'Oh forgive me! These things must hurt you--they would have hurt me in
old days--but they burn within me, and you bid me speak out. What if it
be God himself who is driving His painful lesson home to me, to you,
to the world? What does it mean: this gradual growth of what we call
infidelity, of criticism and science on the one hand, this gradual death
of the old traditions on the other? _Sin_, you answer, _the enmity of
the human mind against God, the momentary triumph of Satan_. And so you
acquiesce, heavy-hearted, in God's present defeat, looking for vengeance
and requital here-after. I am not so ready to believe in man's capacity
to rebel against his Maker! Where you see ruin and sin, I see the urgent
process of Divine education, God's steady ineluctable command "to put
away childish things," the pressure of His spirit on ours toward new
ways of worship and new forms of love!'

And after a while it was with these 'new ways of worship and now forms
of love' that the mind began to be perpetually occupied. The break with
the old things was no sooner complete, than the eager soul, incapable
then, as always, of resting in negation or oppositions pressed
passionately forward to a new synthesis, not only speculative, but
practical. Before it rose perpetually the haunting vision of another
palace of faith--another church or company of the faithful, which was to
become the shelter of human aspiration amid the desolation and anarchy
caused by the crashing of the old! How many men and women must have gone
through the same strait as itself--how many must be watching with it
through the darkness for the rising of a new City of God!

One afternoon, close upon Christmas, he found himself in Parliament
Square, on his way toward Westminster Bridge and the Embankment. The
beauty of a sunset sky behind the Abbey arrested him, and he stood
leaning over the railings beside the Peel statue to look.

The day before, he had passed the same spot with a German friend. His
companion--a man of influence and mark in his own country, who had been
brought up however in England and knew it well--had stopped before the
Abbey and had said to him with emphasis: 'I never find myself in this
particular spot of London without a sense of emotion and reverence.
Other people feel that in treading the Forum of Rome they are at the
centre of human things. I am more thrilled by Westminster than Rome;
your venerable Abbey is to me the symbol of a nationality