All the elaborated glory of things made,
the perfected dreams of aesthetes, the embroideries of romance, seemed as
nothing beside this sudden vision of the wild goodness native in humble
hearts.
1910.

A CHRISTIAN

One day that summer, I came away from a luncheon in company of an old
College chum. Always exciting to meet those one hasn't seen for years;
and as we walked across the Park together I kept looking at him askance.
He had altered a good deal. Lean he always was, but now very lean, and
so upright that his parson's coat was overhung by the back of his long
and narrow head, with its dark grizzled hair, which thought had not yet
loosened on his forehead. His clean-shorn face, so thin and oblong, was
remarkable only for the eyes: dark-browed and lashed, and coloured like
bright steel, they had a fixity in them, a sort of absence, on one
couldn't tell what business. They made me think of torture. And his
mouth always gently smiling, as if its pinched curly sweetness had been
commanded, was the mouth of a man crucified--yes, crucified!

Tramping silently over the parched grass, I felt that if we talked, we
must infallibly disagree; his straight-up, narrow forehead so suggested a
nature divided within itself into compartments of iron.

It was hot that day, and we rested presently beside the Serpentine. On
its bright waters were the usual young men, sculling themselves to and
fro with their usual sad energy, the usual promenaders loitering and
watching them, the usual dog that swam when it did not bark, and barked
when it did not swim; and my friend sat smiling, twisting between his
thin fingers the little gold cross on his silk vest.

Then all of a sudden we did begin to talk; and not of those matters of
which the well-bred naturally converse--the habits of the rarer kinds of
ducks, and the careers of our College friends, but of something never
mentioned in polite society.

At lunch our hostess had told me the sad story of an unhappy marriage,
and I had itched spiritually to find out what my friend, who seemed so
far away from me, felt about such things. And now I determined to find
out.

"Tell me," I asked him, "which do you consider most important--the letter
or the spirit of Christ's teachings?"

"My dear fellow," he answered gently, "what a question! How can you
separate them?"

"Well, is it not the essence of His doctrine that the spirit is all
important, and the forms of little value?