(2)


From these belated seizures of the day's lost opportunities the bishop
passed to such a pessimistic estimate of the church as had never entered
his mind before.

It was as if he had fallen suddenly out of a spiritual balloon into
a world of bleak realism. He found himself asking unprecedented and
devastating questions, questions that implied the most fundamental
shiftings of opinion. Why was the church such a failure? Why had it
no grip upon either masters or men amidst this vigorous life of modern
industrialism, and why had it no grip upon the questioning young? It was
a tolerated thing, he felt, just as sometimes he had felt that the
Crown was a tolerated thing. He too was a tolerated thing; a curious
survival....

This was not as things should be. He struggled to recover a proper
attitude. But he remained enormously dissatisfied....

The church was no Levite to pass by on the other side away from the
struggles and wrongs of the social conflict. It had no right when the
children asked for the bread of life to offer them Gothic stone....

He began to make interminable weak plans for fulfilling his duty to his
diocese and his daughter.

What could he do to revivify his clergy? He wished he had more personal
magnetism, he wished he had a darker and a larger presence. He wished he