"There is nothing to excuse!—the phrase fits. 'A reduced Christianity'—as opposed to a 'full Christianity'—that is the description lately given, I think, by a divinity professor. I don't quarrel with it at all. Who can care for a 'reduced' anything! But a transformed Christianity—that is another matter."
"Why 'Christianity' at all?"
Meynell looked at him in a smiling silence. He—the man of religion—was unwilling in these surroundings to play the prophet, to plunge into the central stream of argument. But Norham, the outsider and dilettante, was conscious of a kindled mind.
"That is the question to which it always seems to me there is no answer," he said easily, leaning back in his chair. "You think you can take what you like of a great historical religion and leave the rest—that you can fall back on its pre-suppositions and build it anew. But the pre-suppositions themselves are all crumbling. 'God,'—'soul,' 'free-will,' 'immortality'—even human identity—is there one of the old fundamental notions that still stands, unchallenged? What are we in the eyes of modern psychology—but a world of automata—dancing to stimuli from outside? What has become of conscience—of the moral law—of Kant's imperative—in the minds of writers like these?"
He pointed to two recent novels lying on the table, both of them brilliant glorifications of sordid forms of adultery.
Meynell's look fired.
"Ah!—but let us distinguish. We are not anarchists—as those men are. Our claim is precisely that we are, and desire to remain, a part of a Society—a definite community with definite laws—of a National Church—of the nation, that is, in its spiritual aspect. The question for which we are campaigning is as to the terms of membership in that society. But terms and conditions there must always be. The 'wild living intellect of man' must accept conditions in the Church, as we conceive it, no less than in the Church as Newman conceived it."
Norham shrugged his shoulders.
"Then why all this bother?"
"Because the conditions must be adjusted from time to time! Otherwise the church suffers and souls are lost—wantonly, without reason. But there is no church—no religion—without some venture, some leap of faith! If you can't make any leap at all—any venture—then you remain outside—and you think yourself, perhaps, entitled to run amuck—as these men do!" He pointed to the books. "But we make the venture!—we accept the great hypothesis—of faith."