Nor did he attach sufficient importance to Lady Sunderbund’s disposition to invite Positivists, members of the Brotherhood Church, leaders among the Christian Scientists, old followers of the Rev. Charles Voysey, Swedenborgians, Moslem converts, Indian Theosophists, psychic phenomena and so forth, to meet him.  Nevertheless it began to drift into his mind that he was by no means so completely in control of the new departure as he had supposed at first.  Both he and Lady Sunderbund professed universalism; but while his was the universalism of one who would simplify to the bare fundamentals of a common faith, hers was the universalism of the collector.  Religion to him was something that illuminated the soul, to her it was something that illuminated prayer-books.  For a considerable time they followed their divergent inclinations without any realization of their divergence.  None the less a vague doubt and dissatisfaction with the prospect before him arose to cloud his confidence.

At first there was little or no doubt of his own faith.  He was still altogether convinced that he had to confess and proclaim God in his life.  He was as sure that God was the necessary king and saviour of mankind and of a man’s life, as he was of the truth of the Binomial Theorem.  But what began first to fade was the idea that he had been specially called to proclaim the True God to all the world.  He would have the most amiable conference with Lady Sunderbund, and then as he walked back to Notting Hill he would suddenly find stuck into his mind like a challenge, Heaven knows how:  “Another prophet?” Even if he succeeded in this mission enterprise, he found himself asking, what would he be but just a little West-end Mahomet?  He would have founded another sect, and we have to make an end to all sects.  How is there to be an end to sects, if there are still to be chapels—­richly decorated chapels—­and congregations, and salaried specialists in God?

That was a very disconcerting idea.  It was particularly active at night.  He did his best to consider it with a cool detachment, regardless of the facts that his private income was just under three hundred pounds a year, and that his experiments in cultured journalism made it extremely improbable that the most sedulous literary work would do more than double this scanty sum.  Yet for all that these nasty, ugly, sordid facts were entirely disregarded, they did somehow persist in coming in and squatting down, shapeless in a black corner of his mind—­from which their eyes shone out, so to speak—­whenever his doubt whether he ought to set up as a prophet at all was under consideration.

(6)

Then very suddenly on this October afternoon the situation had come to a crisis.

He had gone to Lady Sunderbund’s flat to see the plans and drawings for the new church in which he was to give his message to the world.  They had brought home to him the complete realization of Lady Sunderbund’s impossibility.  He had attempted upon the spur of the moment an explanation of just how much they differed, and he had precipitated a storm of extravagantly perplexing emotions....