Does not that run through all
the Sermon on the Mount?"

"Certainly."

"If, then," I said, "Christ's teaching is concerned with the spirit, do
you consider that Christians are justified in holding others bound by
formal rules of conduct, without reference to what is passing in their
spirits?"

"If it is for their good."

"What enables you to decide what is for their good?"

"Surely, we are told."

"Not to judge, that ye be not judged."

"Oh! but we do not, ourselves, judge; we are but impersonal ministers of
the rules of God."

"Ah! Do general rules of conduct take account of the variations of the
individual spirit?"

He looked at me hard, as if he began to scent heresy.

"You had better explain yourself more fully," he said. "I really don't
follow."

"Well, let us take a concrete instance. We know Christ's saying of the
married that they are one flesh! But we know also that there are wives
who continue to live the married life with dreadful feelings of spiritual
revolt wives who have found out that, in spite of all their efforts, they
have no spiritual affinity with their husbands. Is that in accordance
with the spirit of Christ's teaching, or is it not?"

"We are told----" he began.

"I have admitted the definite commandment: 'They twain shall be one
flesh.' There could not be, seemingly, any more rigid law laid down; how
do you reconcile it with the essence of Christ's teaching? Frankly, I
want to know: Is there or is there not a spiritual coherence in
Christianity, or is it only a gathering of laws and precepts, with no
inherent connected spiritual philosophy?"

"Of course," he said, in his long-suffering voice, "we don't look at
things like that--for us there is no questioning."

"But how do you reconcile such marriages as I speak of, with the spirit
of Christ's teaching? I think you ought to answer me."

"Oh! I can, perfectly," he answered; "the reconciliation is through
suffering. What a poor woman in such a case must suffer makes for the
salvation of her spirit. That is the spiritual fulfilment, and in such a
case the justification of the law."

"So then," I said, "sacrifice or suffering is the coherent thread of
Christian philosophy?"

"Suffering cheerfully borne," he answered.

"You do not think," I said, "that there is a touch of extravagance in
that? Would you say, for example, that an unhappy marriage is a more
Christian thing than a happy one, where there is no suffer