had he ever talked with any freedom of his new apprehensions of religious reality.  And that had been at Eleanor’s initiative.  There was, he saw now, something of insolence and something of treachery in this concealment.  His ruling disposition throughout the crisis had been to force comfort and worldly well-being upon all those dependants even at the price of his own spiritual integrity.  In no way had he consulted them upon the bargain....  While we have pottered, each for the little good of his own family, each for the lessons and clothes and leisure of his own children, assenting to this injustice, conforming to that dishonest custom, being myopically benevolent and fundamentally treacherous, our accumulated folly has achieved this catastrophe.  It is not so much human wickedness as human weakness that has permitted the youth of the world to go through this hell of blood and mud and fire.  The way to the kingdom of God is the only way to the true safety, the true wellbeing of the children of men....

It wasn’t fair to them.  But now he saw how unfair it was to them in a light that has only shone plainly upon European life since the great interlude of the armed peace came to an end in August, 1914.  Until that time it had been the fashion to ignore death and evade poverty and necessity for the young.  We can shield our young no longer, death has broken through our precautions and tender evasions—­and his eyes went eastward into the twilight that had swallowed up his daughter and her lover.

The tumbled darkling sky, monstrous masses of frowning blue, with icy gaps of cold light, was like the great confusions of the war.  All our youth has had to go into that terrible and destructive chaos—­because of the kings and churches and nationalities sturdier-souled men would have set aside.

Everything was sharp and clear in his mind now.  Eleanor after all had brought him his solution.

He sat quite still for a little while, and then stood up and turned northward towards Notting Hill.

The keepers were closing Kensington Gardens, and he would have to skirt the Park to Victoria Gate and go home by the Bayswater Road....

(14)

As he walked he rearranged in his mind this long-overdue apology for his faith that he was presently to make to his family.  There was no one to interrupt him and nothing to embarrass him, and so he was able to set out everything very clearly and convincingly.  There was perhaps a disposition to digress into rather voluminous subordinate explanations, on such themes, for instance, as sacramentalism, whereon he found himself summarizing Frazer’s Golden Bough, which the Chasters’ controversy had first obliged him to read, and upon the irrelevance of the question of immortality to the process of salvation.  But the reality of his eclaircissement was very different from anything he prepared in these anticipations.