ckles, you know the type. Of
course he began, as they always do, by saying that he had seen men die
in all parts of the world and they all died the better for their faith.
None of them seemed to live, or else he had a morbid mind and likes
death. I don't know. Anyhow he had the cheek to say that King's
spiritual life wasn't as strong as it had been. He was deeply
concerned about us. He whined about us. He thought we were all going
to the devil because the scholars have taken to cutting chapel. Just
imagine a little tick like that coming here to tell us, whom he doesn't
know, that we're not so soulful as the clean young men out West. Thank
god we're not. I gave him about ten minutes and cleared out."

There was a murmur of delight.

"I suppose no one heard you leave the room," said Martin, but Lawrence
never rose to jests about his bulk and gait.

"And there were all Brockley's gang," he went on, "sitting with all the
light of grace in their eyes. And when the pock-marked chap got busy
in the impressive line you could fairly hear them thinking, 'God's in
His Heaven, all's right with the world.'"

"And a very good thought," said Rendell.

Lawrence would always rise to the religious bait.

"Just the kind of thought that you would expect from a well-fed Liberal
poet."

Lawrence opened violently a bottle of Munich beer and drained the
contents. Then he gave a vast sigh of relief, pulled out his pipe and
stood expansively before the fire, exposing, unconsciously, a large gap
of shirt between his waistcoat and the grey flannel trousers whose sole
support lay in their tightness.

"It isn't God that matters," he declared. "It's the Godites. They're
worse than ever."

"They've at least begun to move with the times."

"Exactly," said Martin, coming in as usual to assist Lawrence. "They
swallow everything new and say they meant it all the time. I don't
mind good old burn-the-devil bigots, but this up-to-date Interpreting
and Restatement and Revaluation and Earnest Wash, it makes me sick.
Why can't they give up their tribal deity and do something sensible?"

"You're so beastly crude," answered Rendell. "Oxford isn't exactly a
brainless place, and it's full of religion."

"It's full of a washed-out, watery, emasculate ghost of a faith," said
Martin. "They daren't say what they really do mean for fear of giving
the show away. So they talk about Evolution and the Unknowable and
'may be something in it.'