e number who are rather impressed, who
for a few days or weeks take to reading their Bibles or going to a new
place of worship or praying or fasting or being kind and unselfish, is
always enormous in relation to the people whose lives are permanently
changed. The effort needed if a contemporary is to blow off the froth,
is always very considerable.

Among the froth that I would blow off is I think most of the tremendous
efforts being made in England by the Anglican church to attract
favourable attention to itself _apropos_ of the war. I came back from
my visit to the Somme battlefields to find the sylvan peace of Essex
invaded by a number of ladies in blue dresses adorned with large
white crosses, who, regardless of the present shortage of nurses, were
visiting every home in the place on some mission of invitation whose
details remained obscure. So far as I was able to elucidate this
project, it was in the nature of a magic incantation; a satisfactory end
of the war was to be brought about by convergent prayer and religious
assiduities. The mission was shy of dealing with me personally, although
as a lapsed communicant I should have thought myself a particularly
hopeful field for Anglican effort, and it came to my wife and myself
merely for our permission and countenance in an appeal to our domestic
servants. My wife consulted the household; it seemed very anxious to
escape from that appeal, and as I respect Christianity sufficiently
to detest the identification of its services with magic processes, the
mission retired--civilly repulsed. But the incident aroused an uneasy
curiosity in my mind with regard to the general trend of Anglican
teaching and Anglican activities at the present time. The trend of my
enquiries is to discover the church much more incoherent and much less
religious--in any decent sense of the word--than I had supposed it to
be.

Organisation is the life of material and the death of mental and
spiritual processes. There could be no more melancholy exemplification
of this than the spectacle of the Anglican and Catholic churches at the
present time, one using the tragic stresses of war mainly for pew-rent
touting, and the other paralysed by its Austrian and South German
political connections from any clear utterance upon the moral issues of
the war. Through the opening phases of the war the Established Church
of England was inconspicuous; this is no longer the case, but it may be
doubted whether the c