"And that's what you are going to live for?" said his father. "That is your faith necessary to salvation?" "I take it to be the interpretation of human history." "Perhaps it is; perhaps it is," murmured the vicar, abstractedly. "For my own part," he added, bestirring himself to refill his pipe, "I can still see a guiding light in the older faith. Of course the world has rejected it; I don't seek to delude myself on that point; I shrink with horror from the blasphemy which would have us pretend that our civilisation obeys the spirit of Christ. The world has rejected it. Now as ever, 'despised and rejected of men.' The world, very likely, will do without religion. Yet, Dyce, when I think of the Sermon on the Mount--" He paused again, holding his pipe in his hand, unlit, and looking before him with wide eyes. "I respect that as much as anyone can," said Dyce, gravely. "As much as anyone can--who doesn't believe it." His father took him up with gentle irony. "I don't expect the impossible. You _cannot_ believe in it; for you were born a post-Darwinian. Well, your religion is temporal; let us take that for granted. You do not deny yourself; you believe that self-assertion to the uttermost is the prime duty." "Provided that self-assertion be understood aright. I understand it as meaning the exercise of all my civic faculties." "Which, in your case, are faculties of command, faculties which point you to the upper seat, Dyce. Tom Bullock, my gardener, is equally to assert himself, but with the understanding that _his_ faculties point to the bottom of the table, where the bread is a trifle stale, and butter sometimes lacking. Yes, yes: I understand. Of course you will do your very best for Tom; you would like him to have what the sweet language of our day calls a square meal. But still he must eat below the salt; there you can't help him." "Because nature itself cannot," explained Dyce. "One wants Tom to acknowledge that, without bitterness, and at the same time to understand that, but for _him_, his honest work, his clean life, the world couldn't go on at all. If Tom _feels_ that, he is a religious man."