“I must not play priest or providence to them,” he admitted at last.  “I must not even stand between God and them.”

He saw now what he had been doing; it had been the flaw in his faith that he would not trust his family to God.  And he saw too that this distrust has been the flaw in the faith of all religious systems hitherto....

(13)

In this strange voyage of the spirit which was now drawing to its end, in which Scrope had travelled from the confused, unanalyzed formulas and assumptions and implications of his rectory upbringing to his present stark and simple realization of God, he had at times made some remarkable self-identifications.  He was naturally much given to analogy; every train of thought in his mind set up induced parallel currents.  He had likened himself to the Anglican church, to the whole Christian body, as, for example, in his imagined second conversation with the angel of God.  But now he found himself associating himself with a still more far-reaching section of mankind.  This excess of solicitude was traceable perhaps in nearly every one in all the past of mankind who had ever had the vision of God.  An excessive solicitude to shield those others from one’s own trials and hardships, to preserve the exact quality of the revelation, for example, had been the fruitful cause of crippling errors, spiritual tyrannies, dogmatisms, dissensions, and futilities.  “Suffer little children to come unto me”; the text came into his head with an effect of contribution.  The parent in us all flares out at the thought of the younger and weaker minds; we hide difficulties, seek to spare them from the fires that temper the spirit, the sharp edge of the truth that shapes the soul.  Christian is always trying to have a carriage sent back from the Celestial City for his family.  Why, we ask, should they flounder dangerously in the morasses that we escaped, or wander in the forest in which we lost ourselves?  Catch these souls young, therefore, save them before they know they exist, kidnap them to heaven; vaccinate them with a catechism they may never understand, lull them into comfort and routine.  Instinct plays us false here as it plays the savage mother false when she snatches her fevered child from the doctor’s hands.  The last act of faith is to trust those we love to God....

Hitherto he had seen the great nets of theological overstatement and dogma that kept mankind from God as if they were the work of purely evil things in man, of pride, of self-assertion, of a desire to possess and dominate the minds and souls of others.  It was only now that he saw how large a share in the obstruction of God’s Kingdom had been played by the love of the elder and the parent, by the carefulness, the fussy care, of good men and women.  He had wandered in wildernesses of unbelief, in dangerous places of doubt and questioning, but he had left his wife and children safe and secure in the self-satisfaction of orthodoxy.  To none of them except to Eleanor