and understood and believed.  Religion, as we know it in its technical sense, is so faint-hearted about it all!  It has limited worship to things beautiful enough, arches and music and ceremony:  and it is so afraid of vagueness, so considerate of man’s feeble grasp and small outlook, that it is afraid of recognising all the channels by which that sense is communicated, for fear of weakening a special effect.  I’ll tell you two or three of the experiences I mean.  You know old Mrs. Chetwynd, who is fading away in that little cottage beyond the churchyard.  She is poor, old, ill.  She can hardly be said to have a single pleasure, as you and I reckon pleasures.  She just lies there in that poky room waiting for death, always absolutely patient and affectionate and sweet-tempered, grateful for everything, never saying a hard or cross word.  Well, I go to see her sometimes—­not as often as I ought.  She shakes hands with that old knotted-looking hand of hers which has grown soft enough now after its endless labours.  She talks a little—­she is interested in all the news, she doesn’t regret things, or complain, or think it hard that she can’t be out and about.  After I have been with her for two minutes, with her bright old eyes looking at me out of such a thicket, so to speak, of wrinkles,—­her face simply hacked and seamed by life,—­I feel myself in the presence of something very divine indeed,—­a perfectly pure, tender, joyful, human spirit, suffering the last extremity of discomfort and infirmity, and yet entirely radiant and undimmed.  It is then that I feel inclined to kneel down before God, and thank Him humbly for having made and shown me so utterly beautiful a thing as that poor old woman’s courage and sweetness.  I feel as I suppose the devout Catholic feels before the reserved Sacrament in the shrine—­in the presence of a divine mystery; and I rejoice silently that God is what He is, and that I see Him for once unveiled.

“And then the sight of a happy and contented child, kind and spirited and affectionate, like little Molly Akers, never making a fuss, or seeming to want things for herself, or cross, or tiresome—­that gives me the same feeling!  Then flowers often give me the same feeling, with their cleanness and fresh beauty and pure outline and sweet scent—­so useless in a way, often so unregarded, and yet so content just to be what they are, so apart from every stain and evil passion.

“And then in the middle of that you see a man like Barlow stumbling home tipsy to his frightened wife and children, or you read a bad case in the papers, or a letter from a man of virtue finding fault with everybody and slinging pious Billingsgate about:  or I lose my own temper about something, and feel I have made a hash of my life—­and then I wonder what is the foul poison that has got into things, and what is the dismal ugliness that seems smeared all over life, so that the soul seems like a beautiful bird caught in a slime-pit, and trying to struggle out, with its pinions fouled and dabbled, wondering miserably what it has done to be so filthily hampered.”