I cannot tell you how sorry I am to hear that we are to lose your help at the forthcoming election. It is just the moment when splendid talents such as yours would be most useful to us. But I must not, of course, ask you to reconsider your decision. My own regret is shared, I need hardly tell you, in the fullest sense by my colleagues. I had a wireless only yesterday from Lord Brede to say, “Please express deep regret Lady Porstock very natural decision she has taken none more sorry than self to see ranks of old comrades in arms depleted tout lasse tout casse tout passe ac.ac.ac. Brede.” You will be glad to hear that Sir Hugh ffynes has consented to fill the Manchester N.W. (3) coupon, so that Liberalism in that constituency will not be without its worthy representative.

Yours sincerely,

James Holroyd

About this time Francis and Gervase, who had both done very well at Eton, got leaving scholarships into the Guards. It was not so much the financial side of this that appealed to me (the scholarships had the effect of reducing the premium to £500) as the consciousness that my boys were well thought of by their masters and were worthy grandsons of Herbert Blisworth. And now what was left for me but to retire into the background? And what is left for me, you will ask, but to retire into the background, and bring these inconsequent memoirs to a conclusion? Well, I confess that I have finished with public affairs; and if any of my readers goes beyond this point, he must do it on the clear understanding that he has let himself be betrayed into taking an interest in the private affairs of a talkative old woman who was not, after all, much of a personage even in her day. Her private affairs, nay, her very private affairs, for what is so personal to each of us as his or her attitude towards religion? And that is all I have left to speak of. It is what we older folk begin to worry about when the interests of youth desert us and the friends of youth are taken from our side, and we find ourselves no longer battling with the winds of circumstance, but volplaning steadily towards the drome that waits for all of us at the last.

I know I have figured in these pages as a careless sort of butterfly, untroubled by any thought of my last end. Perhaps my readers will be disappointed in me at finding such a reversal of my old ways of thought. But, be that as it may, old age and bereavement and the lack of absorbing occupations combined to drive me in upon myself, and make me think about my last landing. It was natural that in this position I should turn for guidance to one who from quite an early age had manifested an interest in my spiritual affairs, who, indeed, had laughingly described himself as my “father professor,” Canon Dives. Canon Dives I have written, for so I shall always remember him, but indeed by this time he had attained that preferment for which his exceptional qualities had long marked him out, as Episcopal Bishop of Norwich.[[15]] So long as the Established Church remained a single body (only weakened by the secession of the Feminists in ’46, and the Enthusiasts in ’53), the Westernizing party had still sufficient weight to hinder the advancement of one who had always been so outspoken a champion of “relativist” views. But, as those of my readers who are interested in such subjects will remember, in 1964, only five years after Disestablishment became an accomplished fact, the ecclesiastical map was yet further complicated by a schism within the old Church of England. The Westernizers succeeded in securing for themselves that recognition by the Orthodox Churches of the East which remained theirs till, on the outbreak of the Great War, they were solemnly anathematized and cut off from Communion. But they secured this advantage at the price of separating themselves from the whole relativist party, which contained within itself so much that was most striking in the intellect of contemporary Christianity. At West Mill, our parish church had remained Anglican (it was only in the towns that the old churches were divided up among the various denominations), and at the schism Mr. Rowlands, after much hesitation, pronounced in favour of the relativists—it would have cost him a divorce to do otherwise—so that, at least for his lifetime, the position of the parish was defined. I was not very much influenced by this fact; but old friendship and the outstanding personality of the new Bishop of Norwich made me, as I say, turn to him.

I wrote, then, to Bishop Dives asking him for an exposition of the Christian religion suited to the beginner—to one who had been accustomed to regard the supernatural as not real, or, if real, not vital. He was kind enough to send me by return a record taken from one of his own recent sermons, preached at Holy Trinity Church, Brompton. It was part of a course, but he said it was exactly the thing for one in my state of mind. I mean to print the relevant part of it here.

“Everything is relative to a thinker. That is clear from the mere force of words; for what is a thing but a thought? When I think a thing I at the same time thing it: I give it thingness by thinking it. Now, that all thought is relative to a thinker has long been clear so far as the process of thought, what we call nowadays the thinkage, is concerned. It is the boast of modern philosophy, trained, and proud to have been trained, in the school of relativist Science, that it has gone further than this. It assures us (I trust I make my meaning clear) that it is not only our thinkage but our thoughtage that is relative to a thinker. If I think that two and two are four—allowing, for the sake of argument, that this is so, though I know well that there are serious difficulties about believing it to be so—if I think that two and two are four, then the fourness, if I may so express myself, of the two and the two combined is part of my thoughtage, and relative to me as a thinker.

“But not, let us hasten to add, of my thoughtage only. It is part of the race-thoughtage, the thoughtage which rises like an upgushing stream from the harmonious and simultaneous thinkage of the human species. I think we may go further, and say that it upgushes equally from the thinkage of all other spiritual beings, if there are any other spiritual beings in existence, and in so far as they exist. Now, when a thing is merely the thoughtage of my thinkage, what does that prove? Why, nothing or next to nothing; merely that it is thinkable. But when it is the thoughtage not only of my thinkage but of the world-thinkage, then we go further; then we are not content to say, This is thinkable; we must needs add, This is thinkworthy. More than that we do not know, and we shall never know. The old confidence that objects exist, outside of and apart from our thinkage, is gone. The old confidence that things are true, outside of and apart from our thinkage, is gone. That confidence, valuable as it has been in the training of our race, and powerfully as it has contributed to the development of our history, is no longer ours. It made the fatal mistake of distinguishing and abstracting our thoughtage from our thinkage. To repeat that mistake to-day would be to argue as if Mosenheim and Poschling had never existed—I mean, in so far as they ever did exist.

“Well, when first we realize that there is no such thing, properly speaking, as existence, and no such thing, as truth, we feel, for a time, unmanned. We are like aviators plane-wrecked on some little island far from all help, with nothing around us but sea and air. And we naturally ask ourselves, do we not, what have we saved from the wreck? If we are no longer allowed to say, ‘This exists,’ or ‘This is true’—or, at any rate, not allowed to say it without a great deal of qualification, a very great deal of qualification—what can we say? Oh, it is all right, my dear sisters and brothers, we have just one little plank saved to us from the wreck. And what is that plank? Why, we can still say, ‘This is thinkworthy.’ Oh, beautiful word, thinkworthiness! And beautiful thing, thoughtworthiness, I mean think—thoughtthinkiness, no, I don’t mean that (here the record is somewhat blurred, and it would appear as if Bishop Dives must have blown his nose). Oh, beautiful thing, thinkworthiness! If indeed thinkworthiness can be called a thing, and in so far as it is right to do so.

“It is thinkworthy, my dear sisters and brothers, that two and two make, or rather, in a phrase of less apparent grammar but more spiritual meaning, makes, four. It is thinkworthy that any two sides of a triangle are greater than the third. It is thinkworthy that thinks which are equal to the same think—I mean, things which are equal to the same thing, are equal to one another.