substituted: "acknowledge yourselves to be the true servants of
the one God, who is the Lord of Mankind?"

For a moment silence hung in the cathedral. Then one voice, a
boy's voice, led a raggedresponse. "I do."

Then the bishop: "Our help is in the Name of the Lord."
The congregation answered doubtfully, with a glance at its

prayer books: "Who hath made heaven and earth."
The bishop: "Blessed be the name of the Lord."

The congregation said with returning confidence: "Henceforth,
world without end."

(12)
Before his second address the bishop had to listen to Veni

Creator Spiritus, in its English form, and it seemed to him the
worst of all possible hymns. Its defects became monstrously

exaggerated to his hypersensitive mind. It impressed him in its
Englished travesty as a grotesque, as a veritable Charlie Chaplin

among hymns, and in truth it does stick out most awkward feet, it
misses its accusatives, it catches absurdly upon points of

abstruse doctrine. The great Angel stood motionless and ironical
at the bishop's elbow while it was being sung. "Your church," he

seemed to say.
"We must end this sort of thing," whispered the bishop. "We

must end this sort of thing--absolutely." He glanced at the
faces of the singers, and it became beyond all other things

urgent, that he should lift them once for all above the sectarian
dogmatism of that hymn to a simple vision of God's light....

He roused himself to the touching business of the laying on of
hands. While he did so the prepared substance of his second

address was running through his mind. The following prayer and
collects he read without difficulty, and so came to his second

address. His disposition at first was explanatory.
"When I spoke to you just now," he began, "I fell

unintentionally into the use of a Greek word, epitelesei. It was
written to me in a letter from a friend with another word that

also I am now going to quote to you. This letter touched very
closely upon the things I want to say to you now, and so these

two words are very much in my mind. The former one was taken from
the Epistle to the Philippians; it signifies, 'He will complete

the work begun'; the one I have now in mind comes from the
Epistle to the Ephesians; it is Epiphausei--or, to be fuller,

epiphausei soi ho Christos, which signifies that He will shine
upon us. And this is very much in my thoughts now because I do

believe that this world, which seemed so very far from God a
little while ago, draws near now to an unexampled dawn. God is at

hand.
"It is your privilege, it is your grave and terrible position,

that you have been born at the very end and collapse of a
negligent age, of an age of sham kingship, sham freedom,

relaxation, evasion, greed, waste, falsehood, and sinister
preparation. Your lives open out in the midst of the breakdown

for which that age prepared. To you negligence is no longer
possible. There is cold and darkness, there is the heat of the

furnace before you; you will live amidst extremes such as our
youth never knew; whatever betide, you of your generation will

have small chance of living untempered lives. Our country is at
war and half mankind is at war; death and destruction trample

through the world; men rot and die by the million, food
diminishes and fails, there is a wasting away of all the hoarded

resources, of all the accumulated well-being of mankind; and
there is no clear prospect yet of any end to this enormous and

frightful conflict. Why did it ever arise? What made it possible?
It arose because men had forgotten God. It was possible because

they worshipped simulacra, were loyal to phantoms of race and
empire, permitted themselves to be ruled and misled by idiot

princes and usurper kings. Their minds were turned from God, who
alone can rule and unite mankind, and so they have passed from

the glare and follies of those former years into the darkness and
anguish of the present day. And in darkness and anguish they will

remain until they turn to that King who comes to rule them, until
the sword and indignation of God have overthrown their misleaders

and oppressors, and the Justice of God, the Kingdom of God set
high over the republics of mankind, has brought peace for ever to

the world. It is to this militant and imminent God, to this
immortal Captain, this undying Law-giver, that you devote

yourselves to-day.
"For he is imminent now. He comes. I have seen in the east and

in the west, the hearts and the minds and the wills of men
turning to him as surely as when a needle is magnetized it turns

towards the north. Even now as I preach to you here, God stands
over us all, ready to receive us...."

And as he said these words, the long nave of the cathedral, the
shadows of its fretted roof, the brown choir with its golden

screen, the rows of seated figures, became like some picture cast
upon a flimsy and translucent curtain. Once more it seemed to the

bishop that he saw God plain. Once more the glorious effulgence
poured about him, and the beautiful and wonderful conquest of

men's hearts and lives was manifest to him.
He lifted up his hands and cried to God, and with an emotion so

profound, an earnestness so commanding, that very many of those
who were present turned their faces to see the figure to which he

looked and spoke. And some of the children had a strange
persuasion of a presence there, as of a divine figure militant,

armed, and serene....
"Oh God our Leader and our Master and our Friend," the bishop

prayed, "forgive our imperfection and our little motives, take us
and make us one with thy great purpose, use us and do not reject

us, make us all here servants of thy kingdom, weave our lives
into thy struggle to conquer and to bring peace and union to the

world. We are small and feeble creatures, we are feeble in
speech, feebler still in action, nevertheless let but thy light

shine upon us and there is not one of us who cannot be lit by thy
fire, and who cannot lose himself in thy salvation. Take us into

thy purpose, O God. Let thy kingdom come into our hearts and into
this world."

His voice ceased, and he stood for a measurable time with his
arms extended and his face upturned....

The golden clouds that whirled and eddied so splendidly in his
brain thinned out, his sense of God's immediacy faded and passed,

and he was left aware of the cathedralpulpit in which he stood
so strangely posed, and of the astonished congregation below him.

His arms sank to his side. His eyes fell upon the book in front
of him and he felt for and gripped the two upper corners of it

and, regardless of the common order and practice, read out the
Benediction, changing the words involuntarily as he read:

"The Blessing of God who is the Father, the Son, the Spirit and
the King of all Mankind, be upon you and remain with you for

ever. Amen."
Then he looked again, as if to look once more upon that radiant

vision of God, but now he saw only the clear cool space of the
cathedral vault and the coloured glass and tracery of the great

rose window. And then, as the first notes of the organ came
pealing above the departing stir of the congregation, he turned

about and descended slowly, like one who is still half dreaming,
from the pulpit.

(13)
In the vestry he found Canon Bliss. "Help me to take off these

garments," the bishop said. "I shall never wear them again."