’"The creed that rose in heaven sets below; and where we had an angel we have claw-feet and fangs.  Ask how that is!  The creed is much what it was when the followers diverged it from the Founder.  But humanity is not where it was when that creed was food and guidance.  Creeds will not die not fighting.  We cannot root them up out of us without blood.”

‘He threatens blood!—­’

’"Ours, my Beauchamp, is the belief that humanity advances beyond the limits of creeds, is to be tied to none.  We reverence the Master in his teachings; we behold the limits of him in his creed—­ and that is not his work.  We truly are his disciples, who see how far it was in him to do service; not they that made of his creed a strait-jacket for humanity.  So, in our prayers we dedicate the world to God, not calling him great for a title, no—­showing him we know him great in a limitless world, lord of a truth we tend to, have not grasped.  I say Prayer is good.  I counsel it to you again and again:  in joy, in sickness of heart.  The infidel will not pray; the creed-slave prays to the image in his box."’

‘I’ve had enough!’ Colonel Halkett ejaculated.

‘"We,"’ Captain Baskelett put out his hand for silence with an ineffable look of entreaty, for here was Shrapnel’s hypocrisy in full bloom: 

’"We make prayer a part of us, praying for no gifts, no interventions; through the faith in prayer opening the soul to the undiscerned.  And take this, my Beauchamp, for the good in prayer, that it makes us repose on the unknown with confidence, makes us flexible to change, makes us ready for revolution—­for life, then!  He who has the fountain of prayer in him will not complain of hazards.  Prayer is the recognition of laws; the soul’s exercise and source of strength; its thread of conjunction with them.  Prayer for an object is the cajolery of an idol; the resource of superstition.  There you misread it, Beauchamp.  We that fight the living world must have the universal for succour of the truth in it.  Cast forth the soul in prayer, you meet the efuence of the outer truth, you join with the creative elements giving breath to you; and that crust of habit which is the soul’s tomb; and custom, the soul’s tyrant; and pride, our volcano-peak that sinks us in a crater; and fear, which plucks the feathers from the wings of the soul and sits it naked and shivering in a vault, where the passing of a common hodman’s foot above sounds like the king of terrors coming,—­you are free of them, you live in the day and for the future, by this exercise and discipline of the soul’s faith.  Me it keeps young everlastingly, like the fountain of . . ."’

‘I say I cannot sit and hear any more of it!’ exclaimed the colonel, chafing out of patience.

Lord Palmet said to Miss Halkett:  ’Isn’t it like what we used to remember of a sermon?’

Cecilia waited for her father to break away, but Captain Baskelett had undertaken to skip, and was murmuring in sing-song some of the phrases that warned him off: