The three labour extremists that Morrice Deans had assembled obviously liked the bishop and found him picturesque, and were not above a certain snobbish gratification at the purple-trimmed company they were in, but it was clear that they regarded his intervention in the great dispute as if it were a feeble waving from the bank across the waters of a great river.

“There’s an incurable misunderstanding between the modern employer and the modern employed,” the chief labour spokesman said, speaking in a broad accent that completely hid from him and the bishop and every one the fact that he was by far the best-read man of the party.  “Disraeli called them the Two Nations, but that was long ago.  Now it’s a case of two species.  Machinery has made them into different species.  The employer lives away from his work-people, marries a wife foreign, out of a county family or suchlike, trains his children from their very birth in a different manner.  Why, the growth curve is different for the two species.  They haven’t even a common speech between them.  One looks east and the other looks west.  How can you expect them to agree?  Of course they won’t agree.  We’ve got to fight it out.  They say we’re their slaves for ever.  Have you ever read Lady Bell’s ‘At the Works’?  A well-intentioned woman, but she gives the whole thing away.  We say, No!  It’s our sort and not your sort.  We’ll do without you.  We’ll get a little more education and then we’ll do without you.  We’re pressing for all we can get, and when we’ve got that we’ll take breath and press for more.  We’re the Morlocks.  Coming up.  It isn’t our fault that we’ve differentiated.”

“But you haven’t understood the drift of Christianity,” said the bishop.  “It’s just to assert that men are One community and not two.”

“There’s not much of that in the Creeds,” said a second labour leader who was a rationalist.  “There’s not much of that in the services of the church.”

The vicar spoke before his bishop, and indeed he had plenty of time to speak before his bishop.  “Because you will not set yourselves to understand the symbolism of her ritual,” he said.

“If the church chooses to speak in riddles,” said the rationalist.

“Symbols,” said Morrice Deans, “need not be riddles,” and for a time the talk eddied about this minor issue and the chief labour spokesman and the bishop looked at one another.  The vicar instanced and explained certain apparently insignificant observances, his antagonist was contemptuously polite to these explanations.  “That’s all very pratty,” he said....

The bishop wished that fine points of ceremonial might have been left out of the discussion.