selfishness, but so much less than, for instance, I have,
that it is absurd that he should be the agnostic and I the professing
Christian.

7

The Christian Church. Sometimes one feels that it is a fantasy, the
flaming ideal one has for it. One thinks of it as a fire, a sword, an
army with banners marching against dragons; one doesn't see how such
power can be withstood, be the dragons never so strong. And then one
looks round and sees it instead as a frail organisation of the lame, the
halt, and the blind, a tepid organisation of the satisfied, the
bourgeois, the conventionally genteel, a helpless organisation of the
ignorant, the half-witted, the stupid; an organisation full to the brim
of cant, humbug, timid orthodoxy, unreality, self-content, and all kinds
of Potterism--and one doesn't see how it can overcome anything whatever.

What is the truth? Where, between these two poles, does the actual
church stand? Or does it, like most of us its members, swing to and from
between them, touching now one, now the other? A Potterite church--yes;
because we are most of us Potterites. An anti-Potterite church--yes,
again; because at its heart is something sharp and clean and fine and
direct, like a sword, which will not let us be contented Potterites, but
which is for ever goading us out of ourselves, pricking us out of our
trivial satisfactions and our egotistic discontents.

I suppose the fact is that the Church can only work on the material it
finds, and do a little here and a little there. It would be a sword in
the hands of such men as Gideon; on the other hand, it can't do much
with the Clare Potters. The real thing frightens them if ever they see
it; the sham thing they mould to their own liking, till it is no more
than a comfortable shelter from the storms of life. It is the world's
Potters who have taken the Church and spoilt it, degraded it to the
poor dull thing it is. It is the Potterism in all of us which at every
turn checks and drags it down. Personally, I can forgive Potterism
everything but that.

What is one to do about it?

PART VI:

TOLD BY R.M.

CHAPTER I

THE END OF A POTTER MELODRAMA

1

While Clare talked to Juke in the vestry, Jane talked to her parents at
Potter's Bar. She was trying to make them drop their campaign against
Gideon. But she had no success. Lady Pinkerton said, 'The claims of Truth
are inexorable. Truth is a hard god to follow, and often demands the
sacr