a severance from his
ecclesiastical dignity. But he had grown up in the church, his life had
been so entirely clerical and Anglican, that the widest separation he
had hitherto been able to imagine from this past had left him still a
bishop, heretical perhaps, innovating in the broadening of beliefs and
the liberalizing of practice, defensive even as Chasters was defensive,
but still with the palace and his dignities, differing in opinion rather
than in any tangible reality from his previous self. For a bishop,
disbelief in the Church is a far profounder scepticism than mere
disbelief in God. God is unseen, and in daily things unfelt; but
the Church is with the predestined bishop always. His concept of the
extremest possible departure from orthodoxy had been something that
Chasters had phrased as "a restatement of Christ." It was a new idea, an
idea that had come with an immense effect of severance and novelty, that
God could be other than the God of the Creed, could present himself
to the imagination as a figure totally unlike the white, gentle, and
compromising Redeemer of an Anglican's thought. That the bishop should
treat the whole teaching of the church and the church itself as wrong,
was an idea so new that it fell upon him now like a thunderbolt out of a
cloudless sky. But here, clear in his mind now, was a feeling, amounting
to conviction, that it was the purpose and gesture of the true God that
he should come right out of the church and all his professions.

And in the first glow of his vision he felt this gesture imperative. He
must step right out.... Whither? how? And when?

To begin with it seemed to him that an immediate renunciation was
demanded. But it was a momentous step. He wanted to think. And to go
on thinking. Rather than to act precipitately. Although the imperative
seemed absolute, some delaying and arresting instinct insisted that he
must "think" If he went back to Princhester, the everyday duties of
his position would confront him at once with an effect of a definite
challenge. He decided to take one of the Reform club bedrooms for two or
three days, and wire to Princhester that he was "unavoidably delayed in
town," without further explanations. Then perhaps this inhibitory force
would give way.

It did not, however, give way. His mind sat down for two days in a blank
amazement at the course before him, and at the end of that time this
reasonless and formless institution was as strong as ever.