidery."
+
+"Why, Sally will know of a room," Mr. Bentley replied. "Sam!" he called.
+
+"Yessah--yes, Mistah Ho'ace." Sam appeared at the door.
+
+"Ask Miss Sally to come down, if she's not busy."
+
+Kate Marcy sat dumbly in her chair, her hands convulsively clasping its
+arms, her breast heaving stormily, her face becoming intense with the
+effort of repressing the wild emotion within her: emotion that threatened
+to strangle her if resisted, or to sweep her out like a tide and drown
+her in deep waters: emotion that had no one mewing, and yet summed up a
+life, mysteriously and overwhelmingly aroused by the sight of a room, and
+of a kindly old gentleman who lived in it!
+
+Mr. Bentley took the chair beside her.
+
+"Why, I believe it's going to clear off, after all," he exclaimed.
+"Sam predicted it, before breakfast. He pretends to be able to tell by
+the flowers. After a while I must show you my flowers, Miss Marcy, and
+what Dalton Street can do by way of a garden--Mr. Hodder could hardly
+believe it, even when he saw it." Thus he went on, the tips of his
+fingers pressed together, his head bent forward in familiar attitude, his
+face lighted, speaking naturally of trivial things that seemed to suggest
+themselves; and careful, with exquisite tact that did not betray itself,
+to address both. A passing automobile startled her with the blast of its
+horn. "I'm afraid I shall never get accustomed to them," he lamented.
+"At first I used to be thankful there were no trolley cars on this
+street, but I believe the automobiles are worse."
+
+A figure flitted through the hall and into the room, which Hodder
+recognized as Miss Grower's. She reminded him of a flying shuttle across
+the warp of Mr. Bentley's threads, weaving them together; swift, sure,
+yet never hurried or flustered. One glance at the speechless woman
+seemed to suffice her for a knowledge of the situation.
+
+"Mr. Hodder has brought us a new friend and neighbour, Sally,--Miss Kate
+Marcy. She is to have a room near us, that we may see her often."
+
+Hodder watched Miss Grower's procedure with a breathless interest.
+
+"Why, Mrs. McQuillen has a room--across the street, you know, Mr.
+Bentley."
+
+Sally perched herself on the edge of the armchair and laid her hand
+lightly on Kate Marcy's.
+
+Even Sally Grover was powerless to prevent the inevitable, and the touch
+of her hand seemed the signal for the release of the pent-up forces. The
+worn body, the worn nerves, the weakened will gave way, and Kate Marcy
+burst into a paroxysm of weeping that gradually became automatic,
+convulsive, like a child's. There was no damming this torrent, once
+released. Kindness, disinterested friendship, was the one unbearable
+thing.
+
+"We must bring her upstairs," said Sally Grover, quietly, "she's going to
+pieces."
+
+Hodder helping, they fairly carried her up the flight, and laid her on
+Sally Grover's own bed.
+
+That afternoon she was taken to Mrs. McQuillen's.
+
+The fiends are not easily cheated. And during the nights and days that
+followed even Sally Grower, whose slight frame was tireless, whose
+stoicism was amazing, came out of the sick room with a white face and
+compressed lips. Tossing on the mattress, Kate Marcy enacted over again
+incident after incident of her past life, events natural to an existence
+which had been largely devoid of self-pity, but which now, clearly
+enough, tested the extreme limits of suffering. Once more, in her
+visions, she walked the streets, wearily measuring the dark, empty
+blocks, footsore, into the smaller hours of the night; slyly,
+insinuatingly, pathetically offering herself--all she possessed--to the
+hovering beasts of prey. And even these rejected her, with gibes, with
+obscene jests that sprang to her lips and brought a shudder to those who
+heard.
+
+Sometimes they beheld flare up fitfully that mysterious thing called
+the human spirit, which all this crushing process had not served to
+extinguish. She seemed to be defending her rights, whatever these may
+have been! She expostulated with policemen. And once, when Hodder was
+present, she brought back vividly to his mind that first night he had
+seen her, when she had defied him and sent him away. In moments she
+lived over again the careless, reckless days when money and good looks
+had not been lacking, when rich food and wines had been plentiful. And
+there were other events which Sally Grower and the good-natured
+Irishwoman, Mrs. McQuillen, not holding the key, could but dimly
+comprehend. Education, environment, inheritance, character--what a
+jumble of causes! What Judge was to unravel them, and assign the exact
+amount of responsibility?
+
+There were other terrible scenes when, more than semiconscious, she cried
+out piteously for drink, and cursed them for withholding it. And it was
+in the midst of one of these that an incident occurred which made a deep
+impression upon young Dr. Giddings, hesitating with his opiates, and
+assisting the indomitable Miss Grower to hold his patient. In the midst
+of the paroxysm Mr. Bentley entered and stood over her by the bedside,
+and suddenly her struggles ceased. At first she lay intensely still,
+staring at him with wide eyes of fear. He sat down and took her hand,
+and spoke to her, quietly and naturally, and her pupils relaxed. She
+fell into a sleep, still clinging to his fingers.
+
+It was Sally who opposed the doctor's wish to send her to a hospital.
+
+"If it's only a question of getting back her health, she'd better die,"
+she declared. "We've got but one chance with her, Dr. Giddings, to keep
+her here. When she finds out she's been to a hospital, that will be the
+end of it with her kind. We'll never get hold of her again. I'll take
+care of Mrs. McQuillen."
+
+Doctor Giddings was impressed by this wisdom.
+
+"You think you have a chance, Miss Grower?" he asked. He had had a
+hospital experience.
+
+Miss Grower was wont to express optimism in deeds rather than words.
+
+"If I didn't think so, I'd ask you to put a little more in your
+hypodermic next time," she replied.
+
+And the doctor went away, wondering . . . .
+
+Drink! Convalescence brought little release for the watchers. The
+fiends would retire, pretending to have abandoned the field, only to
+swoop down again when least expected. There were periods of calm when it
+seemed as though a new and bewildered personality were emerging, amazed
+to find in life a kindly thing, gazing at the world as one new-born. And
+again, Mrs. McQuillen or Ella Finley might be seen running bareheaded
+across the street for Miss Grower. Physical force was needed, as the
+rector discovered on one occasion; physical force, and something more,
+a dauntlessness that kept Sally Grower in the room after the other women
+had fled in terror. Then remorse, despondency, another fear . . . .
+
+As the weeks went by, the relapses certainly became fewer. Something was
+at work, as real in its effects as the sunlight, but invisible. Hodder
+felt it, and watched in suspense while it fought the beasts in this
+woman, rending her frame in anguish. The frame might succumb, the breath
+might leave it to moulder, but the struggle, he knew, would go until the
+beasts were conquered. Whence this knowledge?--for it was knowledge.
+
+On the quieter days of her convalescence she seemed, indeed, more Madonna
+than Magdalen as she sat against the pillows, her red-gold hair lying in
+two heavy plaits across her shoulders, her cheeks pale; the inner,
+consuming fires that smouldered in her eyes died down. At such times her
+newly awakened innocence (if it might be called such--pathetic innocence,
+in truth!) struck awe into Hodder; her wonder was matched by his own.
+Could there be another meaning in life than the pursuit of pleasure,
+than the weary effort to keep the body alive?
+
+Such was her query, unformulated. What animated these persons who had
+struggled over her so desperately, Sally Grower, Mr. Bentley, and Hodder
+himself? Thus her opening mind. For she had a mind.
+
+Mr. Bentley was the chief topic, and little by little he became exalted
+into a mystery of which she sought the explanation.
+
+"I never knew anybody like him," she would exclaim.
+
+"Why, I'd seen him on Dalton Street with the children following him, and
+I saw him again that day of the funeral. Some of the girls I knew used
+to laugh at him. We thought he was queer. And then, when you brought me
+to him that morning and he got up and treated me like a lady, I just
+couldn't stand it. I never felt so terrible in my life. I just wanted
+to die, right then and there. Something inside of me kept pressing and
+pressing, until I thought I would die. I knew what it was to hate
+myself, but I never hated myself as I have since then.
+
+"He never says anything about God, and you don't, but when he comes in
+here he seems like God to me. He's so peaceful,--he makes me peaceful.
+I remember the minister in Madison,--he was a putty-faced man with
+indigestion,--and when he prayed he used to close his eyes and try to
+look pious, but he never fooled me. He never made me believe he knew
+anything about God. And don't think for a minute he'd have done what you
+and Miss Grower and Mr. Bentley did! He used to cross the street to get
+out of the way of drunken men--he wouldn't have one of them in his
+church. And I know of a girl he drove out of town because she had a baby
+and her sweetheart wouldn't marry her. He sent her to hell. Hell's
+here--isn't it?"
+
+These sudden remarks of hers surprised and troubled him. But they had
+another effect, a constructive effect. He was astonished, in going over
+such conversations afterwards, to discover that her questions and his
+efforts to answer them in other than theological terms were both
+illuminating and stimulating. Sayings in the Gospels leaped out in his
+mind, fired with new meanings; so simple, once perceived, that he was
+amazed not to have seen them before. And then he was conscious of a
+palpitating joy which left in its wake a profound thankfulness. He made
+no attempt as yet to correlate these increments, these glimpses of truth
+into a system, but stored them preciously away.
+
+He taxed his heart and intellect to answer her sensible and helpfully,
+and thus found himself avoiding the logic, the Greek philosophy, the
+outworn and meaningless phrases of speculation; found himself employing
+(with extraordinary effect upon them both) the simple words from which
+many of these theories had been derived. "He that hath seen me hath seen
+the Father." What she saw in Horace Bentley, he explained, was God. God
+wished us to know how to live, in order that we might find happiness, and
+therefore Christ taught us that the way to find happiness was to teach
+others how to live,--once we found out. Such was the meaning of Christ's
+Incarnation, to teach us how to live in order that we might find God and
+happiness. And Hodder translated for her the word Incarnation.
+
+Now, he asked, how were we to recognize God, how might we know how he
+wished us to live, unless we saw him in human beings, in the souls into
+which he had entered? In Mr. Bentley's soul? Was this too deep?
+
+She pondered, with flushed face.
+
+"I never had it put to me like that," she said, presently. "I never
+could have known what you meant if I hadn't seen Mr. Bentley."
+
+Here was a return flash, for him. Thus, teaching he taught. From this
+germ he was to evolve for himself the sublime truth that the world grown
+better, not through automatic, soul-saving machinery, but by Personality.
+
+On another occasion she inquired about "original sin;"--a phrase which
+had stuck in her memory since the stormings of the Madison preacher.
+Here was a demand to try his mettle.
+
+"It means," he replied after a moment, "that we are all apt to follow the
+selfish, animal instincts of our matures, to get all we can for ourselves
+without thinking of others, to seek animal pleasures. And we always
+suffer for it."
+
+"Sure," she agreed. "That's what happened to me."
+
+"And unless we see and know some one like Mr. Bentley," he went on,
+choosing his words, "or discover for ourselves what Christ was, and what
+he tried to tell us, we go on 'suffering, because we don't see any way
+out. We suffer because we feel that we are useless, that other persons
+are doing our work."
+
+"That's what hell is!" She was very keen. "Hell's here," she repeated.
+
+"Hell may begin here, and so may heaven," he answered.
+
+"Why, he's in heaven now!" she exclaimed, "it's funny I never thought of
+it before." Of course she referred to Mr. Bentley.
+
+Thus; by no accountable process of reasoning, he stumbled into the path
+which was to lead him to one of the widest and brightest of his vistas,
+the secret of eternity hidden in the Parable of the Talents! But it will
+not do to anticipate this matter . . . .
+
+The divine in this woman of the streets regenerated by the divine in her
+fellow-creatures, was gasping like a new-born babe for breath. And with
+what anxiety they watched her! She grew strong again, went with Sally
+Drover and the other girls on Sunday excursions to the country, applied
+herself to her embroidery with restless zeal for days, only to have it
+drop from her nerveless fingers. But her thoughts were uncontrollable,
+she was drawn continually to the edge of that precipice which hung over
+the waters whence they had dragged her, never knowing when the vertigo
+would seize her. And once Sally Drover, on the alert for just such an
+occurrence, pursued her down Dalton Street and forced her back . . .
+
+Justice to Miss Drover cannot be done in these pages. It was she who
+bore the brunt of the fierce resentment of the reincarnated fiends when
+the other women shrank back in fear, and said nothing to Mr. Bentley or
+Hodder until the incident was past. It was terrible indeed to behold
+this woman revert--almost in the twinkling of an eye--to a vicious wretch
+crazed for drink, to feel that the struggle had to be fought all over
+again. Unable to awe Sally Drover's spirit, she would grow piteous.
+
+"For God's sake let me go--I can't stand it. Let me go to hell--that's
+where I belong. What do you bother with me for? I've got a right."
+
+Once the doctor had to be called. He shook his head but his eye met
+Miss Grower's, and he said nothing.
+
+"I'll never be able to pull out, I haven't got the strength," she told
+Hodder, between sobs. "You ought to have left me be, that was where I
+belonged. I can't stand it, I tell you. If it wasn't for that woman
+watching me downstairs, and Sally Grower, I'd have had a drink before
+this. It ain't any use, I've got so I can't live without it--I don't
+want to live."
+
+And then remorse, self-reproach, despair,--almost as terrible to
+contemplate. She swore she would never see Mr. Bentley again, she
+couldn't face him.
+
+Yet they persisted, and gained ground. She did see Mr. Bentley, but what
+he said to her, or she to him, will never be known. She didn't speak of
+it . . . .
+
+Little by little her interest was aroused, her pride in her work
+stimulated. None was more surprised than Hodder when Sally Grower
+informed him that the embroidery was really good; but it was thought
+best, for psychological reasons, to discard the old table-cover with its
+associations and begin a new one. On occasional evenings she brought her
+sewing over to Mr. Bentley's, while Sally read aloud to him and the young
+women in the library. Miss Grower's taste in fiction was romantic; her
+voice (save in the love passages, when she forgot herself ) sing-song,
+but new and unsuspected realms were opened up for Kate Marcy, who would
+drop her work and gaze wide-eyed out of the window, into the darkness.
+
+And it was Sally who must be given credit for the great experiment,
+although she took Mr. Bentley and Hodder into her confidence. On it they
+staked all. The day came, at last, when the new table-cover was
+finished. Miss Grower took it to the Woman's Exchange, actually sold it,
+and brought back the money and handed it to her with a smile, and left
+her alone.
+
+An hour passed. At the end of it Kate Marcy came out of her room,
+crossed the street, and knocked at the door of Mr. Bentley's library.
+Hodder happened to be there.
+
+"Come in," Mr. Bentley said.
+
+She entered, breathless, pale. Her eyes, which had already lost much of
+the dissipated look, were alight with exaltation. Her face bore evidence
+of the severity of the hour of conflict, and she was perilously near to
+tears. She handed Mr. Bentley the money.
+
+"What's this, Kate?" he asked, in his kindly way.
+
+"It's what I earned, sir," she faltered. "Miss Grower sold the
+table-cover. I thought maybe you'd put it aside for me, like you do for
+the others.
+
+"I'll take good care of it," he said.
+
+"Oh, sir, I don't ever expect to repay you, and Miss Grower and Mr.
+Hodder!
+
+"Why, you are repaying us," he replied, cutting her short, "you are
+making us all very happy. And Sally tells me at the Exchange they like
+your work so well they are asking for more. I shouldn't have suspected,"
+he added, with a humorous glance at the rector, "that Mr. Hodder knew so
+much about embroidery."
+
+He rose, and put the money in his desk,--such was his genius for avoiding
+situations which threatened to become emotional.
+
+"I've started another one," she told them, as she departed.
+
+A few moments later Miss Grower appeared.
+
+"Sally," said Mr. Bentley, "you're a wise woman. I believe I've made
+that remark before. You have managed that case wonderfully."
+
+"There was a time," replied Miss Grower, thoughtfully, when it looked
+pretty black. We've got a chance with her now, I think."
+
+"I hope so. I begin to feel so," Mr. Bentley declared.
+
+"If we succeed," Miss Grower went on, "it will be through the heart. And
+if we lose her again, it will be through the heart."
+
+Hodder started at this proof of insight.
+
+"You know her history, Mr. Hodder?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+"Well, I don't. And I don't care to. But the way to get at Kate Marcy,
+light as she is in some respects, is through her feelings. And she's
+somehow kept 'em alive. We've got to trust her, from now on--that's the
+only way. And that's what God does, anyhow."
+
+This was one of Miss Grover's rare references to the Deity.
+
+Turning over that phrase in his mind, Hodder went slowly back towards the
+parish house. God trusted individuals--even such as Kate Marcy. What
+did that mean? Individual responsibility! He repeated it. Was the
+world on that principle, then? It was as though a search-light were
+flung ahead of him and he saw, dimly, a new order--a new order in
+government and religion. And, as though spoken by a voice out of the
+past, there sounded in his ears the text of that sermon which had so
+deeply moved him, "I will arise and go to my Father."
+
+The church was still open, and under the influence of the same strange
+excitement which had driven him to walk in the rain so long ago, he
+entered and went slowly up the marble aisle. Through the gathering gloom
+he saw the figure on the cross. And as he stood gazing at it, a message
+for which he had been waiting blazed up within him.
+
+He would not leave the Church!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE RIDDLE OF CAUSATION
+
+
+I
+
+In order to portray this crisis in the life of Kate Marcy, the outcome of
+which is still uncertain, other matters have been ignored.
+
+How many persons besides John Hodder have seemed to read--in crucial
+periods--a meaning into incidents having all the outward appearance of
+accidents! What is it that leads us to a certain man or woman at a
+certain time, or to open a certain book? Order and design? or influence?
+
+The night when he had stumbled into the cafe in Dalton Street might well
+have been termed the nadir of Hodder's experience. His faith had been
+blotted out, and, with it had suddenly been extinguished all spiritual
+sense, The beast had taken possession. And then, when it was least
+expected,--nay, when despaired of, had come the glimmer of a light;
+distant, yet clear. He might have traced the course of his
+disillusionment, perhaps, but cause and effect were not discernible here.
+
+They soon became so, and in the weeks that followed he grew to have the
+odd sense of a guiding hand on his shoulder,--such was his instinctive
+interpretation of it, rather than the materialistic one of things
+ordained. He might turn, in obedience to what seemed a whim, either to
+the right or left, only to recognize new blazes that led him on with
+surer step; and trivial accidents became events charged with meaning.
+He lived in continual wonder.
+
+One broiling morning, for instance, he gathered up the last of the books
+whose contents he had a month before so feverishly absorbed, and which
+had purged him of all fallacies. At first he had welcomed them with a
+fierce relief, sucked them dry, then looked upon them with loathing. Now
+he pressed them gratefully, almost tenderly, as he made his way along the
+shady side of the street towards the great library set in its little
+park.
+
+He was reminded, as he passed from the blinding sunlight into the cool
+entrance hall, with its polished marble stairway and its statuary, that
+Eldon Parr's munificence had made the building possible: that some day
+Mr. Parr's bust would stand in that vestibule with that of Judge Henry
+Goodrich--Philip Goodrich's grandfather--and of other men who had served
+their city and their commonwealth.
+
+Upstairs, at the desk, he was handing in the volumes to the young woman
+whose duty it was to receive them when he was hailed by a brisk little
+man in an alpaca coat, with a skin like brown parchment.
+
+"Why, Mr. Hodder," he exclaimed cheerfully, with a trace of German
+accent, "I had an idea you were somewhere on the cool seas with our
+friend, Mr. Parr. He spoke, before he left, of inviting you."
+
+It had been Eldon Parr, indeed, who had first brought Hodder to the
+library, shortly after the rector's advent, and Mr. Engel had accompanied
+them on a tour of inspection; the financier himself had enjoined the
+librarian to "take good care" of the clergyman. Mr. Waring, Mr.
+Atterbury; and Mr. Constable were likewise trustees. And since then,
+when talking to him, Hodder had had a feeling that Mr. Engel was not
+unconscious of the aura--if it may be called such--of his vestry.
+
+Mr. Engel picked up one of the books as it lay on the counter, and as he
+read the title his face betrayed a slight surprise.
+
+"Modern criticism!" he exclaimed.
+
+"You have found me out," the rector acknowledged, smiling.
+
+"Came into my room, and have a chat," said the librarian, coaxingly.
+
+It was a large chamber at the corner of the building, shaded by awnings,
+against which brushed the branches of an elm which had belonged to the
+original park. In the centre of the room was a massive oak desk, one
+whole side of which was piled high with new volumes.
+
+"Look there," said the librarian, with a quick wave of his hand, "those
+are some which came in this week, and I had them put here to look over.
+Two-thirds of 'em on religion, or religious philosophy. Does that
+suggest anything to you clergymen?"
+
+"Do many persons read them, Mr. Engel?" said the rector, at length.
+
+"Read them!" cried Mr. Engel, quizzically. "We librarians are a sort of
+weather-vanes, if people only knew enough to consult us. We can hardly
+get a sufficient number of these new religious books the good ones,
+I mean--to supply the demand. And the Lord knows what trash is devoured,
+from what the booksellers tell me. It reminds me of the days when this
+library was down on Fifth Street, years ago, and we couldn't supply
+enough Darwins and Huxleys and Spencers and popular science generally.
+That was an agnostic age. But now you'd be surprised to see the
+different kinds of men and women who come demanding books on religion
+--all sorts and conditions. They're beginning to miss it out of their
+lives; they want to know. If my opinion's worth anything, I should not
+hesitate to declare that we're on the threshold of a greater religious
+era than the world has ever seen."
+
+Hodder thrust a book back into the pile, and turned abruptly, with a
+manner that surprised the librarian. No other clergyman to whom he had
+spoken on this subject had given evidence of this strong feeling, and the
+rector of St. John's was the last man from whom he would have expected
+it.
+
+"Do you really think so?" Hodder demanded.
+
+"Why, yes," said Mr. Engel, when he had recovered from his astonishment.
+"I'm sure of it. I think clergymen especially--if you will pardon me
+--are apt to forget that this is a reading age. That a great many people
+who used to get what instruction they had--ahem--from churches, for
+instance, now get it from books. I don't want to say anything to offend
+you, Mr. Hodder--"
+
+"You couldn't," interrupted the rector. He was equally surprised at the
+discovery that he had misjudged Mr. Engel, and was drawn towards him now
+with a strong sympathy and curiosity.
+
+"Well," replied Mr. Engel, "I'm glad to hear you say that." He
+restrained a gasp. Was this the orthodox Mr. Hodder of St. John's?
+
+"Why," said Hodder, sitting down, "I've learned, as you have, by
+experience. Only my experience hasn't been so hopeful as yours--that is,
+if you regard yours as hopeful. It would be hypocritical of me not to
+acknowledge that the churches are losing ground, and that those who ought
+to be connected with them are not. I am ready to admit that the churches
+are at fault. But what you tell me of people reading these books gives
+me more courage than I have had for--for some time."
+
+"Is it so!" ejaculated the little man, relapsing into the German idiom of
+his youth.
+
+"It is," answered the rector, with an emphasis not to be denied. "I wish
+you would give me your theory about this phenomenon, and speak frankly."
+
+"But I thought--" the bewildered librarian began. "I saw you had been
+reading those books, but I thought--"
+
+"Naturally you did," said Holder, smiling. His personality, his
+ascendency, his poise, suddenly felt by the other, were still more
+confusing. "You thought me a narrow, complacent, fashionable priest who
+had no concern as to what happened outside the walls of his church, who
+stuck obstinately to dogmas and would give nothing else a hearing. Well,
+you were right."
+
+"Ah, I didn't think all that," Mr. Engel protested, and his parchment
+skin actually performed the miracle of flushing. "I am not so stupid.
+And once, long ago when I was young, I was going to be a minister
+myself."
+
+"What prevented you?" asked Holder, interested.
+
+"You want me to be frank--yes, well, I couldn't take the vows." The
+brown eyes of the quiet, humorous, self-contained and dried-up custodian
+of the city's reading flamed up. "I felt the call," he exclaimed. "You
+may not credit it to look at me now, Mr. Hodder. They said to me, 'here
+is what you must swear to believe before you can make men and women
+happier and more hopeful, rescue them from sin and misery!' You know
+what it was."
+
+Hodder nodded.
+
+"It was a crime. It had nothing to do with religion. I thought it over
+for a year--I couldn't. Oh, I have since been thankful. I can see now
+what would have happened to me--I should have had fatty degeneration of
+the soul."
+
+The expression was not merely forcible, it was overwhelming. It brought
+up before Holder's mind, with sickening reality, the fate he had himself
+escaped. Fatty degeneration of the soul!
+
+The little man, seeing the expression on the rector's face, curbed his
+excitement, and feared he had gone too far.
+
+"You will pardon me!" he said penitently, "I forget myself. I did not
+mean all clergymen."
+
+"I have never heard it put so well," Holder declared. "That is exactly
+what occurs in many cases."
+
+"Yes, it is that," said Engel, still puzzled, but encouraged, eyeing the
+strong face of the other. "And they lament that the ministry hasn't more
+big men. Sometimes they get one with the doctrinal type of mind
+--a Newman--but how often? And even a Newman would be of little avail
+to-day. It is Eucken who says that the individual, once released from
+external authority, can never be turned back to it. And they have been
+released by the hundreds of thousands ever since Luther's time, are being
+freed by the hundreds of thousands to-day. Democracy, learning, science,
+are releasing them, and no man, no matter how great he may be, can stem
+that tide. The able men in the churches now--like your Phillips Brooks,
+who died too soon--are beginning to see this. They are those who
+developed after the vows of the theological schools were behind them.
+Remove those vows, and you will see the young men come. Young men are
+idealists, Mr. Hodder, and they embrace other professions where the mind
+is free, and which are not one whit better paid than the ministry.
+
+"And what is the result," he cried, "of the senseless insistence on the
+letter instead of the spirit of the poetry of religion? Matthew Arnold
+was a thousand times right when he inferred that Jesus Christ never spoke
+literally and yet he is still being taken literally by most churches, and
+all the literal sayings which were put into his mouth are maintained as
+Gospel truth! What is the result of proclaiming Christianity in terms of
+an ancient science and theology which awaken no quickening response in
+the minds and hearts of to-day? That!" The librarian thrust a yellow
+hand towards the pile of books. "The new wine has burst the old skin and
+is running all over the world. Ah, my friend, if you could only see, as
+I do, the yearning for a satisfying religion which exists in this big
+city! It is like a vacuum, and those books are rushing to supply it.
+I little thought," he added dreamily, "when I renounced the ministry in
+so much sorrow that one day I should have a church of my own. This
+library is my church, and men and women of all creeds come here by the
+thousands. But you must pardon me. I have been carried away--I forgot
+myself."
+
+"Mr. Engel," replied the rector, "I want you to regard me as one of your
+parishioners."
+
+The librarian looked at him mutely, and the practical, desiccated little
+person seemed startlingly transformed into a mediaeval, German mystic.
+
+"You are a great man, Mr. Hodder," he said. "I might have guessed it."
+
+It was one of the moments when protest would have been trite,
+superfluous. And Hodder, in truth, felt something great swelling within
+him, something that was not himself, and yet strangely was. But just
+what--in view of his past strict orthodoxy and limited congregation
+--Mr. Engel meant, he could not have said. Had the librarian recognized,
+without confession on his part, the change in him? divined his future
+intentions?
+
+"It is curious that I should have met you this morning, Mr. Engel," he
+said. "I expressed surprise when you declared this was a religious age,
+because you corroborated something I had felt, but of which I had no
+sufficient proof. I felt that a great body of unsatisfied men and women
+existed, but that I was powerless to get in touch with them; I had
+discovered that truth, as you have so ably pointed out, is disguised and
+distorted by ancient dogmas; and that the old Authority, as you say, no
+longer carries weight."
+
+"Have you found the new one?" Mr. Engel demanded.
+
+"I think I have," the rector answered calmly, "it lies in personality.
+I do not know whether you will agree with me that the Church at large has
+a future, and I will confess to you that there was a time when I thought
+she had not. I see now that she has, once given to her ministers that
+freedom to develop of which you speak. In spite of the fact that truth
+has gradually been revealed to the world by what may be called an
+Apostolic Succession of Personalities,--Augustine, Dante, Francis of
+Assisi, Luther, Shakespeare, Milton, and our own Lincoln and Phillips
+Brooks,--to mention only a few,--the Church as a whole has been blind to
+it. She has insisted upon putting the individual in a straitjacket, she
+has never recognized that growth is the secret of life, that the clothes
+of one man are binding on another."
+
+"Ah, you are right--a thousand times right," cried the librarian. "You
+have read Royce, perhaps, when he says, 'This mortal shall put on
+individuality--'"
+
+"No," said the rector, outwardly cool, but inwardly excited by the
+coruscation of this magnificent paraphrase of Paul's sentence, by the
+extraordinary turn the conversation had taken. "I am ashamed to own that
+I have not followed the development of modern philosophy. The books I
+have just returned, on historical criticism," he went on, after a
+moment's hesitation, "infer what my attitude has been toward modern
+thought. We were made acquainted with historical criticism in the
+theological seminary, but we were also taught to discount it. I have
+discounted it, refrained from reading it,--until now. And yet I have
+heard it discussed in conferences, glanced over articles in the reviews.
