"You may say that that is absurd: that Christ is my Master, and I could have shown Him. Hilda, so He is: I cling passionately to that. But listen: I can't express Him, I don't understand Him. I no longer feel that He was animating and ordering the form of religion I administered. It is not that I feel Anglicanism to be untrue, and something else—say Wesleyanism—to be true; it is much more that I feel them all to be out of touch with reality. That's it. I don't think you can possibly see it, but that is the main trouble.
"That, too, brings me to my next point, and this I find harder still to express. I want you to realise that I feel as if I had never seen life before. I feel as if I had been shown all my days a certain number of pictures and told that they were the real thing, or given certain descriptions and told that they were true. I had always accepted that they were. But, Hilda, they are not. Wickedness is not wicked in the way that I was told it was wicked, and what I was told was salvation is not the salvation men and women want. I have been playing in a fool's paradise all these years, and I've got outside the gate. I am distressed and terrified, I think, but underneath it all I am very glad….
"You will say, 'What are you going to do?' and I can only reply, I don't know. I'm not going to make any vast change, if you mean that. A padre I am, and a padre I shall stay for the war at least, and none of us can see beyond that at present. But what I do mean to do is just this: I mean to try and get down to reality myself and try to weigh it up. I am going to eat and drink with publicans and sinners; maybe I shall find my Master still there."
Peter stopped and looked up. Langton was stretched out in a chair beside him, reading a novel, a pipe in his mouth. Moved by an impulse, he interrupted him.
"Old man," he said, "I want you to let me read you a bit of this letter.
It's to my girl, but there's nothing rotten in reading it. May I?"
Langton did not move. "Carry on," he said shortly.
Peter finished and put down the sheet. The other smoked placidly and said nothing. "Well?" demanded Peter impatiently.
"I should cut out that last sentence," pronounced the judge.
"Why? It's true."
"Maybe, but it isn't pretty."