"I think I can guess what you mean," said Charles, gravely. "One does not often meet any one like Mr. Alwynn."
"No. I was thinking of him. Until I came to Slumberleigh the lines had not fallen to me in very clerical places, so my experience is limited; but he seems to me to be the only clergyman I have known who does not force on one a form of religion that has been dead and buried for years."
"The clergy have much to answer for on that head," said Charles with bitterness. "I sometimes like and respect them as individuals, but I do not love them as a class. One ought to make allowance for the fact that they are tied and bound by the chain of their Thirty-nine Articles; that at three-and-twenty they shut the doors deliberately on any new and possibly unorthodox idea; and it is consequently unreasonable to expect from them any genuine freedom or originality of thought. I can forgive them their assumption of superiority, their inability to meet honest scepticism with anything like fairness, their continual bickering among themselves; but I cannot forgive them the harm they are doing to religion, the discredit they are bringing upon it by their bigoted views and obsolete ideas. They busy themselves doing good—that is the worst of it; they mean well, but they do not see that, in the mean while, their Church is being left unto them desolate; though perhaps, after all, the Church having come to be what it is, that is the best thing that can happen."
"There are men among the clergy who will not come under that sweeping accusation," said Ruth. "Look at some of the London churches. Are they desolate? Goodness and earnestness will be a power to the end of time, however narrow the accompanying creed may be."
"That is true, but we have heads as well as hearts. Goodness and earnestness appeal to the heart alone. The intellect is left out in the cold. However good and earnest, and eloquent one of these great preachers may be, the reason we go to hear him is not only because of that, but because he appears to be thinking in a straight line, because he seems to recognize the long-resisted claim of the intellect, and we hope he will have a word to say to us. He promises well, but listen to him a little longer, follow his thought, and you will begin to see that he will only look for truth within a certain area, that his steps are describing an arc, that he is tethered. Give him time enough, and you will see him tread out the complete circle in which he and his brethren are equally bound to walk."
"You forget," said Ruth, "that you are regarding the Church from the stand-point of the cultivated and intellectual class, for whom the Church has ceased to represent religion; but there are lots of people neither cultivated nor intellectual—women even of our own class are not so as a rule—to whom the Church, with its ritual and dogma, is a real help and comfort. If, as you say, it does not suit the more highly educated, I think you have no right to demand that it should suit what is, after all, a very small minority. It would be most unfair if it did."
Charles did not answer. He had been looking at her, and thinking how few women could have disagreed with him as quietly and resolutely as this young girl riding at his side, carefully avoiding chance rabbit-holes as she spoke.
"There is, and there always will be, a certain number of people, not only among the clergy," she went on, "who, as somebody says, 'put the church clock back,' and are unable to see that they cannot alter the time of day for all that; only they can and do prevent many well-intentioned people from trusting to it any longer. But there are others here and there whom a dogmatic form of religion has been quite unable to spoil, whose more simple turn of mind draws out of the very system that appears to you so lifeless and effete, a real faith, a personal possession, which no one can take from them."
Her eyes sparkled as she spoke, and Charles saw that she was thinking of Mr. Alwynn.
"He has got it," he said, slowly, "this something which we all want, and for the greater part never find. He has got it. To see and recognize it early is a great thing," he continued, earnestly. "To disbelieve in it in early life, and cavil at all the caricatures and imitations, and only come to find out its reality comparatively later on, is a great misfortune—a great misfortune."