works of Legge
and Frazer, and for the first time he began to measure the dimensions
and power of the modern criticism of church doctrine and observance.
Green tea should have lit his way to refutation; instead it lit up the
whole inquiry with a light of melancholy confirmation. Neither by night
nor by day could the bishop find a proper method of opening a counter
attack upon Chasters, who was indisputably an intellectually abler man
and a very ruthless beast indeed to assail, and meanwhile the demand
that action should be taken increased.

The literature of church history and the controversies arising out of
doctrinal development became the employment of the bishop's leisure and
a commanding preoccupation. He would have liked to discuss with some one
else the network of perplexities in which he was entangling himself, and
more particularly with Canon Bliss, but his own positions were becoming
so insecure that he feared to betray them by argument. He had grown up
with a kind of intellectual modesty. Some things he had never yet talked
about; it made his mind blench to think of talking about them. And his
great aching gaps of wakefulness began now, thanks to the green tea, to
be interspersed with theological dreams and visions of an extravagant
vividness. He would see Frazer's sacrificial kings butchered
picturesquely and terribly amidst strange and grotesque rituals; he
would survey long and elaborate processions and ceremonials in which
the most remarkable symbols were borne high in the sight of all men; he
would cower before a gigantic and threatening Heaven. These
green-tea dreams and visions were not so much phases of sleep as an
intensification and vivid furnishing forth of insomnia. It added
greatly to his disturbance that--exceeding the instructions of
Brighton-Pomfrey--he had now experimented ignorantly and planlessly
with one or two narcotics and sleeping mixtures that friends and
acquaintances had mentioned in his hearing. For the first time in his
life he became secretive from his wife. He knew he ought not to take
these things, he knew they were physically and morally evil, but
a tormenting craving drove him to them. Subtly and insensibly his
character was being undermined by the growing nervous trouble.

He astonished himself by the cunning and the hypocritical dignity he
could display in procuring these drugs. He arranged to have a tea-making
set in his bedroom, and secretly substituted green tea, for wh