"I thought we should hear of Dunchester before long," said the Professor, with a sarcastic lip. "Anything that annoys his brethren has his constant support. But if the Church allows a Socinian to be put over her, she must take the consequences!"
"What can the Church do?" said the Dean, shrugging his shoulders. "If we had accepted Disestablishment years ago, Dunchester would never have been a bishop. And now we may have missed our chance."
"Of what?"—Canon Dornal looked up—"of Disestablishment?"
The Dean nodded.
"The whole force of this Liberal movement," he said slowly, "will be thrown against Disestablishment. There comes the dividing line between it and the past. I say again, we have missed our chance. If the High Churchmen had known their own minds—if they had joined hands boldly with the Liberation society, and struck off the State fetters—we should at least have been left in quiet possession of what remained to us. We should not have been exposed to this treachery from within. Or, at least, we should have made short work of it."
"That means, that you take for granted we should have kept our endowments and our churches?" said Canon Dornal.
The Dean flushed.
"We have been called a nation of shopkeepers," he said vehemently, "but nobody has ever called us a nation of thieves."
The Canon was silent. Then his eye caught the bulky MS. report lying before the Dean, and he made a restless movement as though the sight of it displeased him.
"The demonstrations the papers report this morning are not all on one side," said the Rural Dean slowly but cheerfully, as though from a rather unsatisfactory reverie this fact had emerged.