the curate_."

He said he was reading more than he used to do now that the parish was
off his hands, and he was preparing material for a book. It was, he
explained later, to take the form of a huge essay ostensibly on Secular
Canons, but its purport was to be no less than the complete
secularization of the Church of England. At first he wanted merely to
throw open the cathedral chapters to distinguished laymen, irrespective
of their theological opinions, and to make each English cathedral a
centre of intellectual activity, a college as it were of philosophers
and writers. But afterwards his suggestions grew bolder, the Articles of
Religion were to be set aside, the creeds made optional even for the
clergy. His dream became more and more richly picturesque until at last
he saw Canterbury a realized Thelema, and St. Paul's a new Academic
Grove. He was to work at that remarkable proposal intermittently for
many years, and to leave it at last no more than a shapeless mass of
memoranda, fragmentary essays, and selected passages for quotation. Yet
mere patchwork and scrapbook as it would be, I still have some thought
of publishing it. There is a large human charity about it, a sun too
broad and warm, a reasonableness too wide and free perhaps for the timid
convulsive quality of our time, yet all good as good wine for the wise.
Is it incredible that a day should come when our great grey monuments to
the Norman spirit should cease to be occupied by narrow-witted parsons
and besieged by narrow-souled dissenters, the soul of our race in exile
from the home and place our fathers built for it?...

If he was not perceptibly changed, I thought my cousin Jane had become
more than a little sharper and stiffer. She did not like my uncle's own
personal secularization, and still less the glimpses she got of the
ampler intentions of his book. She missed the proximity to the church
and her parochial authority. But she was always a silent woman, and made
her comments with her profile and not with her tongue....

"I'm glad you've come back, Stephen," said my father as we sat together
after dinner and her departure, with port and tall silver candlesticks
and shining mahogany between us. "I've missed you. I've done my best to
follow things out there. I've got, I suppose, every press mention
there's been of you during the war and since. I've subscribed to two
press-cutting agencies, so that if one missed you the other fellow got
you. Perhaps