ish that I didn't feel the necessity of
coordinating my opinions and accepting Christianity as laid down by the
Church. I should love to be a sort of Swedenborgian with all sorts of
fanciful private beliefs. But I want to force everything within the
convention. I hate Free Thought, Free Love, and Free Verse, and yet I
hate almost equally the stuffy people who have never contemplated the
possibility of their merit. Do you ever read a paper called The
Spectator? Now I believe in what The Spectator stands for, and I admire
its creed enormously, but the expression of its opinions makes me spue.
If only earnest young believers wouldn't treat Almighty God with the
same sort of proprietary air that schoolgirls use toward a favorite
mistress."

"Michael, Michael!" cried Viner, "where are you taking me with your
coordinating impulses and your Spectators and your earnest young
believers? What undergraduate paradox are you trying to wield against
me? Remember, I've been down nearly twenty years. I can no longer turn
mental somersaults. I thought you implied _you_ were a believer."

"Oh, no, I'm watching and hoping. And just now I'm afraid the anchor is
dragging. Hope does have an anchor, doesn't she? I'm not asking, you
know, for the miracle of a direct revelation from God. The psychologists
have made miracles of that sort hardly worth while. But I'm hoping with
all my might to see bit by bit everything fall away except faith.
Perhaps when I behold God in one of his really cynical moods ... I'm
groping in the dark after a hazy idea of subordination. That's
something, you know. But I haven't found my own place in the scheme."

"You see you're very modern, after all," said Viner, "with your
coordinations and subordinations."

"But I don't want to assert myself," Michael explained. "I want to
surrender myself, and I'm not going to surrender anything until I am
sure by faith that I'm not merely surrendering the wastage of myself."

Michael left Viner with a sense of the pathetic sameness of the
mission-priest's existence. He had known so well before he went that,
because it was Monday, he would find him sitting in that armchair,
smoking that pipe, reading that novel. Every other evening he would be
either attending to parochial clubs in rooms of wood and corrugated
iron, or his own room would be infested with boys who from year to year,
from month to month, never changed in general character, but always gave
the same impression o