+I had, you see, closed the door of my mind. I was in a state where
+arguments make no impression."
+
+The librarian made a gesture of sympathetic assent, which was also a
+tribute to the clergyman's frankness.
+
+"You will perhaps wonder how I could have lived these years in an
+atmosphere of modern thought and have remained uninfluenced. Well, I
+have recently been wondering--myself." Hodder smiled. "The name of
+Royce is by no means unfamiliar to me, and he taught at Harvard when I
+was an undergraduate. But the prevailing philosophy of that day among
+the students was naturalism. I represent a revolt from it. At the
+seminary I imbibed a certain amount of religious philosophy--but I did
+not continue it, as thousands of my more liberal fellow-clergymen have
+done. My religion 'worked' during the time, at least, I remained in my
+first parish. I had no interest in reconciling, for instance, the
+doctrine of evolution with the argument for design. Since I have been
+here in this city," he added, simply, "my days have been filled with a
+continued perplexity--when I was not too busy to think. Yes, there was
+an unacknowledged element of fear in my attitude, though I comforted
+myself with the notion that opinions, philosophical and scientific, were
+in a state of flux."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Mr. Engel, "I comprehend. But, from the manner in which
+you spoke just now, I should have inferred that you have been reading
+modern philosophy--that of the last twenty years. Ah, you have
+something before you, Mr. Hodder. You will thank God, with me, for that
+philosophy. It has turned the tide, set the current running the other
+way. Philosophy is no longer against religion, it is with it. And if
+you were to ask me to name one of the greatest religious teachers of
+our age, I should answer, William James. And there is Royce, of whom I
+spoke,--one of our biggest men. The dominant philosophies of our times
+have grown up since Arnold wrote his 'Literature and Dogma,' and they are
+in harmony with the quickening social spirit of the age, which is a
+religious spirit--a Christian spirit, I call it. Christianity is coming
+to its own. These philosophies, which are not so far apart, are the
+flower of the thought of the centuries, of modern science, of that most
+extraordinary of discoveries, modern psychology. And they are far from
+excluding religion, from denying the essential of Christ's teachings.
+On the other hand, they grant that the motive-power of the world is
+spiritual.
+
+"And this," continued Mr. Engel, "brings me to another aspect of
+authority. I wonder if it has struck you? In mediaeval times, when a
+bishop spoke ex cathedra, his authority, so far as it carried weight,
+came from two sources. First, the supposed divine charter of the Church
+to save and damn. That authority is being rapidly swept away. Second,
+he spoke with all the weight of the then accepted science and philosophy.
+But as soon as the new science began to lay hold on people's minds, as
+--for instance--when Galileo discovered that the earth moved instead of the
+sun (and the pope made him take it back), that second authority began to
+crumble too. In the nineteenth century science had grown so strong that
+the situation looked hopeless. Religion had apparently irrevocably lost
+that warrant also, and thinking men not spiritually inclined, since they
+had to make a choice between science and religion, took science as being
+the more honest, the more certain.
+
+"And now what has happened? The new philosophies have restored your
+second Authority, and your first, as you properly say, is replaced by the
+conception of Personality. Personality is nothing but the rehabilitation
+of the prophet, the seer. Get him, as Hatch says, back into your Church.
+The priests with their sacrifices and automatic rites, the logicians,
+have crowded him out. Why do we read the Old Testament at all? Not for
+the laws of the Levites, not for the battles and hangings, but for the
+inspiration of the prophets. The authority of the prophet comes through
+personality, the source of which is in what Myers calls the infinite
+spiritual world--in God. It was Christ's own authority.
+
+"And as for your other authority, your ordinary man, when he reads modern
+philosophy, says to himself, this does not conflict with science? But he
+gets no hint, when he goes to most churches, that there is, between the
+two, no real quarrel, and he turns away in despair. He may accept the
+pragmatism of James, the idealism of Royce, or even what is called neo
+realism. In any case, he gains the conviction that a force for good is
+at worn in the world, and he has the incentive to become part of it.....
+But I have given you a sermon!"
+
+"For which I can never be sufficiently, grateful," said Hodder, with an
+earnestness not to be mistaken.
+
+The little man's eyes rested admiringly, and not without emotion, on the
+salient features of the tall clergyman. And when he spoke again, it was
+in acknowledgment of the fact that he had read Hodder's purpose.
+
+"You will have opposition, my friend. They will fight you--some persons
+we know. They do not wish--what you and I desire. But you will not
+surrender--I knew it." Mr. Engel broke off abruptly, and rang a bell on
+his desk. "I will make out for you a list. I hope you may come in
+again, often. We shall have other talks,--yes? I am always here."
+
+Then it came to pass that Hodder carried back with him another armful of
+books. Those he had brought back were the Levellers of the False. These
+were the Builders of the True.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Hodder had known for many years that the writings of Josiah Royce and of
+William James had "been in the air," so to speak, and he had heard them
+mentioned at dinner parties by his more intellectual parishioners, such
+as Mrs. Constable and Martha Preston. Now he was able to smile at his
+former attitude toward these moderns, whose perusal he had deprecated as
+treason to the saints! And he remembered his horror on having listened
+to a fellow-clergyman discuss with calmness the plan of the "Varieties of
+Religious Experiences." A sacrilegious dissection of the lives of these
+very saints! The scientific process, the theories of modern psychology
+applied with sang-froid to the workings of God in the human soul!
+Science he had regarded as the proclaimed enemy of religion, and in these
+days of the apotheosis of science not even sacred things were spared.
+
+Now Hodder saw what the little librarian had meant by an authority
+restored. The impartial method of modern science had become so firmly
+established in the mind of mankind by education and reading that the
+ancient unscientific science of the Roman Empire, in which orthodox
+Christianity was clothed, no longer carried authority. In so far as
+modern science had discovered truth, religion had no quarrel with it.
+And if theology pretended to be the science of religion, surely it must
+submit to the test of the new science! The dogged clinging to the
+archaic speculations of apologists, saints, and schoolmen had brought
+religion to a low ebb indeed.
+
+One of the most inspiring books he read was by an English clergyman of
+his own Church whom he had formerly looked upon as a heretic, with all
+that the word had once implied. It was a frank yet reverent study of the
+self-consciousness of Christ, submitting the life and teachings of Jesus
+to modern criticism and the scientific method. And the Saviour's
+divinity, rather than being lessened, was augmented. Hodder found it
+infinitely refreshing that the so-called articles of Christian belief,
+instead of being put first and their acceptance insisted upon, were made
+the climax of the investigation.
+
+Religion, he began to perceive, was an undertaking, are attempt to find
+unity and harmony of the soul by adopting, after mature thought, a
+definite principle in life. If harmony resulted,--if the principle
+worked, it was true. Hodder kept an open mind, but he became a
+pragmatist so far. Science, on the other hand, was in a sphere by
+herself, and need have no conflict with religion; science was not an
+undertaking, but an impartial investigation by close observation of facts
+in nature. Her object was to discover truths by these methods alone.
+She had her theories, indeed, but they must be submitted to rigorous
+tests. This from a book by Professor Perry, an advocate of the new
+realism.
+
+On the other hand there were signs that modern science, by infinitesimal
+degrees, might be aiding in the solution of the Mystery . . . .
+
+But religion, Hodder saw, was trusting. Not credulous, silly trusting,
+but thoughtful trusting, accepting such facts as were definitely known.
+Faith was trusting. And faith without works was dead simply because
+there could be no faith without works. There was no such thing as belief
+that did not result in act.
+
+A paragraph which made a profound impression on Hodder at that time
+occurs in James's essay, "Is life worth living?"
+
+"Now-what do I mean by I trusting? Is the word to carry with it
+license to define in detail an invisible world, and to authorize and
+excommunicate those whose trust is different? . . Our faculties of
+belief were not given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they
+were given us to live by. And to trust our religions demands men first
+of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible world
+which they suggest were real. It is a fact of human nature that man can
+live and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single
+dogma and definition."
+
+Yet it was not these religious philosophies which had saved him, though
+the stimulus of their current had started his mind revolving like a
+motor. Their function, he perceived now, was precisely to compel him to
+see what had saved him, to reenforce it with the intellect, with the
+reason, and enable him to save others. The current set up,--by a
+thousand suggestions of which he made notes,--a personal construction,
+coordination, and he had the exhilaration of feeling, within him, a
+creative process all his own. Behold a mystery 'a paradox'--one of many.
+As his strength grew greater day by day, as his vision grew clearer, he
+must exclaim with Paul: "Yet not I, but the grace of God which was with
+me!"
+
+He, Hodder, was but an instrument transmitting power. And yet--oh
+paradox!--the instrument continued to improve, to grow stronger, to
+develop individuality and personality day by day! Life, present and
+hereafter, was growth, development, the opportunity for service in a
+cause. To cease growing was to die.
+
+He perceived at last the form all religion takes is that of consecration
+to a Cause,--one of God's many causes. The meaning of life is to find
+one's Cause, to lose one's self in it. His was the liberation of the
+Word,--now vouchsafed to him; the freeing of the spark from under the
+ashes. The phrase was Alison's. To help liberate the Church, fan into
+flame the fire which was to consume the injustice, the tyranny, the
+selfishness of the world, until the Garvins, the Kate Marcys, the stunted
+children, and anaemic women were no longer possible.
+
+It was Royce who, in one illuminating sentence, solved for him the
+puzzle, pointed out whence his salvation had come. "For your cause can
+only be revealed to you through some presence that first teaches you to
+love the unity of the spiritual life. . . You must find it in human
+shape."
+
+Horace Bentley!
+
+He, Hodder, had known this, but known it vaguely, without sanction. The
+light had shone for him even in the darkness of that night in Dalton
+Street, when he thought to have lost it forever. And he had awakened the
+next morning, safe,--safe yet bewildered, like a half drowned man on warm
+sands in the sun.
+
+"The will of the spiritual world, the divine will, revealed in man."
+What sublime thoughts, as old as the Cross itself, yet continually and
+eternally new!
+
+
+
+III
+
+There was still another whose face was constantly before him, and the
+reflection of her distressed yet undaunted soul,--Alison Parr. The
+contemplation of her courage, of her determination to abide by nothing
+save the truth, had had a power over him that he might not estimate, and
+he loved her as a man loves a woman, for her imperfections. And he loved
+her body and her mind.
+
+One morning, as he walked back from Mrs. Bledsoe's through an
+unfrequented, wooded path of the Park, he beheld her as he had summoned
+her in his visions. She was sitting motionless, gazing before her with
+clear eyes, as at the Fates. . .
+
+She started on suddenly perceiving him, but it was characteristic of her
+greeting that she seemed to feel no surprise at the accident which had
+brought them together.
+
+"I am afraid," he said, smiling, "that I have broken in on some profound
+reflections."
+
+She did not answer at once, but looked up at him, as he stood over her,
+with one of her strange, baffling gazes, in which there was the hint of a
+welcoming smile.
+
+"Reflection seems to be a circular process with me," she answered. "I
+never get anywhere--like you."
+
+"Like me!" he exclaimed, seating himself on the bench. Apparently their
+intercourse, so long as it should continue, was destined to be on the
+basis of intimacy in which it had begun. It was possible at once to be
+aware of her disturbing presence, and yet to feel at home in it.
+
+"Like you, yes," she said, continuing to examine him. "You've changed
+remarkably."
+
+In his agitation, at this discovery of hers he again repeated her words.
+
+"Why, you seem happier, you look happier. It isn't only that, I can't
+explain how you impress me. It struck me when you were talking to Mr.
+Bentley the other day. You seem to see something you didn't see when
+I first met you, that you didn't see the first time we were at Mr.
+Bentley's together. Your attitude is fixed--directed. You have made a
+decision of some sort--a momentous one, I rather think."
+
+"Yes," he replied, "you are right. It's more than remarkable that you
+should have guessed it."
+
+She remained silent
+
+"I have decided," he found himself saying abruptly, "to continue in the
+Church."
+
+Still she was silent, until he wondered whether she would answer him. He
+had often speculated to himself how she would take this decision, but he
+could make no surmise from her expression as she stared off into the
+wood. Presently she turned her head, slowly, and looked into his face.
+Still she did not speak.
+
+"You are wondering how I can do it," he said.
+
+"Yes," she acknowledged, in a low voice.
+
+"I should like you to know--that is why I spoke of it. You have never
+asked me, and I have never told you that the convictions I formerly held
+I lost. And with them, for a while, went everything. At least so I
+believed."
+
+"I knew it," she answered, "I could see that, too."
+
+"When I argued with you, that afternoon,--the last time we talked
+together alone,--I was trying to convince myself, and you--" he
+hesitated, "--that there was something. The fact that you could not
+seem to feel it stimulated me."
+
+He read in her eyes that she understood him. And he dared not, nor did
+he need to emphasize further his own intense desire that she should find
+a solution of her own.
+
+"I wish you to know what I am telling you for two reasons," he went on.
+"It was you who spoke the words that led to the opening of my eyes to the
+situation into which I had been drifting for two years, who compelled me
+to look upon the inconsistencies and falsities which had gradually been
+borne in upon me. It was you, I think, who gave me the courage to face
+this situation squarely, since you possess that kind of courage
+yourself."
+
+"Oh, no," she cried. "You would have done it anyway."
+
+He paused a moment, to get himself in hand.
+
+"For this reason, I owed it to you to speak--to thank you. I have
+realized, since that first meeting, that you became my friend then,
+and that you spoke as a friend. If you had not believed in my sincerity,
+you would not have spoken. I wish you to know that I am fully aware and
+grateful for the honour you did me, and that I realize it is not always
+easy for you to speak so--to any one."
+
+She did not reply.
+
+"There is another reason for my telling you now of this decision of
+mine to remain a clergyman," he continued. "It is because I value your
+respect and friendship, and I hope you will believe that I would not take
+this course unless I saw my way clear to do it with sincerity."
+
+"One has only to look at you to see that you are sincere," she said
+gently, with a thrill in her voice that almost unmanned him. "I told you
+once that I should never have forgiven myself if I had wrecked your life.
+I meant it. I am very glad."
+
+It was his turn to be silent.
+
+"Just because I cannot see how it would be possible to remain in the
+Church after one had been--emancipated, so to speak,"--she smiled at
+him,--"is no reason why you may not have solved the problem."
+
+Such was the superfine quality of her honesty. Yet she trusted him!
+He was made giddy by a desire, which he fought down, to justify himself
+before her. His eye beheld her now as the goddess with the scales in her
+hand, weighing and accepting with outward calm the verdict of the balance
+. . . . Outward calm, but inner fire.
+
+"It makes no difference," she pursued evenly, bent on choosing her words,
+"that I cannot personally understand your emancipation, that mine is
+different. I can only see the preponderance of evil, of deception,
+of injustice--it is that which shuts out everything else. And it's
+temperamental, I suppose. By looking at you, as I told you, I can see
+that your emancipation is positive, while mine remains negative. You
+have somehow regained a conviction that the good is predominant, that
+there is some purpose in the universe."
+
+He assented. Once more she relapsed into thought, while he sat
+contemplating her profile. She turned to him again with a tremulous
+smile.
+
+"But isn't a conviction that the good is predominant, that there is a
+purpose in the universe, a long way from the positive assertions in the
+Creeds?" she asked. "I remember, when I went through what you would
+probably call disintegration, and which seemed to me enlightenment, that
+the Creeds were my first stumbling-blocks. It seemed wrong to repeat
+them."
+
+"I am glad you spoke of this," he replied gravely. "I have arrived at
+many answers to that difficulty--which did not give me the trouble I had
+anticipated. In the first place, I am convinced that it was much more of
+a difficulty ten, twenty, thirty years ago than it is to-day. That which
+I formerly thought was a radical tendency towards atrophy, the drift of
+the liberal party in my own Church and others, as well as that which I
+looked upon with some abhorrence as the free-thinking speculation of many
+modern writers, I have now come to see is reconstruction. The results of
+this teaching of religion in modern terms are already becoming apparent,
+and some persons are already beginning to see that the Creeds express
+certain elemental truths in frankly archaic language. All this should be
+explained in the churches and the Sunday schools,--is, in fact, being
+explained in some, and also in books for popular reading by clergymen of
+my own Church, both here and in England. We have got past the critical
+age."
+
+She followed him closely, but did not interrupt.
+
+"I do not mean to say that the Creeds are not the sources of much
+misunderstanding, but in my opinion they do not constitute a sufficient
+excuse for any clergyman to abandon his Church on account of them.
+Indeed there are many who interpret them by modern thought--which is
+closer to the teachings of Christ than ancient thought--whose honesty
+cannot be questioned. Personally, I think that the Creeds either ought
+to be taken out of the service; or changed, or else there should be a
+note inserted in the service and catechism definitely permitting a
+liberal interpretation which is exactly what so many clergymen, candidly,
+do now.
+
+"When I was ordained a deacon, and then a priest, I took vows which would
+appear to be literally conflicting. Compelled to choose between these
+vows, I accept that as supreme which I made when I affirmed that I would
+teach nothing which I should be persuaded might not be concluded and
+affirmed by the Scripture. The Creeds were derived from the Scripture
+--not the Scripture from the Creeds. As an individual among a body of
+Christians I am powerless to change either the ordinal vows or the
+Creeds, I am obliged to wait for the consensus of opinion. But if,
+on the whole, I can satisfy my conscience in repeating the Creeds and
+reading the service, as other honest men are doing--if I am convinced
+that I have an obvious work to do in that Church, it would be cowardly
+for me to abandon that work."
+
+Her eyes lighted up.
+
+"I see what you mean," she said, "by staying in you can do many things
+that you could not do, you can help to bring about the change, by being
+frank. That is your point of view. You believe m the future of the
+Church."
+
+"I believe in an universal, Christian organization," he replied.
+
+"But while stronger men are honest," she objected, "are not your ancient
+vows and ancient Creeds continually making weaker men casuists?"
+
+"Undoubtedly," he agreed vigorously, and thought involuntarily of Mr.
+Engel's phrased fatty degeneration of the soul. "Yet I can see the
+signs, on all sides, of a gradual emancipation, of which I might be
+deemed an example." A smile came into his eyes, like the sun on a
+grey-green sea.
+
+"Oh, you could never be a casuist!" she exclaimed, with a touch of
+vehemence. "You are much too positive. It is just that note, which is
+characteristic of so many clergymen, that note of smoothing-over and
+apology, which you lack. I could never feel it, even when you were
+orthodox. And now--" words failed her as she inspected his ruggedness.
+
+"And now," he took her up, to cover his emotion, "now I am not to be
+classified!"
+
+Still examining him, she reflected on this.
+
+"Classified?" Isn't it because you're so much of an individual that one
+fails to classify you? You represent something new to my experience,
+something which seems almost a contradiction--an emancipated Church."
+
+"You imagined me out of the Church,--but where?" he demanded.
+
+"That's just it," she wondered intimately, "where? When I try, I can see
+no other place for you. Your place as in the pulpit."
+
+He uttered a sharp exclamation, which she did not heed.
+
+"I can't imagine you doing institutional work, as it is called,--you're
+not fitted for it, you'd be wasted in it. You gain by the historic
+setting of the Church, and yet it does not absorb you. Free to preach
+your convictions, unfettered, you will have a power over people that will
+be tremendous. You have a very strong personality."
+
+She set his heart, his mind, to leaping by this unexpected confirmation
+on her part of his hopes, and yet the man in him was intent upon the
+woman. She had now the air of detached judgment, while he could not
+refrain from speculating anxiously on the effect of his future course on
+her and on their intimate relationship. He forbore from thinking, now,
+of the looming events which might thrust them apart,--put a physical
+distance between them,--his anxiety was concerned with the possible
+snapping of the thread of sympathy which had bound them. In this
+respect, he dreaded her own future as much as his own. What might she
+do? For he felt, in her, a potential element of desperation; a capacity
+to commit, at any moment, an irretrievable act.
+
+"Once you have made your ideas your own," she mused, "you will have the
+power of convincing people."
+
+"And yet--"
+
+"And yet"--she seized his unfinished sentence, "you are not at all
+positive of convincing me. I'll give you the credit of forbearing to
+make proselytes." She smiled at him.
+
+Thus she read him again.
+
+"If you call making proselytes a desire to communicate a view of life
+which gives satisfaction--" he began, in his serious way.
+
+"Oh, I want to be convinced!" she exclaimed, penitently, "I'd give
+anything to feel as you feel. There's something lacking in me, there
+must be, and I have only seen the disillusionizing side. You infer that
+the issue of the Creeds will crumble,--preach the new, and the old will
+fall away of itself. But what is the new? How, practically, do you deal
+with the Creeds? We have got off that subject."
+
+"You wish to know?" he asked.
+
+"Yes--I wish to know."
+
+"The test of any doctrine is whether it can be translated into life,
+whether it will make any difference to the individual who accepts it.
+The doctrines expressed in the Creeds must stand or fall by the test.
+Consider, for instance, the fundamental doctrine in the Creeds, that of
+the Trinity, which has been much scoffed at. A belief in God, you will
+admit, has an influence on conduct, and the Trinity defines the three
+chief aspects of the God in whom Christians believe. Of what use to
+quarrel with the word Person if God be conscious? And the character of
+God has an influence on conduct. The ancients deemed him wrathful,
+jealous, arbitrary, and hence flung themselves before him and propitiated
+him. If the conscious God of the universe be good, he is spoken of as a
+Father. He is as once, in this belief, Father and Creator. And inasmuch
+as it is known that the divine qualities enter into man, and that one
+Man, Jesus, whose composite portrait--it is agreed--could not have been
+factitiously invented, was filled with them, we speak of God in man as
+the Son. And the Spirit of God that enters into the soul of man,
+transforming, inspiring, and driving him, is the Third Person, so-called.
+There is no difficulty so far, granted the initial belief in a beneficent
+God.
+
+"If we agree that life has a meaning, and, in order to conform to the
+purpose of the Spirit of the Universe, must be lived in one way, we
+certainly cannot object to calling that right way of living, that decree
+of the Spirit, the Word.
+
+"The Incarnate Word, therefore, is the concrete example of a human being
+completely filled with the Spirit, who lives a perfect life according to
+its decree. Ancient Greek philosophy called this decree, this meaning of
+life, the Logos, and the Nicene Creed is a confession of faith in that
+philosophy. Although this creed is said to have been, scandalously
+forced through the council of Nicaea by an emperor who had murdered his
+wife and children, and who himself was unbaptized, against a majority of
+bishops who would, if they had dared Constantine's displeasure, have
+given the conscience freer play, to-day the difficulty has, practically
+disappeared. The creed is there in the prayer book, and so long as it
+remains we are at liberty to interpret the ancient philosophy in which it
+is written--and which in any event could not have been greatly improved
+upon at that time--in our own modern way, as I am trying to explain it to
+you.
+
+"Christ was identified with the Logos, or Word, which must have had a
+meaning for all time, before and after its, complete revelation. And
+this is what the Nicene Creed is trying to express when it says,
+'Begotten of his Father before all worlds.' In other words, the purpose
+which Christ revealed always existed. The awkward expression of the
+ancients, declaring that he 'came down' for our salvation (enlightenment)
+contains a fact we may prove by experience, if we accept the meaning he
+put upon existence, and adopt this meaning as our scheme of life. But
+we: must first be quite clear, as: to this meaning. We may and do
+express all this differently, but it has a direct bearing on life. It is
+the doctrine of the Incarnation. We begins to perceive through it that
+our own incarnations mean something, and that our task is to discover
+what they do mean--what part in the world purpose we are designed to play
+here.
+
+"Incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary is an emphasis on the
+fact that man born of woman may be divine. But the ignorant masses of
+the people of the Roman Empire were undoubtedly incapable of grasping a
+theory of the Incarnation put forward in the terms of Greek philosophy;
+while it was easy for them, with their readiness to believe in nature
+miracles, to accept the explanation of Christ's unique divinity as due to
+actual, physical generation by the Spirit. And the wide belief in the
+Empire in gods born in this way aided such a conception. Many thousands
+were converted to Christianity when a place was found in that religion
+for a feminine goddess, and these abandoned the worship of Isis, Demeter,
+and Diana for that of the Virgin Mary. Thus began an evolution which is
+still going on, and we see now that it was impossible that the world
+should understand at once the spiritual meaning of life as Christ taught
+it--that material facts merely symbolize the divine. For instance, the
+Gospel of John has been called the philosophical or spiritual gospel.
+And in spite of the fact that it has been assailed and historically
+discredited by modern critics, for me it serves to illuminate certain
+truths of Christ's message and teaching that the other Gospels do not.
+Mark, the earliest Gospel, does not refer to the miraculous birth. At
+the commencements of Matthew and Luke you will read of it, and it is to
+be noted that the rest of these narratives curiously and naively
+contradict it. Now why do we find the miraculous birth in these Gospels
+if it had not been inserted in order to prove, in a manner acceptable to
+simple and unlettered minds, the Theory of the Incarnation, Christ's
+preexistence? I do not say the insertion was deliberate. And it is
+difficult for us moderns to realize the polemic spirit in which the
+Gospels were written. They were clearly not written as history. The
+concern of the authors, I think, was to convert their readers to Christ.
+
+"When we turn to John, what do we find? In the opening verses of this
+Gospel the Incarnation is explained, not by a virgin birth, but in a
+manner acceptable to the educated and spiritually-minded, in terms of the
+philosophy of the day. And yet how simply! 'In the beginning was the
+Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' I prefer John's
+explanation.
+
+"It is historically true that, in the earlier days when the Apostles'
+Creed was put forth, the phrase 'born of they Virgin Mary' was inserted
+for the distinct purpose of laying stress on the humanity of Christ, and
+to controvert the assertion of the Gnostic sect that he was not born at
+all, but appeared in the world in some miraculous way.
+
+"Thus to-day, by the aid of historical research, we are enabled to regard
+the Creeds in the light of their usefulness to life. The myth of the
+virgin birth probably arose through the zeal of some of the writers of
+the Gospels to prove that the prophecy of Isaiah predicted the advent of
+the Jewish Messiah who should be born of a virgin. Modern scholars are
+agreed that the word Olmah which Isaiah uses does not mean virgin, but
+young woman. There is quite a different Hebrew word for 'virgin.' The
+Jews, at the time the Gospels were written, and before, had forgotten
+their ancient Hebrew. Knowing this mistake, and how it arose, we may
+repeat the word Virgin Mary in the sense used by many early Christians,
+as designating the young woman who was the mother of Christ.
+
+"I might mention one or two other phrases, archaic and obscure.
+'The Resurrection of the Body' may refer to the phenomenon of Christ's
+reappearance after death, for which modern psychology may or may not
+account. A little reflection, however, convinces one that the phenomenon
+did take place in some manner, or else, I think, we should never have
+heard of Christ. You will remember that the Apostles fled after his
+death on the cross, believing what he had told them was all only a dream.
+They were human, literal and cowardly, and they still needed some kind of
+inner, energizing conviction that the individuality persisted after
+death, that the solution of human life was victory over it, in order to
+gain the courage to go out and preach the Gospel and face death
+themselves. And it was Paul who was chiefly instrumental in freeing the
+message from the narrow bounds of Palestine and sending it ringing down
+the ages to us. The miracle doesn't lie in what Paul saw, but in the
+whole man transformed, made incandescent, journeying tirelessly to the
+end of his days up and down the length and breadth of the empire,
+labouring, as he says, more abundantly than they all. It is idle to say
+that the thing which can transform a man's entire nature and life is not
+a reality."
+
+She had listened, motionless, as under the spell of his words.
+Self-justification, as he proceeded, might easily have fused itself into
+a desire to convince her of the truth of his beliefs. But he was not
+deceived, he knew her well enough to understand, to feel the indomitable
+spirit of resistance in her. Swayed she could be, but she would mot
+easily surrender.
+
+"There is another phrase," she said after a moment, "which I have never
+heard explained, 'descended into hell.'"
+
+"It was merely a matter of controverting those who declared Christ was
+taken from the cross before he died. In the childish science of the
+time, to say that one descended into hell was to affirm that he was
+actually dead, since the souls of the departed were supposed to go at
+once to hell. Hell and heaven were definite places. To say that Christ
+ascended to heaven and sat on the right hand of the Father is to declare
+one's faith that his responsible work in the spiritual realm continues."
+
+"And the Atonement? doesn't that imply a sacrifice of propitiation?"
+
+"Atonement may be pronounced At-one-ment," Hodder replied. "The old
+idea, illustrated by a reference to the sacrifice of the ancients, fails
+to convey the truth to modern minds. And moreover, as I have inferred,
+these matters had to be conveyed in symbols until mankind were prepared
+to grasp the underlying spiritual truths which Christ sought to convey.
