s.

"You know, my dears, I had to give up the church. I just simply didn't
believe any more in orthodox Church teaching. And I feel I've never
explained that properly to you. Not at all clearly. I want to explain
that now. It's a queer thing, I know, for me to say to you, but I want
you to understand that I am a religious man. I believe that God matters
more than wealth or comfort or position or the respect of men, that he
also matters more than your comfort and prosperity. God knows I have
cared for your comfort and prosperity. I don't want you to think that in
all these changes we have been through lately, I haven't been aware of
all the discomfort into which you have come--the relative discomfort.
Compared with Princhester this is dark and crowded and poverty-stricken.
I have never felt crowded before, but in this house I know you are
horribly crowded. It is a house that seems almost contrived for small
discomforts. This narrow passage outside; the incessant going up and
down stairs. And there are other things. There is the blankness of our
London Sundays. What is the good of pretending? They are desolating.
There's the impossibility too of getting good servants to come into our
dug-out kitchen. I'm not blind to all these sordid consequences. But all
the same, God has to be served first. I had to come to this. I felt I
could not serve God any longer as a bishop in the established church,
because I did not believe that the established church was serving God.
I struggled against that conviction--and I struggled against it largely
for your sakes. But I had to obey my conviction.... I haven't talked
to you about these things as much as I should have done, but partly at
least that is due to the fact that my own mind has been changing and
reconsidering, going forward and going back, and in that fluid state
it didn't seem fair to tell you things that I might presently find
mistaken. But now I begin to feel that I have really thought out things,
and that they are definite enough to tell you...."

He paused and resumed. "A number of things have helped to change the
opinions in which I grew up and in which you have grown up. There were
worries at Princhester; I didn't let you know much about them, but there
were. There was something harsh and cruel in that atmosphere. I saw for
the first time--it's a lesson I'm still only learning--how harsh and
greedy rich people and employing people are to poor people and working
people, an