these men's
voices, that the church, as people say, "wasn't in it." And that at
the same time the church held the one remedy for all this ugliness and
contention in its teaching of the universal fatherhood of God and the
universal brotherhood of men. Only for some reason he hadn't the phrases
and he hadn't the voice to assert this over their wrangling and their
stiff resolution. He wanted to think the whole business out thoroughly,
for the moment he had nothing to say, and there was the labour leader
opposite waiting smilingly to hear what he had to say so soon as the
bout between the vicar and the rationalist was over.

(6)

That morning in the long galleries of the bishop's imagination a fresh
painting had been added. It was a big wall painting rather in the manner
of Puvis de Chavannes. And the central figure had been the bishop of
Princhester himself. He had been standing upon the steps of the
great door of the cathedral that looks upon the marketplace where the
tram-lines meet, and he had been dressed very magnificently and rather
after the older use. He had been wearing a tunicle and dalmatic under a
chasuble, a pectoral cross, purple gloves, sandals and buskins, a mitre
and his presentation ring. In his hand he had borne his pastoral staff.
And the clustering pillars and arches of the great doorway were painted
with a loving flat particularity that omitted nothing but the sooty
tinge of the later discolourations.

On his right hand had stood a group of employers very richly dressed
in the fashion of the fifteenth century, and on the left a rather more
numerous group of less decorative artisans. With them their wives and
children had been shown, all greatly impressed by the canonicals. Every
one had been extremely respectful.

He had been reconciling the people and blessing them and calling them
his "sheep" and his "little children."

But all this was so different.

Neither party resembled sheep or little children in the least degree. .

The labour leader became impatient with the ritualistic controversy; he
set his tea-cup aside out of danger and leant across the corner of the
table to the bishop and spoke in a sawing undertone. "You see," he said,
"the church does not talk our language. I doubt if it understands our
language. I doubt if we understand clearly where we are ourselves. These
things have to be fought out and hammered out. It's a big dusty dirty
noisy job. It may be a bloody job before it's