How on earth did it come that he was sitting with his arm over the bulwarks of a yacht instead of——­Oh, the thing was a miracle—­a miracle!  He could think of it in no other light than that of a miracle.

Well, if it were a miracle, it had been the work of God, and God had to be thanked for it.  He had explained to Phyllis once that he thought of God only as a Principle—­as the Principle which worked in opposition to the principle of nature.  That was certainly the God which had been evolved out of modern civilization.  The pagan gods had been just the opposite.  They had been founded on natural principles.  The Hebrew tradition that God had made man in his own image was the reverse of the scheme of the pagan man who had made God after his own image; in the image of man created he God.

But holding the theory that he held—­that God was the sometimes successful opponent to the principles of nature (which he called the Devil)—­Herbert Courtland felt that this was the very God to whom his thanks were due for the miracle that had been performed on his behalf.

“Thank God—­thank God—­thank God!” he murmured, looking out over the rippling waters, steel gray in the soft shadow of the summer’s night.

But then he held that “thank God” was but a figure of speech.

“Tinky-tink, tinky-tink, tinky-tinky-tinky-tinky-tinky-tinky-tink,” went the youth with the banjo in the bows.

CHAPTER XXIII.

ITS MOUTHINGS OF THE PAST HAD BECOME ITS MUMBLINGS OF THE PRESENT.

It was very distressing—­very disappointing!  The bishop would neither institute proceedings against the rector of St. Chad’s nor state plainly if it was his intention to proceed against that clergyman.  When some people suggested very delicately—­the way ordinary people would suggest anything to a bishop—­that it was surely not in sympathy with the organization of the Church for any clergyman to take advantage of his position and his pulpit to cast sometimes ridicule, sometimes abuse, upon certain “scriptural characters”—­that was their phrase—­who had hitherto always been regarded as sacred, comparatively sacred, the bishop had brought the tips of the fingers of one hand in immediate, or almost immediate, contact with the tips of the fingers of his other hand, and had shaken his head—­mournfully, sadly.  These signs of acquiescence, trifling though they were, had encouraged the deputation that once waited on his lordship—­two military men (retired on the age clause), an officer of engineers (on the active list), a solicitor (retired), and a member of the London County Council (by occupation an ironmonger), to express the direct opinion that the scandal which had been created by the dissemination—­the unrebuked dissemination—­of the doctrines held by the rector of St. Chad’s was affording the friends of Disestablishment an additional argument in favor of their policy of spoliation.  At this statement his lordship had nodded his head three times with a gravity that deeply impressed the spokesman of the deputation.  He wondered if his lordship had ever before heard that phrase about the furnishing of an additional argument to the friends of Disestablishment. (As a matter of fact his lordship had heard it before.)