“Without it, I should have remained a mere empiric, like the rest of our politicians.  I should have judged measures from the narrow, merely practical point of view; or rather, I should pretty certainly have guided myself by some theory in which I only tried to believe.”

“So you have now a belief, Dyce?  Come, that’s a point to have reached.  That alone should give you a distinction among the aspiring men of to-day.  And what do you believe?”

After drawing a meditative puff or two, Dyce launched into his familiar demonstration.  He would very much rather have left it aside; he felt that he was not speaking as one genuinely convinced, and that his father listened without serious interest.  But the theory had all to be gone through; he unwound it, like thread off a reel, rather mechanically and heavily towards the end.

“And that’s what you are going to live for?” said his father.  “That is your faith necessary to salvation?”

“I take it to be the interpretation of human history.”

“Perhaps it is; perhaps it is,” murmured the vicar, abstractedly.  “For my own part,” he added, bestirring himself to refill his pipe, “I can still see a guiding light in the older faith.  Of course the world has rejected it; I don’t seek to delude myself on that point; I shrink with horror from the blasphemy which would have us pretend that our civilisation obeys the spirit of Christ.  The world has rejected it.  Now as ever, ‘despised and rejected of men.’  The world, very likely, will do without religion.  Yet, Dyce, when I think of the Sermon on the Mount—­”

He paused again, holding his pipe in his hand, unlit, and looking before him with wide eyes.

“I respect that as much as anyone can,” said Dyce, gravely.

“As much as anyone can—­who doesn’t believe it.”  His father took him up with gentle irony.  “I don’t expect the impossible.  You cannot believe in it; for you were born a post-Darwinian.  Well, your religion is temporal; let us take that for granted.  You do not deny yourself; you believe that self-assertion to the uttermost is the prime duty.”

“Provided that self-assertion be understood aright.  I understand it as meaning the exercise of all my civic faculties.”

“Which, in your case, are faculties of command, faculties which point you to the upper seat, Dyce.  Tom Bullock, my gardener, is equally to assert himself, but with the understanding that his faculties point to the bottom of the table, where the bread is a trifle stale, and butter sometimes lacking.  Yes, yes:  I understand.  Of course you will do your very best for Tom; you would like him to have what the sweet language of our day calls a square meal.  But still he must eat below the salt; there you can’t help him.”

“Because nature itself cannot,” explained Dyce.  “One wants Tom to acknowledge that, without bitterness, and at the same time to understand that, but for him, his honest work, his clean life, the world couldn’t go on at all.  If Tom feels that, he is a religious man.”