rgets that you also want air."

"It seems rather a ghastly business," I said.

"Yes," said Father Payne, "it's a wretched business! That combination of
great sensitiveness and great self-righteousness is the most melancholy
thing I know. You have to get rid of one or the other--and yet that is how
Gladwin is made. Now, I have plenty of opinions of my own, but I don't
consider them final or absolute. It ends, of course, in poor Gladwin
knowing about a hundredth part of what is going on in the world, and
thinking that it's d--d bad. Of course it is, if you neglect the other
ninety-nine parts altogether!"

XLIV

OF WORSHIP

It was one of those perfectly fine and radiant days of early summer, with a
touch of easterly about the breeze, which means perhaps a drier air, and
always seems to bring out the true colours of our countryside, as with a
touch of ethereal golden-tinged varnish. The humid rain-washed days, so
common in England, are beautiful enough, with their rolling cloud-ranges
and their soft mistiness: but the clear sparkle of this brighter weather,
summer without its haze, intensifying each tone of colour and sharply
defining each several tint, has a special beauty of form as well as of hue.

I walked with Father Payne far among the fields. He was at first in a
silent mood, observing and enjoying. We passed a field carpeted with
buttercups, and he said, "That's a beautiful touch, 'the flower-enamelled
field'--it isn't just washed with colour, it is like hammered work of
beaten gold, like the letters in old missals!" Presently he burst out into
talk: "I don't want to say anything affected," he began, "but a day like
this, out in the country, gives me a stronger feeling of what I can only
describe as _worship_ than anything else in the world, because the
scene holds the beauty of life so firmly up before you. Worship means the
sense of the unmistakable presence of beauty, I am sure--a beauty great and
overwhelming, which one has had no part in making--'The sea is His, and He
made it, and His hands prepared the dry land. O come, let us worship and
fall down, and kneel before the Lord our Maker'--it's that exactly--a sense
of joyful abasement in the presence of something great and infinitely
beautiful. I do wish that were more clearly stated and understood and
believed. Religion, as we know it in its technical sense, is so
faint-hearted about it all! It has limited worship to things beautiful
enough, arches