of what you once were.  It was my custom to note my early impressions of all the men who worked with me, because I have a firm belief in the soundness of first impressions and the considerable risk one runs of having them obscured by the accidents and habituations of constant intercourse.  I found that quite early in your days at St. Matthew’s I wrote against your name ’enthusiastic, but a saving delicacy.’  After all our life-long friendship I would not write anything truer.  I would say of you to-day, ’This man might have been a revivalist, if he were not a gentleman.’  There is the enthusiast, there is the revivalist, in you.  It seems to me that the stresses and questions of this great crisis in the world’s history have brought it nearer to the surface than I had ever expected it to come.

“I quite understand and I sympathize with your impatience with the church at the present time; we present a spectacle of pompous insignificance hard to bear with.  We are doing very little, and we are giving ourselves preposterous airs.  There seems to be an opinion abroad that in some quasi-automatic way the country is going to collapse after the war into the arms of the church and the High Tories; a possibility I don’t accept for a moment.  Why should it?  These forcible-feeble reactionaries are much more likely to explode a revolution that will disestablish us.  And I quite understand your theological difficulties—­quite.  The creeds, if their entire symbolism is for a moment forgotten, if they are taken as opaque statements of fact, are inconsistent, incredible.  So incredible that no one believes them; not even the most devout.  The utmost they do is to avert their minds—­reverentially.  Credo quia impossibile.  That is offensive to a Western mind.  I can quite understand the disposition to cry out at such things, ’This is not the Church of God!’—­to run out from it—­

“You have some dream, I suspect, of a dramatic dissidence.

“Now, my dear Brother and erstwhile pupil, I ask you not to do this thing.  Wait, I implore you.  Give me—­and some others, a little time.  I have your promise for three months, but even after that, I ask you to wait.  Let the reform come from within the church.  The church is something more than either its creeds, its clergy, or its laymen.  Look at your cathedral rising out of and dominating Princhester.  It stands not simply for Athanasius; it stands but incidentally for Athanasius; it stands for all religion.  Within that fabric—­let me be as frank here as in our private conversation—­doctrine has altered again and again.  To-day two distinct religions worship there side by side; one that fades and one that grows brighter.  There is the old quasi-materialistic belief of the barbarians, the belief in such things, for example, as that Christ the physical Son of God descended into hell and stayed there, seeing the sights I suppose like any tourist and being treated with diplomatic civilities for three