+Orthodox Christianity has been so profoundly affected by the ancient
+Jewish religion that the conception of God as wrathful and jealous--a God
+wholly outside--has persisted to our times. The Atonement means union
+with the Spirit of the Universe through vicarious suffering, and
+experience teaches us that our own sufferings are of no account unless
+they be for a cause, for the furtherance of the design of the beneficent
+Spirit which is continually at work. Christ may be said to have died for
+humanity because he had to suffer death itself in order to reveal the
+complete meaning of life. You once spoke to me about the sense of sin
+--of being unable to feel it."
+
+She glanced at him quickly, but did not speak.
+
+"There is a theory concerning this," he continued, "which has undoubtedly
+helped many people, and which may be found in the writings of certain
+modern psychologists. It is that we have a conscious, or lower, human
+self, and a subconscious, or better self. This subconscious self
+stretches down, as it were, into the depths of the universe and taps the
+source of spiritual power. And it is through the subconscious self that
+every man is potentially divine. Potentially, because the conscious self
+has to reach out by an effort of the will to effect this union with the
+spiritual in the subconscious, and when it is effected, it comes from the
+response of the subconscious. Apparently from without, as a gift, and
+therefore, in theological language, it is called grace. This is what is
+meant by being born again, the incarnation of the Spirit in the
+conscious, or human. The two selves are no longer divided, and the
+higher self assumes control,--takes the reins, so to speak.
+
+"It is interesting, as a theory. And the fact that it has been seriously
+combated by writers who deny such a function of the subconscious does not
+at all affect the reality of the experience.
+
+"Once we have had a vision of the true meaning of life a vision which
+stirs the energies of our being, what is called 'a sense of sin'
+inevitably follows. It is the discontent, the regret, in the light
+of a higher knowledge, for the: lost opportunities, for a past life
+which has been uncontrolled by any unifying purpose, misspent in futile
+undertakings, wasted, perhaps, in follies and selfish caprices which have
+not only harmed ourselves but others. Although we struggle, yet by
+habit, by self-indulgence, by lack of a sustained purpose, we have formed
+a character from which escape seems hopeless. And we realize that in
+order to change ourselves, an actual regeneration of the will is
+necessary. For awhile, perchance, we despair of this. The effort to get
+out of the rut we have made for ourselves seems of no avail. And it is
+not, indeed, until we arrive, gradually or otherwise, and through a
+proper interpretation of the life of Christ, at the conviction that we
+may even never become useful in the divine scheme that we have a sense of
+what is called 'the forgiveness of sins.' This conviction, this grace,
+this faith to embark on the experiment accomplishes of itself the revival
+of the will, the rebirth which we had thought impossible. We discover
+our task, high or humble,--our cause. We grow marvellously at one with
+God's purpose, and we feel that our will is acting in the same direction
+as his. And through our own atonement we see the meaning of that other
+Atonement which led Christ to the Cross. We see that our conviction, our
+grace, has come through him, and how he died for our sins."
+
+"It's quite wonderful how logical and simple you make it, how thoroughly
+you have gone into it. You have solved it for yourself--and you will
+solve it for others many others."
+
+She rose, and he, too, got to his feet with a medley of feelings.
+The path along which they walked was already littered with green acorns.
+A gray squirrel darted ahead of them, gained a walnut and paused,
+quivering, halfway up the trunk, to gaze back at them. And the glance
+she presently gave him seemed to partake of the shyness of the wild
+thing.
+
+"Thank you for explaining it to me," she said.
+
+"I hope you don't think--" he began.
+
+"Oh, it isn't that!" she cried, with unmistakable reproach. "I asked you
+--I made you tell me. It hasn't seemed at all like--the confessional,"
+she added, and smiled and blushed at the word. "You have put it so
+nicely, so naturally, and you have given me so much to think about. But
+it all depends--doesn't it?--upon whether one can feel the underlying
+truth of which you spoke in the first place; it rests upon a sense of the
+prevailing goodness of things. It seems to me cruel that what is called
+salvation, the solution of the problem of life, should depend upon an
+accidental discovery. We are all turned loose with our animal passions
+and instincts, of self-preservation, by an indifferent Creator, in a
+wilderness, and left to find our way out as best we can. You answer that
+Christ showed us the way. There are elements in his teaching I cannot
+accept--perhaps because I have been given a wrong interpretation of them.
+I shall ask you more questions some day.
+
+"But even then," she continued, "granted that Christ brought the complete
+solution, as you say, why should so many millions have lived and died,
+before and after his coming, who had suffered so, and who had never heard
+of him? That is the way my reason works, and I can't help it. I would
+help it if I could."
+
+"Isn't it enough," he asked, "to know that a force is at work combating
+evil,--even if you are not yet convinced that it is a prevailing force?
+Can you not trust that it will be a prevailing force, if your sympathies
+are with it, without demanding a revelation of the entire scheme of the
+universe? Of what use is it to doubt the eternal justice?"
+
+"Oh, use!" she cried, "I grant you its uselessness. Doubt seems an
+ingrained quality. I can't help being a fatalist."
+
+"And yet you have taken your life in your own hands," he reminded her,
+gently.
+
+"Only to be convinced of its futility," she replied.
+
+Again, momentarily thrust back into himself, he wondered jealously once
+more what the disillusionments had been of that experience from before
+which she seemed, at times, ready to draw back a little the veil.
+
+"A sense of futility is a sense of incompleteness," he said, "and
+generally precedes a sense of power."
+
+"Ah, you have gained that! Yet it must always have been latent in you
+--you make one feel it. But now!" she exclaimed, as though the discovery
+had just dawned on her, "now you will need power, now you will have to
+fight as you have never fought in your life."
+
+He found her enthusiasm as difficult to withstand as her stoicism.
+
+"Yes, I shall have to fight," he admitted. Her partisanship was sweet.
+
+"When you tell them what you have told me," she continued, as though
+working it out in her own mind, "they will never submit to it, if they
+can help it. My father will never submit to it. They will try to put
+you out, as a heretic,--won't they?"
+
+"I have an idea that they will," he conceded, with a smile.
+
+"And won't they succeed? Haven't they the power?"
+
+"It depends,--in the first place, on whether the bishop thinks me a
+heretic."
+
+"Have you asked him?"
+
+"No."
+
+"But can't they make you resign?"
+
+"They can deprive me of my salary."
+
+She did not press this.
+
+"You mustn't think me a martyr," he pleaded, in a lighter tone.
+
+She paid no heed to this protest, but continued to regard him with a face
+lighted by enthusiasm.
+
+"Oh, that's splendid of you!" she cried. "You are going to speak the
+truth as you see it, and let them do their worst. Of course,
+fundamentally, it isn't merely because they're orthodox that they won't
+like it, although they'll say so, and perhaps think so. It will be
+because if you have really found the truth--they will instinctively, fear
+its release. For it has a social bearing, too--hasn't it?--although you
+haven't explained that part of it."
+
+"It has a distinct social bearing," he replied, amazed at the way her
+mind flew forward and grasped the entire issue, in spite of the fact that
+her honesty still refused to concede his premises. Such were the
+contradictions in her that he loved. And, though she did not suspect it,
+she had in her the Crusader's spirit. "I have always remembered what
+you once said, that many who believed themselves Christians had an
+instinctive feeling that there is a spark in Christianity which, if
+allowed to fly, would start a conflagration beyond their control. And
+that they had covered the spark with ashes. I, too," he added
+whimsically, "was buried under the ashes."
+
+"And the spark," she demanded, "is not Socialism--their nightmare?"
+
+"The spark is Christianity itself--but I am afraid they will not be able
+to distinguish it from Socialism. The central paradox in Christianity
+consists in the harmonizing of the individual and socialistic spirit, and
+this removes it as far from the present political doctrine of socialism
+as it is possible to be. Christianity, looked at from a certain
+viewpoint,--and I think the proper viewpoint,--is the most
+individualistic of religions, since its basic principle is the
+development of the individual into an autonomous being."
+
+They stood facing each other on an open stretch of lawn. The place was
+deserted. Through the trees, in the near distance, the sightless front
+of the Ferguson mansion blazed under the September sun.
+
+"Individualistic!" she repeated, as though dazed by the word applied to
+the religion she had discarded. "I can't understand. Do you think I
+ever can understand?" she asked him, simply.
+
+"It seems to me you understand more than you are willing to give yourself
+credit for," he answered seriously. "You don't take into account your
+attitude."
+
+"I see what you mean--a willingness to take the right road, if I can find
+it. I am not at all sure that I want to take it. But you must tell me
+more--more of what you have discovered. Will you?"
+
+He just hesitated. She herself appeared to acknowledge no bar to their
+further intimacy--why should he?
+
+"I will tell you all I know," he said.
+
+Suddenly, as if by a transference of thought, she voiced what he had in
+mind.
+
+"You are going to tell them the truth about themselves!" she exclaimed.
+"--That they are not Christians!"
+
+His silence was an admission.
+
+"You must see," he told her, after the moment they had looked into each
+other's faces, "that this is the main reason why I must stay at St.
+John's, in the Church, if I conscientiously can."
+
+"I see. The easier course would be to resign, to have scruples. And you
+believe there is a future for the Church."
+
+"I believe it," he assented.
+
+She still held his eyes.
+
+"Yes, it is worth doing. If you see it that way it is more worth doing
+than anything else. Please don't think," she said, "that I don't
+appreciate why you have told me all this, why you have given me your
+reasons. I know it hasn't been easy. It's because you wish me to have
+faith in you for my own sake, not for yours. And I am grateful."
+
+"And if that faith is justified, as you will help to justify it, that it
+may be transferred to a larger sphere," he answered.
+
+She gave him her hand, but did not reply.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+MR. GOODRICH BECOMES A PARTISAN
+
+
+
+I
+
+In these days of his preparation, she haunted him continually. In her he
+saw typified all those who possessed the: divine discontent, the yearning
+unsatisfied,--the fatalists and the dreamers. And yet she seemed to have
+risen through instinct to share the fire of his vision of religion
+revealed to the countless ranks of strugglers as the hidden motive-power
+of the world, the impetus of scientist, statesman, artist, and
+philanthropist! They had stood together on the heights of the larger
+view, whence the whole of the battle-line lay disclosed.
+
+At other and more poignant moments he saw her as waving him bravely on
+while he steamed out through towering seas to safety. The impression was
+that of smiling at her destiny. Had she fixed upon it? and did she
+linger now only that she might inspire him in his charge? She was
+capable, he knew, of taking calmly the irrevocable step, of accepting the
+decree as she read it. The thought tortured, the desire to save her from
+herself obsessed him; with true clairvoyance she had divined him aright
+when she had said that he wished her to have faith in him for her own
+sake. Could he save her in spite of herself? and how? He could not see
+her, except by chance. Was she waiting until he should have crossed the
+bar before she should pay some inexorable penalty of which he knew
+nothing?
+
+Thus he speculated, suffered, was at once cast down and lifted up by the
+thought of her. To him, at least, she was one of those rare and
+dauntless women, the red stars of history, by whom the Dantes and
+Leonardos are fired to express the inexpressible, and common clay is
+fused and made mad: one of those women who, the more they reveal, become
+the more inscrutable. Divinely inarticulate, he called her; arousing the
+passion of the man, yet stirring the sublimer efforts of the god.
+
+What her feelings toward him, whether she loved him as a woman loves a
+man he could not say, no man being a judge in the supreme instance. She
+beheld him emancipated, perhaps, from what she might have called the
+fetters of an orthodoxy for which she felt an instinctive antagonism; but
+whether, though proclaiming himself free, the fact of his continuation in
+the ministry would not of itself set up in her a reaction, he was unable
+to predict. Her antipathy to forms, he saw, was inherent. Her interest
+--her fascinated absorption, it might be called--in his struggle was
+spiritual, indeed, but it also had mixed in it the individualistic zeal
+of the nonconformist. She resented the trammels of society; though she
+suffered from her efforts to transcend them. The course he had
+determined upon appeared to her as a rebellion not only against a
+cut-and-dried state of mind, but also against vested privilege. Yet she
+had in her, as she confessed, the craving for what privilege brings in
+the way of harmonious surroundings. He loved her for her contradictions.
+
+Thus he was utterly unable to see what the future held for him in the way
+of continued communion with her, to evolve any satisfactory theory as to
+why she remained in the city. She had told him that the gardens were an
+excuse. She had come, by her own intimation, to reflect, to decide some
+momentous question. Marriage? He found this too agitating to dwell
+upon, summoning, as it did, conjectures of the men she might have known;
+and it was perhaps natural, in view of her attitude, that he could only
+think of such a decision on her part as surrender.
+
+That he had caught and held her attention, although by no conscious
+effort of his own, was clear to him. But had he not merely arrested her?
+Would she not presently disappear, leaving only in his life the scarlet
+thread which she had woven into it for all time? Would he not fail to
+change, permanently, the texture of hers?
+
+Such were his hopes and fears concerning her, and they were mingled
+inextricably with other hopes and fears which had to do with the great
+venture of his life. He dwelt in a realm of paradoxes, discovered that
+exaltation was not incompatible with anxiety and dread. He had no
+thought of wavering; he had achieved to an extent he would not have
+believed possible the sense of consecration which brings with it
+indifference to personal fortunes, and the revelation of the inner world,
+and yet he shrank from the wounds he was about to receive--and give.
+Outwardly controlled, he lived in the state of intense excitement of the
+leader waiting for the time to charge.
+
+
+
+II
+
+The moment was at hand. September had waned, the nights were cooling,
+his parishioners were returning from the East. One of these was Eleanor
+Goodrich, whom he met on a corner, tanned and revived from her long
+summer in Massachusetts. She had inherited the kindly shrewdness of
+glance characteristic of gentlefolk, the glance that seeks to penetrate
+externals in its concern for the well-being of those whom it scrutinizes.
+And he was subtly aware, though she greeted him cordially, that she felt
+a change in him without being able to account for it.
+
+"I hear you have been here all summer," she said reproachfully. "Mother
+and father and all of us were much disappointed that you did not come to
+us on the Cape."
+
+"I should have come, if it had been possible," he replied. "It seems to
+have done you a world of good."
+
+"Oh, I!" She seemed slightly embarrassed, puzzled, and did not look at
+him. "I am burned as disgracefully as Evelyn. Phil came on for a month.
+
+"He tells me he hasn't seen you, but that isn't surprising, for he hasn't
+been to church since June--and he's a vestryman now, too."
+
+She was in mourning for her father-in-law, who had died in the spring.
+Phil Goodrich had taken his place. Eleanor found the conversation,
+somehow, drifting out of her control. It was not at all what she would
+have desired to say. Her colour heightened.
+
+"I have not been conducting the services, but I resume them next Sunday,"
+said the rector. "I ought to tell you," he went on, regarding her, "in
+view of the conversation we have had, that I have changed my mind
+concerning a great many things we have talked about--although I have not
+spoken of this as yet to any of the members of the congregation."
+
+She was speechless, and could only stare at him blankly.
+
+"I mean," he continued, with a calmness that astonished her afterwards,
+"that I have changed my whole conception as to the functions and future
+of the Church, that I have come to your position, that we must make up
+our minds for ourselves, and not have them made up for us. And that we
+must examine into the truth of all statements, and be governed
+accordingly."
+
+Her attitude was one of mingled admiration, concern, and awe. And he saw
+that she had grasped something of the complications which his course was
+likely to bring about.
+
+"But you are not going to leave us!" she managed to exclaim.
+
+"Not if it is possible to remain," he said, smiling.
+
+"I am so glad." She was still overpowered by the disclosure. "It is
+good of you to tell me. Do you mind my telling Phil?"
+
+"Not at all," he assured her.
+
+"Will you forgive me," she asked, after a slight pause during which she
+had somewhat regained her composure, "if I say that I always thought, or
+rather hoped you would change? that your former beliefs seemed so--unlike
+you?"
+
+He continued to smile at her as she stepped forward to take the car.
+
+"I'll have to forgive you," he answered, "because you were right--"
+
+She was still in such a state of excitement when she arrived down town
+that she went direct to her husband's law office.
+
+"I like this!" he exclaimed, as, unannounced, she opened the door of his
+sanctuary. "You might have caught me with one of those good-looking
+clients of mine."
+
+"Oh, Phil!" she cried, "I've got such a piece of news, I couldn't resist
+coming to tell you. I met Mr. Hodder--and he's changed."
+
+"Changed!" Phil repeated, looking up at her flushed face beside him.
+Instead of a law-book, he flung down a time table in which he had been
+investigating the trains to a quail shooting club in the southern part of
+the state: The transition to Mr. Hodder was, therefore, somewhat abrupt.
+"Why, Nell, to look at you, I thought it could be nothing else than my
+somewhat belated appointment to the United States Supreme Court. How has
+Hodder changed? I always thought him pretty decent."
+
+"Don't laugh at me," she begged, "it's really serious--and no one knows
+it yet. He said I might tell you. Do you remember that talk we had at
+father's, when he first came, and we likened him to a modern Savonarola?"
+
+"And George Bridges took the floor, and shocked mother and Lucy and
+Laureston," supplied Phil.
+
+"I don't believe mother really was as much shocked as she appeared to
+be," said Eleanor. "At any rate, the thing that had struck us--you and
+me--was that Mr. Hodder looked as though he could say something helpful,
+if he only would. And then I went to see him afterwards, in the parish
+house--you remember?--after we had been reading modern criticism
+together, and he told me that the faith which had come down from the
+fathers was like an egg? It couldn't be chipped. I was awfully
+disappointed--and yet I couldn't help liking him, he was so honest.
+And the theological books he gave me to read--which were so mediaeval
+and absurd! Well, he has come around to our point of view. He told
+me so himself."
+
+"But what is our point of view, Nell?" her husband asked, with a smile.
+"Isn't it a good deal like Professor Bridges', only we're not quite so
+learned? We're just ordinary heathens, as far as I can make out. If
+Hodder has our point of view, he ought to go into the law or a trust
+company."
+
+"Oh, Phil!" she protested, "and you're on the vestry! I do believe in
+Something, and so do you."
+
+"Something," he observed, "is hardly a concrete and complete theology."
+
+"Why do you make me laugh," she reproached him, "when the matter is so
+serious? What I'm trying to tell you is that I'm sure Mr. Hodder has
+worked it out. He's too sincere to remain in the Church and not have
+something constructive and satisfying. I've always said that he seemed
+to have a truth shut up inside of him which he could not communicate.
+Well, now he looks as though he were about to communicate it, as though
+he had discovered it. I suppose you think me silly, but you'll grant,
+whatever Mr. Hodder may be, he isn't silly. And women can feel these
+things. You know I'm not given to sentimentality, but I was never so
+impressed by the growth in any personality as I was this morning by his.
+He seems to have become himself, as I always imagined him. And, Phil, he
+was so fine! He's absolutely incapable of posing, as you'll admit, and
+he stood right up and acknowledged that he'd been wrong in our argument.
+He hasn't had the services all summer, and when he resumes them next
+Sunday I gathered that he intends to make his new position clear."
+
+Mr. Goodrich thrust his hands in his pockets and gave a low whistle.
+
+"I guess I won't go shooting Saturday, after all," he declared.
+"I wouldn't miss Hodder's sermon for all the quail in Harrington County."
+
+"It's high time you did go to church," remarked Eleanor, contemplating,
+not without pride, her husband's close-cropped, pugnacious head.
+
+Your judgments are pretty sound, Nell. I'll do you that credit. And
+I've always owned up that Hodder would be a fighter if he ever got
+started. It's written all over him. What's more, I've a notion that
+some of our friends are already a little suspicious of him."
+
+"You mean Mr. Parr?" she asked, anxiously.
+
+"No, Wallis Plimpton."
+
+"Oh!" she exclaimed, with disdain in her voice.
+
+"Mr. Parr only got back yesterday, and Wallis told me that Hodder had
+refused to go on a yachting trip with him. Not only foolishness, but
+high treason." Phil smiled. "Plimpton's the weather-vane, the barometer
+of that crowd--he feels a disturbance long before it turns up--he's as
+sensitive as the stock market."
+
+"He is the stock market," said Eleanor.
+
+"It's been my opinion," Phil went on reflectively, "that they've all had
+just a trace of uneasiness about Hodder all along, an idea that Nelson
+Langmaid slipped up for the first time in his life when he got him to
+come. Oh, the feeling's been dormant, but it existed. And they've been
+just a little afraid that they couldn't handle him if the time ever came.
+He's not their type. When I saw Plimpton at the Country Club the other
+day he wondered, in that genial, off-hand manner of his, whether Hodder
+would continue to be satisfied with St. John's. Plimpton said he might
+be offered a missionary diocese. Oh we'll have a fine old row."
+
+"I believe," said Eleanor, "that that's the only thing that interests
+you."
+
+"Well, it does please me," he admitted, when I think of Gordon Atterbury
+and Everett Constable and a few others,--Eldon Parr,--who believe that
+religion ought to be kept archaic and innocuous, served in a form that
+won't bother anybody. By the way, Nell, do you remember the verse the
+Professor quoted about the Pharisees, and cleansing the outside of the
+cup and platter?"
+
+"Yes," she answered, "why?"
+
+"Well--Hodder didn't give you any intimation as to what he intended to do
+about that sort of thing, did he?"
+
+"What sort of thing?"
+
+"About the inside of Eldon Parr's cup,--so to speak. And the inside of
+Wallis Plimpton's cup, and Everett Constable's cup, and Ferguson's cup,
+and Langmaid's. Did it ever strike you that, in St. John's, we have the
+sublime spectacle of Eldon Parr, the Pharisee in chief, conducting the
+Church of Christ, who, uttered that denunciation? That's what George
+Bridges meant. There's something rather ironical in such a situation, to
+say the least."
+
+"I see," said Eleanor, thoughtfully.
+
+"And what's more, it's typical," continued Phil, energetically, "the big
+Baptist church on the Boulevard is run by old Sedges, as canny a rascal
+as you could find in the state. The inside of has cup has never been
+touched, though he was once immersed in the Mississippi, they say, and
+swallowed a lot of water."
+
+"Oh, Phil!"
+
+"Hodder's been pretty intimate with Eldon Parr--that always puzzled me,"
+Phil went on. "And yet I'm like you, I never doubted Hodder's honesty.
+I've always been curious to know what would happen when he found out the
+kind of thing Eldon Parr is doing every day in his life, making people
+stand and deliver in the interest of what he would call National
+Prosperity. Why, that fellow, Funk, they sent to the penitentiary the
+other day for breaking into the Addicks' house isn't a circumstance to
+Eldon Parr. He's robbed his tens of thousands, and goes on robbing them
+right along. By the way, Mr. Parr took most of Addicks' money before
+Funk got his silver."
+
+"Phil, you have such a ridiculous way of putting things! But I suppose
+it's true."
+
+"True! I should say it was! There was Mr. Bentley--that was mild. And
+there never was a hold-up of a western express that could compare to the
+Consolidated Tractions. Some of these big fellows have the same kind of
+brain as the professional thieves. Well, they are professional thieves
+--what's the use of mincing matters! They never try the same game twice.
+Mr. Parr's getting ready to make another big haul right now. I know,
+because Plimpton said as much, although he didn't confide in me what this
+particular piece of rascality is. He knows better." Phil Goodrich
+looked grim.
+
+"But the law?" exclaimed his wife.
+
+"There never was a law that Nelson Langmaid couldn't drive a horse and
+carriage through."
+
+"And Mr. Langmaid's one of the nicest men I know!"
+
+"What I wonder," mused Phil, "is whether this is a mere doctrinal revolt
+on Hodder's part, or whether he has found out a few things. There are so
+many parsons in these days who don't seem to see any inconsistency in
+robbing several thousand people to build settlement houses and carved
+marble altars, and who wouldn't accept a Christmas box from a highwayman.
+But I'll do Hodder the justice to say he doesn't strike me as that kind.
+And I have an idea that Eldon Parr and Wallis Plimpton and the rest know
+he isn't, know that he'd be a Tartar if he ever get started, and that's
+what makes them uneasy."
+
+"Then it isn't his change of religious opinions they would care about?"
+said Eleanor.
+
+"Oh, I don't say that Eldon Parr won't try to throw him out if he
+questions the faith as delivered by the Saints."
+
+"Phil, what a way of putting it!"
+
+"Any indication of independence, any approach to truth would be regarded
+as dangerous," Phil continued. And of course Gordon Atterbury and others
+we could mention, who think they believe in the unchipped egg theory,
+will be outraged. But it's deeper than that. Eldon Parr will give
+orders that Hodder's to go."
+
+"Give orders?"
+
+"Certainly. That vestry, so far as Mr. Parr is concerned, is a mere
+dummy board of directors. He's made Langmaid, and Plimpton, and even
+Everett Constable, who's the son of an honourable gentleman, and ought to
+know better. And he can ruin them by snapping his fingers. He can even
+make the financial world too hot for Ferguson. I'll say this for Gordon
+Atterbury, that Mr. Parr can't control him, but he's got a majority
+without him, and Gordon won't vote for a heretic. Who are left, except
+father-in-law Waring and myself?"
+
+"He can't control either of you!" said Eleanor, proudly.
+
+"When it comes to that, Nell--we'll move into Canada and buy a farm."
+
+"But can he hurt you, Phil--either of you?" she asked, after a moment.
+
+"I'd like to see him try it," Phil Goodrich declared
+
+And his wife thought, as she looked at him, that she would like to see
+Mr. Parr try it, too.
+
+
+
+III
+
+Phil Goodrich had once said that Mr. Plimpton's translation of the
+national motto E pluribus unum, was "get together," and it was true that
+not the least of Mr. Plimpton's many gifts was that of peace making.
+Such was his genius that he scented trouble before it became manifest to
+the world, and he stoutly declared that no difference of opinion ever
+existed between reasonable men that might not be patched up before the
+breach became too wide--provided that a third reasonable man contributed
+his services. The qualifying word "reasonable" is to be noted. When
+Mr. Bedloe Hubbell had undertaken, in the name of Reform, to make a
+witch's cauldron of the city's politics, which Mr. Beatty had hitherto
+conducted so smoothly from the back room of his saloon, Mr. Plimpton had
+unselfishly offered his services. Bedloe Hubbell, although he had been a
+playmate of Mr. Plimpton's wife's, had not proved "reasonable," and had
+rejected with a scorn only to be deemed fanatical the suggestion that Mr.
+Hubbell's interests and Mr. Beatty's interests need not clash, since Mr.
+Hubbell might go to Congress! And Mr. Plimpton was the more hurt since
+the happy suggestion was his own, and he had had no little difficulty in
+getting Mr. Beatty to agree to it.
+
+Yet Mr. Plimpton's career in the ennobling role of peacemaker had,
+on the whole, been crowned with such success as to warrant his belief
+in the principle. Mr. Parr, for instance,--in whose service, as in that
+of any other friend, Mr. Plimpton was always ready to act--had had
+misunderstandings with eminent financiers, and sometimes with United
+States Senators. Mr. Plimpton had made many trips to the Capitol at
+Washington, sometimes in company with Mr. Langmaid, sometimes not, and on
+one memorable occasion had come away smiling from an interview with the
+occupant of the White House himself.
+
+Lest Mr. Plimpton's powers of premonition seem supernatural, it may be
+well to reveal the comparative simplicity of his methods. Genius,
+analyzed, is often disappointing, Mr. Plimpton's was selective and
+synthetic. To illustrate in a particular case, he had met Mr. Parr in
+New York and had learned that the Reverend Mr. Hodder had not only
+declined to accompany the banker on a yachting trip, but had elected to
+remain in the city all summer, in his rooms in the parish house, while
+conducting no services. Mr. Parr had thought this peculiar. On his
+return home Mr. Plimpton had one day dropped in to see a Mr. Gaines, the
+real estate agent for some of his property. And Mr. Plimpton being
+hale-fellow-well-met, Mr. Gaines had warned him jestingly that he would
+better not let his parson know that he owned a half interest in a certain
+hotel in Dalton Street, which was leased at a profitable rate.
+
+If Mr. Plimpton felt any uneasiness, he did not betray it. And he
+managed to elicit from the agent, in an entirely casual and jovial
+manner, the fact that Mr. Hodder, a month or so before, had settled the
+rent of a woman for a Dalton Street flat, and had been curious to
+discover the name of the owner. Mr. Gaines, whose business it was to
+recognize everybody, was sure of Mr. Hodder, although he had not worn
+clerical clothes.
+
+Mr. Plimpton became very thoughtful when he had left the office. He
+visited Nelson Langmaid in the Parr Building. And the result of the
+conference was to cause Mr. Langmaid to recall, with a twinge of
+uneasiness, a certain autumn morning in a room beside Bremerton Lake
+when he had been faintly yet distinctly conscious of the, admonitory
+whisperings of that sixth sense which had saved him on other occasions.
