"My neighbours tell me. I hear about the changes from my friend, William Marydrew,—a great church-goer and very keen in his intellects, for all his years. He says that in the old days the clergy used to thunder and flash the Word down, like lightning, on the people; but now they argue and palter and mark time, so that folk go out of church as doubtful as when they went in. It's all education, and men's brains getting larger and their sense of justice increasing."
"Don't you think it," answered Judith. "Their brains will land mankind in the madhouse at the rate we're going in some directions. Are right and wrong other than right and wrong because godless men; for their own base ends, try to mix 'em?"
"I don't know; but I do know that a good deal of the world's work is standing still thanks to education. Labour has got such a lot to talk about nowadays, that it spends half its time chattering; and the money is always the subject nowadays, never the work that's supposed to earn it."
"Weak faith is the sin at the back of all our troubles; and the world's pretty ripe for the avenging Hand so far as the faithful can see," she answered.
"I don't believe that. Laws are made for the living, not the dead. We labour too much under—not the avenging Hand, but the dead Hand. Everything changes, including our standards of faith and duty. I heard a chap say last week—a sober, decent man too—that life was quite difficult enough without being handicapped by the Ten Commandments. Of course he was joking, but you see the point."
Mrs. Huxam did not see the point. She retorted sternly and told Jacob that he was little better than an atheist to question the enduring quality of inspiration.
"It's all of a piece," she continued. "Man is losing sight of his Maker at every turn in the road. We talk of Anti-Christ and don't see that Anti-Christ is already among us, netting souls by the hundred thousand. The abiding consciousness of the Divine Presence is lost—gone. This generation hardly knows the meaning of the words. And what follows? The men and women are false in wedlock, false in fatherhood and motherhood, false in business and false in faith. There are new, sham gods being lifted up, and you—you, my daughter's husband—are worshipping 'em with the rest. You pretend it isn't so; but your words condemn you."
Jacob laughed, for he had thought long upon these things and slipped farther from his old guides than Mrs. Huxam knew.
"'Consciousness of the Divine Presence' a guarantee for honesty in business!" he answered. "Why, my dear woman, it isn't even a guarantee for honesty in the pulpit! How many of the parsons are honest, or dare to say what they know is the truth? And we laymen—look round. Take Ireland—two camps of men fighting like devils, with 'consciousness of the Divine Presence' the bedrock of all their quarrels. And our so-called Christian Government—what would become of that, if, for one sitting of Parliament, it put 'the Divine Presence' before practical politics and diplomacy? No, no; 'consciousness of the Divine Presence' don't make men honest, I assure you, mother—not even such as say they believe in it."
She glared at him and turned very white.