Perhaps one has just come from it and one’s soul is filled with the stern, glad singing of a great foundry, of the religious, victorious praising spirit of man, dipping up steel in mighty spoonfuls—­the stuff the inside of the earth is made of, and flinging it together into a great network or crust for the planet—­into mighty floors or sidewalks all round the earth for cities to tread on and there comes to seem something so successful, so manlike, so godlike about it, about the way these men who do these things do them and do what they set out to do, that when I find myself suddenly, all in a few minutes on a Sunday morning, thrown out of this atmosphere into a Christian church, find myself sitting all still and waiting, with all these good people about me, and when I find them offering me their religion so gravely, so hopefully, it all comes to me with a great rush sometimes—­comes to me as out of great deeps of resentment, that religion could possibly be made in a church to seem something so faint, so beautifully weary, so dreamy, and as if it were humming softly, absently to itself.

I wonder in the presence of a Christianity like this whether I am a Christian or not—­the quartet choirs, confections, the little, dainty, faintly sweet sermons—­it is as if—­no I will not say it....

I have this moment crossed the words out before my eyes.  It is as if, after all, religion, instead of being as I supposed down at the foundry, the stern and splendid music of man conquering all things for God, were, after all, some huge, sublime and holy vagueness, as if the service and the things I saw about me were not hard true realities—­as if going to Church were like sitting in a cloud—­some soft musical cloud or floating island of goodness and drifting and drifting....

* * * * *

Not all churches are alike, but I am speaking of something that must have happened to many men.  I but record this blank space on this page, as a spiritual fact, as a part of the religious experience of a man trying to be good.

When this little experience of which the words have to be crossed out after going to Church—­finally settles down, there is still a grim truth left in it.

The vagueness of the man who is good, who locks himself up in a Church and says, “Oh God!  Oh God!  Oh God!” and the vigour and incisiveness of the man who says nothing about it and who goes out of doors and acts like a god all the week—­these remain with me as a daily and abiding sense.

And when I find myself myself, I, who have gloried in cathedrals since I was a little child, looking ahead for a God upon the earth, and when I see the foundries, the airships, the ocean liners beckoning the soul of man upon the skies, and the victory of the soul over the dust and over the water and over the air and when I see the Cathedrals beside them, those vast, faint, grave, happy, floating islands of the Saved, drifting backward down the years, it does not seem as if I could bear the foundries saying one thing about my God and the cathedrals saying another.