“It’s an age of sham, of conformity,” Mr. Austin announced. “There seem no fighters left. The pseudo-believers have it all their own way, since apparently there is no genuine belief to oppose them. The spectacle is revolting. We have our political figure-heads cynically dissolving old faiths into vaporous metaphors—metaphors accepted literally by the masses. We have science tottering to a ruinous alliance with metaphysics. We have a church engaged in a dignified tug of war over a candlestick—the rival camps spattering one another with mud or holy water!” His audience was silent and Mr. Merrick, pushing back his plate and leaning his arm on the table as he sat sideways to it, continued in even more impressive tones, “Don’t, my dear Cuthbert, speak to me of faith, blind faith. Faith is a sort of intellectual suicide. With a fixed subjective faith one is cut off from all objective truth as, I think, Guyau said.”
He might as well have been talking Greek as far as the cheerful squire was concerned; had better, for tattered remnants of youthful learning still lurked in his wholesomely disencumbered mind.
“Ah well,” said Mr. Cuthbert, “all that’s beside the mark. One must have custom, you know, one must have conformity to keep things from going to pieces. Godersham gave us an excellent sermon on faith last week,” he added, looking genially around the table.
“Ah yes; then you advise a good deal of cutting,” Mr. Jones went on to Felicia, after the patient pause with which he had allowed the thunder of Mr. Merrick’s denunciations to roll by.
“Godersham on faith. I’ve no doubt of it.” The thunder rolled again. “You will always find material prosperity buttressed by conformity. As for the country going to pieces, that’s rubbish. It shrivels in its stiff shell.”
“I have the greatest regard for Godersham—the very greatest,” Mr. Cuthbert said temperately.
“I am not attacking individuals, my dear Cuthbert, but principles. You don’t follow me. I will put it as simply as may be. What I mean is that I despise the man who tells me that he believes, putting his own facile interpretation on the word, in the Thirty-nine Articles, who receives the benefits that such beliefs confer, while possessing a good deal less theism than Voltaire—let us say. I consider such a man morally culpable, and a system that perpetuates such dishonesty I consider a menace to the national welfare.”
Everybody was listening now, except, perhaps, Mr. Jones, whose mind still ran on his roses, and who, seeing Felicia’s attention turned from him, waited for a lull, his head bowed, frowning a little at the interruption. Lady Angela, leaning her brow on her hand, was smiling a wan smile of weariness and softest disdain. Mrs. Merrick looked her acid impatience. Maurice Wynne kept kindly eyes of comprehension upon Mr. Merrick’s flushed insistence. But it was Geoffrey Daunt’s face that arrested Felicia’s attention.
Leaning back in his chair, a long hand playing with his bread, he looked at her father with a look of indifferent yet keenly observant sarcasm. To Felicia the look was like a sudden slap upon her own cheek. She felt herself grow pale with anger. After all, what her father said was true, true, at all events, of most of those who heard him, comfortable conformists who would bow to any creed that insured comfort. And she did not care whether it were true or not. He was alone, and they were all against him. In the pause, awkward and hostile, that followed his tirade, she said, clearly, with a light defiance, tossing the words at all of them. “Hear! hear! papa.” She flung into the emptiness a flaming little banner of revolt. Geoffrey looked swiftly from her father to her. Her eyes had been on him while she spoke and now met his. In her face, steely in its steadiness as a drawn sword, he saw the whole drama of her thoughts and read the deeper defiance towards himself. It was at him the sword was pointed. For a long moment they looked at each other across the table. Geoffrey’s hand continued automatically to break his bread.
“Hear! hear! Miss Merrick.” Maurice echoed; he leaned forward, drawing her eyes from Geoffrey’s. “I put your glove in my helmet. But really, you know, Mr. Merrick—“ his smile, graceful, healing, turned from the almost ardour with which it had assured her of championship—“we shall plunge into such metaphysical depths if we are going to argue about faith.”