+
+"Dash it!" he said to himself, after Mr. Plimpton had departed, and
+he stood in the window and gazed across at the flag on the roof of
+'Ferguson's.' "It would serve me right for meddling in this parson
+business. Why did I take him away from Jerry Whitely, anyhow?"
+
+It added to Nelson Langmaid's discomfort that he had a genuine affection,
+even an admiration for the parson in question. He might have known by
+looking at the man that he would wake up some day,--such was the burden
+of his lament. And there came to him, ironically out of the past, the
+very words of Mr. Parr's speech to the vestry after Dr. Gilman's death,
+that succinct list of qualifications for a new rector which he himself,
+Nelson Langmaid, had humorously and even more succinctly epitomized.
+Their "responsibility to the parish, to the city, and to God" had been to
+find a rector "neither too old nor too young, who would preach the faith
+as we received it, who was not sensational, and who did not mistake
+Socialism for Christianity."  At the "Socialism" a certain sickly
+feeling possessed the lawyer, and he wiped beads of perspiration from his
+dome-like forehead.
+
+He didn't pretend to be versed in theology--so he had declared--and at
+the memory of these words of his the epithet "ass," self applied, passed
+his lips. "You want a parson who will stick to his last, not too high or
+too low or too broad or too narrow, who has intellect without too much
+initiative . . . and will not get the church uncomfortably full of
+strangers and run you out of your pews." Thus he had capped the
+financier. Well, if they had caught a tartar, it served him, Nelson
+Langmaid, right. He recalled his talk with Gerald Whitely, and how his
+brother-in-law had lost his temper when they had got on the subject of
+personality . . . .
+
+Perhaps Wallis Plimpton could do something. Langmaid's hopes of this
+were not high. It may have been that he had suspicions of what Mr.
+Plimpton would have called Hodder's "reasonableness." One thing was
+clear--that Mr. Plimpton was frightened. In the sanctuaries, the private
+confessionals of high finance (and Nelson Langmaid's office may be called
+so), the more primitive emotions are sometimes exhibited.
+
+"I don't see what business it is of a clergyman, or of any one else,
+whether I own property in Dalton Street," Mr. Plimpton had said, as he
+sat on the edge of the lawyer's polished mahogany desk. "What does he
+expect us to do,--allow our real estate to remain unproductive merely for
+sentimental reasons? That's like a parson, most of 'em haven't got any
+more common sense than that. What right has he got to go nosing around
+Dalton Street? Why doesn't he stick to his church?"
+
+"I thought you fellows were to build him a settlement house there,"
+Langmaid observed.
+
+"On the condition that he wouldn't turn socialist."
+
+"You'd better have stipulated it in the bond," said the lawyer, who could
+not refrain, even at this solemn moment, from the temptation of playing
+upon Mr. Plimpton's apprehensions. "I'm afraid he'll make it his
+business, Wallis, to find out whether you own anything in Dalton Street.
+I'll bet he's got a list of Dalton Street property in his pocket right
+now."
+
+Mr. Plimpton groaned.
+
+"Thank God I don't own any of it!" said Langmaid.
+
+"What the deuce does he intend to do?" the other demanded.
+
+"Read it out in church," Langmaid suggested. "It wouldn't sound pretty,
+Wallis, to be advertised in the post on Monday morning as owning that
+kind of a hotel."
+
+"Oh, he's a gentleman," said Mr. Plimpton, "he wouldn't do anything as
+low as that!"
+
+"But if he's become a socialist?" objected Langmaid.
+
+"He wouldn't do it," his friend reiterated, none too confidently.
+"I shouldn't be surprised if he made me resign from the vestry and forced
+me to sell my interest. It nets me five thousand a year."
+
+"What is the place?" Langmaid asked sympathetically, "Harrod's?"
+
+Mr. Plimpton nodded.
+
+"Not that I am a patron," the lawyer explained somewhat hastily. "But
+I've seen the building, going home."
+
+"It looks to me as if it would burn down some day, Wallis."
+
+"I wish it would," said Mr. Plimpton.
+
+"If it's any comfort to you--to us," Langmaid went on, after a moment,
+"Eldon Parr owns the whole block above Thirteenth, on the south side
+--bought it three years ago. He thinks the business section will grow that
+way."
+
+"I know," said Mr. Plimpton, and they looked at each other.
+
+The name predominant in both minds had been mentioned.
+
+"I wonder if Hodder really knows what he's up against." Mr. Plimpton
+sometimes took refuge in slang.
+
+"Well, after all, we're not sure yet that he's 'up against anything,'"
+replied Langmaid, who thought the time had come for comfort. "It may all
+be a false alarm. There's no reason, after all, why a Christian
+clergyman shouldn't rescue women in Dalton Street, and remain in the city
+to study the conditions of the neighbourhood where his settlement house
+is to be. And just, because you or I would not be able to resist an
+invitation to go yachting with Eldon Parr, a man might be imagined who
+had that amount of moral courage."
+
+"That's just it. Hodder seems to me, now I come to think of it, just the
+kind of John Brown type who wouldn't hesitate to get into a row with
+Eldon Parr if he thought it was right, and pull down any amount of
+disagreeable stuff about our ears."
+
+"You're mixing your heroes, Wallis," said Langmaid.
+
+"I can't help it. You'd catch it, too, Nelson. What in the name of
+sense possessed you to get such a man?"
+
+This being a question the lawyer was unable to answer, the conversation
+came to another pause. And it was then that Mr. Plimpton's natural
+optimism reasserted itself.
+
+"It isn't done,--the thing we're afraid of, that's all," he proclaimed,
+after a turn or two about the room. "Hodder's a gentleman, as I said,
+and if he feels as we suspect he does he'll resign like a gentleman and a
+Christian. I'll have a talk with him--oh, you can trust me! I've got an
+idea. Gordon Atterbury told me the other day there is a vacancy in a
+missionary diocese out west, and that Hodder's name had been mentioned,
+among others, to the bishops for the place. He'd make a rattling
+missionary bishop, you know, holding services in saloons and knocking
+men's heads together for profanity, and he boxes like a professional.
+Now, a word from Eldon Parr might turn the trick. Every parson wants to
+be a bishop."
+
+Langmaid shook his head.
+
+"You're getting out of your depths, my friend. The Church isn't Wall
+Street. And missionary bishops aren't chosen to make convenient
+vacancies."
+
+"I don't mean anything crude," Mr. Plimpton protested. "But a word from
+the chief layman of a diocese like this, a man who never misses a General
+Convention, and does everything handsomely, might count,--particularly if
+they're already thinking of Hodder. The bishops would never suspect we
+wanted to get rid of him."
+
+"Well," said Langmaid, "I advise you to go easy, all along the line."
+
+"Oh, I'll go easy enough," Mr. Plimpton assented, smiling. "Do you
+remember how I pulled off old Senator Matthews when everybody swore he
+was dead set on voting for an investigation in the matter of those coal
+lands Mr. Parr got hold of in his state?"
+
+"Matthews isn't Hodder, by a long shat," said Langmaid. "If you ask me
+my opinion, I'll tell you frankly that if Hodder has made up his mind to
+stay in St. John's a ton of dynamite and all the Eldon Parrs in the
+nation can't get him out."
+
+"Can't the vestry make him resign?" asked Mr. Plimpton, uncomfortably.
+
+"You'd better, go home and study your canons, my friend. Nothing short
+of conviction for heresy can do it, if he doesn't want to go."
+
+"You wouldn't exactly call him a heretic," Mr. Plimpton said ruefully.
+
+"Would you know a heretic if you saw one?" demanded Langmaid.
+
+"No, but my wife would, and Gordon Atterbury and Constable would, and
+Eldon Parr. But don't let's get nervous."
+
+"Well, that's sensible at any rate," said Langmaid . . . .
+
+So Mr. Plimpton had gone off optimistic, and felt even more so the next
+morning after he had had his breakfast in the pleasant dining room of the
+Gore Mansion, of which he was now master. As he looked out through the
+open window at the sunshine in the foliage of Waverley Place, the
+prospect of his being removed from that position of dignity and influence
+on the vestry of St. John's, which he had achieved, with others, after so
+much walking around the walls, seemed remote. And he reflected with
+satisfaction upon the fact that his wife, who was his prime minister,
+would be home from the East that day. Two heads were better than one,
+especially if one of the two were Charlotte Gore's. And Mr. Plimpton had
+often reflected upon the loss to the world, and the gain to himself, that
+she was a woman.
+
+It would not be gallant to suggest that his swans were geese.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The successful navigation of lower Tower Street, at noonday, required
+presence of mind on the part of the pedestrian. There were currents and
+counter-currents, eddies and backwaters, and at the corner of Vine a
+veritable maelstrom through which two lines of electric cars pushed their
+way, east and weft, north and south, with incessant clanging of bells;
+followed by automobiles with resounding horns, trucks and delivery wagons
+with wheels reverberating on the granite. A giant Irish policeman, who
+seemed in continual danger of a violent death, and wholly indifferent to
+it, stood between the car tracks and halted the rush from time to time,
+driving the people like sheep from one side to the other. Through the
+doors of Ferguson's poured two conflicting streams of humanity, and
+wistful groups of young women, on the way from hasty lunches, blocked the
+pavements and stared at the finery behind the plate-glass windows.
+
+The rector, slowly making his way westward, permitted himself to be
+thrust hither and thither, halted and shoved on again as he studied the
+faces of the throng. And presently he found himself pocketed before one
+of the exhibits of feminine interest, momentarily helpless, listening to
+the admiring and envious chorus of a bevy of diminutive shop-girls on the
+merits of a Paris gown. It was at this moment that he perceived, pushing
+towards him with an air of rescue, the figure of his vestryman, Mr.
+Wallis Plimpton.
+
+"Well, well, well!" he cried, as he seized Hodder by the arm and pulled
+him towards the curb. "What are you doing herein the marts of trade?
+Come right along with me to the Eyrie, and we'll have something, to eat."
+
+The Eyrie was a famous lunch club, of limited membership, at the top of
+the Parr Building, where financial affairs of the first importance were
+discussed and settled.
+
+Hodder explained that he had lunched at half-past twelve.
+
+"Well, step into my office a minute. It does me good, to see you again,
+upon my word, and I can't let you get by without a little pow-wow."
+
+Mr. Plimpton's trust company, in Vine Street, resembled a Greek temple.
+Massive but graceful granite columns adorned its front, while within it
+was partitioned off with polished marble and ornamental grills. In the
+rear, guarded by the desks and flanked by the compartments of various
+subordinates, was the president's private sanctum, and into this holy of
+holies Mr. Plimpton led the way with the simple, unassuming genial air of
+the high priest of modern finance who understands men. The room was
+eloquent almost to affectation of the system and order of great business,
+inasmuch as it betrayed not the least sign of a workshop. On the dark
+oak desk were two leather-bound books and a polished telephone. The
+walls were panelled, there was a stone fireplace with andirons set, a
+deep carpet spread over the tessellated floor, and three leather-padded
+armchairs, one of which Mr. Plimpton hospitably drew forward for the
+rector. He then produced a box of cigars.
+
+"You don't smoke, Mr. Hodder. I always forget. That's the way you
+manage to keep yourself in such good shape." He drew out a gold match
+box and seated himself with an air of gusto opposite his guest. "And you
+haven't had a vacation, they tell me."
+
+"On the contrary," said the rector, "McCrae has taken the services all
+summer."
+
+"But you've been in the city!" Mr. Plimpton exclaimed, puffing at his
+cigar.
+
+"Yes, I've been in the city."
+
+"Well, well, I'll bet you haven't been idle. Just between us, as
+friends, Mr. Hodder, I've often wondered if you didn't work too hard
+--there's such a thing as being too conscientious, you know. And I've
+an idea that the rest of the vestry think so. Mr. Parr, for instance.
+We know when we've got a good thing, and we don't want to wear you out.
+Oh, we can appreciate your point of view, and admire it. But a little
+relaxation--eh? It's too bad that you couldn't have seen your way to
+take that cruise--Mr. Parr was all cut up about it. I guess you're the
+only man among all of us fairly close to him, who really knows him well,"
+said Mr. Plimpton, admiringly. "He thinks a great deal of you, Mr.
+Hodder. By the way, have you seen him since he got back?"
+
+"No," Hodder answered.
+
+
+"The trip did him good. I thought he was a little seedy in the spring
+--didn't you? Wonderful man! And when I think how he's slandered and
+abused it makes me hot. And he never says anything, never complains,
+lives up there all alone, and takes his medicine. That's real
+patriotism, according to my view. He could retire to-morrow
+--but he keeps on--why? Because he feels the weight of a tremendous
+responsibility on his shoulders, because he knows if it weren't for him
+and men like him upon whom the prosperity of this nation depends, we'd
+have famine and anarchy on our hands in no time. And look what he's done
+for the city, without ostentation, mind you! He never blows his own
+horn-never makes a speech. And for the Church! But I needn't tell you.
+When this settlement house and chapel are finished, they'll be coming out
+here from New York to get points. By the way, I meant to have written
+you. Have our revised plans come yet? We ought to break ground in
+November, oughtn't we?"
+
+"I intend to lay my views on that matter before the vestry at the next
+meeting, the rector said.
+
+"Well," declared Mr. Plimpton, after a scarcely perceptible pause, "I've
+no doubt they'll be worth listening to. If I were to make a guess," he
+continued, with a contemplative smile, blowing a thin stream of smoke
+towards the distant ceiling, "I should bet that you have spent your
+summer looking over the ground. I don't say that you have missed your
+vocation, Mr. Hodder, but I don't mind telling you that for a clergyman,
+for a man absorbed in spiritual matters, a man who can preach the sermons
+you preach, you've got more common-sense and business thoroughness than
+any one I have ever run across in your profession."
+
+"Looking over the ground?" Hodder repeated, ignoring the compliment.
+
+"Sure," said Mr. Plimpton, smiling more benignly than ever. "You mustn't
+be modest about it. Dalton Street. And when that settlement house is
+built, I'll guarantee it will be run on a business basis. No nonsense."
+
+"What do you mean by nonsense?" Hodder asked. He did not make the
+question abrupt, and there was even the hint of a smile in his eyes,
+which Mr. Plimpton found the more disquieting.
+
+"Why, that's only a form of speech. I mean you'll be practical,
+efficient, that you'll get hold of the people of that neighbourhood and
+make 'em see that the world isn't such a bad place after all, make 'em
+realize that we in St. John's want to help 'em out. That you won't make
+them more foolishly discontented than they are, and go preaching
+socialism to them."
+
+"I have no intention of preaching socialism," said Hodder. But he laid a
+slight emphasis on the word which sent a cold shiver down Mr. Plimpton's
+spine, and made him wonder whether there might not be something worse
+than socialism.
+
+"I knew you wouldn't," he declared, with all the heartiness he could
+throw into his voice. "I repeat, you're a practical, sensible man. I'll
+yield to none in my belief in the Church as a moral, uplifting, necessary
+spiritual force in our civilization, in my recognition of her high
+ideals, but we business men, Mr. Hodder,--as--I am sure you must agree,
+--have got to live, I am sorry to say, on a lower plane. We've got to deal
+with the world as we find it, and do our little best to help things
+along. We can't take the Gospel literally, or we should all be ruined
+in a day, and swamp everybody else. You understand me?
+
+"I understand you," said the rector.
+
+Mr. Plimpton's cigar had gone out. In spite of himself, he had slipped
+from the easy-going, casual tone into one that was becoming persuasive,
+apologetic, strenuous. Although the day was not particularly warm, he
+began to perspire a little; and he repeated the words over to himself,
+"I understand you." What the deuce did the rector know? He had somehow
+the air of knowing everything--more than Mr. Plimpton did. And Mr.
+Plimpton was beginning to have the unusual and most disagreeable feeling
+of having been weighed in the balance and found wanting. He glanced at
+his guest, who sat quite still, the head bent a trifle, the disturbing
+gray eyes fixed contemplatively an him--accusingly. And yet the
+accusation did not seem personal with the clergyman, whose eyes were
+nearly the medium, the channels of a greater, an impersonal Ice. It was
+true that the man had changed. He was wholly baffling to Mr. Plimpton,
+whose sense of alarm increased momentarily into an almost panicky feeling
+as he remembered what Langmaid had said. Was this inscrutable rector of
+St. John's gazing, knowingly, at the half owner of Harrods Hotel in
+Dalton Street, who couldn't take the Gospel literally? There was
+evidently no way to find out at once, and suspense would be unbearable,
+in vain he told himself that these thoughts were nonsense, the discomfort
+persisted, and he had visions of that career in which he had become
+one of the first citizens and the respected husband of Charlotte Gore
+clashing down about his ears. Why? Because a clergyman should choose
+to be quixotic, fanatical? He did not took quixotic, fanatical, Mr.
+Plimpton had to admit,--but a good deal saner than he, Mr. Plimpton, must
+have appeared at that moment. His throat was dry, and he didn't dare to
+make the attempt to relight his cigar.
+
+"There's nothing like getting together--keeping in touch with people,
+Mr. Hodder," he managed to say. "I've been out of town a good deal this
+summer--putting on a little flesh, I'm sorry to admit. But I've been
+meaning to drop into the parish house and talk over those revised plans
+with you. I will drop in--in a day or two. I'm interested in the work,
+intensely interested, and so is Mrs. Plimpton. She'll help you. I'm
+sorry you can't lunch with me."
+
+He had the air, now, of the man who finds himself disagreeably and
+unexpectedly closeted with a lunatic; and his language, although he
+sought to control it, became even a trifle less coherent.
+
+"You must make allowances for us business men, Mr. Hodder. I mean, of
+course, we're sometimes a little lax in our duties--in the summer, that
+is. Don't shoot the pianist, he's doing his--ahem! You know the story.
+
+"By the way, I hear great things of you; I'm told it's on the cards that
+you're to be made a bishop."
+
+"Oh," answered the rector, "there are better men mentioned than I!"
+
+"I want you to know this," said his vestryman, as he seized Hodder's
+hand, "much as we value you here, bitterly as we should hate to lose you,
+none of us, I am sure, would stand in the way of such a deserved
+advancement."
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Plimpton," said the rector.
+
+Mr. Plimpton watched the vigorous form striding through the great chamber
+until it disappeared. Then he seized his hat and made his way as rapidly
+as possible through the crowds to the Parr Building. At the entrance of
+the open-air roof garden of the Eyrie he ran into Nelson Langmaid.
+
+"You're the very man I'm after," said Mr. Plimpton, breathlessly.
+"I stopped in your office, and they said you'd gone up."
+
+"What's the matter, Wallis?" inquired the lawyer, tranquilly. "You look
+as if you'd lost a couple of bonds."
+
+I've just seen Hodder, and he is going to do it."
+
+"Do what?"
+
+"Sit down here, at this table in the corner, and I'll tell you."
+
+For a practical man, it must be admitted that Mr. Plimpton had very
+little of the concrete to relate. And it appeared on cross-examination
+by Mr. Langmaid, who ate his cold meat and salad with an exasperating and
+undiminished appetite--that the only definite thing the rector had said
+was that he didn't intend to preach socialism. This was reassuring.
+
+"Reassuring!" exclaimed Mr. Plimpton, whose customary noonday hunger was
+lacking, "I wish you could have heard him say it!"
+
+"The wicked," remarked the lawyer, "flee when no man pursueth. Don't
+shoot the pianist!" Langmaid set down his beer, and threw back his head
+and laughed. "If I were the Reverend Mr. Hodder, after such an
+exhibition as you gave, I should immediately have suspected the pianist
+of something, and I should have gone off by myself and racked my brains
+and tried to discover what it was. He's a clever man, and if he hasn't
+got a list of Dalton Street property now he'll have one by to-morrow,
+and the story of some of your transactions with Tom Beatty and the City
+Council."
+
+"I believe you'd joke in the electric chair," said Mr. a Plimpton,
+resentfully. "I'll tell you this,--and my experience backs me up,
+--if you can't get next to a man by a little plain talk, he isn't safe.
+I haven't got the market sense for nothing, and I'll give you this tip,
+Nelson,--it's time to stand from under. Didn't I warn you fellows that
+Bedloe Hubbell meant business long before he started in? and this parson
+can give Hubbell cards and spades. Hodder can't see this thing as it is.
+He's been thinking, this summer. And a man of that kind is downright
+dangerous when he begins to think. He's found out things, and he's put
+two and two together, and he's the uncompromising type. He has a notion
+that the Gospel can be taken literally, and I could feel all the time I
+was talking to him he thought I was a crook."
+
+"Perhaps he was right," observed the lawyer.
+
+"That comes well from you," Mr. Plimpton retorted.
+
+"Oh, I'm a crook, too," said Langmaid. "I discovered it some time ago.
+The difference between you and me, Wallis, is that I am willing to
+acknowledge it, and you're not. The whole business world, as we know it,
+is crooked, and if we don't cut other people's throats, they'll cut
+ours."
+
+"And if we let go, what would happen to the country?" his companion
+demanded.
+
+Langmaid began to shake with silent laughter.
+
+"Your solicitude about the country, Wallis, is touching. I was brought
+up to believe that patriotism had an element of sacrifice in it, but I
+can't see ours. And I can't imagine myself, somehow, as a Hercules
+bearing the burden of our Constitution. From Mr. Hodder's point of view,
+perhaps,--and I'm not sure it isn't the right one, the pianist is doing
+his damnedest, to the tune of--Dalton Street. We might as well look this
+thing in the face, my friend. You and I really don't believe in another
+world, or we shouldn't be taking so much trouble to make this one as we'd
+like to have it."
+
+"I never expected to hear you talk this way," said Mr. Plimpton.
+
+"Well, it's somewhat of a surprise to me," the lawyer admitted.
+
+"And I don't think you put it fairly," his friend contended. "I never
+can tell when you are serious, but this is damned serious. In business
+we have to deal with crooks, who hold us up right and left, and if we
+stood back you know as well as I do that everything would go to pot.
+And if we let the reformers have their way the country would be bedlam.
+We'd have anarchy and bloodshed, revolution, and the people would be
+calling us, the strong men, back in no time. You can't change human
+nature. And we have a sense of responsibility--we support law and order
+and the Church, and found institutions, and give millions away in
+charity."
+
+The big lawyer listened to this somewhat fervent defence of his order
+with an amused smile, nodding his head slightly from side to side.
+
+"If you don't believe in it," demanded Mr. Plimpton, why the deuce don't
+you drop it?"
+
+"It's because of my loyalty," said Langmaid. "I wouldn't desert my pals.
+I couldn't bear, Wallis, to see you go to the guillotine without me."
+
+Mr. Plimpton became unpleasantly silent.
+
+"Well, you may think it's a joke," he resumed, after a moment, "but there
+will be a guillotine if we don't look out. That confounded parson is
+getting ready to spring something, and I'm going to give Mr. Parr a tip.
+He'll know how to handle him. He doesn't talk much, but I've got an
+idea, from one or two things he let drop, that he's a little suspicious
+of a change in Hodder. But he ought to be waived."
+
+"You're in no condition to talk to Mr. Parr, or to anyone else, except
+your wife, Walks," Langmaid said. "You'd better go home, and let me see
+Mr. Parr. I'm responsible for Mr. Hodder, anyway."
+
+"All right," Mr. Plimpton agreed, as though he had gained some shred of
+comfort from this thought. "I guess you're in worse than any of us."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Inside of the Cup, Volume 5
+by Winston Churchill
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+The Project Gutenberg Ebook The Inside of the Cup, v5, by Winston Churchill
+WC#23 in our series by Winston Churchill (USA author, not Sir Winston)
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+Title: The Inside of the Cup, Volume 5.
+
+Author: Winston Churchill (USA author, not Sir Winston Churchill)
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+Release Date: March, 2004  [EBook #5360]
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INSIDE OF THE CUP, V5, BY CHURCHILL ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
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+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
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+
+
+
+
+
+THE INSIDE OF THE CUP
+
+By Winston Churchill
+
+
+
+Volume 5.
+
+
+XVII.     RECONSTRUCTION
+XVIII.    THE RIDDLE OF CAUSATION
+XIX.      MR. GOODRICH BECOMES A PARTISAN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+RECONSTRUCTION
+
+
+I
+
+Life had indeed become complicated, paradoxical.  He, John Hodder, a
+clergyman, rector of St. John's by virtue of not having resigned, had
+entered a restaurant of ill repute, had ordered champagne for an
+abandoned woman, and had no sense of sin when he awoke the next morning!
+The devil, in the language of orthodox theology, had led him there.  He
+had fallen under the influence of the tempter of his youth, and all in
+him save the carnal had been blotted out.
+
+More paradoxes!  If the devil had not taken possession of him and led him
+there, it were more than probable that he could never have succeeded in
+any other way in getting on a footing of friendship with this woman, Kate
+Marcy.  Her future, to be sure, was problematical.  Here was no simple,
+sentimental case he might formerly have imagined, of trusting innocence
+betrayed, but a mixture of good and evil, selfishness and unselfishness.
+And she had, in spite of all, known the love which effaces self!.  Could
+the disintegration, in her case, be arrested?
+
+Gradually Hodder was filled with a feeling which may be called amazement
+because, although his brain was no nearer to a solution than before, he
+was not despondent.  For a month he had not permitted his mind to dwell
+on the riddle; yet this morning he felt stirring within him a new energy
+for which he could not account, a hope unconnected with any mental
+process!  He felt in touch, once more, faintly but perceptibly, with
+something stable in the chaos.  In bygone years he had not seen the
+chaos, but the illusion of an orderly world, a continual succession of
+sunrises, 'couleur de rose', from the heights above Bremerton.  Now were
+the scales fallen from his eyes; now he saw the evil, the injustice, the
+despair; felt, in truth, the weight of the sorrow of it all, and yet that
+sorrow was unaccountably transmuted, as by a chemical process, into
+something which for the first time had a meaning--he could not say what
+meaning.  The sting of despair had somehow been taken out of it, and it
+remained poignant!
+
+Not on the obsession of the night before, when he had walked down Dalton
+Street and beheld it transformed into a realm of adventure, but upon his
+past life did he look back now with horror, upon the even tenor of those
+days and years in the bright places.  His had been the highroad of a
+fancied security, from which he had feared to stray, to seek his God
+across the rough face of nature, from black, forgotten capons to the
+flying peaks in space.  He had feared reality.  He had insisted upon
+gazing at the universe through the coloured glasses of an outworn
+theology, instead of using his own eyes.
+
+So he had left the highroad, the beaten way of salvation many others had
+deserted, had flung off his spectacles, had plunged into reality, to be
+scratched and battered, to lose his way.  Not until now had something of
+grim zest come to him, of an instinct which was the first groping of a
+vision, as to where his own path might lie.  Through what thickets and
+over what mountains he knew not as yet--nor cared to know.  He felt
+resistance, whereas on the highroad he had felt none.  On the highroad
+his cry had gone unheeded and unheard, yet by holding out his hand in the
+wilderness he had helped another, bruised and bleeding, to her feet!
+Salvation, Let it be what it might be, he would go on, stumbling and
+seeking, through reality.
+
+Even this last revelation, of Eldon Parr's agency in another tragedy,
+seemed to have no further power to affect him.  .  .  Nor could Hodder
+think of Alison as in blood-relationship to the financier, or even to the
+boy, whose open, pleasure-loving face he had seen in the photograph.
+
+
+
+II
+
+A presage of autumn was in the air, and a fine, misty rain drifted in at
+his windows as he sat at his breakfast.  He took deep breaths of the
+moisture, and it seemed to water and revive his parching soul.  He found
+himself, to his surprise, surveying with equanimity the pile of books in
+the corner which had led him to the conviction of the emptiness of the
+universe--but the universe was no longer empty!  It was cruel, but a
+warring force was at work in it which was not blind, but directed.  He
+could not say why this was so, but he knew it, he felt it, sensed its
+energy within him as he set out for Dalton Street.
+
+He was neither happy nor unhappy, but in equilibrium, walking with sure
+steps, and the anxiety in which he had fallen asleep the night before was
+gone: anxiety lest the woman should have fled, or changed her mind, or
+committed some act of desperation.
+
+In Dalton Street a thin coat of yellow mud glistened on the asphalt, but
+even the dreariness of this neighbourhood seemed transient.  He rang the
+bell of the flat, the door swung open, and in the hall above a woman
+awaited him.  She was clad in black.
+
+"You wouldn't know me, would you?"  she inquired.  "Say, I scarcely know
+myself.  I used to wear this dress at Pratt's, with white collars and
+cuffs and--well, I just put it on again.  I had it in the bottom of my
+trunk, and I guessed you'd like it."
+
+"I didn't know you at first," he said, and the pleasure in his face was
+her reward.
+
+The transformation, indeed, was more remarkable than he could have
+believed possible, for respectability itself would seem to have been
+regained by a costume, and the abundance of her remarkable hair was now
+repressed.  The absence of paint made her cheeks strangely white, the
+hollows under the eyes darker.  The eyes themselves alone betrayed the
+woman of yesterday; they still burned.
