were patriots one heard discordantly enough, but where were the
bishops and divines who spoke for the Prince of Peace? Where was

the blessing of the church, where was the veto of the church?
When it came to that one discovered only a broad preoccupied back

busied in supplementing the Army Medical Corps with Red Cross
activities, good work in its way--except that the canonicals

seemed superfluous. Who indeed looked to the church for any voice
at all? And so to Diogenes.

The bishop's mind went hunting for an answer to that
indictment. And came back and came back to the image of Diogenes.

It was with that image dangling like a barbed arrow from his
mind that the bishop went into the pulpit to preach upon St.

Crispin's day, and looked down upon a thin and scattered
congregation in which the elderly, the childless, and the

unoccupied predominated.
That night insomnia resumed its sway.

Of course the church ought to be controlling this great storm,
the greatest storm of war that had ever stirred mankind. It ought

to be standing fearlessly between the combatants like a figure in
a wall painting, with the cross of Christ uplifted and the

restored memory of Christendom softening the eyes of the armed
nations. "Put down those weapons and listen to me," so the church

should speak in irresistible tones, in a voice of silver
trumpets.

Instead it kept a long way from the fighting, tucked up its
vestments, and was rolling its local tubs quite briskly.

(7)
And then came the aggravation of all these distresses by an

abrupt abandonment of smoking and alcohol. Alcoholic relaxation,
a necessary mitigation of the unreality of peacetime politics,

becomes a grave danger in war, and it was with an understandable
desire to forward the interests of his realm that the King

decided to set his statesmen an example--which unhappily was
not very widely followed--by abstaining from alcohol during the

continuance of the struggle. It did however swing over the Bishop
of Princhester to an immediate and complete abandonment of both

drink and tobacco. At that time he was finding comfort for his
nerves in Manila cheroots, and a particularly big and heavy type

of Egyptian cigarette with a considerableamount of opium, and
his disorganized system seized upon this sudden change as a

grievance, and set all his jangling being crying aloud for one
cigarette--just one cigarette.

The cheroots, it seemed, he could better spare, but a cigarette
became his symbol for his lost steadiness and ease.

It brought him low.
The reader has already been told the lamentableincident of the

stolen cigarette and the small boy, and how the bishop, tormented
by that shameful memory, cried aloud in the night.

The bishop rolled his tub, and is there any tub-rolling in the
world more busy and exacting than a bishop's? He rolled in it

spite of ill-health and insomnia, and all the while he was
tormented by the enormousbackground of the world war, by his

ineffective realization of vast national needs, by his passionate
desire, for himself and his church, not to be ineffective.

The distressful alternation between nights of lucid doubt and
days of dull acquiescence was resumed with an intensification of

its contrasts. The brief phase of hope that followed the turn of
the fighting upon the Maine, the hope that after all the war

would end swiftly, dramatically, and justly, and everything be as
it had been before--but pleasanter, gave place to a phase that

bordered upon despair. The fall of Antwerp and the doubts and
uncertainties of the Flanders situation weighed terribly upon the

bishop. He was haunted for a time by nightmares of Zeppelins
presently raining fire upon London. These visions became

Apocalyptic. The Zeppelins came to England with the new year, and
with the close of the year came the struggle for Ypres that was

so near to being a collapse of the allieddefensive. The events
of the early spring, the bloodyfailure of British generalship at

Neuve Chapelle, the naval disaster in the Dardanelles, the
sinking of the Falaba, the Russian defeat in the Masurian Lakes,

all deepened the bishop's impression of the immensity of the
nation's difficulties and of his own unhelpfulness. He was

ashamed that the church should hold back its curates from
enlistment while the French priests were wearing their uniforms

in the trenches; the expedition of the Bishop of London to hold
open-air services at the front seemed merely to accentuate the

tub-rolling. It was rolling the tub just where it was most in the
way.

What was wrong? What was wanting?
The Westminster Gazette, The Spectator, and several other of

the most trusted organs of public opinion were intermittently
discussing the same question. Their discussions implied at once

the extreme need that was felt for religion by all sorts of
representative people, and the universalconviction that the

church was in some way muddling and masking her revelation. "What
is wrong with the Churches?" was, for example, the general

heading of The Westminster Gazette's correspondence.
One day the bishop skimmed a brief incisive utterance by Sir

Harry Johnston that pierced to the marrow of his own shrinking
convictions. Sir Harry is one of those people who seem to write

as well as speak in a quick tenor. "Instead of propounding
plainly and without the acereted mythology of Asia Minor, Greece

and Rome, the pure Gospel of Christ.... they present it
overloaded with unbelievable myths (such as, among a thousand

others, that Massacre of the Innocents which never took
place).... bore their listeners by a Tibetan repetition of creeds

that have ceased to be credible.... Mutually contradictory
propositions.... Prayers and litanies composed in Byzantine and

mediaeval times.... the want of actuality, the curious silliness
which has, ever since the destruction of Jerusalem, hung about

the exposition of Christianity.... But if the Bishops continue
to fuss about the trappings of religion.... the maintenance of

codes compiled by people who lived sixteen hundred or two
thousand five hundred years ago.... the increasingly educated and

practical-minded working classes will not come to church, weekday
or Sunday."

The bishop held the paper in his hand, and with a mind that he
felt to be terribly open, asked himself how true that sharp

indictment might be, and, granting its general truth, what was
the duty of the church, that is to say of the bishops, for as

Cyprian says, ecelesia est in episcopo. We say the creeds; how
far may we unsay them?

So far be had taken no open action against Chasters. Suppose
now be were to side with Chasters and let the whole diocese, the

church of Princhester, drift as far as it chose under his
inaction towards an extreme modernism, risking a conflict with,

and if necessary fighting, the archbishop.... It was but for a
moment that his mind swung to this possibility and then recoiled.

The Laymen, that band of bigots, would fight. He could not
contemplate litigation and wrangling about the teaching of the

church. Besides, what were the "trappings of religion" and what
the essentials? What after all was "the pure gospel of Christ" of

which this writer wrote so glibly? He put the paper down and took
a New Testament from his desk and opened it haphazard. He felt a

curious wish that he could read it for the first time. It was
over-familiar. Everything latterly in his theology and beliefs

had become over-familiar. It had all become mechanical and dead
and unmeaning to his tired mind....

Whippham came with a reminder of more tub-rolling, and the
bishop's speculations were broken off.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH - THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND
(1)

THAT night when he cried aloud at the memory of his furtive
cigarette, the bishop was staying with a rich man named Garstein

Fellows. These Garstein Fellows people were steel people with a
financial side to them; young Garstein Fellows had his fingers in

various chemical businesses, and the real life of the firm was in