“For my own part—I’m liberal,” said Mr. Mackinder, and added, “very liberal. Let me tell you, Mr. Sydenham, exactly how I see things.”
He paused for a moment as if he collected his views.
“If a little boy has grown up in a home, in the sort of home which one might describe as God-fearing, if he has not only heard of God but seen God as a living influence upon the people about him, then—then, I admit, you have something real. He will believe in God. He will know God. God—simply because of the faith about him—will be a knowable reality. God is a faith. In men. Such a boy’s world will fall into shape about the idea of God. He will take God as a matter of course. Such a boy can be religious from childhood—yes.... But there are very few such homes.”
“Less, probably, than there used to be?”
Mr. Mackinder disavowed an answer by a gesture of hands and shoulders. He went on, frowning slightly as he talked. He wanted to say exactly what he thought. “For all other boys, Mr. Sydenham, God, for all practical purposes, does not exist. Their worlds have been made without him; they do not think in terms of him; and if he is to come into their lives at all he must come in from the outside—a discovery, like a mighty rushing wind. By what is called Conversion. At adolescence. Until that happens you must build the soul on pride, on honour, on the decent instincts. It is all you have. And the less they hear about God the better. They will not understand. It will be a cant to them—a kind of indelicacy. The two greatest things in the world have been the most vulgarized. God and sex.... If I had my own way I would have no religious services for my boys at all.”
“Instead of which?”
Mr. Mackinder paused impressively before replying.
“The local curate is preparing two of my elder boys for Confirmation at the present time.”
He gazed gloomily at the tablecloth. “If one could do as one liked!” he said. “If only one could do as one liked!”
But now Oswald was realizing for the first time the eternal tragedy of the teacher, that sower of unseen harvests, that reaper of thistles and the wind, that serf of custom, that subjugated rebel, that feeble, persistent antagonist of the triumphant things that rule him. And behind that immediate tragedy Oswald was now apprehending for the first time something more universally tragic, an incessantly recurring story of high hopes and a grey ending; the story of boys and girls, clean and sweet-minded, growing up into life, and of the victory of world inertia, of custom drift and the tarnishing years.