preparation or prelude, by surprise. "Why, Bishop, was the Spermaticos
Logos identified with the Second and not the Third Person of the
Trinity?"

It was indiscreet, it was silly, to turn upon the speaker and affect an
air of disengagement and modernity and to say: "Ah, that indeed is the
unfortunate aspect of the whole affair."

Whereupon the fierce young man had exploded with: "To that, is it, that
you Anglicans have come?"

The whole gathering had given itself up to the disputation, Lady
Sunderbund, an actress, a dancer--though she, it is true, did not say
very much--a novelist, a mechanical expert of some sort, a railway peer,
geniuses, hairy and Celtic, people of no clearly definable position,
but all quite unequal to the task of maintaining that air of reverent
vagueness, that tenderness of touch, which is by all Anglican standards
imperative in so deep, so mysterious, and, nowadays, in mixed society at
least, so infrequent a discussion.

It was like animals breaking down a fence about some sacred spot. Within
a couple of minutes the affair had become highly improper. They had
raised their voices, they had spoken with the utmost familiarity of
almost unspeakable things. There had been even attempts at epigram.
Athanasian epigrams. Bent the novelist had doubted if originally there
had been a Third Person in the Trinity at all. He suggested a reaction
from a too-Manichaean dualism at some date after the time of St. John's
Gospel. He maintained obstinately that that Gospel was dualistic.

The unpleasant quality of the talk was far more manifest in the