ear. I am working. I cannot tell you fully
because I am not working alone. But there are movements afoot in which
I hope very shortly to be able to ask you to share. That much at least I
may say at this stage. Obscure but very powerful influences are at
work for the liberalizing of the church, for release from many
narrow limitations, for the establishment of a modus vivendi with the
nonconformist and dissentient bodies in Britain and America, and with
the churches of the East. But of that no more now.

"And in conclusion, my dear Scrope, let me insist again upon the eternal
persistence of the essential Religious Fact:"

(Greek Letters Here)

(Rev. i. 18. "Fear not. I am the First and Last thing, the Living
thing.")

And these promises which, even if we are not to take them as promises in
the exact sense in which, let us say, the payment of five sovereigns
is promised by a five-pound note, are yet assertions of practically
inevitable veracity:

(Greek Letters Here)

(Phil. i. 6. "He who began... will perfect." Eph. v. 14. "He will
illuminate.")

The old man had written his Greek tags in shakily resolute capitals. It
was his custom always to quote the Greek Testament in his letters,
never the English version. It is a practice not uncommon with the more
scholarly of our bishops. It is as if some eminent scientific man were
to insist upon writing H2O instead of "water," and "sodium chloride"
instead of "table salt" in his private correspondence. Or upon hanging
up a stuffed crocodile in his hall to give the place tone. The Bishop
of Princhester construed these brief dicta without serious exertion, he
found them very congenial texts, but there were insuperable difficulties
in the problem why Likeman should suppose they had the slightest weight
upon his side of their discussion. The more he thought the less they
seemed to be on Likeman's side, until at last they began to take on a
complexion entirely opposed to the old man's insidious arguments, until
indeed they began to bear the extraordinary interpretation of a special
message, unwittingly delivered.

(8)

The bishop was still thinking over this communication when he was
interrupted by Lady Ella. She came with a letter in her hand to ask him
whether she might send five-and-twenty pounds to a poor cousin of his,
a teacher in a girls' school, who had been incapacitated from work by
a dislocation of the cartilage of her knee. If she could go to that
unorthod