loyments, so absorbed by great events,
that his history if it were told in detail would differ scarcely at all
from the histories of most comparatively unemployed minds during those
first dramatic days, the days when the Germans made their great rush
upon Paris and it seemed that France was down, France and the whole
fabric of liberal civilization. He emerged from these stunning
apprehensions after the Battle of the Marne, to find himself busy upon a
score of dispersed and disconnected war jobs, and trying to get all the
new appearances and forces and urgencies of the war into relations with
himself. One thing became very vivid indeed, that he wasn't being used
in any real and effective way in the war. There was a mighty going
to and fro upon Red Cross work and various war committees, a vast
preparation for wounded men and for the succour of dislocated
families; a preparation, that proved to be needless, for catastrophic
unemployment. The war problem and the puzzle of German psychology ousted
for a time all other intellectual interests; like every one else the
bishop swam deep in Nietzsche, Bernhardi, Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
and the like; he preached several sermons upon German materialism
and the astonishing decay of the German character. He also read every
newspaper he could lay his hands on--like any secular man. He signed
an address to the Russian Orthodox church, beginning "Brethren," and
he revised his impressions of the Filioque controversy. The idea of a
reunion of the two great state churches of Russia and England had always
attracted him. But hitherto it had been a thing quite out of scale,
visionary, utopian. Now in this strange time of altered perspectives it
seemed the most practicable of suggestions. The mayor and corporation
and a detachment of the special reserve in uniform came to a great
intercession service, and in the palace there were two conferences of
local influential people, people of the most various types, people
who had never met tolerantly before, expressing now opinions of
unprecedented breadth and liberality.

All this sort of thing was fresh and exciting at first, and then it
began to fall into a routine and became habitual, and as it became
habitual he found that old sense of detachment and futility was creeping
back again. One day he realized that indeed the whole flood and tumult
of the war would be going on almost exactly as it was going on now if
there had been neither cathedral