“Ah! well, Archdeacon, I think you will find if a man is anxious about setting matters right to-day and here he will not be indifferent about to-morrow and there. But you must satisfy him there is a to-morrow and there.” “But that is of course.” “To you, yes. But to how many? I don’t judge men by their professions or their creeds. I judge them by their acts. And so judged I conclude that for most men to-day and here are very real, to-morrow and there are very visionary, very problematical; so distant, so uncertain, as to be a negligible quantity.” “Then you would have us?” “I would have the Church remember that we live in a questioning age, an age when the fact of an institution or an opinion being hoary with age, so far from rendering it secure from investigation rather makes it an object of suspicion. We have found our forefathers wrong in so many things, and we have improved on them so much, that we have lost our confidence in their judgment. The Church drones about things nobody questions I mean what Matthew Arnold calls ‘right conduct,’ what you call ‘righteousness’; it dogmatises, I mean asserts positively or takes for granted things which an increasing number of intelligent men are very far indeed from taking for granted. Men will no more endure being droned to about right conduct than they will submit to having it eternally dinned into their ears that twice two makes four. They cry you ‘granted.’ They go to Church for bread and you give them a stone. They seek for guidance and assurance, if guidance and assurance there may be, on matters you have made a special study, and instead of showing them how to be sure, you only tell them that you are sure.” “What more can we do? People don’t believe, because their hearts are corrupt, and they don’t want to believe. If anyone wish to know the truth let him seek it on his knees. ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but cannot tell whither it cometh, and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit.’” “Possibly,” said Edward, dryly. “We quote authorities in the Law Courts, Mr. St. Clair; but, you see, they are of acknowledged validity there. The suitors in our Courts are bound by the law they seek to invoke, and submit themselves to the jurisdiction when they enter their plaints. You see, the whole point is that, to-day, you have to deal with honest doubters who deny the authority of your authority, and your only answer is a _petitio principis_. But I see Miss St. Clair is ready for her expedition to the village, and I am to have the honour of accompanying her.”