The bishop avoided “The Light under the Altar” for nearly a year.  It was only when a second book was announced with the winning title of “The Core of Truth in Christianity” that he perceived he must take action.  He sat up late one night with a marked copy, a very indignantly marked copy, of the former work that an elderly colonel, a Wombash parishioner, an orthodox Layman of the most virulent type, had sent him.  He perceived that he had to deal with a dialectician of exceptional ability, who had concentrated a quite considerable weight of scholarship upon the task of explaining away every scrap of spiritual significance in the Eucharist.  From Chasters the bishop was driven by reference to the works of Legge and Frazer, and for the first time he began to measure the dimensions and power of the modern criticism of church doctrine and observance.  Green tea should have lit his way to refutation; instead it lit up the whole inquiry with a light of melancholy confirmation.  Neither by night nor by day could the bishop find a proper method of opening a counter attack upon Chasters, who was indisputably an intellectually abler man and a very ruthless beast indeed to assail, and meanwhile the demand that action should be taken increased.

The literature of church history and the controversies arising out of doctrinal development became the employment of the bishop’s leisure and a commanding preoccupation.  He would have liked to discuss with some one else the network of perplexities in which he was entangling himself, and more particularly with Canon Bliss, but his own positions were becoming so insecure that he feared to betray them by argument.  He had grown up with a kind of intellectual modesty.  Some things he had never yet talked about; it made his mind blench to think of talking about them.  And his great aching gaps of wakefulness began now, thanks to the green tea, to be interspersed with theological dreams and visions of an extravagant vividness.  He would see Frazer’s sacrificial kings butchered picturesquely and terribly amidst strange and grotesque rituals; he would survey long and elaborate processions and ceremonials in which the most remarkable symbols were borne high in the sight of all men; he would cower before a gigantic and threatening Heaven.  These green-tea dreams and visions were not so much phases of sleep as an intensification and vivid furnishing forth of insomnia.  It added greatly to his disturbance that—­exceeding the instructions of Brighton-Pomfrey—­he had now experimented ignorantly and planlessly with one or two narcotics and sleeping mixtures that friends and acquaintances had mentioned in his hearing.  For the first time in his life he became secretive from his wife.  He knew he ought not to take these things, he knew they were physically and morally evil, but a tormenting craving drove him to them.  Subtly and insensibly his character was being undermined by the growing nervous trouble.

He astonished himself by the cunning and the hypocritical dignity he could display in procuring these drugs.  He arranged to have a tea-making set in his bedroom, and secretly substituted green tea, for which he developed a powerful craving, in the place of the delicate China tea Lady Ella procured him.