“We are truly accustomed now to the idea that whatever has life cannot possibly remain unchanged, but must always develop by leaving some part behind and producing some part that is new.  It is God’s will that the religious thought of the world, which is made up of the thought of individuals, shall proceed in this way, whether we will or not, but it must always help progress when we can make our wills at one with God’s in this matter; we go faster and safer so.  Now to say that to submit willingly to God’s law of growth is to produce chaos must certainly be a fallacy.  It must then be a fallacy to argue that to keep a mind open to all influences is antagonistic to the truest religious life; we cannot—­whether we wish or not, we cannot—­let go any truth that has been assimilated into our lives; and what truth we have not assimilated it is no advantage to hold without agitation.  We know better where we are when we are forced to sift it.  It is the very great apparent advantage of recognised order that deceives us!  When we lose that apparent advantage, when we lose, too, the familiar names and symbols, and think, like children, that we have lost the reality they have expressed to us, a very low state of things appears to result.  The strain and stress of life become much greater.  Ah! but, my friend, it is that strain and stress that shape us into the image of God.”

“You hinted, I think, that to your mind there was a more real obstacle, one peculiar to our age.”

Ever since I first met him I have been puzzled to know how it was that I often knew so nearly what Toyner meant when he only partially expressed his thought; he had this power over my understanding.  He was my master from the first.

He laid his hand now slightly upon my arm, as though to emphasise what he said.

“It is a little hard to explain it reverently,” he said, “and still harder to understand why the difficulty should have come about, but in our day it would seem that the nights of prayer and the fresh intuition into the laws of God’s working, which we see united in the life of our great Example, have become divorced.  It is their union again that we must have—­that we shall have; but at present there is the difficulty for every man of us—­the men who lead us in either path are different men and lead different ways.  Our law-givers are not the men who meet God upon the mount.  Our scientists are not the teachers who are pre-eminent for fasting and prayer.  We who to be true to ourselves must follow in both paths find our souls perplexed.”

In front of us, as we turned a curve in the drive, a bed of scarlet lilies stood stately in the sun, and a pair of bickering sparrows rose from the fountain near which they grew.  Toyner made a slight gesture of his hand.  With the eagerness of a child he asked: 

“Is it not hard to believe that we may ask and expect forgiveness and gifts from the God who by slow inevitable laws of growth clothes the lilies, who ordains the fall of every one of these sparrows, foresees the fall and ordains it—­the God whose character is expressed in physical law?  The texts of Jesus have become so trite that we forget that they contain the same vision of ‘God’s mind in all things’ that makes it so hard to believe in a personality in God, that makes prayer seem to us so futile.”