+
+"Why," he exclaimed, looking around him, "you have been busy, haven't
+you?"
+
+"I've been up since six," she told him proudly.  The flat had been
+dismantled of its meagre furniture, the rug was rolled up and tied, and a
+trunk strapped with rope was in the middle of the floor.  Her next remark
+brought home to him the full responsibility of his situation.  She led
+him to the window, and pointed to a spot among the drenched weeds and
+rubbish in the yard next door.  "Do you see that bottle?  That's the
+first thing I did--flung it out there.  It didn't break," she added
+significantly, "and there are three drinks in it yet."
+
+Once more he confined his approval to his glance.
+
+"Now you must come and have some breakfast," he said briskly.  "If I had
+thought about it I should have waited to have it with you."
+
+"I'm not hungry."  In the light of his new knowledge, he connected her
+sudden dejection with the sight of the bottle.
+
+"But you must eat.  You're exhausted from all this work.  And a cup of
+coffee will make all the difference in the world."
+
+She yielded, pinning on her hat.  And he led her, holding the umbrella
+over her, to a restaurant in Tower Street, where a man in a white cap and
+apron was baking cakes behind a plate-glass window.  She drank the
+coffee, but in her excitement left the rest of the breakfast almost
+untasted.
+
+"Say," she asked him once, "why are you doing this?"
+
+"I don't know," he answered, "except that it gives me pleasure."
+
+"Pleasure?"
+
+"Yes.  It makes me feel as if I were of some use."
+
+She considered this.
+
+"Well," she observed, reviled by the coffee, "you're the queerest
+minister I ever saw."
+
+When they had reached the pavement she asked him where they were going.
+
+"To see a friend of mine, and a friend of yours," he told her.  "He does
+net live far from here."
+
+She was silent again, acquiescing.  The rain had stopped, the sun was
+peeping out furtively through the clouds, the early loiterers in Dalton
+Street stared at them curiously.  But Hodder was thinking of that house
+whither they were bound with a new gratitude, a new wonder that it should
+exist.  Thus they came to the sheltered vestibule with its glistening
+white paint, its polished name plate and doorknob.  The grinning,
+hospitable darky appeared in answer to the rector's ring.
+
+"Good morning, Sam," he said; "is Mr. Bentley in?"
+
+Sam ushered them ceremoniously into the library, and gate Marcy gazed
+about her with awe, as at something absolutely foreign to her experience:
+the New Barrington Hotel, the latest pride of the city, recently erected
+at the corner of Tower and Jefferson and furnished in the French style,
+she might partially have understood.  Had she been marvellously and
+suddenly transported and established there, existence might still have
+evinced a certain continuity.  But this house!  .  .
+
+Mr. Bentley rose from the desk in the corner.
+
+"Oh, it's you, Hodder," he said cheerfully, laying his hand on the
+rector's arm.  "I was just thinking about you."
+
+"This is Miss Marcy, Mr. Bentley," Hodder said.
+
+Mr. Bentley took her hand and led her to a chair.
+
+"Mr. Hodder knows how fond I am of young women," he said.  "I have six of
+them upstairs,--so I am never lonely."
+
+Mr. Bentley did not appear to notice that her lips quivered.
+
+Hodder turned his eyes from her face.  "Miss Marcy has been lonely," he
+explained, "and I thought we might get her a room near by, where she
+might see them often.  She is going to do embroidery."
+
+"Why, Sally will know of a room," Mr. Bentley replied.  "Sam!" he called.
+
+"Yessah--yes, Mistah Ho'ace."  Sam appeared at the door.
+
+Ask Miss Sally to come down, if she's not busy."
+
+Kate Marcy sat dumbly in her chair, her hands convulsively clasping its
+arms, her breast heaving stormily, her face becoming intense with the
+effort of repressing the wild emotion within her: emotion that threatened
+to strangle her if resisted, or to sweep her out like a tide and drown
+her in deep waters: emotion that had no one mewing, and yet summed up a
+life, mysteriously and overwhelmingly aroused by the sight of a room, and
+of a kindly old gentleman who lived in it!
+
+Mr. Bentley took the chair beside her.
+
+"Why, I believe it's going to clear off, after all," he exclaimed.
+"Sam predicted it, before breakfast.  He pretends to be able to tell by
+the flowers.  After a while I must show you my flowers, Miss Marcy, and
+what Dalton Street can do by way of a garden--Mr. Hodder could hardly
+believe it, even when he saw it."  Thus he went on, the tips of his
+fingers pressed together, his head bent forward in familiar attitude, his
+face lighted, speaking naturally of trivial things that seemed to suggest
+themselves; and careful, with exquisite tact that did not betray itself,
+to address both.  A passing automobile startled her with the blast of its
+horn.  "I'm afraid I shall never get accustomed to them," he lamented.
+"At first I used to be thankful there were no trolley cars on this
+street, but I believe the automobiles are worse."
+
+A figure flitted through the hall and into the room, which Hodder
+recognized as Miss Grower's.  She reminded him of a flying shuttle across
+the warp of Mr. Bentley's threads, weaving them together; swift, sure,
+yet never hurried or flustered.  One glance at the speechless woman
+seemed to suffice her for a knowledge of the situation.
+
+"Mr. Hodder has brought us a new friend and neighbour, Sally,--Miss Kate
+Marcy.  She is to have a room near us, that we may see her often."
+
+Hodder watched Miss Grower's procedure with a breathless interest.
+
+"Why, Mrs. McQuillen has a room--across the street, you know, Mr.
+Bentley."
+
+Sally perched herself on the edge of the armchair and laid her hand
+lightly on Kate Marcy's.
+
+Even Sally Grover was powerless to prevent the inevitable, and the touch
+of her hand seemed the signal for the release of the pent-up forces.  The
+worn body, the worn nerves, the weakened will gave way, and Kate Marcy
+burst into a paroxysm of weeping that gradually became automatic,
+convulsive, like a child's.  There was no damming this torrent, once
+released.  Kindness, disinterested friendship, was the one unbearable
+thing.
+
+"We must bring her upstairs," said Sally Grover, quietly, "she's going to
+pieces."
+
+Hodder helping, they fairly carried her up the flight, and laid her on
+Sally Grover's own bed.
+
+That afternoon she was taken to Mrs. McQuillen's.
+
+The fiends are not easily cheated.  And during the nights and days that
+followed even Sally Grower, whose slight frame was tireless, whose
+stoicism was amazing, came out of the sick room with a white face and
+compressed lips.  Tossing on the mattress, Kate Marcy enacted over again
+incident after incident of her past life, events natural to an existence
+which had been largely devoid of self-pity, but which now, clearly
+enough, tested the extreme limits of suffering.  Once more, in her
+visions, she walked the streets, wearily measuring the dark, empty
+blocks, footsore, into the smaller hours of the night; slyly,
+insinuatingly, pathetically offering herself--all she possessed--to the
+hovering beasts of prey.  And even these rejected her, with gibes, with
+obscene jests that sprang to her lips and brought a shudder to those who
+heard.
+
+Sometimes they beheld flare up fitfully that mysterious thing called
+the human spirit, which all this crushing process had not served to
+extinguish.  She seemed to be defending her rights, whatever these may
+have been!  She expostulated with policemen.  And once, when Hodder was
+present, she brought back vividly to his mind that first night he had
+seen her, when she had defied him and sent him away.  In moments she
+lived over again the careless, reckless days when money and good looks
+had not been lacking, when rich food and wines had been plentiful.  And
+there were other events which Sally Grower and the good-natured
+Irishwoman, Mrs. McQuillen, not holding the key, could but dimly
+comprehend.  Education, environment, inheritance, character--what a
+jumble of causes!  What Judge was to unravel them, and assign the exact
+amount of responsibility?
+
+There were other terrible scenes when, more than semiconscious, she cried
+out piteously for drink, and cursed them for withholding it.  And it was
+in the midst of one of these that an incident occurred which made a deep
+impression upon young Dr. Giddings, hesitating with his opiates, and
+assisting the indomitable Miss Grower to hold his patient.  In the midst
+of the paroxysm Mr. Bentley entered and stood over her by the bedside,
+and suddenly her struggles ceased.  At first she lay intensely still,
+staring at him with wide eyes of fear.  He sat down and took her hand,
+and spoke to her, quietly and naturally, and her pupils relaxed.  She
+fell into a sleep, still clinging to his fingers.
+
+It was Sally who opposed the doctor's wish to send her to a hospital.
+
+"If it's only a question of getting back her health, she'd better die,"
+she declared.  "We've got but one chance with her, Dr. Giddings, to keep
+her here.  When she finds out she's been to a hospital, that will be the
+end of it with her kind.  We'll never get hold of her again.  I'll take
+care of Mrs. McQuillen."
+
+Doctor Giddings was impressed by this wisdom.
+
+"You think you have a chance, Miss Grower?"  he asked.  He had had a
+hospital experience.
+
+Miss Grower was wont to express optimism in deeds rather than words.
+
+"If I didn't think so, I'd ask you to put a little more in your
+hypodermic next time," she replied.
+
+And the doctor went away, wondering .  .  .  .
+
+Drink!  Convalescence brought little release for the watchers.  The
+fiends would retire, pretending to have abandoned the field, only to
+swoop down again when least expected.  There were periods of calm when it
+seemed as though a new and bewildered personality were emerging, amazed
+to find in life a kindly thing, gazing at the world as one new-born.  And
+again, Mrs. McQuillen or Ella Finley might be seen running bareheaded
+across the street for Miss Grower.  Physical force was needed, as the
+rector discovered on one occasion; physical force, and something more,
+a dauntlessness that kept Sally Grower in the room after the other women
+had fled in terror.  Then remorse, despondency, another fear .  .  .  .
+
+As the weeks went by, the relapses certainly became fewer.  Something was
+at work, as real in its effects as the sunlight, but invisible.  Hodder
+felt it, and watched in suspense while it fought the beasts in this
+woman, rending her frame in anguish.  The frame might succumb, the breath
+might leave it to moulder, but the struggle, he knew, would go until the
+beasts were conquered.  Whence this knowledge?--for it was knowledge.
+
+On the quieter days of her convalescence she seemed, indeed, more Madonna
+than Magdalen as she sat against the pillows, her red-gold hair lying in
+two heavy plaits across her shoulders, her cheeks pale; the inner,
+consuming fires that smouldered in her eyes died down.  At such times her
+newly awakened innocence (if it might be called such--pathetic innocence,
+in truth!) struck awe into Hodder; her wonder was matched by his own.
+Could there be another meaning in life than the pursuit of pleasure,
+than the weary effort to keep the body alive?
+
+Such was her query, unformulated.  What animated these persons who had
+struggled over her so desperately, Sally Grower, Mr. Bentley, and Hodder
+himself?  Thus her opening mind.  For she had a mind.
+
+Mr. Bentley was the chief topic, and little by little he became exalted
+into a mystery of which she sought the explanation.
+
+"I never knew anybody like him," she would exclaim.
+
+"Why, I'd seen him on Dalton Street with the children following him, and
+I saw him again that day of the funeral.  Some of the girls I knew used
+to laugh at him.  We thought he was queer.  And then, when you brought me
+to him that morning and he got up and treated me like a lady, I just
+couldn't stand it.  I never felt so terrible in my life.  I just wanted
+to die, right then and there.  Something inside of me kept pressing and
+pressing, until I thought I would die.  I knew what it was to hate
+myself, but I never hated myself as I have since then.
+
+"He never says anything about God, and you don't, but when he comes in
+here he seems like God to me.  He's so peaceful,--he makes me peaceful.
+I remember the minister in Madison,--he was a putty-faced man with
+indigestion,--and when he prayed he used to close his eyes and try to
+look pious, but he never fooled me.  He never made me believe he knew
+anything about God.  And don't think for a minute he'd have done what you
+and Miss Grower and Mr. Bentley did!  He used to cross the street to get
+out of the way of drunken men--he wouldn't have one of them in his
+church.  And I know of a girl he drove out of town because she had a baby
+and her sweetheart wouldn't marry her.  He sent her to hell.  Hell's
+here--isn't it?"
+
+These sudden remarks of hers surprised and troubled him.  But they had
+another effect, a constructive effect.  He was astonished, in going over
+such conversations afterwards, to discover that her questions and his
+efforts to answer them in other than theological terms were both
+illuminating and stimulating.  Sayings in the Gospels leaped out in his
+mind, fired with new meanings; so simple, once perceived, that he was
+amazed not to have seen them before.  And then he was conscious of a
+palpitating joy which left in its wake a profound thankfulness.  He made
+no attempt as yet to correlate these increments, these glimpses of truth
+into a system, but stored them preciously away.
+
+He taxed his heart and intellect to answer her sensible and helpfully,
+and thus found himself avoiding the logic, the Greek philosophy, the
+outworn and meaningless phrases of speculation; found himself employing
+(with extraordinary effect upon them both) the simple words from which
+many of these theories had been derived.  "He that hath seen me hath seen
+the Father."  What she saw in Horace Bentley, he explained, was God.  God
+wished us to know how to live, in order that we might find happiness, and
+therefore Christ taught us that the way to find happiness was to teach
+others how to live,--once we found out.  Such was the meaning of Christ's
+Incarnation, to teach us how to live in order that we might find God and
+happiness.  And Hodder translated for her the word Incarnation.
+
+Now, he asked, how were we to recognize God, how might we know how he
+wished us to live, unless we saw him in human beings, in the souls into
+which he had entered?  In Mr. Bentley's soul?  Was this too deep?
+
+She pondered, with flushed face.
+
+"I never had it put to me like that," she said, presently.  "I never
+could have known what you meant if I hadn't seen Mr. Bentley."
+
+Here was a return flash, for him.  Thus, teaching he taught.  From this
+germ he was to evolve for himself the sublime truth that the world grown
+better, not through automatic, soul-saving machinery, but by Personality.
+
+On another occasion she inquired about "original sin;"--a phrase which
+had stuck in her memory since the stormings of the Madison preacher.
+Here was a demand to try his mettle.
+
+"It means," he replied after a moment, "that we are all apt to follow the
+selfish, animal instincts of our matures, to get all we can for ourselves
+without thinking of others, to seek animal pleasures.  And we always
+suffer for it."
+
+"Sure," she agreed.  "That's what happened to me."
+
+"And unless we see and know some one like Mr. Bentley," he went on,
+choosing his words, "or discover for ourselves what Christ was, and what
+he tried to tell us, we go on 'suffering, because we don't see any way
+out.  We suffer because we feel that we are useless, that other persons
+are doing our work."
+
+"That's what hell is!" She was very keen.  "Hell's here," she repeated.
+
+"Hell may begin here, and so may heaven," he answered.
+
+"Why, he's in heaven now!"  she exclaimed, "it's funny I never thought of
+it before."  Of course she referred to Mr. Bentley.
+
+Thus; by no accountable process of reasoning, he stumbled into the path
+which was to lead him to one of the widest and brightest of his vistas,
+the secret of eternity hidden in the Parable of the Talents!  But it will
+not do to anticipate this matter .  .  .  .
+
+The divine in this woman of the streets regenerated by the divine in her
+fellow-creatures, was gasping like a new-born babe for breath.  And with
+what anxiety they watched her!  She grew strong again, went with Sally
+Drover and the other girls on Sunday excursions to the country, applied
+herself to her embroidery with restless zeal for days, only to have it
+drop from her nerveless fingers.  But her thoughts were uncontrollable,
+she was drawn continually to the edge of that precipice which hung over
+the waters whence they had dragged her, never knowing when the vertigo
+would seize her.  And once Sally Drover, on the alert for just such an
+occurrence, pursued her down Dalton Street and forced her back .  .  .
+
+Justice to Miss Drover cannot be done in these pages.  It was she who
+bore the brunt of the fierce resentment of the reincarnated fiends when
+the other women shrank back in fear, and said nothing to Mr. Bentley or
+Hodder until the incident was past.  It was terrible indeed to behold
+this woman revert--almost in the twinkling of an eye--to a vicious wretch
+crazed for drink, to feel that the struggle had to be fought all over
+again.  Unable to awe Sally Drover's spirit, she would grow piteous.
+
+"For God's sake let me go--I can't stand it.  Let me go to hell--that's
+where I belong.  What do you bother with me for?  I've got a right."
+
+Once the doctor had to be called.  He shook his head.  but his eye met
+Miss Grower's, and he said nothing.
+
+"I'll never be able to pull out, I haven't got the strength," she told
+Hodder, between sobs.  "You ought to have left me be, that was where I
+belonged.  I can't stand it, I tell you.  If it wasn't for that woman
+watching me downstairs, and Sally Grower, I'd have had a drink before
+this.  It ain't any use, I've got so I can't live without it--I don't
+want to live."
+
+And then remorse, self-reproach, despair,--almost as terrible to
+contemplate.  She swore she would never see Mr. Bentley again, she
+couldn't face him.
+
+Yet they persisted, and gained ground.  She did see Mr. Bentley, but what
+he said to her, or she to him, will never be known.  She didn't speak of
+it .  .  .  .
+
+Little by little her interest was aroused, her pride in her work
+stimulated.  None was more surprised than Hodder when Sally Grower
+informed him that the embroidery was really good; but it was thought
+best, for psychological reasons, to discard the old table-cover with its
+associations and begin a new one.  On occasional evenings she brought her
+sewing over to Mr. Bentley's, while Sally read aloud to him and the young
+women in the library.  Miss Grower's taste in fiction was romantic; her
+voice (save in the love passages, when she forgot herself ) sing-song,
+but new and unsuspected realms were opened up for Kate Marcy, who would
+drop her work and gaze wide-eyed out of the window, into the darkness.
+
+And it was Sally who must be given credit for the great experiment,
+although she took Mr. Bentley and Hodder into her confidence.  On it they
+staked all.  The day came, at last, when the new table-cover was
+finished.  Miss Grower took it to the Woman's Exchange, actually sold it,
+and brought back the money and handed it to her with a smile, and left
+her alone.
+
+An hour passed.  At the end of it Kate Marcy came out of her room,
+crossed the street, and knocked at the door of Mr. Bentley's library.
+Hodder happened to be there.
+
+"Come in," Mr. Bentley said.
+
+She entered, breathless, pale.  Her eyes, which had already lost much of
+the dissipated look, were alight with exaltation.  Her face bore evidence
+of the severity of the hour of conflict, and she was perilously near to
+tears.  She handed Mr. Bentley the money.
+
+"What's this, Kate?"  he asked, in his kindly way.
+
+"It's what I earned, sir," she faltered.  "Miss Grower sold the table-
+cover.  I thought maybe you'd put it aside for me, like you do for the
+others.
+
+"I'll take good care of it," he said.
+
+"Oh, sir, I don't ever expect to repay you, and Miss Grower and Mr.
+Hodder!
+
+"Why, you are repaying us," he replied, cutting her short, "you are
+making us all very happy.  And Sally tells me at the Exchange they like
+your work so well they are asking for more.  I shouldn't have suspected,"
+he added, with a humorous glance at the rector, "that Mr. Hodder knew so
+much about embroidery."
+
+He rose, and put the money in his desk,--such was his genius for avoiding
+situations which threatened to become emotional.
+
+"I've started another one," she told them, as she departed.
+
+A few moments later Miss Grower appeared.
+
+"Sally," said Mr. Bentley, "you're a wise woman.  I believe I've made
+that remark before.  You have managed that case wonderfully."
+
+"There was a time," replied Miss Grower, thoughtfully, when it looked
+pretty black.  We've got a chance with her now, I think."
+
+"I hope so.  I begin to feel so," Mr. Bentley declared.
+
+"If we succeed," Miss Grower went on, "it will be through the heart.  And
+if we lose her again, it will be through the heart."
+
+Hodder started at this proof of insight.
+
+"You know her history, Mr. Hodder?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+"Well, I don't.  And I don't care to.  But the way to get at Kate Marcy,
+light as she is in some respects, is through her feelings.  And she's
+somehow kept 'em alive.  We've got to trust her, from now on--that's the
+only way.  And that's what God does, anyhow."
+
+This was one of Miss Grover's rare references to the Deity.
+
+Turning over that phrase in his mind, Hodder went slowly back towards the
+parish house.  God trusted individuals--even such as Kate Marcy.  What
+did that mean?  Individual responsibility!  He repeated it.  Was the
+world on that principle, then?  It was as though a search-light were
+flung ahead of him and he saw, dimly, a new order--a new order in
+government and religion.  And, as though spoken by a voice out of the
+past, there sounded in his ears the text of that sermon which had so
+deeply moved him, "I will arise and go to my Father."
+
+The church was still open, and under the influence of the same strange
+excitement which had driven him to walk in the rain so long ago, he
+entered and went slowly up the marble aisle.  Through the gathering gloom
+he saw the figure on the cross.  And as he stood gazing at it, a message
+for which he had been waiting blazed up within him.
+
+He would not leave the Church!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE RIDDLE OF CAUSATION
+
+
+I
+
+In order to portray this crisis in the life of Kate Marcy, the outcome of
+which is still uncertain, other matters have been ignored.
+
+How many persons besides John Hodder have seemed to read--in crucial
+periods--a meaning into incidents having all the outward appearance of
+accidents!  What is it that leads us to a certain man or woman at a
+certain time, or to open a certain book?  Order and design? or influence?
+
+The night when he had stumbled into the cafe in Dalton Street might well
+have been termed the nadir of Hodder's experience.  His faith had been
+blotted out, and, with it had suddenly been extinguished all spiritual
+sense, The beast had taken possession.  And then, when it was least
+expected,--nay, when despaired of, had come the glimmer of a light;
+distant, yet clear.  He might have traced the course of his
+disillusionment, perhaps, but cause and effect were not discernible here.
+
+They soon became so, and in the weeks that followed he grew to have the
+odd sense of a guiding hand on his shoulder,--such was his instinctive
+interpretation of it, rather than the materialistic one of things
+ordained.  He might turn, in obedience to what seemed a whim, either to
+the right or left, only to recognize new blazes that led him on with
+surer step; and trivial accidents became events charged with meaning.
+He lived in continual wonder.
+
+One broiling morning, for instance, he gathered up the last of the books
+whose contents he had a month before so feverishly absorbed, and which
+had purged him of all fallacies.  At first he had welcomed them with a
+fierce relief, sucked them dry, then looked upon them with loathing.  Now
+he pressed them gratefully, almost tenderly, as he made his way along the
+shady side of the street towards the great library set in its little
+park.
+
+He was reminded, as he passed from the blinding sunlight into the cool
+entrance hall, with its polished marble stairway and its statuary, that
+Eldon Parr's munificence had made the building possible: that some day
+Mr. Parr's bust would stand m that vestibule with that of Judge Henry
+Goodrich--Philip Goodrich's grandfather--and of other men who had served
+their city and their commonwealth.
+
+Upstairs, at the desk, he was handing in the volumes to the young woman
+whose duty it was to receive them when he was hailed by a brisk little
+man in an alpaca coat, with a skin like brown parchment.
+
+"Why, Mr. Hodder," he exclaimed cheerfully, with a trace of German
+accent, "I had an idea you were somewhere on the cool seas with our
+friend, Mr. Parr.  He spoke, before he left, of inviting you."
+
+It had been Eldon Parr, indeed, who had first brought Hodder to the
+library, shortly after the rector's advent, and Mr. Engel had accompanied
+them on a tour of inspection; the financier himself had enjoined the
+librarian to "take good care" of the clergyman.  Mr. Waring, Mr.
+Atterbury; and Mr. Constable were likewise trustees.  And since then,
+when talking to him, Hodder had had a feeling that Mr. Engel was not
+unconscious of the aura--if it may be called such--of his vestry.
+
+Mr. Engel picked up one of the books as it lay on the counter, and as he
+read the title his face betrayed a slight surprise.
+
+"Modern criticism!" he exclaimed.
+
+"You have found me out," the rector acknowledged, smiling.
+
+"Came into my room, and have a chat," said the librarian, coaxingly.
+
+It was a large chamber at the corner of the building, shaded by awnings,
+against which brushed the branches of an elm which had belonged to the
+original park.  In the centre of the room was a massive oak desk, one
+whole side of which was piled high with new volumes.
+
+"Look there," said the librarian, with a quick wave of his hand, "those
+are some which came in this week, and I had them put here to look over.
+Two-thirds of 'em on religion, or religious philosophy.  Does that
+suggest anything to you clergymen?"
+
+"Do many persons read them, Mr. Engel?"  said the rector, at length.
+
+"Read them!" cried Mr. Engel, quizzically.  "We librarians are a sort of
+weather-vanes, if people only knew enough to consult us.  We can hardly
+get a sufficient number of these new religious books the good ones,
+I mean--to supply the demand.  And the Lord knows what trash is devoured,
+from what the booksellers tell me.  It reminds me of the days when this
+library was down on Fifth Street, years ago, and we couldn't supply
+enough Darwins and Huxleys and Spencers and popular science generally.
+That was an agnostic age.  But now you'd be surprised to see the
+different kinds of men and women who come demanding books on religion--
+all sorts and conditions.  They're beginning to miss it out of their
+lives; they want to know.  If my opinion's worth anything, I should not
+hesitate to declare that we're on the threshold of a greater religious
+era than the world has ever seen."
+
+Hodder thrust a book back into the pile, and turned abruptly, with a
+manner that surprised the librarian.  No other clergyman to whom he had
+spoken on this subject had given evidence of this strong feeling, and the
+rector of St. John's was the last man from whom he would have expected
+it.
+
+"Do you really think so?" Hodder demanded.
+
+"Why, yes," said Mr. Engel, when he had recovered from his astonishment.
+"I'm sure of it.  I think clergymen especially--if you will pardon me--
+are apt to forget that this is a reading age.  That a great many people
+who used to get what instruction they had--ahem--from churches, for
+instance, now get it from books.  I don't want to say anything to offend
+you, Mr. Hodder--"
+
+"You couldn't," interrupted the rector.  He was equally surprised at the
+discovery that he had misjudged Mr. Engel, and was drawn towards him now
+with a strong sympathy and curiosity.
+
+"Well," replied Mr. Engel, "I'm glad to hear you say that."  He
+restrained a gasp.  Was this the orthodox Mr. Hodder of St. John's?
+
+"Why," said Hodder, sitting down, "I've learned, as you have, by
+experience.  Only my experience hasn't been so hopeful as yours--that is,
+if you regard yours as hopeful.  It would be hypocritical of me not to
+acknowledge that the churches are losing ground, and that those who ought
+to be connected with them are not.  I am ready to admit that the churches
+are at fault.  But what you tell me of people reading these books gives
+me more courage than I have had for--for some time."
+
+"Is it so!" ejaculated the little man, relapsing into the German idiom of
+his youth.
+
+"It is," answered the rector, with an emphasis not to be denied.  "I wish
+you would give me your theory about this phenomenon, and speak frankly."
+
+"But I thought--" the bewildered librarian began.  "I saw you had been
+reading those books, but I thought--"
+
+"Naturally you did," said Holder, smiling.  His personality, his
+ascendency, his poise, suddenly felt by the other, were still more
+confusing.  "You thought me a narrow, complacent, fashionable priest who
+had no concern as to what happened outside the walls of his church, who
+stuck obstinately to dogmas and would give nothing else a hearing.  Well,
+you were right."
+
+"Ah, I didn't think all that," Mr. Engel protested, and his parchment
+skin actually performed the miracle of flushing.  "I am not so stupid.
+And once, long ago when I was young, I was going to be a minister
+myself."
+
+"What prevented you?"  asked Holder, interested.
+
+"You want me to be frank--yes, well, I couldn't take the vows."  The
+brown eyes of the quiet, humorous, self-contained and dried-up custodian
+of the city's reading flamed up.  "I felt the call," he exclaimed.  "You
+may not credit it to look at me now, Mr. Hodder.  They said to me, 'here
+is what you must swear to believe before you can make men and women
+happier and more hopeful, rescue them from sin and misery!'  You know
+what it was."
+
+Hodder nodded.
+
+"It was a crime.  It had nothing to do with religion.  I thought it over
+for a year--I couldn't.  Oh, I have since been thankful.  I can see now
+what would have happened to me--I should have had fatty degeneration of
+the soul."
+
+The expression was not merely forcible, it was overwhelming.  It brought
+up before Holder's mind, with sickening reality, the fate he had himself
+escaped.  Fatty degeneration of the soul!
+
+The little man, seeing the expression on the rector's face, curbed his
+excitement, and feared he had gone too far.
+
+"You will pardon me!" he said penitently, "I forget myself.  I did not
+mean all clergymen."
+
+"I have never heard it put so well," Holder declared.  "That is exactly
+what occurs in many cases."
