There is an entire difference in the mental quality of those who are converts to a faith and those who are brought up in it.  The former know it from outside as well as from within.  They know not only that it is, but also that it is not.  The latter have a confidence in their creed that is one with their apprehension of sky or air or gravitation.  It is a primary mental structure, and they not only do not doubt but they doubt the good faith of those who do.  They think that the Atheist and Agnostic really believe but are impelled by a mysterious obstinacy to deny.  So it had been with the Bishop of Princhester; not of cunning or design but in simple good faith he had accepted all the inherited assurances of his native rectory, and held by Church, Crown, Empire, decorum, respectability, solvency—­and compulsory Greek at the Little Go—­as his father had done before him.  If in his undergraduate days he had said a thing or two in the modern vein, affected the socialism of William Morris and learnt some Swinburne by heart, it was out of a conscious wildness.  He did not wish to be a prig.  He had taken a far more genuine interest in the artistry of ritual.

Through all the time of his incumbency of the church of the Holy Innocents, St. John’s Wood, and of his career as the bishop suffragan of Pinner, he had never faltered from his profound confidence in those standards of his home.  He had been kind, popular, and endlessly active.  His undergraduate socialism had expanded simply and sincerely into a theory of administrative philanthropy.  He knew the Webbs.  He was as successful with working-class audiences as with fashionable congregations.  His home life with Lady Ella (she was the daughter of the fifth Earl of Birkenholme) and his five little girls was simple, beautiful, and happy as few homes are in these days of confusion.  Until he became Bishop of Princhester—­he followed Hood, the first bishop, as the reign of his Majesty King Edward the Peacemaker drew to its close—­no anticipation of his coming distress fell across his path.

(2)

He came to Princhester an innocent and trustful man.  The home life at the old rectory of Otteringham was still his standard of truth and reality.  London had not disillusioned him.  It was a strange waste of people, it made him feel like a missionary in infidel parts, but it was a kindly waste.  It was neither antagonistic nor malicious.  He had always felt there that if he searched his Londoner to the bottom, he would find the completest recognition of the old rectory and all its data and implications.

But Princhester was different.

Princhester made one think that recently there had been a second and much more serious Fall.