“Yes:  I heard that your sermon last Sunday had caused a scandal.  What was it you said?  That, in a breakdown of Christianity like the present, we might leave talk of the public-houses and usefully consider Sunday closing of churches and chapels—­or something of the sort.”

“Was it in that form the report reached you?” the Minister asked with entire gravity.  “There is an epigrammatist abroad in Polpier, and I have never been able to trace him—­or her.  But it is the truth—­and it may well have leaked out in my discourse—­that I feel our services to have lost their point and our ministrations their savour. . . .  I—­I beg your pardon,” he corrected himself:  “I should have said ‘my ministrations.’”

“Not at all. . . .  Do you suppose I have not been feeling with you—­ that all our business has suddenly turned flat, stale, unprofitable?”

“It is a natural discouragement. . . .  Let us own it to none until we have found our hearts again.  I see now that even that hint of it in my sermon was a momentary lapse of loyalty.  Meanwhile I clutch on this proposal of yours.  It will give us all what we most want—­a sense of being useful.”

The Vicar stepped back a pace and eyed him.  Then, on an impulse—­

“Hambly,” he said, “you have to hear Confession.  I am going to tell you something I have kept secret even from my wife. . . .  I have written to the Bishop asking his permission to volunteer for service.”

“May God bring you safely back, my friend!  If I were younger. . . .  And the Army will want chaplains.”

“But I am not offering myself as a chaplain.”

“How, then?”

“I am asking leave to fight. . . .  Don’t stare, man; and don’t answer me until you have heard my reasons.  Well, you have read your newspaper and must have noted how, all over Britain, the bishops, clergy, and ministers of all denominations are turning themselves into recruiting sergeants and urging men to fight.  You note how they preach this War as a War in defence of Law, in defence of Right against Might, a War for the cause of humanity, a War for an ideal.  In to-day’s paper it has even become a War against War. . . .  Well, if all this be true, why should I as a priest be denied my share in the crusade?  Why should I be forbidden to lay down my life in what is, to these people, so evidently my Master’s service?  Why should it be admirable—­nay, a fundamental of manhood—­in Tom and Dick and Harry to play the Happy Warrior life-size, but reprehensible in me? Or again, look at it in this way.—­You and I, as ministers of the Gospel, have gone about preaching it (pretty ineffectively, to be sure) for a Gospel of Peace.  Well now, if these fellows are right, it turns out that we have been wrong all the time, and the sooner we make amends, by carrying a gun, the better.  Any way—­priest or no priest—­I have in me certain scruples which deter me from telling Tom or Dick or Harry to take a gun and kill a man, and from scolding him if he is not quick about it, while I myself am not proposing to take the risk or earn the undying honour—­ or the guilt—­whichever it may be.”