Mona smiled.
"The story of that," she said, "is written on each man's white stone."
"And yet, if most people act on that principle," he said, "they are a little apt to lose the Spirit of Praise and Prayer altogether. Don't you think so?"
Mona did not answer the question for a moment. Then she met the eyes that were fixed on her face. "Yes," she said frankly, "I do."
They walked on for a few minutes in silence.
"And may I ask what you do go to church for?" he said at last. "Don't answer if I take a liberty in asking."
"You don't at all; but it is a little difficult to say. I believe I go to church in order to get some one to think beautiful thoughts for me. When one's life is busy with work that takes all one's brain-power, there is little energy left with which to think beautiful thoughts. One loses sight of the ideal in the actual. I go to church in order to keep hold of it. If I were a seamstress I should probably go out among the hills on Sunday morning and think my beautiful thoughts for myself."
"You make it, in fact, a question of the division of labour. We are to buy our beautiful thoughts ready-made as we buy our boots, because a complicated state of society leaves us no time to make them."
"Precisely; and yet we are not exactly to buy them ready-made. I think it is Robertson who says that a thought is of no use to us, however beautiful, unless it is in a sense our own,—unless it makes us feel that we have been groping round it unconsciously, and all but grasping it. We cry 'Eureka!' when a beautiful thought strikes home, and we become aware for the first time that we have been in search of something. The moral of all this is, that our priest or preacher must be a man with a mind akin to our own, moving on the same plane, but if possible with a wider radius. This granted, his sect and creed are matters of infinitely little moment."
"But it seems to me that books would serve your purpose as well as sermons?"