But, as I said, it was the stained-glass window that dominated me, and seemed to contain in itself an epitome—yet not quite that, perhaps—of sermon and service and hymn, and the system that had made their survival possible in twentieth-century England. And yet, let me first put down that through it came light, real if distorted, and distilled, but how faintly, from the true arch of the outside heaven. And let me not forget this as I go on to remember its eight divisions, containing each a worshipping and apparently musical young woman, arrayed as no being has ever been arrayed, and regarding with upturned eyes—well, fortunately the artist had stopped short there, though merely, one fears, from want of space. I have called these maidens musical for the rather inadequate reason that in the hands of each were instruments by and through which sounds might conceivably be produced. But at the nature of these one could, alas, guess only too readily. Even in the grasp of experts one would have been justly dubious about the capabilities of those two-stringed violins, that one-keyed portable organ, those twin-trumpets with a common mouthpiece. And imagination reeled before their combined contemplation in the hands of these anæmic and self-evident amateurs. Nor could one turn from the subject, and find consolation in its colour or history. The window was not forty years old, and the colour was but a ghost of what colour might be.
The whole window indeed was but a ghost—a ghost, manufactured at the thirtieth hand, of the mediæval work of some laborious but crude designer. And what, one wondered, could be even its pretended message to the full-blooded, restless, and instructed generation of to-day? Could these sallow-cheeked saints, these obviously unhealthy, ill-nourished, incapable young women, tell anything worth the hearing upon any single plane of thought or conduct to the men and women of 1910? Could they indeed preach any other possible sermon than to cry out to all would-be healthy people to flee away from them into the outer sunshine? Were they even justified as reflections, infinitely remote, of the pale Galilean of Gautier and Swinburne? And was there in fact ever a pale Galilean, the least of Whose doctrines they could ever imaginably have embodied? Was that sturdy, sun-browned Youth, with His carpenter's wrists and His physical endurance, with His undreamed spiritual forces and His splendid sanity in their control, with the glory of His emancipating conceptions and His divine simplicity in their exposition—was He ever such as to be thus pallidly worshipped save in the twilight imageries of earlier centuries and the resentful poetry of rebellious thinkers? And I couldn't help wondering if my stained-glass window had perhaps cast its spell not only upon the aisles, but the authority of the Church that had set it up.
Only a year or two ago, for instance, I remember being assured by a youthful priest from Cambridge, who had scarcely ever stirred beyond his East End settlement, that, while he would refrain from setting a limit to God's mercy, no man could really be considered safe who had not made verbal confession of his sins to himself or one of his brothers. And only last week, upon the beach at Swanage, I heard another young clergyman, of a rather more so-called evangelical way of thinking, most positively assuring a ring of little children that the Devil was even then whispering in their ears what a good time he would like to give them. No wonder that the Carthews and the Rogers' stand aside, and wait impatiently for the coming of the New Word or of the Old one as it was. And no wonder that men and women, more really religious now, perhaps, than ever in history, look on at it all rather dubiously in a healthy hesitation, or turn frankly away to the tennis-lawn and river.
I have been watching them all the afternoon plying their oars here upon the Thames—strong and ruddy, keen-faced artisans from Reading, actresses from town, barristers, doctors, men of leisure, and men of affairs. And now, as I write, they are plying still, while across the fields comes the ineffectual call of the various ecclesiastical bells. By some they are not even heard, I suppose. They are singing choruses from "Our Miss Gibbs." To others they are just decorative in the region of river sounds, as the loose-strife and charlock in that of its colours. To a few they must even be merely sad. They might mean—they once have meant—so much to their country's seething life. And now they would seem to contain almost less significance than the gramophone in the steam-launch round the corner.
A few moments ago the Bishop, Carthew's newly-acquired brother-in-law, was leaning forward in his chair.
"If you knew," he said, "the real agony with which the Church has to face these problems."
Carthew nodded.
"Yes," he said slowly, "parturition's always painful—especially to the elderly—but the price for shirking it——"