“At Oxford, I fear, I had the artistic temperament rather badly; and artists love to be limited.  I liked the church as a pretty pattern; discipline was mere decoration.  I delighted in mere divisions of time; I liked eating fish on Friday.  But then I like fish; and the fast was made for men who like meat.  Then I came to Hoxton and found men who had fasted for five hundred years; men who had to gnaw fish because they could not get meat—­and fish-bones when they could not get fish.  As too many British officers treat the army as a review, so I had treated the Church Militant as if it were the Church Pageant.  Hoxton cures that.  Then I realized that for eighteen hundred years the Church Militant had not been a pageant, but a riot—­and a suppressed riot.  There, still living patiently in Hoxton, were the people to whom the tremendous promises had been made.  In the face of that I had to become a revolutionary if I was to continue to be religious.  In Hoxton one cannot be a conservative without being also an atheist—­ and a pessimist.  Nobody but the devil could want to conserve Hoxton.

“On the top of all this comes Hawkins.  If he had cursed all the Hoxton men, excommunicated them, and told them they were going to hell, I should have rather admired him.  If he had ordered them all to be burned in the market-place, I should still have had that patience that all good Christians have with the wrongs inflicted on other people.  But there is no priestcraft about Hawkins—­nor any other kind of craft.  He is as perfectly incapable of being a priest as he is of being a carpenter or a cabman or a gardener or a plasterer.  He is a perfect gentleman; that is his complaint.  He does not impose his creed, but simply his class.  He never said a word of religion in the whole of his damnable address.  He simply said all the things his brother, the major, would have said.  A voice from heaven assures me that he has a brother, and that this brother is a major.

“When this helpless aristocrat had praised cleanliness in the body and convention in the soul to people who could hardly keep body and soul together, the stampede against our platform began.  I took part in his undeserved rescue, I followed his obscure deliverer, until (as I have said) we stood together on the wall above the dim gardens, already clouding with fog.  Then I looked at the curate and at the burglar, and decided, in a spasm of inspiration, that the burglar was the better man of the two.  The burglar seemed quite as kind and human as the curate was—­ and he was also brave and self-reliant, which the curate was not.  I knew there was no virtue in the upper class, for I belong to it myself; I knew there was not so very much in the lower class, for I had lived with it a long time.  Many old texts about the despised and persecuted came back to my mind, and I thought that the saints might well be hidden in the criminal class.  About the time Hawkins let himself down the ladder I was crawling up a low, sloping, blue-slate roof after the large man, who went leaping in front of me like a gorilla.