He found his aunt in the garden, sitting out in the sun. He bent down to kiss her, and she detained his hand for a moment. "So you are at home?" she said, "and happy?—that is what I had wished and hoped. You have been to the pool—yes, that is a lovely spot. It was that, I think, which made your uncle buy the place; he had a great love of water—and in my unhappy days here, when I had lost him, I used often to go there and wish things were otherwise. But that is all over now!"
After luncheon, Miss Merry excused herself and said she was going to the village to see a farm-labourer's wife, who had lost a child and was in great distress. "Poor soul!" said Mrs. Graves. "Give her my love, and ask her to come and see me as soon as she can." Presently as they sat together, Howard smoking, she asked him something about his work. "Will you tell me what you are doing?" she said. "I daresay I should not understand, but I like to know what people are thinking about—don't use technical terms, but just explain your idea!"
Howard was just in the frame of mind, trying to revive an old train of thought, in which it is a great help to make a statement of the range of a subject; he said so, and began to explain very simply what was in his mind, the essential unity of all religion, and his attempt to disentangle the central motive from outlying schemes and dogmas. Mrs. Graves heard him attentively, every now and then asking a question, which showed that she was following the drift of his thought.
"Ah, that's very interesting and beautiful," she said at last. "May I say that it is the one thing that attracts me, though I have never followed it philosophically. Now," she went on, "I am going to reduce it all to practical terms, and I don't want to beat about the bush—there's no need for that! I want to ask you a plain question. Have you any religion or faith of your own?"
"Ah," said Howard, "who can say? I am a conformist, certainly, because I recognise in religion a fine sobering, civilising force at work, and if one must choose one's side, I want to be on that side and not on the other. But religion seems to me in its essence a very artistic thing, a perception of effects which are hidden from many hearts and minds. When a man speaks of definite religious experience, I feel that I am in the presence of a perception of something real—as real as music and painting. But I doubt if it is a sense given to all, or indeed to many; and I don't know what it really is. And then, too, one comes across people who hold it in an ugly, or a dreary, or a combative, or a formal way; and then sometimes it seems to me almost an evil thing."
"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "I understand that. May I give you an instance, and you will see if I perceive your thought. The good Vicar here, my cousin Frank, Jack's father—you will meet him to-night—is a man who holds a rigid belief, or thinks he holds it. He preaches what he calls the sinew and bone of doctrine, and he is very stern in the pulpit. He likes lecturing people in rows! But in reality he is one of the kindest and vaguest of men. He preached a stiff sermon about conversion the other day—I am pretty sure he did not understand it himself—and he disquieted one of my good maids so much that she went to him and asked what she could do to get assurance. He seems to have hummed and hawed, and then to have said that she need not trouble her head about it—that she was a good girl, and had better be content with doing her duty. He is the friendliest of men, and that is his real religion; he hasn't an idea how to apply his system, which he learned at a theological college, but he feels it his duty to preach it."
"Yes," said Howard, "that is just what I mean; but there must be some explanation for this curious outburst of forms and doctrines, so contradictory in the different sects. Something surely causes both the form of religion and the force of it?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "just as in an engine something causes both the steam and the piston-rod; it's an intelligence somewhere that fits the one to the other. But then, as you say, what is the cause of all this extravagance and violence of expression?"
"That is the human element," said Howard—"the cautious, conservative, business-like side that can't bear to let anything go. All religion begins, it seems to me, by an outburst of moral force, an attempt to simplify, to get a principle; and then the people who don't understand it begin to make it technical and defined; uncritical minds begin to attribute all sorts of vague wonders to it—things unattested, natural exaggerations, excited statements, impossible claims; and then these take traditional shape and the poor steed gets hung with all sorts of incongruous burdens."
"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "but the force is there all the time; the old hard words, like regeneration and atonement, do not mean DEFINITE things—that is the mischief; they are the receipts made up by stupid, hard-headed people who do not understand; but they stand for large and wonderful experiences and are like the language of children telling their dreams. The moral genius who sees through it all and gives the first impulse is trying to deal with life directly and frankly; and the difficulty arises from people who see the attendant circumstances and mistake them for the causes. But I do not see it from that side, of course! I understand what you are aiming at. You are trying to disentangle all the phenomena, are you not, and referring them to their real causes, instead of lumping them all together as the phenomena of religion?"