t best a devout and pious ministration to
the worshipper's own soul; in which the loving of one's neighbour and
caring for one another seemed to play precisely no part at all.

True it was, as I already knew, that in the East End of London, and
elsewhere, some of the very High Church clergy were carrying on a work
of real devotion among the poor, and that with possibly a more
distinguished measure of success than attended the efforts of any other
branch of Christian service. They did not influence anything like the
number of people who were influenced by dissenting bodies, but those who
did come under their sway came without reservation.

But the point which absorbed me was the question of how this particular
aspect of religion affected Sylvia. In this, at all events, it seemed to
me a far from helpful or wholesome kind of religion. Sylvia liked early
morning services because so few people attended them. It was "almost
like having the church to oneself." The supreme feature of religious
life for Sylvia had for its emblem the tinkle of the bell at the service
she always called Mass. The coming of the Presence--that was the C
Major of life for Sylvia. For the rest, meditation, preferably in the
setting provided by St. Jude's, with its permanent aroma of incense and
its dim lights--the world shut out by stained glass--this, with prayer,
genuflections, and the ecstasy of long thought upon the circumstances of
the supreme act of Christ's life upon earth, seemed to me to represent
the sum total of Sylvia's religion.

But, over and above what was to me the chilling negativeness of all
this, its indifference to the human welfare of all other mortals, there
was in Sylvia's religion something else, which I find myself unable,
even now, to put into words. Some indication of it, perhaps, is given by
the little passage I have quoted from one of her books. It was the one
thing positive which I found in my lady's religion; all the rest was to
me a beautiful, intricate, purely artificial negation of human life and
human interest.

This one thing positive struck into my vitals with a chill premonition,
as of something unnatural and, to me, unfathomable. It was a sentiment
which I can only call anti-human. Even as those of Sylvia's persuasion
held that the clergy should be celibate, so it seemed to me they viewed
all purely human loves, ties, emotions, sentiments, and interests
generally with a kind of jealous suspicion, as influences