anything but the poetry of ornaments, and he had to work

strenuously to master the legal side of the question. Whippham,
his chaplain, was worse than useless as a helper. The bishop

wanted to end the matter as quickly, quietly, and favourably to
Morrice Deans as possible; he thought Morrice Deans a thoroughly

good man in his parish, and he believed that the substitution of
a low churchman would mean a very complete collapse of church

influence in Mogham Banks, where people were now thoroughly
accustomed to a highly ornate service. But Morrice Deans was

intractable and his pursuers indefatigable, and on several
occasions the bishop sat far into the night devising compromises

and equivocations that should make the Kensitites think that
Morrice Deans wasn't wearing vestments when he was, and that

should make Morrice Deans think he was wearing vestments when he
wasn't. And it was Whippham who first suggested green tea as a

substitute for coffee, which gave the bishop indigestion, as his
stimulant for these nocturnal bouts.

Now green tea is the most lucid of poisons.
And while all this extra activity about Morrice Deans, these

vigils and crammings and writings down, were using all and more
energy than the bishop could well spare, he was also doing his

quiet utmost to keep "The Light under the Altar" ease from coming
to a head.

This man he hated.
And he dreaded him as well as hated him. Chasters, the author

of "The Light under the Altar," was a man who not only reasoned
closely but indelicately. There was a demonstrating, jeering, air

about his preaching and writing, and everything he said and did
was saturated by the spirit of challenge. He did not so much

imitate as exaggerate the style of Matthew Arnold. And whatever
was done publicly against him would have to be done very publicly

because his book had got him a London reputation.
From the bishop's point of view Chasters was one of nature's

ignoblemen. He seemed to have subscribed to the Thirty-Nine
Articles and passed all the tests and taken all the pledges that

stand on the way to ordination, chiefly for the pleasure of
attacking them more successfully from the rear; he had been given

the living of Wombash by a cousin, and filled it very largely
because it was not only more piquant but more remunerative and

respectable to be a rationalist lecturer in a surplice. And in a
hard kind of ultra-Protestant way his social and parochial work

was not badly done. But his sermons were terrible. "He takes a
text," said one informant, "and he goes on firstly, secondly,

thirdly, fourthly, like somebody tearing the petals from a
flower. 'Finally,' he says, and throws the bare stalk into the

dustbin."
The bishop avoided "The Light under the Altar" for nearly a

year. It was only when a second book was announced with the
winning title of "The Core of Truth in Christianity" that he

perceived he must take action. He sat up late one night with a
marked copy, a very indignantly marked copy, of the former work

that an elderlycolonel, a Wombash parishioner, an orthodox
Layman of the most virulent type, had sent him. He perceived that

he had to deal with a dialectician of exceptionalability, who
had concentrated a quite considerable weight of scholarship upon

the task of explaining away every scrap of spiritual significance
in the Eucharist. From Chasters the bishop was driven by

reference to the works of Legge and Frazer, and for the first
time he began to measure the dimensions and power of the modern

criticism of church doctrine and observance. Green tea should
have lit his way to refutation; instead it lit up the whole

inquiry with a light of melancholyconfirmation. Neither by night
nor by day could the bishop find a proper method of opening a

counter attack upon Chasters, who was indisputably an
intellectually abler man and a very ruthless beast indeed to

assail, and meanwhile the demand that action should be taken
increased.

The literature of church history and the controversies arising
out of doctrinal development became the employment of the

bishop's leisure and a commanding preoccupation. He would have
liked to discuss with some one else the network of perplexities

in which he was entangling himself, and more particularly with
Canon Bliss, but his own positions were becoming so insecure that

he feared to betray them by argument. He had grown up with a kind
of intellectualmodesty. Some things he had never yet talked

about; it made his mind blench to think of talking about them.
And his great aching gaps of wakefulness began now, thanks to the

green tea, to be interspersed with theological dreams and visions
of an extravagant vividness. He would see Frazer's sacrificial

kings butchered picturesquely and terriblyamidst strange and
grotesque rituals; he would survey long and elaborate processions

and ceremonials in which the most remarkable symbols were borne
high in the sight of all men; he would cower before a gigantic

and threatening Heaven. These green-tea dreams and visions were
not so much phases of sleep as an intensification and vivid

furnishing forth of insomnia. It added greatly to his disturbance
that--exceeding the instructions of Brighton-Pomfrey--he had

now experimented ignorantly and planlessly with one or two
narcotics and sleeping mixtures that friends and acquaintances

had mentioned in his hearing. For the first time in his life he
became secretive from his wife. He knew he ought not to take

these things, he knew they were physically" target="_blank" title="ad.按照自然规律">physically and morally evil, but
a tormenting craving drove him to them. Subtly and insensibly his

character was being undermined by the growing nervous trouble.
He astonished himself by the cunning and the hypocritical

dignity he could display in procuring these drugs. He arranged to
have a tea-making set in his bedroom, and secretly substituted

green tea, for which he developed a powerful craving, in the
place of the delicate China tea Lady Ella procured him.

(5)
These doctrinal and physical anxieties and distresses were at

their worst in the spring and early summer of 1914. That was a
time of great mental and moral disturbance. There was premonition

in the air of those days. It was like the uneasiness sensitive
people experience before a thunderstorm. The moral atmosphere was

sullen and close. The whole world seemed irritable and
mischievous. The suffragettes became extraordinarily malignant;

the democratic movement went rotten with sabotage and with a cant
of being "rebels"; the reactionary Tories and a crew of noisy old

peeresses set themselves to create incurableconfusion again in
the healing wounds of Ireland, and feuds and frantic folly broke

out at every point of the social and political edifice. And then
a bomb burst at Sarajevo that silenced all this tumult. The

unstable polity of Europe heeled over like a ship that founders.
Through the swiftest, tensest week in history Europe capsized

into war.
(6)

The first effect of the war upon the mind of the bishop, as
upon most imaginative minds, was to steady and exalt it.

Trivialities and exasperations seemed swept out of existence. Men
lifted up their eyes from disputes that had seemed incurable and

wrangling that promised to be interminable, and discovered a
plain and tragic issue that involved every one in a common call

for devotion. For a great number of men and women who had been
born and bred in security, the August and September of 1914 were

the supremely heroic period of their lives. Myriads of souls were
born again to ideas of service and sacrifice in those tremendous

days.
Black and evil thing as the war was, it was at any rate a great

thing; it did this much for countless minds that for the first
time they realized the epic quality of history and their own

relationship to the destinies of the race. The flimsy roof under
which we had been living our lives of comedy fell and shattered

the floor under our feet; we saw the stars above and the abyss
below. We perceived that life was insecure and adventurous, part

of one vast adventure in space and time....
Presently the smoke and dust of battle hid the great distances

again, but they could not altogether destroy the memories of this
revelation.

For the first two months the bishop's attention was so detached
from his immediate surroundings and employments, so absorbed by

great events, that his history if it were told in detail would