“Ah,” said Howard, “who can say?  I am a conformist, certainly, because I recognise in religion a fine sobering, civilising force at work, and if one must choose one’s side, I want to be on that side and not on the other.  But religion seems to me in its essence a very artistic thing, a perception of effects which are hidden from many hearts and minds.  When a man speaks of definite religious experience, I feel that I am in the presence of a perception of something real—­as real as music and painting.  But I doubt if it is a sense given to all, or indeed to many; and I don’t know what it really is.  And then, too, one comes across people who hold it in an ugly, or a dreary, or a combative, or a formal way; and then sometimes it seems to me almost an evil thing.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Graves, “I understand that.  May I give you an instance, and you will see if I perceive your thought.  The good Vicar here, my cousin Frank, Jack’s father—­you will meet him to-night—­is a man who holds a rigid belief, or thinks he holds it.  He preaches what he calls the sinew and bone of doctrine, and he is very stern in the pulpit.  He likes lecturing people in rows!  But in reality he is one of the kindest and vaguest of men.  He preached a stiff sermon about conversion the other day—­I am pretty sure he did not understand it himself—­and he disquieted one of my good maids so much that she went to him and asked what she could do to get assurance.  He seems to have hummed and hawed, and then to have said that she need not trouble her head about it—­that she was a good girl, and had better be content with doing her duty.  He is the friendliest of men, and that is his real religion; he hasn’t an idea how to apply his system, which he learned at a theological college, but he feels it his duty to preach it.”

“Yes,” said Howard, “that is just what I mean; but there must be some explanation for this curious outburst of forms and doctrines, so contradictory in the different sects.  Something surely causes both the form of religion and the force of it?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Graves, “just as in an engine something causes both the steam and the piston-rod; it’s an intelligence somewhere that fits the one to the other.  But then, as you say, what is the cause of all this extravagance and violence of expression?”

“That is the human element,” said Howard—­“the cautious, conservative, business-like side that can’t bear to let anything go.  All religion begins, it seems to me, by an outburst of moral force, an attempt to simplify, to get a principle; and then the people who don’t understand it begin to make it technical and defined; uncritical minds begin to attribute all sorts of vague wonders to it—­things unattested, natural exaggerations, excited statements, impossible claims; and then these take traditional shape and the poor steed gets hung with all sorts of incongruous burdens.”