‘Ah!’ sighed the lady, ‘why trust to these self-willed methods, and neglect the noble and exquisite forms which the Church has prepared for us as embodiments for every feeling of our hearts?’
‘Every feeling, Miss Lavington?’
Argemone hesitated. She had made the good old stock assertion, as in duty bound; but she could not help recollecting that there were several Popish books of devotion at that moment on her table, which seemed to her to patch a gap or two in the Prayer-book.
‘My temple as yet,’ said Lancelot, ‘is only the heaven and the earth; my church-music I can hear all day long, whenever I have the sense to be silent, and “hear my mother sing;” my priests and preachers are every bird and bee, every flower and cloud. Am I not well enough furnished? Do you want to reduce my circular infinite chapel to an oblong hundred-foot one? My sphere harmonies to the Gregorian tones in four parts? My world-wide priesthood, with their endless variety of costume, to one not over-educated gentleman in a white sheet? And my dreams of naiads and flower-fairies, and the blue-bells ringing God’s praises, as they do in “The story without an End,” for the gross reality of naughty charity children, with their pockets full of apples, bawling out Hebrew psalms of which they neither feel nor understand a word?’
Argemone tried to look very much shocked at this piece of bombast. Lancelot evidently meant it as such, but he eyed her all the while as if there was solemn earnest under the surface.
‘Oh, Mr. Smith!’ she said, ‘how can you dare talk so of a liturgy compiled by the wisest and holiest of all countries and ages! You revile that of whose beauty you are not qualified to judge!’
‘There must be a beauty in it all, or such as you are would not love it.’
‘Oh,’ she said hopefully, ‘that you would but try the Church system! How you would find it harmonise and methodise every day, every thought for you! But I cannot explain myself. Why not go to our vicar and open your doubts to him?’
‘Pardon, but you must excuse me.’
‘Why? He is one of the saintliest of men!’