t in the streets
than be dead. Nothing nonsensical ever held me so tightly or kept me so
interested. I suppose really I am full of that very same formless faith
on which you rely. But with me it's not only shapeless but
intangible.... I nibble at religion. I am immensely attracted. I stand
in the doorway. Only when they come out to persuade me to come in I am
like a shy child and I go away. The temples beguile me and the music,
but not the men. I feel I want to join _it_ and they say 'join _us_.'
They are--like vergers. Such small things! Such dreadful little
_arguing_ men! They don't let you come in, they want you to say they are
right. All the really religious people seem to be outside nowadays and
all the pretending, cheating, atheistical, vain and limited people
within....

"But the beautiful things religion gives! The beauty! Do you know Saint
Paul's, Stephen? Latterly I have been there time after time. It is the
most beautiful interior in all the world, so great, so sombrely
dignified, so perfectly balanced--and filled with such wonderful music,
brimming with music just as crystal water brims in a bowl of crystal.
The other day I went there, up into a little gallery high up under the
dome, to hear Bach's Passion Music, the St. Matthew Passion. One hangs
high and far above the little multitudes below, the white-robed singers,
the white-robed musicians, ranks and ranks, the great organ, the rows
and rows and rows of congregation, receding this way, that way, into the
haze of the aisle and the transepts, and out of it all streams the
sound and the singing, it pours up past you like a river, a river that
rushes upward to some great sea, some unknown sea. The whole place is
music and singing.... I hang on to the railings, Stephen, and weep--I
have to weep--and I wonder and wonder....

"One prays then as naturally as one drinks when one is thirsty and cold
water comes to hand. I don't know whom I pray to, but I pray;--of course
I pray. Latterly, Stephen, I have been reading devotional works and
trying to catch that music again. I never do--definitely. Never. But at
times I put down the book and it seems to me that surely a moment ago I
heard it, that if I sit very still in a moment I shall hear it again.
And I can feel it is there, I know it is there, like a bat's cry,
pitched too high for my ears. I know it is there, just as I should still
know there was poetry somewhere if some poor toothless idiot with no
roof to h