"Don't let us argue the Reformation!" said the Bishop, with a new sharpness of note. "We should be here all night. But let me at least point out to you that the Church kept her Creeds!--the Succession!--the four great Councils!--the unbroken unity of essential dogma. But you"--he turned with renewed passion on his companion--"what have you done with the Creeds? Every word in them steeped in the heart's blood of generations!--and you put them aside as a kind of theological bric-a-brac that concerns us no more. Meynell!--you have no conception of the forces that this movement of yours, if you persist in it, will unchain against you! You are like children playing with the lightning!" Denunciation and warning sat with a curious majesty on the little Bishop as he launched these words. It was with a visible effort that Meynell braced himself against them. "Perhaps I estimate the forces for and against differently from yourself, Bishop. But when you prophesy war, I agree. There will be war!--and that makes the novelty of the situation. Till now there has never been equality enough for war. The heretic has been an excrescence to be cut away. Now you will have to make some terms with him! For the ideas behind him have invaded your inmost life. They are all about you and around you--and when you go out to fight him, you will discover that you are half on his side!" "If that means," said the Bishop impatiently, "that the Church is accessible to new ideas--that she is now, as she has always been, a learned Church--the Church of Westcott and Lightfoot, of a host of younger scholars who are as well acquainted with the ideas and contentions of Modernism--as you call it--as any Modernist in Europe--and are still the faithful servants and guardians of Christian dogma--why, then, you say what is true! We perfectly understand your positions--and we reject them." Through Meynell's expression there passed a gleam--slight and gentle--of something like triumph. "Forgive me!--but I think you have given me my point. Let me recall to you the French sayings--'Comprendre, c'est pardonner--Comprendre, c'est aimer.' It is because for the first time you do understand them--that, for the first time, the same arguments play upon you as play upon us--it is for that very reason that we regard the field as half won, before the battle is even joined." The Bishop gazed upon him with a thin, dropping lip--an expression of suffering in the clear blue eyes. "That Christians"--he said under his breath--"should divide the forces of Christ--with the sin and misery of this world devouring and defiling our brethren day by day!"