'Be sure of your facts,' said the Bishop.
'Anyhow, before you came, plenty of the society lash used to be applied to get church-building doles out of Europeans. Moreover, if you look into it, generally you'll find things at Missions much as you find them here. These gloriously "given" Mission churches on Mission lands that the home magazine ecstasizes over are not given so very freely, to say the least of it. They are put up by a sort of social pressure immensely effective,' Topready broke in.
'They say most of the churches this side of the river are built the one way and I don't like the one way. Archdeacon Maynard used to advocate the one way, and impress it on his missionaries black and white. It was he who started the church-rate and debarred defaulters from Easter Communion. I've stopped that, and I want to stop the one way.'
The Bishop groaned. 'Archdeacon Maynard's a vice-president of the
Free and Open Churchmen in England. I heard him speak eloquently,
if a little floridly, on the right of the poor to the House of
God.'
Manners chuckled. 'England's some way off,' he said.
Topready spoke from his heart. 'I don't like it. I told the people that the proper way was for Christians and philo-Christians to build accordingly as they could spare money and time. But they said that they were too few. I answered "Then let them wait in the old church awhile." They said they wanted a new church this year, and that the heathen should be called to help the faithful as in other places. They said they ought to have a kraal levy as other places did it saved a great deal of trouble. They thought me mad, I think. Azariah, the teacher, practically told me so.'
The Bishop lit his pipe again.
'We'll think about it,' he said. 'The consecration is fixed for the day after to-morrow, is it not? It was to be christened Holy Innocents' Church on Childermas Day, was it not? Will you have it consecrated on the Eve instead, Saint John's Night? Time Sunset.'
Topready started. 'Rather late, is it not?' he asked.
It was a great concourse that lined the hillside on the morrow when the sun was going down. The Bishop had spoken that morning in the old plain church of how he wished them to observe certain days of prayer and thanksgiving.