"I will send you papers to-morrow morning. But of course"--added Meynell, after a pause--"a great many of us will be out of our berths, in a few months, temporarily at least. It will rest with Parliament whether we remain so!" "The Non-Jurors of the twentieth century!" murmured Norham, with a half-sceptical intonation. "Ah, but this _is_ the twentieth century!"--said Meynell smiling. "And in our belief the _denouement_ will be different." "What will you do--you clergy--when you are deprived?" "In the first place, it will take a long time to deprive us--and so long as there are any of us left in our livings, each will come to the help of the other." "But you yourself?" "I have already made arrangements for a big barn in the village"--said Meynell, smiling--"a great tithe-barn of the fifteenth century, a magnificent old place, with a forest of wooden arches, and a vault like a church. The village will worship there for a while. We shall make it beautiful!" Norham was silent for a moment. He was stupefied by the energy, the passion of religious hope in the face beside him. Then the critical temper in him conquered his emotion, and he said, not without sarcasm: "This is all very surprising--very interesting--but what are the _ideas_ behind you? A thing like this cannot live without ideas--and I confess I have always thought the ideas of Liberal Christianity a rather beggarly set-out--excuse the phrase!" "There is nothing to excuse!--the phrase fits. 'A reduced Christianity'--as opposed to a 'full Christianity'--that is the description lately given, I think, by a divinity professor. I don't quarrel with it at all. Who can care for a 'reduced' anything! But a _transformed_ Christianity--that is another matter." "Why 'Christianity' at all?" Meynell looked at him in a smiling silence. He--the man of religion--was unwilling in these surroundings to play the prophet, to plunge into the central stream of argument. But Norham, the outsider and dilettante, was conscious of a kindled mind. "That is the question to which it always seems to me there is no answer," he said easily, leaning back in his chair. "You think you can take what you like of a great historical religion and leave the rest--that you can fall back on its pre-suppositions and build it anew. But the pre-suppositions themselves are all crumbling. 'God,'--'soul,' 'free-will,' 'immortality'--even human identity--is there one of the old fundamental notions that still stands, unchallenged? What are we in the eyes of modern psychology--but a world of automata--dancing to stimuli from outside? What has become of conscience--of the moral law--of Kant's imperative--in the minds of writers like these?" He pointed to two recent novels lying on the table, both of them brilliant glorifications of sordid forms of adultery. Meynell's look fired.