第8章 THE SECOND - THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY(5)

Machinery has made them into different species.The employer lives away from his work-people, marries a wife foreign, out of a county family or suchlike, trains his children from their very birth in a different manner.Why, the growth curve is different for the two species.They haven't even a common speech between them.One looks east and the other looks west.How can you expect them to agree? Of course they won't agree.We've got to fight it out.They say we're their slaves for ever.Have you ever read Lady Bell's 'At the Works'? A well-intentioned woman, but she gives the whole thing away.We say, No! It's our sort and not your sort.We'll do without you.We'll get a little more education and then we'll do without you.We're pressing for all we can get, and when we've got that we'll take breath and press for more.We're the Morlocks.Coming up.It isn't our fault that we've differentiated.""But you haven't understood the drift of Christianity," said the bishop."It's just to assert that men are One community and not two.""There's not much of that in the Creeds," said a second labour leader who was a rationalist."There's not much of that in the services of the church."The vicar spoke before his bishop, and indeed he had plenty of time to speak before his bishop."Because you will not set yourselves to understand the symbolism of her ritual," he said.

"If the church chooses to speak in riddles," said the rationalist.

"Symbols," said Morrice Deans, "need not be riddles," and for a time the talk eddied about this minor issue and the chief labour spokesman and the bishop looked at one another.The vicar instanced and explained certain apparently insignificant observances, his antagonist was contemptuously polite to these explanations."That's all very pratty," he said....

The bishop wished that fine points of ceremonial might have been left out of the discussion.

Something much bigger than that was laying hold of his intelligence, the realization of a world extravagantly out of hand.The sky, the wind, the telegraph poles, had been jabbing in the harsh lesson of these men's voices, that the church, as people say, "wasn't in it." And that at the same time the church held the one remedy for all this ugliness and contention in its teaching of the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of men.Only for some reason he hadn't the phrases and he hadn't the voice to assert this over their wrangling and their stiff resolution.He wanted to think the whole business out thoroughly, for the moment he had nothing to say, and there was the labour leader opposite waiting smilingly to hear what he had to say so soon as the bout between the vicar and the rationalist was over.

(6)

That morning in the long galleries of the bishop's imagination a fresh painting had been added.It was a big wall painting rather in the manner of Puvis de Chavannes.And the central figure had been the bishop of Princhester himself.He had been standing upon the steps of the great door of the cathedral that looks upon the marketplace where the tram-lines meet, and he had been dressed very magnificently and rather after the older use.

He had been wearing a tunicle and dalmatic under a chasuble, a pectoral cross, purple gloves, sandals and buskins, a mitre and his presentation ring.In his hand he had borne his pastoral staff.And the clustering pillars and arches of the great doorway were painted with a loving flat particularity that omitted nothing but the sooty tinge of the later discolourations.

On his right hand had stood a group of employers very richly dressed in the fashion of the fifteenth century, and on the left a rather more numerous group of less decorative artisans.With them their wives and children had been shown, all greatly impressed by the canonicals.Every one had been extremely respectful.

He had been reconciling the people and blessing them and calling them his "sheep" and his "little children."But all this was so different.

Neither party resembled sheep or little children in the least degree..

The labour leader became impatient with the ritualistic controversy; he set his tea-cup aside out of danger and leant across the corner of the table to the bishop and spoke in a sawing undertone."You see," he said, "the church does not talk our language.I doubt if it understands our language.I doubt if we understand clearly where we are ourselves.These things have to be fought out and hammered out.It's a big dusty dirty noisy job.It may be a bloody job before it's through.You can't suddenly call a halt in the middle of the scrap and have a sort of millennium just because you want it....

"Of course if the church had a plan," he said, "if it had a proposal to make, if it had anything more than a few pious palliatives to suggest, that might be different.But has it?"The bishop had a bankrupt feeling.On the spur of the moment he could say no more than: "It offers its mediation."(7)

Full as he was with the preoccupation of these things and so a little slow and inattentive in his movements, the bishop had his usual luck at Pringle Junction and just missed the 7.27 for Princhester.He might perhaps have got it by running through the subway and pushing past people, but bishops must not run through subways and push past people.His mind swore at the mischance, even if his lips refrained.

He was hungry and, tired; he would not get to the palace now until long after nine; dinner would be over and Lady Ella would naturally suppose he had dined early with the Rev.Morrice Deans.

Very probably there would be nothing ready for him at all.