+
+"Yes, it is that," said Engel, still puzzled, but encouraged, eyeing the
+strong face of the other.  "And they lament that the ministry hasn't more
+big men.  Sometimes they get one with the doctrinal type of mind--
+a Newman--but how often?  And even a Newman would be of little avail
+to-day.  It is Eucken who says that the individual, once released from
+external authority, can never be turned back to it.  And they have been
+released by the hundreds of thousands ever since Luther's time, are being
+freed by the hundreds of thousands to-day.  Democracy, learning, science,
+are releasing them, and no man, no matter how great he may be, can stem
+that tide.  The able men in the churches now--like your Phillips Brooks,
+who died too soon--are beginning to see this.  They are those who
+developed after the vows of the theological schools were behind them.
+Remove those vows, and you will see the young men come.  Young men are
+idealists, Mr. Hodder, and they embrace other professions where the mind
+is free, and which are not one whit better paid than the ministry.
+
+"And what is the result," he cried, "of the senseless insistence on the
+letter instead of the spirit of the poetry of religion?  Matthew Arnold
+was a thousand times right when he inferred that Jesus Christ never spoke
+literally and yet he is still being taken literally by most churches, and
+all the literal sayings which were put into his mouth are maintained as
+Gospel truth!  What is the result of proclaiming Christianity in terms of
+an ancient science and theology which awaken no quickening response in
+the minds and hearts of to-day?  That!"  The librarian thrust a yellow
+hand towards the pile of books.  "The new wine has burst the old skin and
+is running all over the world.  Ah, my friend, if you could only see, as
+I do, the yearning for a satisfying religion which exists in this big
+city!  It is like a vacuum, and those books are rushing to supply it.
+I little thought," he added dreamily, "when I renounced the ministry in
+so much sorrow that one day I should have a church of my own.  This
+library is my church, and men and women of all creeds come here by the
+thousands.  But you must pardon me.  I have been carried away--I forgot
+myself."
+
+"Mr. Engel," replied the rector, "I want you to regard me as one of your
+parishioners."
+
+The librarian looked at him mutely, and the practical, desiccated little
+person seemed startlingly transformed into a mediaeval, German mystic.
+
+"You are a great man, Mr. Hodder," he said.  "I might have guessed it."
+
+It was one of the moments when protest would have been trite,
+superfluous.  And Hodder, in truth, felt something great swelling within
+him, something that was not himself, and yet strangely was.  But just
+what--in view of his past strict orthodoxy and limited congregation--
+Mr. Engel meant, he could not have said.  Had the librarian recognized,
+without confession on his part, the change in him?  divined his future
+intentions?
+
+"It is curious that I should have met you this morning, Mr. Engel," he
+said.  "I expressed surprise when you declared this was a religious age,
+because you corroborated something I had felt, but of which I had no
+sufficient proof.  I felt that a great body of unsatisfied men and women
+existed, but that I was powerless to get in touch with them; I had
+discovered that truth, as you have so ably pointed out, is disguised and
+distorted by ancient dogmas; and that the old Authority, as you say, no
+longer carries weight."
+
+"Have you found the new one?"  Mr. Engel demanded.
+
+"I think I have," the rector answered calmly, "it lies in personality.
+I do not know whether you will agree with me that the Church at large has
+a future, and I will confess to you that there was a time when I thought
+she had not.  I see now that she has, once given to her ministers that
+freedom to develop of which you speak.  In spite of the fact that truth
+has gradually been revealed to the world by what may be called an
+Apostolic Succession of Personalities,--Augustine, Dante, Francis of
+Assisi, Luther, Shakespeare, Milton, and our own Lincoln and Phillips
+Brooks,--to mention only a few,--the Church as a whole has been blind to
+it.  She has insisted upon putting the individual in a straitjacket, she
+has never recognized that growth is the secret of life, that the clothes
+of one man are binding on another."
+
+"Ah, you are right--a thousand times right," cried the librarian.  "You
+have read Royce, perhaps, when he says, 'This mortal shall put on
+individuality--'"
+
+"No," said the rector, outwardly cool, but inwardly excited by the
+coruscation of this magnificent paraphrase of Paul's sentence, by the
+extraordinary turn the conversation had taken.  "I am ashamed to own that
+I have not followed the development of modern philosophy.  The books I
+have just returned, on historical criticism," he went on, after a
+moment's hesitation, "infer what my attitude has been toward modern
+thought.  We were made acquainted with historical criticism in the
+theological seminary, but we were also taught to discount it.  I have
+discounted it, refrained from reading it,--until now.  And yet I have
+heard it discussed in conferences, glanced over articles in the reviews.
+I had, you see, closed the door of my mind.  I was in a state where
+arguments make no impression."
+
+The librarian made a gesture of sympathetic assent, which was also a
+tribute to the clergyman's frankness.
+
+"You will perhaps wonder how I could have lived these years in an
+atmosphere of modern thought and have remained uninfluenced.  Well, I
+have recently been wondering--myself."  Hodder smiled.  "The name of
+Royce is by no means unfamiliar to me, and he taught at Harvard when I
+was an undergraduate.  But the prevailing philosophy of that day among
+the students was naturalism.  I represent a revolt from it.  At the
+seminary I imbibed a certain amount of religious philosophy--but I did
+not continue it, as thousands of my more liberal fellow-clergymen have
+done.  My religion 'worked' during the time, at least, I remained in my
+first parish.  I had no interest in reconciling, for instance, the
+doctrine of evolution with the argument for design.  Since I have been
+here in this city," he added, simply, "my days have been filled with a
+continued perplexity--when I was not too busy to think.  Yes, there was
+an unacknowledged element of fear in my attitude, though I comforted
+myself with the notion that opinions, philosophical and scientific, were
+in a state of flux."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Mr. Engel, "I comprehend.  But, from the manner in which
+you spoke just now, I should have inferred that you have been reading
+modern philosophy--that of the last twenty years.  Ah, you have
+something before you, Mr. Hodder.  You will thank God, with me, for that
+philosophy.  It has turned the tide, set the current running the other
+way.  Philosophy is no longer against religion, it is with it.  And if
+you were to ask me to name one of the greatest religious teachers of
+our age, I should answer, William James.  And there is Royce, of whom I
+spoke,--one of our biggest men.  The dominant philosophies of our times
+have grown up since Arnold wrote his 'Literature and Dogma,' and they are
+in harmony with the quickening social spirit of the age, which is a
+religious spirit--a Christian spirit, I call it.  Christianity is coming
+to its own.  These philosophies, which are not so far apart, are the
+flower of the thought of the centuries, of modern science, of that most
+extraordinary of discoveries, modern psychology.  And they are far from
+excluding religion, from denying the essential of Christ's teachings.
+On the other hand, they grant that the motive-power of the world is
+spiritual.
+
+"And this," continued Mr. Engel, "brings me to another aspect of
+authority.  I wonder if it has struck you?  In mediaeval times, when a
+bishop spoke ex cathedra, his authority, so far as it carried weight,
+came from two sources.  First, the supposed divine charter of the Church
+to save and damn.  That authority is being rapidly swept away.  Second,
+he spoke with all the weight of the then accepted science and philosophy.
+But as soon as the new science began to lay hold on people's minds, as--
+for instance--when Galileo discovered that the earth moved instead of the
+sun (and the pope made him take it back), that second authority began to
+crumble too.  In the nineteenth century science had grown so strong that
+the situation looked hopeless.  Religion had apparently irrevocably lost
+that warrant also, and thinking men not spiritually inclined, since they
+had to make a choice between science and religion, took science as being
+the more honest, the more certain.
+
+"And now what has happened?  The new philosophies have restored your
+second Authority, and your first, as you properly say, is replaced by the
+conception of Personality.  Personality is nothing but the rehabilitation
+of the prophet, the seer.  Get him, as Hatch says, back into your Church.
+The priests with their sacrifices and automatic rites, the logicians,
+have crowded him out.  Why do we read the Old Testament at all?  Not for
+the laws of the Levites, not for the battles and hangings, but for the
+inspiration of the prophets.  The authority of the prophet comes through
+personality, the source of which is in what Myers calls the infinite
+spiritual world--in God.  It was Christ's own authority.
+
+"And as for your other authority, your ordinary man, when he reads modern
+philosophy, says to himself, this does not conflict with science?  But he
+gets no hint, when he goes to most churches, that there is, between the
+two, no real quarrel, and he turns away in despair.  He may accept the
+pragmatism of James, the idealism of Royce, or even what is called neo
+realism.  In any case, he gains the conviction that a force for good is
+at worn in the world, and he has the incentive to become part of it.....
+But I have given you a sermon!"
+
+"For which I can never be sufficiently, grateful," said Hodder, with an
+earnestness not to be mistaken.
+
+The little man's eyes rested admiringly, and not without emotion, on the
+salient features of the tall clergyman.  And when he spoke again, it was
+in acknowledgment of the fact that he had read Hodder's purpose.
+
+"You will have opposition, my friend.  They will fight you--some persons
+we know.  They do not wish--what you and I desire.  But you will not
+surrender--I knew it."  Mr. Engel broke off abruptly, and rang a bell on
+his desk.  "I will make out for you a list.  I hope you may come in
+again, often.  We shall have other talks,--yes?  I am always here."
+
+Then it came to pass that Hodder carried back with him another armful of
+books.  Those he had brought back were the Levellers of the False.  These
+were the Builders of the True.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Hodder had known for many years that the writings of Josiah Royce and of
+William James had "been in the air," so to speak, and he had heard them
+mentioned at dinner parties by his more intellectual parishioners, such
+as Mrs. Constable and Martha Preston.  Now he was able to smile at his
+former attitude toward these moderns, whose perusal he had deprecated as
+treason to the saints!  And he remembered his horror on having listened
+to a fellow-clergyman discuss with calmness the plan of the "Varieties of
+Religious Experiences."  A sacrilegious dissection of the lives of these
+very saints!  The scientific process, the theories of modern psychology
+applied with sang-froid to the workings of God in the human soul!
+Science he had regarded as the proclaimed enemy of religion, and in these
+days of the apotheosis of science not even sacred things were spared.
+
+Now Hodder saw what the little librarian had meant by an authority
+restored.  The impartial method of modern science had become so firmly
+established in the mind of mankind by education and reading that the
+ancient unscientific science of the Roman Empire, in which orthodox
+Christianity was clothed, no longer carried authority.  In so far as
+modern science had discovered truth, religion had no quarrel with it.
+And if theology pretended to be the science of religion, surely it must
+submit to the test of the new science!  The dogged clinging to the
+archaic speculations of apologists, saints, and schoolmen had brought
+religion to a low ebb indeed.
+
+One of the most inspiring books he read was by an English clergyman of
+his own Church whom he had formerly looked upon as a heretic, with all
+that the word had once implied.  It was a frank yet reverent study of the
+self-consciousness of Christ, submitting the life and teachings of Jesus
+to modern criticism and the scientific method.  And the Saviour's
+divinity, rather than being lessened, was augmented.  Hodder found it
+infinitely refreshing that the so-called articles of Christian belief,
+instead of being put first and their acceptance insisted upon, were made
+the climax of the investigation.
+
+Religion, he began to perceive, was an undertaking, are attempt to find
+unity and harmony of the soul by adopting, after mature thought, a
+definite principle in life.  If harmony resulted,--if the principle
+worked, it was true.  Hodder kept an open mind, but he became a
+pragmatist so far.  Science, on the other hand, was in a sphere by
+herself, and need have no conflict with religion; science was not an
+undertaking, but an impartial investigation by close observation of facts
+in nature.  Her object was to discover truths by these methods alone.
+She had her theories, indeed, but they must be submitted to rigorous
+tests.  This from a book by Professor Perry, an advocate of the new
+realism.
+
+On the other hand there were signs that modern science, by infinitesimal
+degrees, might be aiding in the solution of the Mystery .  .  .  .
+
+But religion, Hodder saw, was trusting.  Not credulous, silly trusting,
+but thoughtful trusting, accepting such facts as were definitely known.
+Faith was trusting.  And faith without works was dead simply because
+there could be no faith without works.  There was no such thing as belief
+that did not result in act.
+
+A paragraph which made a profound impression on Hodder at that time
+occurs in James's essay, "Is life worth living?"
+
+"Now-what do I mean by I trusting?  Is the word to carry with it
+license to define in detail an invisible world, and to authorize and
+excommunicate those whose trust is different?  .  .  Our faculties of
+belief were not given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they
+were given us to live by.  And to trust our religions demands men first
+of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible world
+which they suggest were real.  It is a fact of human nature that man can
+live and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single
+dogma and definition."
+
+Yet it was not these religious philosophies which had saved him, though
+the stimulus of their current had started his mind revolving like a
+motor.  Their function, he perceived now, was precisely to compel him to
+see what had saved him, to reenforce it with the intellect, with the
+reason, and enable him to save others.  The current set up,--by a
+thousand suggestions of which he made notes,--a personal construction,
+coordination, and he had the exhilaration of feeling, within him, a
+creative process all his own.  Behold a mystery 'a paradox'--one of many.
+As his strength grew greater day by day, as his vision grew clearer, he
+must exclaim with Paul: "Yet not I, but the grace of God which was with
+me!"
+
+He, Hodder, was but an instrument transmitting power.  And yet--oh
+paradox!--the instrument continued to improve, to grow stronger, to
+develop individuality and personality day by day!  Life, present and
+hereafter, was growth, development, the opportunity for service in a
+cause.  To cease growing was to die.
+
+He perceived at last the form all religion takes is that of consecration
+to a Cause,--one of God's many causes.  The meaning of life is to find
+one's Cause, to lose one's self in it.  His was the liberation of the
+Word,--now vouchsafed to him; the freeing of the spark from under the
+ashes.  The phrase was Alison's.  To help liberate the Church, fan into
+flame the fire which was to consume the injustice, the tyranny, the
+selfishness of the world, until the Garvins, the Kate Marcys, the stunted
+children, and anaemic women were no longer possible.
+
+It was Royce who, in one illuminating sentence, solved for him the
+puzzle, pointed out whence his salvation had come.  "For your cause can
+only be revealed to you through some presence that first teaches you to
+love the unity of the spiritual life.  .  .  You must find it in human
+shape."
+
+Horace Bentley!
+
+He, Hodder, had known this, but known it vaguely, without sanction.  The
+light had shone for him even in the darkness of that night in Dalton
+Street, when he thought to have lost it forever.  And he had awakened the
+next morning, safe,--safe yet bewildered, like a half drowned man on warm
+sands in the sun.
+
+"The will of the spiritual world, the divine will, revealed in man."
+What sublime thoughts, as old as the Cross itself, yet continually and
+eternally new!
+
+
+
+III
+
+There was still another whose face was constantly before him, and the
+reflection of her distressed yet undaunted soul,--Alison Parr.  The
+contemplation of her courage, of her determination to abide by nothing
+save the truth, had had a power over him that he might not estimate, and
+he loved her as a man loves a woman, for her imperfections.  And he loved
+her body and her mind.
+
+One morning, as he walked back from Mrs. Bledsoe's through an
+unfrequented, wooded path of the Park, he beheld her as he had summoned
+her in his visions.  She was sitting motionless, gazing before her with
+clear eyes, as at the Fates.  .  .
+
+She started on suddenly perceiving him, but it was characteristic of her
+greeting that she seemed to feel no surprise at the accident which had
+brought them together.
+
+"I am afraid," he said, smiling, "that I have broken in on some profound
+reflections."
+
+She did not answer at once, but looked up at him, as he stood over her,
+with one of her strange, baffling gazes, in which there was the hint of a
+welcoming smile.
+
+"Reflection seems to be a circular process with me," she answered.  "I
+never get anywhere--like you."
+
+"Like me!" he exclaimed, seating himself on the bench.  Apparently their
+intercourse, so long as it should continue, was destined to be on the
+basis of intimacy in which it had begun.  It was possible at once to be
+aware of her disturbing presence, and yet to feel at home in it.
+
+"Like you, yes," she said, continuing to examine him.  "You've changed
+remarkably."
+
+In his agitation, at this discovery of hers he again repeated her words.
+
+"Why, you seem happier, you look happier.  It isn't only that, I can't
+explain how you impress me.  It struck me when you were talking to Mr.
+Bentley the other day.  You seem to see something you didn't see when
+I first met you, that you didn't see the first time we were at Mr.
+Bentley's together.  Your attitude is fixed--directed.  You have made a
+decision of some sort--a momentous one, I rather think."
+
+"Yes," he replied, "you are right.  It's more than remarkable that you
+should have guessed it."
+
+She remained silent
+
+"I have decided," he found himself saying abruptly, "to continue in the
+Church."
+
+Still she was silent, until he wondered whether she would answer him.  He
+had often speculated to himself how she would take this decision, but he
+could make no surmise from her expression as she stared off into the
+wood.  Presently she turned her head, slowly, and looked into his face.
+Still she did not speak.
+
+"You are wondering how I can do it," he said.
+
+"Yes," she acknowledged, in a low voice.
+
+"I should like you to know--that is why I spoke of it.  You have never
+asked me, and I have never told you that the convictions I formerly held
+I lost.  And with them, for a while, went everything.  At least so I
+believed."
+
+"I knew it," she answered, "I could see that, too."
+
+"When I argued with you, that afternoon,--the last time we talked
+together alone,--I was trying to convince myself, and you--" he
+hesitated, "--that there was something.  The fact that you could not
+seem to feel it stimulated me."
+
+He read in her eyes that she understood him.  And he dared not, nor did
+he need to emphasize further his own intense desire that she should find
+a solution of her own.
+
+"I wish you to know what I am telling you for two reasons," he went on.
+"It was you who spoke the words that led to the opening of my eyes to the
+situation into which I had been drifting for two years, who compelled me
+to look upon the inconsistencies and falsities which had gradually been
+borne in upon me.  It was you, I think, who gave me the courage to face
+this situation squarely, since you possess that kind of courage
+yourself."
+
+"Oh, no," she cried.  "You would have done it anyway."
+
+He paused a moment, to get himself in hand.
+
+"For this reason, I owed it to you to speak--to thank you.  I have
+realized, since that first meeting, that you became my friend then,
+and that you spoke as a friend.  If you had not believed in my sincerity,
+you would not have spoken.  I wish you to know that I am fully aware and
+grateful for the honour you did me, and that I realize it is not always
+easy for you to speak so--to any one."
+
+She did not reply.
+
+"There is another reason for my telling you now of this decision of
+mine to remain a clergyman," he continued.  "It is because I value your
+respect and friendship, and I hope you will believe that I would not take
+this course unless I saw my way clear to do it with sincerity."
+
+"One has only to look at you to see that you are sincere," she said
+gently, with a thrill in her voice that almost unmanned him.  "I told you
+once that I should never have forgiven myself if I had wrecked your life.
+I meant it.  I am very glad."
+
+It was his turn to be silent.
+
+"Just because I cannot see how it would be possible to remain in the
+Church after one had been--emancipated, so to speak,"--she smiled at
+him,--"is no reason why you may not have solved the problem."
+
+Such was the superfine quality of her honesty.  Yet she trusted him!
+He was made giddy by a desire, which he fought down, to justify himself
+before her.  His eye beheld her now as the goddess with the scales in her
+hand, weighing and accepting with outward calm the verdict of the balance
+.  .  .  .  Outward calm, but inner fire.
+
+"It makes no difference," she pursued evenly, bent on choosing her words,
+"that I cannot personally understand your emancipation, that mine is
+different.  I can only see the preponderance of evil, of deception,
+of injustice--it is that which shuts out everything else.  And it's
+temperamental, I suppose.  By looking at you, as I told you, I can see
+that your emancipation is positive, while mine remains negative.  You
+have somehow regained a conviction that the good is predominant, that
+there is some purpose in the universe."
+
+He assented.  Once more she relapsed into thought, while he sat
+contemplating her profile.  She turned to him again with a tremulous
+smile.
+
+"But isn't a conviction that the good is predominant, that there is a
+purpose in the universe, a long way from the positive assertions in the
+Creeds?" she asked.  "I remember, when I went through what you would
+probably call disintegration, and which seemed to me enlightenment, that
+the Creeds were my first stumbling-blocks.  It seemed wrong to repeat
+them."
+
+"I am glad you spoke of this," he replied gravely.  "I have arrived at
+many answers to that difficulty--which did not give me the trouble I had
+anticipated.  In the first place, I am convinced that it was much more of
+a difficulty ten, twenty, thirty years ago than it is to-day.  That which
+I formerly thought was a radical tendency towards atrophy, the drift of
+the liberal party in my own Church and others, as well as that which I
+looked upon with some abhorrence as the free-thinking speculation of many
+modern writers, I have now come to see is reconstruction.  The results of
+this teaching of religion in modern terms are already becoming apparent,
+and some persons are already beginning to see that the Creeds express
+certain elemental truths in frankly archaic language.  All this should be
+explained in the churches and the Sunday schools,--is, in fact, being
+explained in some, and also in books for popular reading by clergymen of
+my own Church, both here and in England.  We have got past the critical
+age."
+
+She followed him closely, but did not interrupt.
+
+"I do not mean to say that the Creeds are not the sources of much
+misunderstanding, but in my opinion they do not constitute a sufficient
+excuse for any clergyman to abandon his Church on account of them.
+Indeed there are many who interpret them by modern thought--which is
+closer to the teachings of Christ than ancient thought--whose honesty
+cannot be questioned.  Personally, I think that the Creeds either ought
+to be taken out of the service; or changed, or else there should be a
+note inserted in the service and catechism definitely permitting a
+liberal interpretation which is exactly what so many clergymen, candidly,
+do now.
+
+"When I was ordained a deacon, and then a priest, I took vows which would
+appear to be literally conflicting.  Compelled to choose between these
+vows, I accept that as supreme which I made when I affirmed that I would
+teach nothing which I should be persuaded might not be concluded and
+affirmed by the Scripture.  The Creeds were derived from the Scripture
+--not the Scripture from the Creeds.  As an individual among a body of
+Christians I am powerless to change either the ordinal vows or the
+Creeds, I am obliged to wait for the consensus of opinion.  But if,
+on the whole, I can satisfy my conscience in repeating the Creeds and
+reading the service, as other honest men are doing--if I am convinced
+that I have an obvious work to do in that Church, it would be cowardly
+for me to abandon that work."
+
+Her eyes lighted up.
+
+"I see what you mean," she said, "by staying in you can do many things
+that you could not do, you can help to bring about the change, by being
+frank.  That is your point of view.  You believe m the future of the
+Church."
+
+"I believe in an universal, Christian organization," he replied.
+
+"But while stronger men are honest," she objected, "are not your ancient
+vows and ancient Creeds continually making weaker men casuists?"
+
+"Undoubtedly," he agreed vigorously, and thought involuntarily of Mr.
+Engel's phrased fatty degeneration of the soul.  "Yet I can see the
+signs, on all sides, of a gradual emancipation, of which I might be
+deemed an example."  A smile came into his eyes, like the sun on a
+grey-green sea.
+
+"Oh, you could never be a casuist!" she exclaimed, with a touch of
+vehemence.  "You are much too positive.  It is just that note, which is
+characteristic of so many clergymen, that note of smoothing-over and
+apology, which you lack.  I could never feel it, even when you were
+orthodox.  And now--" words failed her as she inspected his ruggedness.
+
+"And now," he took her up, to cover his emotion, "now I am not to be
+classified!"
+
+Still examining him, she reflected on this.
+
+"Classified?" Isn't it because you're so much of an individual that one
+fails to classify you?  You represent something new to my experience,
+something which seems almost a contradiction--an emancipated Church."
+
+"You imagined me out of the Church,--but where?" he demanded.
+
+"That's just it," she wondered intimately, "where?  When I try, I can see
+no other place for you.  Your place as in the pulpit."
+
+He uttered a sharp exclamation, which she did not heed.
+
+"I can't imagine you doing institutional work, as it is called,--you're
+not fitted for it, you'd be wasted in it.  You gain by the historic
+setting of the Church, and yet it does not absorb you.  Free to preach
+your convictions, unfettered, you will have a power over people that will
+be tremendous.  You have a very strong personality."
+
+She set his heart, his mind, to leaping by this unexpected confirmation
+on her part of his hopes, and yet the man in him was intent upon the
+woman.  She had now the air of detached judgment, while he could not
+refrain from speculating anxiously on the effect of his future course on
+her and on their intimate relationship.  He forbore from thinking, now,
+of the looming events which might thrust them apart,--put a physical
+distance between them,--his anxiety was concerned with the possible
+snapping of the thread of sympathy which had bound them.  In this
+respect, he dreaded her own future as much as his own.  What might she
+do?  For he felt, in her, a potential element of desperation; a capacity
+to commit, at any moment, an irretrievable act.
+
+"Once you have made your ideas your own," she mused, "you will have the
+power of convincing people."
+
+"And yet--"
+
+"And yet"--she seized his unfinished sentence, "you are not at all
+positive of convincing me.  I'll give you the credit of forbearing to
+make proselytes."  She smiled at him.
+
+Thus she read him again.
+
+"If you call making proselytes a desire to communicate a view of life
+which gives satisfaction--" he began, in his serious way.
+
+"Oh, I want to be convinced!" she exclaimed, penitently, "I'd give
+anything to feel as you feel.  There's something lacking in me, there
+must be, and I have only seen the disillusionizing side.  You infer that
+the issue of the Creeds will crumble,--preach the new, and the old will
+fall away of itself.  But what is the new?  How, practically, do you deal
+with the Creeds?  We have got off that subject."
+
+"You wish to know?" he asked.
+
+"Yes--I wish to know."
+
+"The test of any doctrine is whether it can be translated into life,
+whether it will make any difference to the individual who accepts it.
+The doctrines expressed in the Creeds must stand or fall by the test.
+Consider, for instance, the fundamental doctrine in the Creeds, that of
+the Trinity, which has been much scoffed at.  A belief in God, you will
+admit, has an influence on conduct, and the Trinity defines the three
+chief aspects of the God in whom Christians believe.  Of what use to
+quarrel with the word Person if God be conscious?  And the character of
+God has an influence on conduct.  The ancients deemed him wrathful,
+jealous, arbitrary, and hence flung themselves before him and propitiated
+him.  If the conscious God of the universe be good, he is spoken of as a
+Father.  He is as once, in this belief, Father and Creator.  And inasmuch
+as it is known that the divine qualities enter into man, and that one
+Man, Jesus, whose composite portrait--it is agreed--could not have been
+factitiously invented, was filled with them, we speak of God in man as
+the Son.  And the Spirit of God that enters into the soul of man,
+transforming, inspiring, and driving him, is the Third Person, so-called.
+There is no difficulty so far, granted the initial belief in a beneficent
+God.
+
+"If we agree that life has a meaning, and, in order to conform to the
+purpose of the Spirit of the Universe, must be lived in one way, we
+certainly cannot object to calling that right way of living, that decree
+of the Spirit, the Word.
+
+"The Incarnate Word, therefore, is the concrete example of a human being
+completely filled with the Spirit, who lives a perfect life according to
+its decree.  Ancient Greek philosophy called this decree, this meaning of
+life, the Logos, and the Nicene Creed is a confession of faith in that
+philosophy.  Although this creed is said to have been, scandalously
+forced through the council of Nicaea by an emperor who had murdered his
+wife and children, and who himself was unbaptized, against a majority of
+bishops who would, if they had dared Constantine's displeasure, have
+given the conscience freer play, to-day the difficulty has, practically
+disappeared.  The creed is there in the prayer book, and so long as it
+remains we are at liberty to interpret the ancient philosophy in which it
+is written--and which in any event could not have been greatly improved
+upon at that time--in our own modern way, as I am trying to explain it to
+you.
+
+"Christ was identified with the Logos, or Word, which must have had a
+meaning for all time, before and after its, complete revelation.  And
+this is what the Nicene Creed is trying to express when it says,
+'Begotten of his Father before all worlds.'  In other words, the purpose
+which Christ revealed always existed.  The awkward expression of the
+ancients, declaring that he 'came down' for our salvation (enlightenment)
+contains a fact we may prove by experience, if we accept the meaning he
+put upon existence, and adopt this meaning as our scheme of life.  But
+we: must first be quite clear, as: to this meaning.  We may and do
+express all this differently, but it has a direct bearing on life.  It is
+the doctrine of the Incarnation.  We begins to perceive through it that
+our own incarnations mean something, and that our task is to discover
+what they do mean--what part in the world purpose we are designed to play
+here.
+
+"Incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary is an emphasis on the
+fact that man born of woman may be divine.  But the ignorant masses of
+the people of the Roman Empire were undoubtedly incapable of grasping a
+theory of the Incarnation put forward in the terms of Greek philosophy;
+while it was easy for them, with their readiness to believe in nature
+miracles, to accept the explanation of Christ's unique divinity as due to
+actual, physical generation by the Spirit.  And the wide belief in the
+Empire in gods born in this way aided such a conception.  Many thousands
+were converted to Christianity when a place was found in that religion
+for a feminine goddess, and these abandoned the worship of Isis, Demeter,
+and Diana for that of the Virgin Mary.  Thus began an evolution which is
+still going on, and we see now that it was impossible that the world
+should understand at once the spiritual meaning of life as Christ taught
+it--that material facts merely symbolize the divine.  For instance, the
+Gospel of John has been called the philosophical or spiritual gospel.
