“What I mean by a mitigated orthodoxy is this:  I am far from accusing Mr. Hodder of insincerity, but he preaches as if every word of the Bible were literally true, and had been dictated by God to the men who held the pen, as if he, as a priest, held some supernatural power that could definitely be traced, through what is known as the Apostolic Succession, back to Peter.”

“Do you mean to say, George,” asked Mrs. Waring, with a note of pain in her voice, “that the Apostolic Succession cannot be historically proved?”

“My dear mother,” said George, “I hope you will hold me innocent of beginning this discussion.  As a harmless professor of history in our renowned University (of which we think so much that we do not send our sons to it) I have been compelled by the children whom you have brought up to sit in judgment on the theology of your rector.”

“They will leave us nothing!” she sighed.

“Nothing, perhaps, that was invented by man to appeal to man’s superstition and weakness.  Of the remainder—­who can say?”

“What,” asked Mrs. Waring, “do they say about the Apostolic Succession?”

“Mother is as bad as the rest of us,” said Eleanor.

“Isn’t she, grandfather?”

“If I had a house to rent,” said Mr. Bridges, when the laughter had subsided, “I shouldn’t advertise five bath rooms when there were only two, or electricity when there was only gas.  I should be afraid my tenants might find it out, and lose a certain amount of confidence in me.  But the orthodox churches are running just such a risk to-day, and if any person who contemplates entering these churches doesn’t examine the premises first, he refrains at his own cost.

“The situation in the early Christian Church is now a matter of history, and he who runs may read.  The first churches, like those of Corinth and Ephesus and Rome, were democracies:  no such thing as a priestly line to carry on a hierarchy, an ecclesiastical dynasty, was dreamed of.  It may be gathered from the gospels that such an idea was so far from the mind of Christ that his mission was to set at naught just such another hierarchy, which then existed in Israel.  The Apostles were no more bishops than was John the Baptist, but preachers who travelled from place to place, like Paul.  The congregations, at Rome and elsewhere, elected their own ‘presbyteri, episcopoi’ or overseers.  It is, to say the least, doubtful, and it certainly cannot be proved historically, that Peter ever was in Rome.”

“The professor ought to have a pulpit of his own,” said Phil.

There was a silence.  And then Evelyn, who had been eating quantities of hothouse grapes, spoke up.

“So far as I can see, the dilemma in which our generation finds itself is this,—­we want to know what there is in Christianity that we can lay hold of.  We should like to believe, but, as George says, all our education contradicts the doctrines that are most insisted upon.  We don’t know where to turn.  We have the choice of going to people like George, who know a great deal and don’t believe anything, or to clergymen like Mr. Hodder, who demand that we shall violate the reason in us which has been so carefully trained.”