Hodder did not immediately reply.  Nor did Alison interrupt his silence, but sat with the stillness which at times so marked her personality, her eyes trustfully fixed on him.  The current pulsing between them was unbroken.  Hodder’s own look, as he gazed into the grate, was that of a seer.

“Yes,” he said at length, “it is by the spirit and not the letter of our Lord’s teaching that we are guided.  The Spirit which we draw from the Gospels.  And everything written down there that does not harmonize with it is the mistaken interpretation of men.  Once the Spirit possesses us truly, we are no longer troubled and confused by texts.

“The alpha and omega of Christ’s message is rebirth into the knowledge of that Spirit, and hence submission to its guidance.  And that is what Paul meant when he said that it freed us from the law.  You are right, Alison, when you declare it to be a violation of the Spirit for a man and woman to live together when love does not exist.  Christ shows us that laws were made for those who are not reborn.  Laws are the rules of society, to be followed by those who have not found the inner guidance, who live and die in the flesh.  But the path which those who live under the control of the Spirit are to take is opened up to them as they journey.  If all men and women were reborn we should have the paradox, which only the reborn can understand, of what is best for the individual being best for society, because under the will of the Spirit none can transgress upon the rights and happiness of others.  The Spirit would make the laws and rules superfluous.

“And the great crime of the Church, for which she is paying so heavy an expiation, is that her faith wavered, and she forsook the Spirit and resumed the law her Master had condemned.  She no longer insisted on that which Christ proclaimed as imperative, rebirth.  She became, as you say, a mechanical organization, substituting, as the Jews had done, hard and fast rules for inspiration.  She abandoned the Communion of Saints, sold her birthright for a mess of pottage, for worldly, temporal power when she declared that inspiration had ceased with the Apostles, when she failed to see that inspiration is personal, and comes through rebirth.  For the sake of increasing her membership, of dominating the affairs of men, she has permitted millions who lived in the law and the flesh, who persisted in forcing men to live by the conventions and customs Christ repudiated, and so stultify themselves, to act in Christ’s name.  The unpardonable sin against the Spirit is to doubt its workings, to maintain that society will be ruined if it be substituted for the rules and regulations supposed to make for the material comforts of the nations, but which in reality suppress and enslave the weak.

“Nevertheless in spite of the Church, marvellously through the Church the germ of our Lord’s message has come down to us, and the age in which we live is beginning to realize its purport, to condemn the Church for her subservient rationalism.