“There is no sin,” said Miss Toner. Barney was not quite comfortable; Oldmeadow saw that. He kicked about in the gravel, a little flushed, and when, once or twice, the old family friend met his eye, it was quickly averted. “God is Good; and everything else is mortal mind—mistake—illusion.”
“You are a sound Platonist, Miss Toner,” Oldmeadow observed, and his kindness hardly cloaked his irony.
“Am I?” she said. When she looked at one she never averted her eyes. She looked until she had seen all that she wished to see. “I am not fond of metaphysics.”
“Socrates defined sin as ignorance, you know, and in a sense it may be. All the same,” said Oldmeadow, and he felt that they were all listening and that in the eyes of his old friends it was more than unlikely that he would get the better of Miss Toner—“there’s mortal mind to be accounted for, isn’t there, and why it gets us continually into such a mess. Whatever name you call it by, there is something that does get us into a mess and mightn’t it be a wholesome discipline to hear it denounced once a week?”
“Not by some one more ignorant than I am!” said Miss Toner, laughing gently. “I’ll go to church for love of Mrs. Chadwick, but not for the sake of the discipline!”
“Mr. Bodman never denounces. Roger is giving you quite a wrong idea,” said Mrs. Chadwick. She had stood looking from one to the other, distressed and bewildered, and she now prepared to leave them. “And Palgrave is very, very unjust. Of course you must not come, dear. It would make me quite unhappy. But Mr. Bodman is not a duffer. If Palgrave feels like that he must certainly stay away. Perhaps you can teach him to be more charitable. It’s easy to see the mote in our neighbour’s eye.” Mrs. Chadwick’s voice slightly trembled. She had been much moved by her son’s defection.
“Come, Mummy, you’re not going to say I’m a duffer!” Palgrave passed an affectionately bantering arm round her shoulders. “Dufferism isn’t my beam!”
But very sadly Mrs. Chadwick drew away, saying as she turned into the house: “No; that isn’t your beam. But pride may be, Palgrave. Spiritual pride.”
Oldmeadow remained standing in the sunlight with Miss Toner and the two young men. The girls had followed Mrs. Chadwick, Meg casting a laughing glance of appreciation at him as she went. Religious scruples would never keep Meg from church if she had a pretty spring dress to wear.
“After all,” he carried on, mildly, the altercation—if that was what it was between him and Miss Toner—“good Platonists as we may be, we haven’t reached the stage of Divine Contemplation yet and things do happen that are difficult to account for, if sin is nothing more positive than illusion and mistake. All the forms of ôte-toi que je m’y mette. All the forms of jealousy and malice. Deliberate cruelties. History is full of horrors, isn’t it? There’s a jealousy of goodness in the human heart, as well as a love. The betrayal of Christ by Judas is symbolic.”