+And in spite of the fact that it has been assailed and historically
+discredited by modern critics, for me it serves to illuminate certain
+truths of Christ's message and teaching that the other Gospels do not.
+Mark, the earliest Gospel, does not refer to the miraculous birth.  At
+the commencements of Matthew and Luke you will read of it, and it is to
+be noted that the rest of these narratives curiously and naively
+contradict it.  Now why do we find the miraculous birth in these Gospels
+if it had not been inserted in order to prove, in a manner acceptable to
+simple and unlettered minds, the Theory of the Incarnation, Christ's
+preexistence?  I do not say the insertion was deliberate.  And it is
+difficult for us moderns to realize the polemic spirit in which the
+Gospels were written.  They were clearly not written as history.  The
+concern of the authors, I think, was to convert their readers to Christ.
+
+"When we turn to John, what do we find?  In the opening verses of this
+Gospel the Incarnation is explained, not by a virgin birth, but in a
+manner acceptable to the educated and spiritually-minded, in terms of the
+philosophy of the day.  And yet how simply!  'In the beginning was the
+Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.'  I prefer John's
+explanation.
+
+"It is historically true that, in the earlier days when the Apostles'
+Creed was put forth, the phrase 'born of they Virgin Mary' was inserted
+for the distinct purpose of laying stress on the humanity of Christ, and
+to controvert the assertion of the Gnostic sect that he was not born at
+all, but appeared in the world in some miraculous way.
+
+"Thus to-day, by the aid of historical research, we are enabled to regard
+the Creeds in the light of their usefulness to life.  The myth of the
+virgin birth probably arose through the zeal of some of the writers of
+the Gospels to prove that the prophecy of Isaiah predicted the advent of
+the Jewish Messiah who should be born of a virgin.  Modern scholars are
+agreed that the word Olmah which Isaiah uses does not mean virgin, but
+young woman.  There is quite a different Hebrew word for 'virgin.' The
+Jews, at the time the Gospels were written, and before, had forgotten
+their ancient Hebrew.  Knowing this mistake, and how it arose, we may
+repeat the word Virgin Mary in the sense used by many early Christians,
+as designating the young woman who was the mother of Christ.
+
+"I might mention one or two other phrases, archaic and obscure.
+'The Resurrection of the Body' may refer to the phenomenon of Christ's
+reappearance after death, for which modern psychology may or may not
+account.  A little reflection, however, convinces one that the phenomenon
+did take place in some manner, or else, I think, we should never have
+heard of Christ.  You will remember that the Apostles fled after his
+death on the cross, believing what he had told them was all only a dream.
+They were human, literal and cowardly, and they still needed some kind of
+inner, energizing conviction that the individuality persisted after
+death, that the solution of human life was victory over it, in order to
+gain the courage to go out and preach the Gospel and face death
+themselves.  And it was Paul who was chiefly instrumental in freeing the
+message from the narrow bounds of Palestine and sending it ringing down
+the ages to us.  The miracle doesn't lie in what Paul saw, but in the
+whole man transformed, made incandescent, journeying tirelessly to the
+end of his days up and down the length and breadth of the empire,
+labouring, as he says, more abundantly than they all.  It is idle to say
+that the thing which can transform a man's entire nature and life is not
+a reality."
+
+She had listened, motionless, as under the spell of his words.  Self-
+justification, as he proceeded, might easily have fused itself into a
+desire to convince her of the truth of his beliefs.  But he was not
+deceived, he knew her well enough to understand, to feel the indomitable
+spirit of resistance in her.  Swayed she could be, but she would mot
+easily surrender.
+
+"There is another phrase," she said after a moment, "which I have never
+heard explained, 'descended into hell.'"
+
+"It was merely a matter of controverting those who declared Christ was
+taken from the cross before he died.  In the childish science of the
+time, to say that one descended into hell was to affirm that he was
+actually dead, since the souls of the departed were supposed to go at
+once to hell.  Hell and heaven were definite places.  To say that Christ
+ascended to heaven and sat on the right hand of the Father is to declare
+one's faith that his responsible work in the spiritual realm continues."
+
+"And the Atonement?  doesn't that imply a sacrifice of propitiation?"
+
+"Atonement may be pronounced At-one-ment," Hodder replied.  "The old
+idea, illustrated by a reference to the sacrifice of the ancients, fails
+to convey the truth to modern minds.  And moreover, as I have inferred,
+these matters had to be conveyed in symbols until mankind were prepared
+to grasp the underlying spiritual truths which Christ sought to convey.
+Orthodox Christianity has been so profoundly affected by the ancient
+Jewish religion that the conception of God as wrathful and jealous--a God
+wholly outside--has persisted to our times.  The Atonement means union
+with the Spirit of the Universe through vicarious suffering, and
+experience teaches us that our own sufferings are of no account unless
+they be for a cause, for the furtherance of the design of the beneficent
+Spirit which is continually at work.  Christ may be said to have died for
+humanity because he had to suffer death itself in order to reveal the
+complete meaning of life.  You once spoke to me about the sense of sin--
+of being unable to feel it."
+
+She glanced at him quickly, but did not speak.
+
+"There is a theory concerning this," he continued, "which has undoubtedly
+helped many people, and which may be found in the writings of certain
+modern psychologists.  It is that we have a conscious, or lower, human
+self, and a subconscious, or better self.  This subconscious self
+stretches down, as it were, into the depths of the universe and taps the
+source of spiritual power.  And it is through the subconscious self that
+every man is potentially divine.  Potentially, because the conscious self
+has to reach out by an effort of the will to effect this union with the
+spiritual in the subconscious, and when it is effected, it comes from the
+response of the subconscious.  Apparently from without, as a gift, and
+therefore, in theological language, it is called grace.  This is what is
+meant by being born again, the incarnation of the Spirit in the
+conscious, or human.  The two selves are no longer divided, and the
+higher self assumes control,--takes the reins, so to speak.
+
+"It is interesting, as a theory.  And the fact that it has been seriously
+combated by writers who deny such a function of the subconscious does not
+at all affect the reality of the experience.
+
+"Once we have had a vision of the true meaning of life a vision which
+stirs the energies of our being, what is called 'a sense of sin'
+inevitably follows.  It is the discontent, the regret, in the light
+of a higher knowledge, for the: lost opportunities, for a past life
+which has been uncontrolled by any unifying purpose, misspent in futile
+undertakings, wasted, perhaps, in follies and selfish caprices which have
+not only harmed ourselves but others.  Although we struggle, yet by
+habit, by self-indulgence, by lack of a sustained purpose, we have formed
+a character from which escape seems hopeless.  And we realize that in
+order to change ourselves, an actual regeneration of the will is
+necessary.  For awhile, perchance, we despair of this.  The effort to get
+out of the rut we have made for ourselves seems of no avail.  And it is
+not, indeed, until we arrive, gradually or otherwise, and through a
+proper interpretation of the life of Christ, at the conviction that we
+may even never become useful in the divine scheme that we have a sense of
+what is called 'the forgiveness of sins.'  This conviction, this grace,
+this faith to embark on the experiment accomplishes of itself the revival
+of the will, the rebirth which we had thought impossible.  We discover
+our task, high or humble,--our cause.  We grow marvellously at one with
+God's purpose, and we feel that our will is acting in the same direction
+as his.  And through our own atonement we see the meaning of that other
+Atonement which led Christ to the Cross.  We see that our conviction, our
+grace, has come through him, and how he died for our sins."
+
+"It's quite wonderful how logical and simple you make it, how thoroughly
+yon have gone into it.  You have solved it for yourself--and you will
+solve it for others many others."
+
+She rose, and he, too, got to his feet with a medley of feelings.
+The path along which they walked was already littered with green acorns.
+A gray squirrel darted ahead of them, gained a walnut and paused,
+quivering, halfway up the trunk, to gaze back at them.  And the glance
+she presently gave him seemed to partake of the shyness of the wild
+thing.
+
+"Thank you for explaining it to me," she said.
+
+"I hope you don't think--" he began.
+
+"Oh, it isn't that!" she cried, with unmistakable reproach.  "I asked you
+--I made you tell me.  It hasn't seemed at all like--the confessional,"
+she added, and smiled and blushed at the word.  "You have put it so
+nicely, so naturally, and you have given me so much to think about.  But
+it all depends--doesn't it?--upon whether one can feel the underlying
+truth of which you spoke in the first place; it rests upon a sense of the
+prevailing goodness of things.  It seems to me cruel that what is called
+salvation, the solution of the problem of life, should depend upon an
+accidental discovery.  We are all turned loose with our animal passions
+and instincts, of self-preservation, by an indifferent Creator, in a
+wilderness, and left to find our way out as best we can.  You answer that
+Christ showed us the way.  There are elements in his teaching I cannot
+accept--perhaps because I have been given a wrong interpretation of them.
+I shall ask you more questions some day.
+
+"But even then," she continued, "granted that Christ brought the complete
+solution, as you say, why should so many millions have lived and died,
+before and after his coming, who had suffered so, and who had never heard
+of him?  That is the way my reason works, and I can't help it.  I would
+help it if I could."
+
+"Isn't it enough," he asked, "to know that a force is at work combating
+evil,--even if you are not yet convinced that it is a prevailing force?
+Can you not trust that it will be a prevailing force, if your sympathies
+are with it, without demanding a revelation of the entire scheme of the
+universe?  Of what use is it to doubt the eternal justice?"
+
+"Oh, use!"  she cried, "I grant you its uselessness.  Doubt seems an
+ingrained quality.  I can't help being a fatalist."
+
+"And yet you have taken your life in your own hands," he reminded her,
+gently.
+
+"Only to be convinced of its futility," she replied.
+
+Again, momentarily thrust back into himself, he wondered jealously once
+more what the disillusionments had been of that experience from before
+which she seemed, at times, ready to draw back a little the veil.
+
+"A sense of futility is a sense of incompleteness," he said, "and
+generally precedes a sense of power."
+
+"Ah, you have gained that!  Yet it must always have been latent in you--
+you make one feel it.  But now!" she exclaimed, as though the discovery
+had just dawned on her, "now you will need power, now you will have to
+fight as you have never fought in your life."
+
+He found her enthusiasm as difficult to withstand as her stoicism.
+
+"Yes, I shall have to fight," he admitted.  Her partisanship was sweet.
+
+"When you tell them what you have told me," she continued, as though
+working it out in her own mind, "they will never submit to it, if they
+can help it.  My father will never submit to it.  They will try to put
+you out, as a heretic,--won't they?"
+
+"I have an idea that they will," he conceded, with a smile.
+
+"And won't they succeed?  Haven't they the power?"
+
+"It depends,--in the first place, on whether the bishop thinks me a
+heretic."
+
+"Have you asked him?"
+
+"No."
+
+"But can't they make you resign?"
+
+"They can deprive me of my salary."
+
+She did not press this.
+
+"You mustn't think me a martyr," he pleaded, in a lighter tone.
+
+She paid no heed to this protest, but continued to regard him with a face
+lighted by enthusiasm.
+
+"Oh, that's splendid of you!" she cried.  "You are going to speak the
+truth as you see it, and let them do their worst.  Of course,
+fundamentally, it isn't merely because they're orthodox that they won't
+like it, although they'll say so, and perhaps think so.  It will be
+because if you have really found the truth--they will instinctively, fear
+its release.  For it has a social bearing, too--hasn't it?--although you
+haven't explained that part of it."
+
+"It has a distinct social bearing," he replied, amazed at the way her
+mind flew forward and grasped the entire issue, in spite of the fact that
+her honesty still refused to concede his premises.  Such were the
+contradictions in her that he loved.  And, though she did not suspect it,
+she had in her the Crusader's spirit.  "I have always remembered what
+you once said, that many who believed themselves Christians had an
+instinctive feeling that there is a spark in Christianity which, if
+allowed to fly, would start a conflagration beyond their control.  And
+that they had covered the spark with ashes.  I, too," he added
+whimsically, "was buried under the ashes."
+
+"And the spark," she demanded, "is not Socialism--their nightmare?"
+
+"The spark is Christianity itself--but I am afraid they will not be able
+to distinguish it from Socialism.  The central paradox in Christianity
+consists in the harmonizing of the individual and socialistic spirit, and
+this removes it as far from the present political doctrine of socialism
+as it is possible to be.  Christianity, looked at from a certain
+viewpoint,--and I think the proper viewpoint,--is the most
+individualistic of religions, since its basic principle is the
+development of the individual into an autonomous being."
+
+They stood facing each other on an open stretch of lawn.  The place was
+deserted.  Through the trees, in the near distance, the sightless front
+of the Ferguson mansion blazed under the September sun.
+
+"Individualistic!" she repeated, as though dazed by the word applied to
+the religion she had discarded.  "I can't understand.  Do you think I
+ever can understand?" she asked him, simply.
+
+"It seems to me you understand more than you are willing to give yourself
+credit for," he answered seriously.  "You don't take into account your
+attitude."
+
+"I see what you mean--a willingness to take the right road, if I can find
+it.  I am not at all sure that I want to take it.  But you must tell me
+more--more of what you have discovered.  Will you?"
+
+He just hesitated.  She herself appeared to acknowledge no bar to their
+further intimacy--why should he?
+
+"I will tell you all I know," he said.
+
+Suddenly, as if by a transference of thought, she voiced what he had in
+mind.
+
+"You are going to tell them the truth about themselves!"  she exclaimed.
+"--That they are not Christians!"
+
+His silence was an admission.
+
+"You must see," he told her, after the moment they had looked into each
+other's faces, "that this is the main reason why I must stay at St.
+John's, in the Church, if I conscientiously can."
+
+"I see.  The easier course would be to resign, to have scruples.  And you
+believe there is a future for the Church."
+
+"I believe it," he assented.
+
+She still held his eyes.
+
+"Yes, it is worth doing.  If you see it that way it is more worth doing
+than anything else.  Please don't think," she said, "that I don't
+appreciate why you have told me all this, why you have given me your
+reasons.  I know it hasn't been easy.  It's because you wish me to have
+faith in you for my own sake, not for yours.  And I am grateful."
+
+"And if that faith is justified, as you will help to justify it, that it
+may be transferred to a larger sphere," he answered.
+
+She gave him her hand, but did not reply.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+MR. GOODRICH BECOMES A PARTISAN
+
+
+
+I
+
+In these days of his preparation, she haunted him continually.  In her he
+saw typified all those who possessed the: divine discontent, the yearning
+unsatisfied,--the fatalists and the dreamers.  And yet she seemed to have
+risen through instinct to share the fire of his vision of religion
+revealed to the countless ranks of strugglers as the hidden motive-power
+of the world, the impetus of scientist, statesman, artist, and
+philanthropist!  They had stood together on the heights of the larger
+view, whence the whole of the battle-line lay disclosed.
+
+At other and more poignant moments he saw her as waving him bravely on
+while he steamed out through towering seas to safety.  The impression was
+that of smiling at her destiny.  Had she fixed upon it? and did she
+linger now only that she might inspire him in his charge?  She was
+capable, he knew, of taking calmly the irrevocable step, of accepting the
+decree as she read it.  The thought tortured, the desire to save her from
+herself obsessed him; with true clairvoyance she had divined him aright
+when she had said that he wished her to have faith in him for her own
+sake.  Could he save her in spite of herself? and how?  He could not see
+her, except by chance.  Was she waiting until he should have crossed the
+bar before she should pay some inexorable penalty of which he knew
+nothing?
+
+Thus he speculated, suffered, was at once cast down and lifted up by the
+thought of her.  To him, at least, she was one of those rare and
+dauntless women, the red stars of history, by whom the Dantes and
+Leonardos are fired to express the inexpressible, and common clay is
+fused and made mad: one of those women who, the more they reveal, become
+the more inscrutable.  Divinely inarticulate, he called her; arousing the
+passion of the man, yet stirring the sublimer efforts of the god.
+
+What her feelings toward him, whether she loved him as a woman loves a
+man he could not say, no man being a judge in the supreme instance.  She
+beheld him emancipated, perhaps, from what she might have called the
+fetters of an orthodoxy for which she felt an instinctive antagonism; but
+whether, though proclaiming himself free, the fact of his continuation in
+the ministry would not of itself set up in her a reaction, he was unable
+to predict.  Her antipathy to forms, he saw, was inherent.  Her interest
+--her fascinated absorption, it might be called--in his struggle was
+spiritual, indeed, but it also had mixed in it the individualistic zeal
+of the nonconformist.  She resented the trammels of society; though she
+suffered from her efforts to transcend them.  The course he had
+determined upon appeared to her as a rebellion not only against a cut-
+and-dried state of mind, but also against vested privilege.  Yet she had
+in her, as she confessed, the craving for what privilege brings in the
+way of harmonious surroundings.  He loved her for her contradictions.
+
+Thus he was utterly unable to see what the future held for him in the way
+of continued communion with her, to evolve any satisfactory theory as to
+why she remained in the city.  She had told him that the gardens were an
+excuse.  She had come, by her own intimation, to reflect, to decide some
+momentous question.  Marriage?  He found this too agitating to dwell
+upon, summoning, as it did, conjectures of the men she might have known;
+and it was perhaps natural, in view of her attitude, that he could only
+think of such a decision on her part as surrender.
+
+That he had caught and held her attention, although by no conscious
+effort of his own, was clear to him.  But had he not merely arrested her?
+Would she not presently disappear, leaving only in his life the scarlet
+thread which she had woven into it for all time?  Would he not fail to
+change, permanently, the texture of hers?
+
+Such were his hopes and fears concerning her, and they were mingled
+inextricably with other hopes and fears which had to do with the great
+venture of his life.  He dwelt in a realm of paradoxes, discovered that
+exaltation was not incompatible with anxiety and dread.  He had no
+thought of wavering; he had achieved to an extent he would not have
+believed possible the sense of consecration which brings with it
+indifference to personal fortunes, and the revelation of the inner world,
+and yet he shrank from the wounds he was about to receive--and give.  Out
+wardly controlled, he lived in the state of intense excitement of the
+leader waiting for the time to charge.
+
+
+
+II
+
+The moment was at hand.  September had waned, the nights were cooling,
+his parishioners were returning from the East.  One of these was Eleanor
+Goodrich, whom he met on a corner, tanned and revived from her long
+summer in Massachusetts.  She had inherited the kindly shrewdness of
+glance characteristic of gentlefolk, the glance that seeks to penetrate
+externals in its concern for the well-being of those whom it scrutinizes.
+And he was subtly aware, though she greeted him cordially, that she felt
+a change in him without being able to account for it.
+
+"I hear you have been here all summer," she said reproachfully.  "Mother
+and father and all of us were much disappointed that you did not come to
+us on the Cape."
+
+"I should have come, if it had been possible," he replied.  "It seems to
+have done you a world of good."
+
+"Oh, I!"  She seemed slightly embarrassed, puzzled, and did not look at
+him.  "I am burned as disgracefully as Evelyn.  Phil came on for a month.
+
+"He tells me he hasn't seen you, but that isn't surprising, for he hasn't
+been to church since June--and he's a vestryman now, too."
+
+She was in mourning for her father-in-law, who had died in the spring.
+Phil Goodrich had taken his place.  Eleanor found the conversation,
+somehow, drifting out of her control.  It was not at all what she would
+have desired to say.  Her colour heightened.
+
+"I have not been conducting the services, but I resume them next Sunday,"
+said the rector.  "I ought to tell you," he went on, regarding her, "in
+view of the conversation we have had, that I have changed my mind
+concerning a great many things we have talked about--although I have not
+spoken of this as yet to any of the members of the congregation."
+
+She was speechless, and could only stare at him blankly.
+
+"I mean," he continued, with a calmness that astonished her afterwards,
+"that I have changed my whole conception as to the functions and future
+of the Church, that I have come to your position, that we must make up
+our minds for ourselves, and not have them made up for us.  And that we
+must examine into the truth of all statements, and be governed
+accordingly."
+
+Her attitude was one of mingled admiration, concern, and awe.  And he saw
+that she had grasped something of the complications which his course was
+likely to bring about.
+
+"But you are not going to leave us!" she managed to exclaim.
+
+"Not if it is possible to remain," he said, smiling.
+
+"I am so glad."  She was still overpowered by the disclosure.  "It is
+good of you to tell me.  Do you mind my telling Phil?"
+
+"Not at all," he assured her.
+
+"Will you forgive me," she asked, after a slight pause during which she
+had somewhat regained her composure, "if I say that I always thought, or
+rather hoped you would change? that your former beliefs seemed so--unlike
+you?"
+
+He continued to smile at her as she stepped forward to take the car.
+
+"I'll have to forgive you," he answered, "because you were right--"
+
+She was still in such a state of excitement when she arrived down town
+that she went direct to her husband's law office.
+
+"I like this!" he exclaimed, as, unannounced, she opened the door of his
+sanctuary.  "You might have caught me with one of those good-looking
+clients of mine."
+
+Oh, Phil!" she cried, "I've got such a piece of news, I couldn't resist
+coming to tell you.  I met Mr. Hodder--and he's changed."
+
+"Changed!" Phil repeated, looking up at her flushed face beside him.
+Instead of a law-book, he flung down a time table in which he had been
+investigating the trains to a quail shooting club in the southern part of
+the state: The transition to Mr. Hodder was, therefore, somewhat abrupt.
+"Why, Nell, to look at you, I thought it could be nothing else than my
+somewhat belated appointment to the United States Supreme Court.  How has
+Hodder changed?  I always thought him pretty decent."
+
+"Don't laugh at me," she begged, "it's really serious--and no one knows
+it yet.  He said I might tell you.  Do you remember that talk we had at
+father's, when he first came, and we likened him to a modern Savonarola?"
+
+"And George Bridges took the floor, and shocked mother and Lucy and
+Laureston," supplied Phil.
+
+"I don't believe mother really was as much shocked as she appeared to
+be," said Eleanor.  "At any rate, the thing that had struck us--you and
+me--was that Mr. Hodder looked as though he could say something helpful,
+if he only would.  And then I went to see him afterwards, in the parish
+house--you remember?--after we had been reading modern criticism
+together, and he told me that the faith which had come down from the
+fathers was like an egg?  It couldn't be chipped.  I was awfully
+disappointed--and yet I couldn't help liking him, he was so honest.
+And the theological books he gave me to read--which were so mediaeval
+and absurd!  Well, he has come around to our point of view.  He told
+me so himself."
+
+"But what is our point of view, Nell?"  her husband asked, with a smile.
+"Isn't it a good deal like Professor Bridges', only we're not quite so
+learned?  We're just ordinary heathens, as far as I can make out.  If
+Hodder has our point of view, he ought to go into the law or a trust
+company."
+
+"Oh, Phil!" she protested, "and you're on the vestry!  I do believe in
+Something, and so do you."
+
+"Something," he observed, "is hardly a concrete and complete theology."
+
+"Why do you make me laugh," she reproached him, "when the matter is so
+serious?  What I'm trying to tell you is that I'm sure Mr. Hodder has
+worked it out.  He's too sincere to remain in the Church and not have
+something constructive and satisfying.  I've always said that he seemed
+to have a truth shut up inside of him which he could not communicate.
+Well, now he looks as though he were about to communicate it, as though
+he had discovered it.  I suppose you think me silly, but you'll grant,
+whatever Mr. Hodder may be, he isn't silly.  And women can feel these
+things.  You know I'm not given to sentimentality, but I was never so
+impressed by the growth in any personality as I was this morning by his.
+He seems to have become himself, as I always imagined him.  And, Phil, he
+was so fine!  He's absolutely incapable of posing, as you'll admit, and
+he stood right up and acknowledged that he'd been wrong in our argument.
+He hasn't had the services all summer, and when he resumes them next
+Sunday I gathered that he intends to make his new position clear."
+
+Mr. Goodrich thrust his hands in his pockets and gave a low whistle.
+
+"I guess I won't go shooting Saturday, after all," he declared.
+"I wouldn't miss Hodder's sermon for all the quail in Harrington County."
+
+"It's high time you did go to church," remarked Eleanor, contemplating,
+not without pride, her husband's close-cropped, pugnacious head.
+
+Your judgments are pretty sound, Nell.  I'll do you that credit.  And
+I've always owned up that Hodder would be a fighter if he ever got
+started.  It's written all over him.  What's more, I've a notion that
+some of our friends are already a little suspicious of him."
+
+"You mean Mr. Parr?"  she asked, anxiously.
+
+"No, Wallis Plimpton."
+
+"Oh!" she exclaimed, with disdain in her voice.
+
+"Mr. Parr only got back yesterday, and Wallis told me that Hodder had
+refused to go on a yachting trip with him.  Not only foolishness, but
+high treason."  Phil smiled.  "Plimpton's the weather-vane, the barometer
+of that crowd--he feels a disturbance long before it turns up--he's as
+sensitive as the stock market."
+
+"He is the stock market," said Eleanor.
+
+"It's been my opinion," Phil went on reflectively, "that they've all had
+just a trace of uneasiness about Hodder all along, an idea that Nelson
+Langmaid slipped up for the first time in his life when he got him to
+come.  Oh, the feeling's been dormant, but it existed.  And they've been
+just a little afraid that they couldn't handle him if the time ever came.
+He's not their type.  When I saw Plimpton at the Country Club the other
+day he wondered, in that genial, off-hand manner of his, whether Hodder
+would continue to be satisfied with St. John's.  Plimpton said he might
+be offered a missionary diocese.  Oh we'll have a fine old row."
+
+"I believe," said Eleanor, "that that's the only thing that interests
+you."
+
+"Well, it does please me," he admitted, when I think of Gordon Atterbury
+and Everett Constable and a few others,--Eldon Parr,--who believe that
+religion ought to be kept archaic and innocuous, served in a form that
+won't bother anybody.  By the way, Nell, do you remember the verse the
+Professor quoted about the Pharisees, and cleansing the outside of the
+cup and platter?"
+
+"Yes," she answered, "why?"
+
+"Well--Hodder didn't give you any intimation as to what he intended to do
+about that sort of thing, did he?"
+
+"What sort of thing?"
+
+"About the inside of Eldon Parr's cup,--so to speak.  And the inside of
+Wallis Plimpton's cup, and Everett Constable's cup, and Ferguson's cup,
+and Langmaid's.  Did it ever strike you that, in St. John's, we have the
+sublime spectacle of Eldon Parr, the Pharisee in chief, conducting the
+Church of Christ, who, uttered that denunciation?  That's what George
+Bridges meant.  There's something rather ironical in such a situation, to
+say the least."
+
+"I see," said Eleanor, thoughtfully.
+
+"And what's more, it's typical," continued Phil, energetically, "the big
+Baptist church on the Boulevard is run by old Sedges, as canny a rascal
+as you could find in the state.  The inside of has cup has never been
+touched, though he was once immersed in the Mississippi, they say, and
+swallowed a lot of water."
+
+"Oh, Phil!"
+
+"Hodder's been pretty intimate with Eldon Parr--that always puzzled me,"
+Phil went on.  "And yet I'm like you, I never doubted Hodder's honesty.
+I've always been curious to know what would happen when he found out the
+kind of thing Eldon Parr is doing every day in his life, making people
+stand and deliver in the interest of what he would call National
+Prosperity.  Why, that fellow, Funk, they sent to the penitentiary the
+other day for breaking into the Addicks' house isn't a circumstance to
+Eldon Parr.  He's robbed his tens of thousands, and goes on robbing them
+right along.  By the way, Mr. Parr took most of Addicks' money before
+Funk got his silver."
+
+"Phil, you have such a ridiculous way of putting things!  But I suppose
+it's true."
+
+"True!  I should say it was!  There was Mr. Bentley--that was mild.  And
+there never was a hold-up of a western express that could compare to the
+Consolidated Tractions.  Some of these big fellows have the same kind of
+brain as the professional thieves.  Well, they are professional thieves--
+what's the use of mincing matters!  They never try the same game twice.
+Mr. Parr's getting ready to make another big haul right now.  I know,
+because Plimpton said as much, although he didn't confide in me what this
+particular piece of rascality is.  He knows better."  Phil Goodrich
+looked grim.
+
+"But the law?"  exclaimed his wife.
+
+"There never was a law that Nelson Langmaid couldn't drive a horse and
+carriage through."
+
+"And Mr. Langmaid's one of the nicest men I know!"
+
+"What I wonder," mused Phil, "is whether this is a mere doctrinal revolt
+on Hodder's part, or whether he has found out a few things.  There are so
+many parsons in these days who don't seem to see any inconsistency in
+robbing several thousand people to build settlement houses and carved
+marble altars, and who wouldn't accept a Christmas box from a highwayman.
+But I'll do Hodder the justice to say he doesn't strike me as that kind.
+And I have an idea that Eldon Parr and Wallis Plimpton and the rest know
+he isn't, know that he'd be a Tartar if he ever get started, and that's
+what makes them uneasy."
+
+"Then it isn't his change of religious opinions they would care about?"
