nor bishop in Princhester. It came to
him that if archbishops were rolled into patriarchs and patriarchs into
archbishops, it would matter scarcely more in the world process that was
afoot than if two men shook hands while their house was afire. At times
all of us have inappropriate thoughts. The unfortunate thought that
struck the bishop as a bullet might strike a man in an exposed trench,
as he was hurrying through the cloisters to a special service and
address upon that doubly glorious day in our English history, the day of
St. Crispin, was of Diogenes rolling his tub.

It was a poisonous thought.

It arose perhaps out of an article in a weekly paper at which he had
glanced after lunch, an article written by one of those sceptical
spirits who find all too abundant expression in our periodical
literature. The writer boldly charged the "Christian churches" with
absolute ineffectiveness. This war, he declared, was above all other
wars a war of ideas, of material organization against rational freedom,
of violence against law; it was a war more copiously discussed than any
war had ever been before, the air was thick with apologetics. And what
was the voice of the church amidst these elemental issues? Bishops and
divines who were patriots one heard discordantly enough, but where were
the bishops and divines who spoke for the Prince of Peace? Where was the
blessing of the church, where was the veto of the church? When it
came to that one discovered only a broad preoccupied back busied in
supplementing the Army Medical Corps with Red Cross activities, good
work in its way--except that the canonicals seemed superfluous. Who
indeed looked to the church for any voice at all? And so to Diogenes.

The bishop's mind went hunting for an answer to that indictment. And
came back and came back to the image of Diogenes.

It was with that image dangling like a barbed arrow from his mind that
the bishop went into the pulpit to preach upon St. Crispin's day, and
looked down upon a thin and scattered congregation in which the elderly,
the childless, and the unoccupied predominated.

That night insomnia resumed its sway.

Of course the church ought to be controlling this great storm, the
greatest storm of war that had ever stirred mankind. It ought to be
standing fearlessly between the combatants like a figure in a wall
painting, with the cross of Christ uplifted and the restored memory of
Christendom softening the eyes of the armed