p, "I find I can't go with Chasters.
He beats at the church; he treats her as though she were wrong. I feel
like a son, growing up, who finds his mother isn't quite so clear-spoken
nor quite so energetic as she seemed to be once. She's right, I feel
sure. I've never doubted her fundamental goodness."

"Yes," said Lady Sunderbund, very eagerly, "yes."

"And yet there's this futility.... You know, my dear lady, I don't
know what to do. One feels on the one hand, that here is a cloud of
witnesses, great men, sainted men, subtle men, figures permanently
historical, before whom one can do nothing but bow down in the utmost
humility, here is a great instrument and organization--what would the
world be without the witness of the church?--and on the other hand here
are our masses out of hand and hostile, our industrial leaders equally
hostile; there is a failure to grip, and that failure to grip is so
clearly traceable to the fact that our ideas are not modern ideas, that
when we come to profess our faith we find nothing in our mouths but
antiquated Alexandrian subtleties and phrases and ideas that may have
been quite alive, quite significant, quite adequate in Asia Minor or
Egypt, among men essentially orientals, fifteen hundred years ago, but
which now--"

He expressed just what they came to now by a gesture.

She echoed his gesture.

"Probably I'm not alone among my brethren," he went on, and then: "But
what is one to do?"

With her hands she acted her sense of his difficulty.

"One may be precipitate," he said. "There's a kind of loyalty and
discipline that requires one to keep the ranks until one's course of
action is perfectly clear. One owes so much to so many. One has to
consider how one may affect--oh! people one has never seen."

He was lugging things now into speech that so far had been scarcely
above the threshold of his conscious thought. He went on to discuss the
entire position of the disbelieving cleric. He discovered a fine point.

"If there was something else, an alternative, another religion, another
Church, to which one could go, the whole case would be different. But to
go from the church to nothingness isn't to go from falsehood to truth.
It's to go from truth, rather badly expressed, rather conservatively
hidden by its protections, truth in an antiquated costume, to the
blackest lie--in the world."

She took that point very brightly.

"One must hold fast to 'iligion," she said, and looked ear