To Margaret, listening dully, there seemed to be an inexpressible incongruity between the man and the office, between the face and the robes, which should have lent a spirituality. She looked about her furtively. Surely, surely she must see that thought reflected from other faces; but her range of vision took in only countenances overflowing with conscious Sabbath rectitude, heads nodding with rhythmic sleepiness and eyes shining with churchly complacency. Suddenly through the rolling periods the meaning struck through to Margaret, and her wandering mind was instantly arrested.
“For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are of the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.”
She heard the words with painful eagerness. Her mind seemed suddenly as acute, as quick to record impressions as though she had just awakened from a long sleep.
A woman in a pew to Margaret’s right dropped her prayer-book with a smart crash onto the wooden floor. The smooth brows drew together sharply and his voice, pauseless, took on a note of asperity, of irritated displeasure. Reading was a specialty of his, and to be interrupted spoiled the general effect and displeased him.
“Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.”
“So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”
An old man, bent and deaf, sat close up under the reader’s desk. He leaned forward with elbow on knee and one open palm behind a hairy ear. His eyes were raised, and his look was rapt. Margaret could see his side-face from where she sat. He saw only the sanctified figure of the priest and heard no human monotone, but the voice of God, speaking through the lips of His anointed. He was a real worshipper. For her the spiritual was swallowed up. That one bodily image stood before her inner self. It had blotted out her diviner view; it had even thrust itself behind the flowing robes and sandaled feet and had dared to usurp the place of the eternal symbol of human spirituality!
She locked her hands about her prayer-book, pinching them between her knees. The woman directly in front of her wore a hot, figured silk and a drab mull boa that looked dreadfully like bunched caterpillars. The riotous rose-odor made her faint and sick, and she had a horrible feeling that the carved heads of the jutting stone work were laughing evilly at her.
A strangling terror of herself seized her—a terror of this new and hideous darkness that had descended upon her spirit—a terror of this overmastering impulse which threatened her soul. It was part of the dominance of the flesh that its senses should be opened only to itself, only to the earthy and the lower. This penalty was already upon her; of all in that congregation, she, only she, must see the bestial lurking everywhere, even in God’s house, and in the vestments of His minister.
“So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”
It was part of their punishment that they could no longer please themselves. Out from every shape of nature and art, from the shadows of grove and the sunshine of open plain, from the crowded street and from the silent church must start forever this spectre, this unsightly comrade of fleshly imagination. This was what it meant to be carnally minded. Margaret’s soul was weak and dizzy with pain.