“It is curious that I should have met you this morning, Mr. Engel,” he said.  “I expressed surprise when you declared this was a religious age, because you corroborated something I had felt, but of which I had no sufficient proof.  I felt that a great body of unsatisfied men and women existed, but that I was powerless to get in touch with them; I had discovered that truth, as you have so ably pointed out, is disguised and distorted by ancient dogmas; and that the old Authority, as you say, no longer carries weight.”

“Have you found the new one?” Mr. Engel demanded.

“I think I have,” the rector answered calmly, “it lies in personality.  I do not know whether you will agree with me that the Church at large has a future, and I will confess to you that there was a time when I thought she had not.  I see now that she has, once given to her ministers that freedom to develop of which you speak.  In spite of the fact that truth has gradually been revealed to the world by what may be called an Apostolic Succession of Personalities,—­Augustine, Dante, Francis of Assisi, Luther, Shakespeare, Milton, and our own Lincoln and Phillips Brooks,—­to mention only a few,—­the Church as a whole has been blind to it.  She has insisted upon putting the individual in a straitjacket, she has never recognized that growth is the secret of life, that the clothes of one man are binding on another.”

“Ah, you are right—­a thousand times right,” cried the librarian.  “You have read Royce, perhaps, when he says, ’This mortal shall put on individuality—­’”

“No,” said the rector, outwardly cool, but inwardly excited by the coruscation of this magnificent paraphrase of Paul’s sentence, by the extraordinary turn the conversation had taken.  “I am ashamed to own that I have not followed the development of modern philosophy.  The books I have just returned, on historical criticism,” he went on, after a moment’s hesitation, “infer what my attitude has been toward modern thought.  We were made acquainted with historical criticism in the theological seminary, but we were also taught to discount it.  I have discounted it, refrained from reading it,—­until now.  And yet I have heard it discussed in conferences, glanced over articles in the reviews.  I had, you see, closed the door of my mind.  I was in a state where arguments make no impression.”

The librarian made a gesture of sympathetic assent, which was also a tribute to the clergyman’s frankness.

“You will perhaps wonder how I could have lived these years in an atmosphere of modern thought and have remained uninfluenced.  Well, I have recently been wondering—­myself.”  Hodder smiled.  “The name of Royce is by no means unfamiliar to me, and he taught at Harvard when I was an undergraduate.  But the prevailing philosophy of that day among the students was naturalism.  I represent a revolt from it.  At the seminary I imbibed a certain amount of religious philosophy—­but