w what there is in Christianity that we can
lay hold of. We should like to believe, but, as George says, all our
education contradicts the doctrines that are most insisted upon. We
don't know where to turn. We have the choice of going to people
like George, who know a great deal and don't believe anything, or to
clergymen like Mr. Hodder, who demand that we shall violate the reason
in us which has been so carefully trained."

"Upon my word, I think you've put it rather well, Evelyn," said Eleanor,
admiringly.

"In spite of personalities," added Mr. Bridges.

"I don't see the use of fussing about it," proclaimed Laureston Grey,
who was the richest and sprucest of the three sons-in-law. "Why can't we
let well enough alone?"

"Because it isn't well enough," Evelyn replied. "I want the real thing
or nothing. I go to church once a month, to please mother. It doesn't do
me any good. And I don't see what good it does you and Lucy to go every
Sunday. You never think of it when you're out at dinners and dances
during the week. And besides," she added, with the arrogance of modern
youth, "you and Lucy are both intellectually lazy."

"I like that from you, Evelyn," her sister flared up.

"You never read anything except the sporting columns and the annual
rules of tennis and golf and polo."

"Must everything be reduced to terms?" Mrs. Waring gently lamented. "Why
can't we, as Laury suggests, just continue to trust?"

"They are the more fortunate, perhaps, who can, mother," George Bridges
answered, with more of feeling in his voice than he was wont to show.
"Unhappily, truth does not come that way. If Roger Bacon and Galileo
and Newton and Darwin and Harvey and the others had 'just trusted,' the
world's knowledge would still remain as stationary as it was during
the thousand-odd years the hierarchy of the Church was supreme, when
theology was history, philosophy, and science rolled into one. If God
had not meant man to know something of his origin differing from
the account in Genesis, he would not have given us Darwin and his
successors. Practically every great discovery since the Revival we owe
to men who, by their very desire for truth, were forced into opposition
to the tremendous power of the Church, which always insisted that
people should 'just trust,' and take the mixture of cosmogony and Greek
philosophy, tradition and fable, paganism, Judaic sacerdotalism, and
temporal power wrongly called spiritual dealt out by t