to you; and that crust
of habit which is the soul's tomb; and custom, the soul's tyrant;
and pride, our volcano-peak that sinks us in a crater; and fear,
which plucks the feathers from the wings of the soul and sits it
naked and shivering in a vault, where the passing of a common
hodman's foot above sounds like the king of terrors coming,--you are
free of them, you live in the day and for the future, by this
exercise and discipline of the soul's faith. Me it keeps young
everlastingly, like the fountain of..."'

'I say I cannot sit and hear any more of it!' exclaimed the colonel,
chafing out of patience.

Lord Palmet said to Miss Halkett: 'Isn't it like what we used to
remember of a sermon?'

Cecilia waited for her father to break away, but Captain Baskelett had
undertaken to skip, and was murmuring in sing-song some of the phrases
that warned him off:

'"History--Bible of Humanity;... Permanency--enthusiast's
dream--despot's aim--clutch of dead men's fingers in live flesh... Man
animal; man angel; man rooted; man winged":... Really, all this is too
bad. Ah! here we are: "At them with outspeaking, Beauchamp!" Here we
are, colonel, and you will tell me whether you think it treasonable or
not. "At them," et caetera: "We have signed no convention to respect
their"--he speaks of Englishmen, Colonel Halkett--"their passive
idolatries; a people with whom a mute conformity is as good as worship,
but a word of dissent holds you up to execration; and only for the
freedom won in foregone days their hate would be active. As we have them
in their present stage,"--old Nevil's mark--"We are not parties to the
tacit agreement to fill our mouths and shut our eyes. We speak because
it is better they be roused to lapidate us than soused in their sty,
with none to let them hear they live like swine, craving only not to be
disturbed at the trough. The religion of this vast English middle-class
ruling the land is Comfort. It is their central thought; their idea of
necessity; their sole aim. Whatsoever ministers to Comfort, seems to
belong to it, pretends to support it, they yield their passive worship
to. Whatsoever alarms it they join to crush. There you get at their
point of unity. They will pay for the security of Comfort, calling
it national worship, or national defence, if too much money is not
subtracted from the means of individual comfort: if too much foresight
is not demanded for the comfort of their bra