“And so when I get around me twenty or thirty men of divers habits of thought and each with his own views of life, I have the chance of getting at twenty or thirty different commentaries on a text. That is a gain: another is that no single one of my commentators is concerned to square his construction of a passage with a hide-bound creed or with the convictions of any one of his hearers. The only thing we are concerned about is to get at the truth.”
“And cannot you get at it in the recognised places of worship. Doesn’t it savour of conceit to set yourselves apart as people better and wiser than their neighbours?”
“Oh! Well, come to that, Mr. Jones, you are a Dissenter yourself, you know. You dissented from established orthodoxy. We aren’t afraid of dissenting from orthodox dissent.”
“But there must be limits, young man; there must be limits.”
“Yes,” assented Tom. “There must be limits. There are the limitations of the human mind. We don’t seek to go beyond them.”
Mr. Jones was now thoroughly roused. He was a man of no mean intelligence and of a wide range of reading. If also he was a man of insatiable vanity and inordinate ambition, perhaps the atmosphere of adulation in which he lived, the incense of incompetent judges, were the chief causes. He felt now that he was talking to a man of sense and fearlessness. Now it is a treat to talk with a man who has the sense and the patience and the disposition to think for himself, and the courage to speak his thoughts. Mr. Jones walked in silence for a time, Tom moderating his longer stride to keep time with the cleric’s shorter pace.
“I hope,” said Mr. Jones, at length, “I hope your teaching is based on the cardinal principles of Christianity?”
“And those?”
“The Immaculate Conception and the Resurrection of our Lord.”
“Those are not principles Mr. Jones. They are either facts or inventions.”