e word was--God.

***

We had built a new church in our parish, that those who built pleasant
houses on the slopes, fleeing from the restless city that lay below,
might have room to worship. But the desire to worship seemed to be
dying of attrition. And the old church where the quarriers and farm
servants assembled and worshipped in an atmosphere that on a warm day
became so thick that one could cut it with a knife--that old church
would have been quite big enough to hold all who came, for the instinct
to pray seemed to be dying. And many, because the new church was now
too big, regretted the old.

Then, suddenly, the new church was filled to the door. Men and women
discovered the road leading down to the hollow where the church stands
amid the graves of the generations. With wistful faces they turned
towards it. While the bell rang they stood in groups among the graves.
And if you listened there was but one word--war, war, war. Over and
over again just that one word. Until the bell was silent, and they
turned into the now crowded church.

As I sat there and cast a glance around me, I felt a sudden amazement.
Those who never before had come down the steep brae when the bell was
ringing were sitting here and there just as if they had been there
every Sunday when the beadle, with head erect, ushers the minister to
the pulpit and snips him in. (Though the church is new, the minister
is yet snipped in by the beadle--a lonely prisoner there on his perch,
and it is an uncanny sound to hear the click of that snip shutting in
the solitary man.)

In the pew in front of me sat a burly man with a head like a dome. He
never came to church. When I met him he would stand for an hour in the
lane among the hawthorns explaining his views. Prayer was mere
superstition. Cosmic laws unchanging and unchangeable held the
universe in their grasp. To ask that one of these laws should be
altered for a moment that a boon might be conferred on us was to ask
that the universe might be shattered. Prayer was immoral, the asking
for what could not be granted, and what we knew could not be granted.
If he went to church it would be hypocrisy on his part.

And thus it came that when the farm servants came up the Gallows road
on their way to church on a summer morning, they often heard the whirr
of my friend's mowing machine as he mowed his lawn. It was the way he
took of letting the parish know that culture could have no dealings