A smile came into May's face at the extreme sweetness of Bingham's voice; a warning that he was about to say something biting.
"Release all parsons who have smart congregations," continued Bingham, in honied tones; "parsons with congregations of jolly, well-dressed women, women who enjoy having their naughtiness slanged from the pulpit just as they enjoy having their photographs in the picture papers. Their spiritual necessities would be more than adequately provided for if they were given a dummy priest and a gramophone."
May's smile seemed to stimulate Bingham's imagination.
"To waste on them a real parson with a soul and a rudimentary intellect," he went on, "is like giving a glass of Moselle to an agricultural labourer when he would be happy with a mug of beer. But the Church wastes its energies even in this time of heartbreakings."
"I should like to see you, Bingham," said the Warden, smiling too, and turning his narrow eyes, in his slow deliberate manner, towards his guest, "as chairman to a committee of English bishops, on the Reconstruction of the Church."
"I've no quarrel with our bishops," said Bingham; "I don't want them to extol every new point of view as they pass along. I don't expect them to behave like young men. Nor do I expect them to be like the Absolute, without 'body, parts or passions.' My indictment is not even against that mere drop in the ocean, 'good Christian souls,' but against humanity and human nature!" Bingham looked from one to the other of his listeners. "Until now, the only people we have taken quite seriously are the very well dressed and the—well, the undressed. The two classes overlap continually. But now we've got to take everybody seriously; we are going to have a Democracy. Human nature has got a new tool, and the tool is Democracy. The new tool is to be put into the same foolish old hands, and we shall very soon discover what we shall call 'the sins of Democracy.' What is fundamentally wrong with us is what apparently we can't help: it's that we are ourselves, that we are human beings." Bingham smiled into his plate. "We adopt Christianity, and because we are human beings we make it intellectually rigid and morally sloppy. We are patronising Democracy, and we shall make it intellectually rigid and morally sloppy too—if we don't take care. Everything we handle becomes intellectually rigid and morally sloppy. And yet we still fancy that, if only we could get hold of the right tools, our hands would do the right work."
"The Reconstruction of Human Nature is what you are demanding," said the Warden.
"Yes, that's what we want," sighed Bingham. "When we have got rid of the Huns, we must begin to think about it."
"If you saw the children I have seen, Mr. Bingham," said May, quietly, "you would want to begin at once, and I think you would be hopeful."
There was on the Warden's face a sudden passionate assent that Bingham detected.