"I see nothing else amiss," he said, rising.
"It is exceedingly kind of you."
"Well, as a matter of fact it is; for I came here expressly to cultivate a bad temper, and you have helped to confirm me in a good one.… Oh, I know what you would say if your politeness allowed: 'Why, if bad temper's my object, did I leave the Liberal Club and come here?' Because, my dear sir, at the Club—though there's plenty—it's of the wrong sort. I wanted a religiously bad temper, and an intelligent one to boot."
"I don't see what religion and bad temper have to do with one another," confessed Mr. Simeon.
"That is because you are a good man, and therefore your religion doesn't matter to you."
"But really," Mr. Simeon protested, flushing; "though one doesn't willingly talk of these inmost things, you must allow me to say that my religion is everything to me."
"You say that, and believe it. Religion, you believe, colours all your life, suffuses it with goodness as with a radiance. But actually, my friend, it is your own good heart that colours and throws its radiance into your religion."
'O lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live'—
'O lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live'—
"—Or religion either.… Pardon me, but a thoroughly virtuous or a thoroughly amiable man is not worth twopence as a touchstone for a creed; he would convert even Mormonism to a thing of beauty.… Whereas the real test of any religion is—as I saw it excellently well put the other day—'not what form it takes in a virtuous mind, but what effects it produces on those of another sort.' Well, I have been studying those effects pretty well all my life, and they may be summed up, roughly but with fair accuracy, as Bad Temper."