It struck me that the two represented two sides of Potterism—­the intellectual and moral.  Clare, the ignorant, muddle-headed sentimentalist; Jane, reacting against this, but on her part grabbing and exploiting.  Their attitude towards truth (that bugbear of Potterism) was typical; Clare couldn’t see it; Jane saw it perfectly clearly, and would reject it without hesitation if it suited her book.  Clare was like her mother, only with better, simpler stuff in her; Jane was rather like her father in her shrewd native wit, only, while he was vulgar in his mind, she was only vulgar in her soul.

Of one thing I was sure:  they would both be, on the whole, satisfied with life, Jane because she would get what she wanted, Clare because she would be content with little.  Clare would inevitably marry; as inevitably, she would love her husband and her children, and come to regard her passion for Oliver Hobart and its tragic sequel as a romantic episode of girlhood, a sort of sowing of wild oats before the real business of life began.  And Jane would, I presumed, ultimately marry Gideon, who was too good for her, altogether too fine and too good.  For Gideon was direct and keen and passionate, and loved and hated cleanly, and thought finely and acutely.  Gideon wasn’t greedy; he took life and its pleasures and triumphs and amusements in his stride, as part of the day’s work; he didn’t seek them out for their own sakes.  Gideon lived for causes and beliefs and ideals.  He was temperamentally Christian, though he didn’t happen to believe Christian dogma.  He had his alloy, like other people, of ambition and selfishness, but so much less than, for instance, I have, that it is absurd that he should be the agnostic and I the professing Christian.

7

The Christian Church.  Sometimes one feels that it is a fantasy, the flaming ideal one has for it.  One thinks of it as a fire, a sword, an army with banners marching against dragons; one doesn’t see how such power can be withstood, be the dragons never so strong.  And then one looks round and sees it instead as a frail organisation of the lame, the halt, and the blind, a tepid organisation of the satisfied, the bourgeois, the conventionally genteel, a helpless organisation of the ignorant, the half-witted, the stupid; an organisation full to the brim of cant, humbug, timid orthodoxy, unreality, self-content, and all kinds of Potterism—­and one doesn’t see how it can overcome anything whatever.

What is the truth?  Where, between these two poles, does the actual church stand?  Or does it, like most of us its members, swing to and from between them, touching now one, now the other?  A Potterite church—­yes; because we are most of us Potterites.  An anti-Potterite church—­yes, again; because at its heart is something sharp and clean and fine and direct, like a sword, which will not let us be contented Potterites, but which is for ever goading us out of ourselves, pricking us out of our trivial satisfactions and our egotistic discontents.