'Last night I went with Lucy and Dora to the midnight service at St. Damian's. It pleased them that I went; and I thought the service, with its bells, its resonant Adeste fideles, and its white flowers, singularly beautiful and touching. And yet, in truth, I was only happy in it because I was so far removed from it; because the legend of Bethlehem and the mythology of the Trinity are no longer matters of particular interest or debate with me; because after a period of three-fourths assent, followed by one lasting over years of critical analysis and controversial reading, I have passed of late into a conception of Christianity far more positive, fruitful, and human than I have yet held. I would fain believe it the Christianity of the future. But the individual must beware lest he wrap his personal thinking in phrases too large for it.
'Yet, at least, one may say that it is a conception which has been gaining more and more hold on the minds of those who during the present century have thought most deeply, and laboured most disinterestedly in the field of Christian antiquity—who have sought with most learning and with fewest hindrances from circumstance to understand Christianity, whether as a history or as a philosophy.
'I have read much German during the past year, and of late a book reviewing the whole course of religious thought in Germany since Schleiermacher, with a mixture of exhaustive information and brilliant style most unusual in a German, has absorbed all my spare hours. Such a movement!—such a wealth of collective labour and individual genius thrown into it—producing offshoots and echoes throughout the world, transforming opinion with the slow inevitableness which belongs to all science, possessing already a great past and sure of a great future.
'In the face of it, our orthodox public, the contented ignorance of our clergy, the solemn assurance of our religious press—what curious and amazing phenomena! Yet probably the two worlds have their analogues in every religion; and what the individual has to learn in these days at once of outward debate and of unifying social aspiration, is "to dissent no longer with the heat of a narrow antipathy, but with the quiet of a large sympathy."'
CHAPTER II
A few days after Lord Driffield's warm invitation to Mr. and Mrs. David Grieve to spend an October Saturday-to-Monday at Benet's Park had been accepted, Lucy was sitting in the September dusk putting some frills into Sandy's Sunday coat, when the door opened and Dora walked in.
'You do look done!' said Lucy, as she held up her cheek to her cousin's salutation. 'What have you been about?'
'They kept me late at the shop, for a Saturday,' said Dora, with a sigh of fatigue, 'and since then I've been decorating. It's the Dedication Festival to-morrow.'
'Well, the festivals don't do you any good,' said Lucy, emphatically; 'they always tire you to death. When you do get to church, I don't believe you can enjoy anything. Why don't you let other people have a turn now, after all these years? There's Miss Barham, and Charlotte Corfield, and Mrs. Willan—they'd all do a great deal more if you didn't do so much. I know that.'
Lucy's cool bright eye meant, indeed, that she had heard some remarks made of late with regard to Dora's position at St. Damian's somewhat unfavourable to her cousin. It was said that she was jealous of co-operation or interference on the part of new members of the congregation in the various tasks she had been accustomed for years past to lay upon herself in connection with the church. She was universally held to be extraordinarily good; but both in the large shop, where she was now forewoman, and at St. Damian's, people were rather afraid of her, and inclined to head oppositions to her. A certain severity had grown upon her; she was more self-confident, though it was a self-confidence grounded always on the authority of the Church; and some parts of the nature which at twenty had been still soft and plastic were now tending to rigidity.