+said Eleanor.
+
+"Oh, I don't say that Eldon Parr won't try to throw him out if he
+questions the faith as delivered by the Saints."
+
+"Phil, what a way of putting it!"
+
+"Any indication of independence, any approach to truth would be regarded
+as dangerous," Phil continued.  And of course Gordon Atterbury and others
+we could mention, who think they believe in the unchipped egg theory,
+will be outraged.  But it's deeper than that.  Eldon Parr will give
+orders that Hodder's to go."
+
+"Give orders?"
+
+"Certainly.  That vestry, so far as Mr. Parr is concerned, is a mere
+dummy board of directors.  He's made Langmaid, and Plimpton, and even
+Everett Constable, who's the son of an honourable gentleman, and ought to
+know better.  And he can ruin them by snapping his fingers.  He can even
+make the financial world too hot for Ferguson.  I'll say this for Gordon
+Atterbury, that Mr. Parr can't control him, but he's got a majority
+without him, and Gordon won't vote for a heretic.  Who are left, except
+father-in-law Waring and myself?"
+
+"He can't control either of you!" said Eleanor, proudly.
+
+"When it comes to that, Nell--we'll move into Canada and buy a farm."
+
+"But can he hurt you, Phil--either of you?"  she asked, after a moment.
+
+"I'd like to see him try it," Phil Goodrich declared
+
+And his wife thought, as she looked at him, that she would like to see
+Mr. Parr try it, too.
+
+
+
+III
+
+Phil Goodrich had once said that Mr. Plimpton's translation of the
+national motto E pluribus unum, was "get together," and it was true that
+not the least of Mr. Plimpton's many gifts was that of peace making.
+Such was his genius that he scented trouble before it became manifest to
+the world, and he stoutly declared that no difference of opinion ever
+existed between reasonable men that might not be patched up before the
+breach became too wide--provided that a third reasonable man contributed
+his services.  The qualifying word "reasonable" is to be noted.  When
+Mr. Bedloe Hubbell had undertaken, in the name of Reform, to make a
+witch's cauldron of the city's politics, which Mr. Beatty had hitherto
+conducted so smoothly from the back room of his saloon, Mr. Plimpton had
+unselfishly offered his services.  Bedloe Hubbell, although he had been a
+playmate of Mr. Plimpton's wife's, had not proved "reasonable," and had
+rejected with a scorn only to be deemed fanatical the suggestion that Mr.
+Hubbell's interests and Mr. Beatty's interests need not clash, since Mr.
+Hubbell might go to Congress!  And Mr. Plimpton was the more hurt since
+the happy suggestion was his own, and he had had no little difficulty in
+getting Mr. Beatty to agree to it.
+
+Yet Mr. Plimpton's career in the ennobling role of peacemaker had,
+on the whole, been crowned with such success as to warrant his belief
+in the principle.  Mr. Parr, for instance,--in whose service, as in that
+of any other friend, Mr. Plimpton was always ready to act--had had
+misunderstandings with eminent financiers, and sometimes with United
+States Senators.  Mr. Plimpton had made many trips to the Capitol at
+Washington, sometimes in company with Mr. Langmaid, sometimes not, and on
+one memorable occasion had come away smiling from an interview with the
+occupant of the White House himself.
+
+Lest Mr. Plimpton's powers of premonition seem supernatural, it may be
+well to reveal the comparative simplicity of his methods.  Genius,
+analyzed, is often disappointing, Mr. Plimpton's was selective and
+synthetic.  To illustrate in a particular case, he had met Mr. Parr in
+New York and had learned that the Reverend Mr. Hodder had not only
+declined to accompany the banker on a yachting trip, but had elected to
+remain in the city all summer, in his rooms in the parish house, while
+conducting no services.  Mr. Parr had thought this peculiar.  On his
+return home Mr. Plimpton had one day dropped in to see a Mr. Gaines, the
+real estate agent for some of his property.  And Mr. Plimpton being hale-
+fellow-well-met, Mr. Gaines had warned him jestingly that he would better
+not let his parson know that he owned a half interest in a certain hotel
+in Dalton Street, which was leased at a profitable rate.
+
+If Mr. Plimpton felt any uneasiness, he did not betray it.  And he
+managed to elicit from the agent, in an entirely casual and jovial
+manner, the fact that Mr. Hodder, a month or so before, had settled the
+rent of a woman for a Dalton Street flat, and had been curious to
+discover the name of the owner.  Mr. Gaines, whose business it was to
+recognize everybody, was sure of Mr. Hodder, although he had not worn
+clerical clothes.
+
+Mr. Plimpton became very thoughtful when he had left the office.  He
+visited Nelson Langmaid in the Parr Building.  And the result of the
+conference was to cause Mr. Langmaid to recall, with a twinge of
+uneasiness, a certain autumn morning in a room beside Bremerton Lake
+when he had been faintly yet distinctly conscious of the, admonitory
+whisperings of that sixth sense which had saved him on other occasions.
+
+"Dash it!" he said to himself, after Mr. Plimpton had departed, and
+he stood in the window and gazed across at the flag on the roof of
+'Ferguson's.'  "It would serve me right for meddling in this parson
+business.  Why did I take him away from Jerry Whitely, anyhow?"
+
+It added to Nelson Langmaid's discomfort that he had a genuine affection,
+even an admiration for the parson in question.  He might have known by
+looking at the man that he would wake up some day,--such was the burden
+of his lament.  And there came to him, ironically out of the past, the
+very words of Mr. Parr's speech to the vestry after Dr. Gilman's death,
+that succinct list of qualifications for a new rector which he himself,
+Nelson Langmaid, had humorously and even more succinctly epitomized.
+Their "responsibility to the parish, to the city, and to God" had been to
+find a rector "neither too old nor too young, who would preach the faith
+as we received it, who was not sensational, and who did not mistake
+Socialism for Christianity."   At the "Socialism" a certain sickly
+feeling possessed the lawyer, and he wiped beads of perspiration from his
+dome-like forehead.
+
+He didn't pretend to be versed in theology--so he had declared--and at
+the memory of these words of his the epithet "ass," self applied, passed
+his lips.  "You want a parson who will stick to his last, not too high or
+too low or too broad or too narrow, who has intellect without too much
+initiative .  .  .  and will not get the church uncomfortably full of
+strangers and run you out of your pews."  Thus he had capped the
+financier.  Well, if they had caught a tartar, it served him, Nelson
+Langmaid, right.  He recalled his talk with Gerald Whitely, and how his
+brother-in-law had lost his temper when they had got on the subject of
+personality .  .  .  .
+
+Perhaps Wallis Plimpton could do something.  Langmaid's hopes of this
+were not high.  It may have been that he had suspicions of what Mr.
+Plimpton would have called Hodder's "reasonableness."  One thing was
+clear--that Mr. Plimpton was frightened.  In the sanctuaries, the private
+confessionals of high finance (and Nelson Langmaid's office may be called
+so), the more primitive emotions are sometimes exhibited.
+
+"I don't see what business it is of a clergyman, or of any one else,
+whether I own property in Dalton Street," Mr. Plimpton had said, as he
+sat on the edge of the lawyer's polished mahogany desk.  "What does he
+expect us to do,--allow our real estate to remain unproductive merely for
+sentimental reasons?  That's like a parson, most of 'em haven't got any
+more common sense than that.  What right has he got to go nosing around
+Dalton Street?  Why doesn't he stick to his church?"
+
+"I thought you fellows were to build him a settlement house there,"
+Langmaid observed.
+
+"On the condition that he wouldn't turn socialist."
+
+"You'd better have stipulated it in the bond," said the lawyer, who could
+not refrain, even at this solemn moment, from the temptation of playing
+upon Mr. Plimpton's apprehensions.  "I'm afraid he'll make it his
+business, Wallis, to find out whether you own anything in Dalton Street.
+I'll bet he's got a list of Dalton Street property in his pocket right
+now."
+
+Mr. Plimpton groaned.
+
+"Thank God I don't own any of it!"  said Langmaid.
+
+"What the deuce does he intend to do?"  the other demanded.
+
+"Read it out in church," Langmaid suggested.  "It wouldn't sound pretty,
+Wallis, to be advertised in the post on Monday morning as owning that
+kind of a hotel."
+
+"Oh, he's a gentleman," said Mr. Plimpton, "he wouldn't do anything as
+low as that!"
+
+"But if he's become a socialist?" objected Langmaid.
+
+"He wouldn't do it," his friend reiterated, none too confidently.
+"I shouldn't be surprised if he made me resign from the vestry and forced
+me to sell my interest.  It nets me five thousand a year."
+
+"What is the place?" Langmaid asked sympathetically, "Harrod's?"
+
+Mr. Plimpton nodded.
+
+"Not that I am a patron," the lawyer explained somewhat hastily.  "But
+I've seen the building, going home."
+
+"It looks to me as if it would burn down some day, Wallis."
+
+"I wish it would," said Mr. Plimpton.
+
+"If it's any comfort to you--to us," Langmaid went on, after a moment,
+"Eldon Parr owns the whole block above Thirteenth, on the south side--
+bought it three years ago.  He thinks the business section will grow that
+way."
+
+"I know," said Mr. Plimpton, and they looked at each other.
+
+The name predominant in both minds had been mentioned.
+
+"I wonder if Hodder really knows what he's up against."  Mr. Plimpton
+sometimes took refuge in slang.
+
+"Well, after all, we're not sure yet that he's "up against anything,"
+replied Langmaid, who thought the time had come for comfort.  "It may all
+be a false alarm.  There's no reason, after all, why a Christian
+clergyman shouldn't rescue women in Dalton Street, and remain in the city
+to study the conditions of the neighbourhood where his settlement house
+is to be.  And just, because you or I would not be able to resist an
+invitation to go yachting with Eldon Parr, a man might be imagined who
+had that amount of moral courage."
+
+"That's just it.  Hodder seems to me, now I come to think of it, just the
+kind of John Brown type who wouldn't hesitate to get into a row with
+Eldon Parr if he thought it was right, and pull down any amount of
+disagreeable stuff about our ears."
+
+"You're mixing your heroes, Wallis," said Langmaid.
+
+"I can't help it.  You'd catch it, too, Nelson.  What in the name of
+sense possessed you to get such a man?"
+
+This being a question the lawyer was unable to answer, the conversation
+came to another pause.  And it was then that Mr. Plimpton's natural
+optimism reasserted itself.
+
+"It isn't done,--the thing we're afraid of, that's all," he proclaimed,
+after a turn or two about the room.  "Hodder's a gentleman, as I said,
+and if he feels as we suspect he does he'll resign like a gentleman and a
+Christian.  I'll have a talk with him--oh, you can trust me!  I've got an
+idea.  Gordon Atterbury told me the other day there is a vacancy in a
+missionary diocese out west, and that Hodder's name had been mentioned,
+among others, to the bishops for the place.  He'd make a rattling
+missionary bishop, you know, holding services in saloons and knocking
+men's heads together for profanity, and he boxes like a professional.
+Now, a word from Eldon Parr might turn the trick.  Every parson wants to
+be a bishop."
+
+Langmaid shook his head.
+
+"You're getting out of your depths, my friend.  The Church isn't Wall
+Street.  And missionary bishops aren't chosen to make convenient
+vacancies."
+
+"I don't mean anything crude," Mr. Plimpton protested.  "But a word from
+the chief layman of a diocese like this, a man who never misses a General
+Convention, and does everything handsomely, might count,--particularly if
+they're already thinking of Hodder.  The bishops would never suspect we
+wanted to get rid of him."
+
+"Well," said Langmaid, "I advise you to go easy, all along the line."
+
+"Oh, I'll go easy enough," Mr. Plimpton assented, smiling.  "Do you
+remember how I pulled off old Senator Matthews when everybody swore he
+was dead set on voting for an investigation in the matter of those coal
+lands Mr. Parr got hold of in his state?"
+
+"Matthews isn't Hodder, by a long shat," said Langmaid.  "If you ask me
+my opinion, I'll tell you frankly that if Hodder has made up his mind to
+stay in St. John's a ton of dynamite and all the Eldon Parrs in the
+nation can't get him out,"
+
+"Can't the vestry make him resign?" asked Mr. Plimpton, uncomfortably.
+
+"You'd better, go home and study your canons, my friend.  Nothing short
+of conviction for heresy can do it, if he doesn't want to go."
+
+"You wouldn't exactly call him a heretic," Mr. Plimpton said ruefully.
+
+"Would you know a heretic if you saw one?"  demanded Langmaid.
+
+"No, but my wife would, and Gordon Atterbury and Constable would, and
+Eldon Parr.  But don't let's get nervous."
+
+"Well, that's sensible at any rate," said Langmaid .  .  .  .
+
+So Mr. Plimpton had gone off optimistic, and felt even more so the next
+morning after he had had his breakfast in the pleasant dining room of the
+Gore Mansion, of which he was now master.  As he looked out through the
+open window at the sunshine in the foliage of Waverley Place, the
+prospect of his being removed from that position of dignity and influence
+on the vestry of St. John's, which he had achieved, with others, after so
+much walking around the walls, seemed remote.  And he reflected with
+satisfaction upon the fact that his wife, who was his prime minister,
+would be home from the East that day.  Two heads were better than one,
+especially if one of the two were Charlotte Gore's.  And Mr. Plimpton had
+often reflected upon the loss to the world, and the gain to himself, that
+she was a woman.
+
+It would not be gallant to suggest that his swans were geese.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The successful navigation of lower Tower Street, at noonday, required
+presence of mind on the part of the pedestrian.  There were currents and
+counter-currents, eddies and backwaters, and at the corner of Vine a
+veritable maelstrom through which two lines of electric cars pushed their
+way, east and weft, north and south, with incessant clanging of bells;
+followed by automobiles with resounding horns, trucks and delivery wagons
+with wheels reverberating on the granite.  A giant Irish policeman, who
+seemed in continual danger of a violent death, and wholly indifferent to
+it, stood between the car tracks and halted the rush from time to time,
+driving the people like sheep from one side to the other.  Through the
+doors of Ferguson's poured two conflicting streams of humanity, and
+wistful groups of young women, on the way from hasty lunches, blocked the
+pavements and stared at the finery behind the plate-glass windows.
+
+The rector, slowly making his way westward, permitted himself to be
+thrust hither and thither, halted and shoved on again as he studied the
+faces of the throng.  And presently he found himself pocketed before one
+of the exhibits of feminine interest, momentarily helpless, listening to
+the admiring and envious chorus of a bevy of diminutive shop-girls on the
+merits of a Paris gown.  It was at this moment that he perceived, pushing
+towards him with an air of rescue, the figure of his vestryman, Mr.
+Wallis Plimpton.
+
+"Well, well, well!" he cried, as he seized Hodder by the arm and pulled
+him towards the curb.  "What are you doing herein the marts of trade?
+Come right along with me to the Eyrie, and we'll have something, to eat."
+
+The Eyrie was a famous lunch club, of limited membership, at the top of
+the Parr Building, where financial affairs of the first importance were
+discussed and settled.
+
+Hodder explained that he had lunched at half-past twelve.
+
+"Well, step into my office a minute.  It does me good, to see you again,
+upon my word, and I can't let you get by without a little pow-wow."
+
+Mr. Plimpton's trust company, in Vine Street, resembled a Greek temple.
+Massive but graceful granite columns adorned its front, while within it
+was partitioned off with polished marble and ornamental grills.  In the
+rear, guarded by the desks and flanked by the compartments of various
+subordinates, was the president's private sanctum, and into this holy of
+holies Mr. Plimpton led the way with the simple, unassuming genial air of
+the high priest of modern finance who understands men.  The room was
+eloquent almost to affectation of the system and order of great business,
+inasmuch as it betrayed not the least sign of a workshop.  On the dark
+oak desk were two leather-bound books and a polished telephone.  The
+walls were panelled, there was a stone fireplace with andirons set, a
+deep carpet spread over the tessellated floor, and three leather-padded
+armchairs, one of which Mr. Plimpton hospitably drew forward for the
+rector.  He then produced a box of cigars.
+
+"You don't smoke, Mr. Hodder.  I always forget.  That's the way you
+manage to keep yourself in such good shape."  He drew out a gold match
+box and seated himself with an air of gusto opposite his guest.  "And you
+haven't had a vacation, they tell me."
+
+"On the contrary," said the rector, "McCrae has taken the services all
+summer."
+
+"But you've been in the city!" Mr. Plimpton exclaimed, puffing at his
+cigar.
+
+"Yes, I've been in the city."
+
+"Well, well, I'll bet you haven't been idle.  Just between us, as
+friends, Mr. Hodder, I've often wondered if you didn't work too hard--
+there's such a thing as being too conscientious, you know.  And I've
+an idea that the rest of the vestry think so.  Mr. Parr, for instance.
+We know when we've got a good thing, and we don't want to wear you out.
+Oh, we can appreciate your point of view, and admire it.  But a little
+relaxation--eh?  It's too bad that you couldn't have seen your way to
+take that cruise--Mr. Parr was all cut up about it.  I guess you're the
+only man among all of us fairly close to him, who really knows him well,"
+said Mr. Plimpton, admiringly.  "He thinks a great deal of you, Mr.
+Hodder.  By the way, have you seen him since he got back?"
+
+No," Hodder answered."
+
+
+"The trip did him good.  I thought he was a little seedy in the spring
+--didn't you?  Wonderful man!  And when I think how he's slandered and
+abused it makes me hot.  And he never says anything, never complains,
+lives up there all alone, and takes his medicine.  That's real
+patriotism, according to my view.  He could retire to-morrow--
+but he keeps on--why?  Because he feels the weight of a tremendous
+responsibility on his shoulders, because he knows if it weren't for him
+and men like him upon whom the prosperity of this nation depends, we'd
+have famine and anarchy on our hands in no time.  And look what he's done
+for the city, without ostentation, mind you!  He never blows his own
+horn-never makes a speech.  And for the Church!  But I needn't tell you.
+When this settlement house and chapel are finished, they'll be coming out
+here from New York to get points.  By the way, I meant to have written
+you.  Have our revised plans come yet?  We ought to break ground in
+November, oughtn't we?"
+
+"I intend to lay my views on that matter before the vestry at the next
+meeting, the rector said.
+
+"Well," declared Mr. Plimpton, after a scarcely perceptible pause, "I've
+no doubt they'll be worth listening to.  If I were to make a guess," he
+continued, with a contemplative smile, blowing a thin stream of smoke
+towards the distant ceiling, "I should bet that you have spent your
+summer looking over the ground.  I don't say that you have missed your
+vocation, Mr. Hodder, but I don't mind telling you that for a clergyman,
+for a man absorbed in spiritual matters, a man who can preach the sermons
+you preach, you've got more common-sense and business thoroughness than
+any one I have ever run across in your profession."
+
+"Looking over the ground?" Hodder repeated, ignoring the compliment.
+
+"Sure, said Mr. Plimpton, smiling more benignly than ever.  "You mustn't
+be modest about it.  Dalton Street.  And when that settlement house is
+built, I'll guarantee it will be run on a business basis.  No nonsense."
+
+"What do you mean by nonsense?"  Hodder asked.  He did not make the
+question abrupt, and there was even the hint of a smile in his eyes,
+which Mr. Plimpton found the more disquieting.
+
+"Why, that's only a form of speech.  I mean you'll be practical,
+efficient, that you'll get hold of the people of that neighbourhood and
+make 'em see that the world isn't such a bad place after all, make 'em
+realize that we in St. John's want to help 'em out.  That you won't make
+them more foolishly discontented than they are, and go preaching
+socialism to them."
+
+"I have no intention of preaching socialism," said Hodder.  But he laid a
+slight emphasis on the word which sent a cold shiver down Mr. Plimpton's
+spine, and made him wonder whether there might not be something worse
+than socialism.
+
+"I knew you wouldn't," he declared, with all the heartiness he could
+throw into his voice.  "I repeat, you're a practical, sensible man.  I'll
+yield to none in my belief in the Church as a moral, uplifting, necessary
+spiritual force in our civilization, in my recognition of her high
+ideals, but we business men, Mr. Hodder,--as--I am sure you must agree,--
+have got to live, I am sorry to say, on a lower plane.  We've got to deal
+with the world as we find it, and do our little best to help things
+along.  We can't take the Gospel literally, or we should all be ruined
+in a day, and swamp everybody else.  You understand me?
+
+"I understand you," said the rector.
+
+Mr. Plimpton's cigar had gone out.  In spite of himself, he had slipped
+from the easy-going, casual tone into one that was becoming persuasive,
+apologetic, strenuous.  Although the day was not particularly warm, he
+began to perspire a little; and he repeated the words over to himself,
+"I understand you."  What the deuce did the rector know?  He had somehow
+the air of knowing everything--more than Mr. Plimpton did.  And Mr.
+Plimpton was beginning to have the unusual and most disagreeable feeling
+of having been weighed in the balance and found wanting.  He glanced at
+his guest, who sat quite still, the head bent a trifle, the disturbing
+gray eyes fixed contemplatively an him--accusingly.  And yet the
+accusation did not seem personal with the clergyman, whose eyes were
+nearly the medium, the channels of a greater, an impersonal Ice.  It was
+true that the man had changed.  He was wholly baffling to Mr. Plimpton,
+whose sense of alarm increased momentarily into an almost panicky feeling
+as he remembered what Langmaid had said.  Was this inscrutable rector of
+St. John's gazing, knowingly, at the half owner of Harrods Hotel in
+Dalton Street, who couldn't take the Gospel literally?  There was
+evidently no way to find out at once, and suspense would be unbearable,
+in vain he told himself that these thoughts were nonsense, the discomfort
+persisted, and he had visions of that career in which he had become
+one of the first citizens and the respected husband of Charlotte Gore
+clashing down about his ears.  Why?  Because a clergyman should choose
+to be quixotic, fanatical?  He did not took quixotic, fanatical, Mr.
+Plimpton had to admit,--but a good deal saner than he, Mr. Plimpton, must
+have appeared at that moment.  His throat was dry, and he didn't dare to
+make the attempt to relight his cigar.
+
+"There's nothing like getting together--keeping in touch with people,
+Mr. Hodder," he managed to say.  "I've been out of town a good deal this
+summer--putting on a little flesh, I'm sorry to admit.  But I've been
+meaning to drop into the parish house and talk over those revised plans
+with you.  I will drop in--in a day or two.  I'm interested in the work,
+intensely interested, and so is Mrs. Plimpton.  She'll help you.  I'm
+sorry you can't lunch with me."
+
+He had the air, now, of the man who finds himself disagreeably and
+unexpectedly closeted.  with a lunatic; and his language, although he
+sought to control it, became eves a trifle less coherent.
+
+"You must make allowances for us business men, Mr. Hodder.  I mean, of
+course, we're sometimes a little lax in our duties--in the summer, that
+is.  Don't shoot the pianist, he's doing his--ahem!  You know the story.
+
+"By the way, I hear great things of you; I'm told it's on the cards that
+you're to be made a bishop."
+
+"Oh," answered the rector, "there are better men mentioned than I!"
+
+"I want you to know this," said his vestryman, as he seized Hodder's
+hand, "much as we value you here, bitterly as we should hate to lose you,
+none of us, I am sure, would stand in the way of such a deserved
+advancement."
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Plimpton," said the rector.
+
+Mr. Plimpton watched the vigorous form striding through the great chamber
+until it disappeared.  Then he seized his hat and made his way as rapidly
+as possible through the crowds to the Parr Building.  At the entrance of
+the open-air roof garden of the Eyrie he ran into Nelson Langmaid.
+
+"You're the very man I'm after," said Mr. Plimpton, breathlessly.
+"I stopped in your office, and they said you'd gone up."
+
+"What's the matter, Wallis?"  inquired the lawyer, tranquilly.  "You look
+as if you'd lost a couple of bonds."
+
+I've just seen Hodder, and he is going to do it."
+
+"Do what?"
+
+"Sit down here, at this table in the corner, and I'll tell you."
+
+For a practical man, it must be admitted that Mr. Plimpton had very
+little of the concrete to relate.  And it appeared on cross-examination
+by Mr. Langmaid, who ate his cold meat and salad with an exasperating and
+undiminished appetite--that the only definite thing the rector had said
+was that he didn't intend to preach socialism.  This was reassuring.
+
+"Reassuring!" exclaimed Mr. Plimpton, whose customary noonday hunger was
+lacking, "I wish you could have heard him say it!"
+
+"The wicked," remarked the lawyer, "flee when no man pursueth.  Don't
+shoot the pianist!"  Langmaid set down his beer, and threw back his head
+and laughed.  "If I were the Reverend Mr. Hodder, after such an
+exhibition as you gave, I should immediately have suspected the pianist
+of something, and I should have gone off by myself and racked my brains
+and tried to discover what it was.  He's a clever man, and if he hasn't
+got a list of Dalton Street property now he'll have one by to-morrow,
+and the story of some of your transactions with Tom Beatty and the City
+Council."
+
+"I believe you'd joke in the electric chair," said Mr. a Plimpton,
+resentfully.  "I'll tell you this,--and my experience backs me up,--
+if you can't get next to a man by a little plain talk, he isn't safe.
+I haven't got the market sense for nothing, and I'll give you this tip,
+Nelson,--it's time to stand from under.  Didn't I warn you fellows that
+Bedloe Hubbell meant business long before he started in? and this parson
+can give Hubbell cards and spades.  Hodder can't see this thing as it is.
+He's been thinking, this summer.  And a man of that kind is downright
+dangerous when he begins to think.  He's found out things, and he's put
+two and two together, and he's the uncompromising type.  He has a notion
+that the Gospel can be taken literally, and I could feel all the time I
+was talking to him he thought I was a crook."
+
+"Perhaps he was right," observed the lawyer.
+
+"That comes well from you," Mr. Plimpton retorted.
+
+Oh, I'm a crook, too," said Langmaid.  "I discovered it some time ago.
+The difference between you and me, Wallis, is that I am willing to
+acknowledge it, and you're not.  The whole business world, as we know it,
+is crooked, and if we don't cut other people's throats, they'll cut
+ours."
+
+"And if we let go, what would happen to the country?" his companion
+demanded.
+
+Langmaid began to shake with silent laughter.
+
+"Your solicitude about the country, Wallis, is touching.  I was brought
+up to believe that patriotism had an element of sacrifice in it, but I
+can't see ours.  And I can't imagine myself, somehow, as a Hercules
+bearing the burden of our Constitution.  From Mr. Hodder's point of view,
+perhaps,--and I'm not sure it isn't the right one, the pianist is doing
+his damnedest, to the tune of--Dalton Street.  We might as well look this
+thing in the face, my friend.  You and I really don't believe in another
+world, or we shouldn't be taking so much trouble to make this one as we'd
+like to have it."
+
+"I never expected to hear you talk this way," said Mr. Plimpton.
+
+"Well, it's somewhat of a surprise to me," the lawyer admitted.
+
+"And I don't think you put it fairly," his friend contended.  "I never
+can tell when you are serious, but this is damned serious.  In business
+we have to deal with crooks, who hold us up right and left, and if we
+stood back you know as well as I do that everything would go to pot.
+And if we let the reformers have their way the country would be bedlam.
+We'd have anarchy and bloodshed, revolution, and the people would be
+calling us, the strong men, back in no time.  You can't change human
+nature.  And we have a sense of responsibility--we support law and order
+and the Church, and found institutions, and give millions away in
+charity."
+
+The big lawyer listened to this somewhat fervent defence of his order
+with an amused smile, nodding his head slightly from side to side.
+
+"If you don't believe in it," demanded Mr. Plimpton, why the deuce don't
+you drop it?"
+
+"It's because of my loyalty," said Langmaid.  "I wouldn't desert my pals.
+I couldn't bear, Wallis, to see you go to the guillotine without me."
+
+Mr. Plimpton became unpleasantly silent.
+
+"Well, you may think it's a joke," he resumed, after a moment, "but there
+will be a guillotine if we don't look out.  That confounded parson is
+getting ready to spring something, and I'm going to give Mr. Parr a tip.
+He'll know how to handle him.  He doesn't talk much, but I've got an
+idea, from one or two things he let drop, that he's a little suspicious
+of a change in Hodder.  But he ought to be waived."
+
+"You're in no condition to talk to Mr. Parr, or to anyone else, except
+your wife, Walks," Langmaid said.  "You'd better go home, and let me see
+Mr. Parr.  I'm responsible for Mr. Hodder, anyway."
+
+"All right," Mr. Plimpton agreed, as though he had gained some shred of
+comfort from this thought.  "I guess you're in worse than any of us."
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Antipathy to forms
+Clothes of one man are binding on another
+Genius, analyzed, is often disappointing
+Hell's here--isn't it?
+Olmah which Isaiah uses does not mean virgin
+Pleasure?  Yes.  It makes me feel as if I were of some use
+Scandalously forced through the council of Nicaea
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INSIDE OF THE CUP, V5, BY CHURCHILL ***
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