man speaks of definite religious experience, I feel that I am in the
presence of a perception of something real--as real as music and
painting. But I doubt if it is a sense given to all, or indeed to many;
and I don't know what it really is. And then, too, one comes across
people who hold it in an ugly, or a dreary, or a combative, or a formal
way; and then sometimes it seems to me almost an evil thing."

"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "I understand that. May I give you an
instance, and you will see if I perceive your thought. The good Vicar
here, my cousin Frank, Jack's father--you will meet him to-night--is a
man who holds a rigid belief, or thinks he holds it. He preaches what
he calls the sinew and bone of doctrine, and he is very stern in the
pulpit. He likes lecturing people in rows! But in reality he is one of
the kindest and vaguest of men. He preached a stiff sermon about
conversion the other day--I am pretty sure he did not understand it
himself--and he disquieted one of my good maids so much that she went
to him and asked what she could do to get assurance. He seems to have
hummed and hawed, and then to have said that she need not trouble her
head about it--that she was a good girl, and had better be content with
doing her duty. He is the friendliest of men, and that is his real
religion; he hasn't an idea how to apply his system, which he learned
at a theological college, but he feels it his duty to preach it."

"Yes," said Howard, "that is just what I mean; but there must be some
explanation for this curious outburst of forms and doctrines, so
contradictory in the different sects. Something surely causes both the
form of religion and the force of it?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "just as in an engine something causes both
the steam and the piston-rod; it's an intelligence somewhere that fits
the one to the other. But then, as you say, what is the cause of all
this extravagance and violence of expression?"

"That is the human element," said Howard--"the cautious, conservative,
business-like side that can't bear to let anything go. All religion
begins, it seems to me, by an outburst of moral force, an attempt to
simplify, to get a principle; and then the people who don't understand
it begin to make it technical and defined; uncritical minds begin to
attribute all sorts of vague wonders to it--things unattested, natural
exaggerations, excited statements, impossible claims; and then these
take traditional shape and