ly proved?"

"My dear mother," said George, "I hope you will hold me innocent of
beginning this discussion. As a harmless professor of history in our
renowned University (of which we think so much that we do not send our
sons to it) I have been compelled by the children whom you have brought
up to sit in judgment on the theology of your rector."

"They will leave us nothing!" she sighed.

"Nothing, perhaps, that was invented by man to appeal to man's
superstition and weakness. Of the remainder--who can say?"

"What," asked Mrs. Waring, "do they say about the Apostolic Succession?"

"Mother is as bad as the rest of us," said Eleanor.

"Isn't she, grandfather?"

"If I had a house to rent," said Mr. Bridges, when the laughter had
subsided, "I shouldn't advertise five bath rooms when there were only
two, or electricity when there was only gas. I should be afraid my
tenants might find it out, and lose a certain amount of confidence in me.
But the orthodox churches are running just such a risk to-day, and if any
person who contemplates entering these churches doesn't examine the
premises first, he refrains at his own cost.

"The situation in the early Christian Church is now a matter of history,
and he who runs may read. The first churches, like those of Corinth and
Ephesus and Rome, were democracies: no such thing as a priestly line to
carry on a hierarchy, an ecclesiastical dynasty, was dreamed of. It may
be gathered from the gospels that such an idea was so far from the mind
of Christ that his mission was to set at naught just such another
hierarchy, which then existed in Israel. The Apostles were no more
bishops than was John the Baptist, but preachers who travelled from place
to place, like Paul. The congregations, at Rome and elsewhere, elected
their own 'presbyteri, episcopoi' or overseers. It is, to say the least,
doubtful, and it certainly cannot be proved historically, that Peter ever
was in Rome."

"The professor ought to have a pulpit of his own," said Phil.

There was a silence. And then Evelyn, who had been eating quantities of
hothouse grapes, spoke up.

"So far as I can see, the dilemma in which our generation finds itself is
this,--we want to know what there is in Christianity that we can lay hold
of. We should like to believe, but, as George says, all our education
contradicts the doctrines that are most insisted upon. We don't know
where to turn. We have the choice of going to people like George