ly shocked by the docility with
which they followed the codes of the service: even when he had committed
his blunder of the contradictory prayers, they had murmured the words
automatically, without protest. To the terrific solemnities of the
Litany they had made the responses with prompt gabbling precision, and
with a rapidity that frankly implied impatience to take the strain off
their knees.

Somehow he felt that to account for a world of unutterable strangeness
they had invented a God far too cheaply simple. His mood was certainly
not one of ribald easy scoff. It was they (he assured himself) whose
theology was essentially cynical; not he. He was a little weary of
this just, charitable, consoling, hebdomadal God; this God who might be
sufficiently honoured by a decorously memorized ritual. Yet was he
too shallow? Was it not seemly that his fellows, bound on this dark,
desperate venture of living, should console themselves with decent
self-hypnosis?

No, he thought. No, it was not entirely seemly. If they pretended that
their God was the highest thing knowable, then they must bring to
His worship the highest possible powers of the mind. He had a strange
yearning for a God less lazily conceived: a God perhaps inclement,
awful, master of inscrutable principles. Yet was it desirable to shake
his congregation's belief in their traditional divinity? He thought of
them--so amiable, amusing, spirited and generous, but utterly untrained
for abstract imaginative thought on any subject whatever. His own
strange surmisings about deity would only shock and horrify them And
after all, was it not exactly their simplicity that made them lovable?
The great laws of truth would work their own destinies without
assistance from him! Even if these pleasant creatures did not genuinely
believe the rites they so politely observed (he knew they did not, for
BELIEF is an intellectual process of extraordinary range and depth), was
it not socially useful that they should pretend to do so?

And yet--with another painful swing of the mind--was it necessary
that Truth should be worshipped with the aid of such astonishingly
transparent formalisms, hoaxes, and mummeries? Alas, it seemed that this
was an old, old struggle that must be troublesomely fought out, again
and again down the generations. Prophets were twice stoned--first in
anger; then, after their death, with a handsome slab in the graveyard.
But words uttered in sincerity (he thought) n