He looked down at the hearthrug, and tried to throw off a memory of his Princhester classes for young women, that oppressed him.  His manner he forced to a more familiar note.  He stuck his hands into his trouser pockets.

“You know, my dears, I had to give up the church.  I just simply didn’t believe any more in orthodox Church teaching.  And I feel I’ve never explained that properly to you.  Not at all clearly.  I want to explain that now.  It’s a queer thing, I know, for me to say to you, but I want you to understand that I am a religious man.  I believe that God matters more than wealth or comfort or position or the respect of men, that he also matters more than your comfort and prosperity.  God knows I have cared for your comfort and prosperity.  I don’t want you to think that in all these changes we have been through lately, I haven’t been aware of all the discomfort into which you have come—­the relative discomfort.  Compared with Princhester this is dark and crowded and poverty-stricken.  I have never felt crowded before, but in this house I know you are horribly crowded.  It is a house that seems almost contrived for small discomforts.  This narrow passage outside; the incessant going up and down stairs.  And there are other things.  There is the blankness of our London Sundays.  What is the good of pretending?  They are desolating.  There’s the impossibility too of getting good servants to come into our dug-out kitchen.  I’m not blind to all these sordid consequences.  But all the same, God has to be served first.  I had to come to this.  I felt I could not serve God any longer as a bishop in the established church, because I did not believe that the established church was serving God.  I struggled against that conviction—­and I struggled against it largely for your sakes.  But I had to obey my conviction....  I haven’t talked to you about these things as much as I should have done, but partly at least that is due to the fact that my own mind has been changing and reconsidering, going forward and going back, and in that fluid state it didn’t seem fair to tell you things that I might presently find mistaken.  But now I begin to feel that I have really thought out things, and that they are definite enough to tell you....”

He paused and resumed.  “A number of things have helped to change the opinions in which I grew up and in which you have grown up.  There were worries at Princhester; I didn’t let you know much about them, but there were.  There was something harsh and cruel in that atmosphere.  I saw for the first time—­it’s a lesson I’m still only learning—­how harsh and greedy rich people and employing people are to poor people and working people, and how ineffective our church was to make things better.  That struck me.  There were religious disputes in the diocese too, and they shook me.  I thought my faith was built on a rock, and I found it was built on sand.  It was slipping and sliding long before the war.