The bishop held the paper in his hand, and with a mind that he felt to be terribly open, asked himself how true that sharp indictment might be, and, granting its general truth, what was the duty of the church, that is to say of the bishops, for as Cyprian says, ecelesia est in episcopo.  We say the creeds; how far may we unsay them?

So far he had taken no open action against Chasters.  Suppose now he were to side with Chasters and let the whole diocese, the church of Princhester, drift as far as it chose under his inaction towards an extreme modernism, risking a conflict with, and if necessary fighting, the archbishop....  It was but for a moment that his mind swung to this possibility and then recoiled.  The Laymen, that band of bigots, would fight.  He could not contemplate litigation and wrangling about the teaching of the church.  Besides, what were the “trappings of religion” and what the essentials?  What after all was “the pure gospel of Christ” of which this writer wrote so glibly?  He put the paper down and took a New Testament from his desk and opened it haphazard.  He felt a curious wish that he could read it for the first time.  It was over-familiar.  Everything latterly in his theology and beliefs had become over-familiar.  It had all become mechanical and dead and unmeaning to his tired mind....

Whippham came with a reminder of more tub-rolling, and the bishop’s speculations were broken off.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH — THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND

(1)

That night when he cried aloud at the memory of his furtive cigarette, the bishop was staying with a rich man named Garstein Fellows.  These Garstein Fellows people were steel people with a financial side to them; young Garstein Fellows had his fingers in various chemical businesses, and the real life of the firm was in various minor partners called Hartstein and Blumenhart and so forth, who had acquired a considerable amount of ungentlemanly science and energy in Germany and German Switzerland.  But the Fellows element was good old Princhester stuff.  There had been a Fellows firm in Princhester in 1819.  They were not people the bishop liked and it was not a house the bishop liked staying at, but it had become part of his policy to visit and keep in touch with as many of the local plutocracy as he could, to give and take with them, in order to make the presence of the church a reality to them.  It had been not least among the negligences and evasions of the sainted but indolent Hood that he had invariably refused overnight hospitality whenever it was possible for him to get back to his home.  The morning was his working time.  His books and hymns had profited at the cost of missing many a generous after-dinner subscription, and at the expense of social unity.  From the outset Scrope had set himself to alter this.  A certain lack of enthusiasm on Lady Ella’s part had merely