"But why," objected Taffy, plucking up courage, "couldn't they do that in the sunlight?"
Velvet-cap opened his mouth. The boy felt he was going to be denounced; when a merry laugh from the old clergyman averted the storm.
"Be content," he said to his companion; "we are Gothic enough in Oxford nowadays. And the lad is right too. There was hope even for eighteenth-century Magdalen while its buildings looked on sunlight and on that tower. We lay too much stress on prayer. The lesson of that tower (with all deference to your amazing discernment and equally amazing whims) is not prayer, but praise. And between ourselves, when all men unite to worship God, it'll be praise, not prayer, that brings them together.
Praise is devotion fit for noble minds,
The differing world's agreeing sacrifice...."
"Oh, if you're going to fling quotations from a tapster's son at my head.... Let me see ... how does it go on?... Where—something or other—different faiths—
Where Heaven divided faiths united finds...."
And in a moment the pair were in hot pursuit after the quotation, tripping each other up, like two schoolboys at a game. Taffy never forgot the last stanza, the last line of which they recovered exactly in the middle of the street, Velvet-cap standing between two tram-lines, right in the path of an advancing car, while he declaimed—
"By penitence when we ourselves forsake,
'Tis but in wise design on piteous Heaven;