‘They are brothers.’
‘Only by courtesy, I think you will find. “Brothers in Christ Jesus,” I believe, is the exact term.’
‘They get hungry three times a day, all the same,’ said the girl, flashing revolt.
‘I am afraid you will begin to think I want to civilise you against your will,’ I returned, after a pause.—The rising was quelled.
‘Then, excuse the remark, my friend, but your Church puzzles me a little. I see no hierarchy, to use the proper expression; no grade upon grade, each, as aforesaid, enjoying more pudding than the one below, until, with the highest, we reach a tableland covered with acres of this delicacy. To tell the honest truth about it, the Church began in a very small way, and it will not do to ignore the fact that the old stable has become a prosperous house of business, with a frontage in the best thoroughfares. Some of the Apostles, respectable as they undoubtedly were, must have smelt strongly of fish—though modern research has, I believe, discovered that they were not mere hands before the mast, but owners of smacks. Their successors—this Bishop from York or Canterbury, this Cardinal Prince from Rome—never offend in that way. Their lives testify to their faith in a manner that must carry conviction to the most sceptical minds. They do not merely say that religion is a good thing, and an all-sufficient, for this world and the next; they show it forth. Step into their houses—hangings and raiment of price, cabinets of medals, rarest parchments, bindings, curios, gems of painting, six courses and dessert every day but fast-day, and kickshaws innumerable to make a mere gastronomic symbol even of that. Their very pastoral staves are wrought in fine gold; and, to preclude all possibility of their employment in coarser uses, are so adroitly filled in with ornament that, by no exercise of human ingenuity, could they be made to hook so much as a leg of lamb. Thus has a religion of humility been saved from its earlier accidental association with low life, and become a calling fit for a gentleman, until the middle, and even the upper, classes have not disdained it, nor professional investors of talent considered it unworthy of their regard. All its original difficulties as a creed of morbid self-denial have been cleared away by the beautiful modern development of the symbol. Is it awkward to watch and work for the needy, day and night? Well, wash their feet at Easter, and you may wash your hands of them for the rest of the year. In my travels have I seen an Emperor and an Archbishop condescending to this exercise, one quite busy with the scented water, the other at hand with the serviette of fine linen edged with lace. ’Tis a peppercorn rent of service and of compassionate deeds; and for this, what generous holdings in the good things of life, in park, moorland, and forest, in palaces of splendour that open to no wayfarer without an introduction, yet are often symbolled for boundless hospitality by some pretty device! The symbol! the symbol! precious contrivance for effecting a true modus vivendi between the tastes of a gentleman and the duties of a creed. With this to aid, my friend, your Church will be the fitting mainstay of your social arrangements, being indeed truly of them, bone of bone, flesh of flesh, its meanest curate fired with the laudable ambition of getting on in the world, and, to this end, not regardless of snug spinsters with the talent laid by in the napkin of the Three per Cents. But where are you in all this? I ask, Where is even your beginning of better things? What note have you of a living Church, when you have not so much as a great doctrinal contest to settle the metaphysical reasons for goodness, before you begin to be good?’
‘That’s what I was just thinking,’ said the Ancient; ‘whereabouts are we?’
‘Parties are the life of the Church: is there no way of starting a question? Do you do anything in pew rents?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘there’s my place a little nearer the schoolmaster than the others, but that’s only because I’m rather deaf.’
‘Vestments? You could not put your pastor in bands? The great thing is to mark him off from the rest, and to give him his badge, as a being engaged in special communication with the Unseen. He is not to be like yourselves, a simple work-a-day creature, feeling his way to the law by the perpetual revelations of the conscience and the heart, and only getting a little beyond you in the knowledge of it, because he feels and labours more. No, he is to be a creature apart, interpreting a message from behind the Veil—a message delivered, not merely a meaning found. This solemn function must have its uniform; so we think; and, for some time, a quarrel over the cut of the uniform was one of the most stimulating exercises of our faith.’
‘Quarrels are fines with us,’ said his Excellency, ‘but we might strike that out.’