The surplice tempted him strongly, for it suggested the sermon he felt impelled to deliver, against the Bishop's orders. For the beautiful chapel in the piny glade was, somehow, false: or, at any rate, false for him. The architect had made it a dainty poem in stone and polished wood, but somehow God had evaded the neat little trap. Moreover, the God his well-bred congregation worshipped, the old traditionally imagined snow-white St. Bernard with radiant jowls of tenderness, shining dewlaps of love; paternal, omnipotent, calm--this deity, though sublime in its way, was too plainly an extension of their own desires. His prominent parishioners--Mr. Dobermann-Pinscher, Mrs. Griffon, Mrs. Retriever; even the delightful Mr. Airedale himself--was it not likely that they esteemed a deity everlastingly forgiving because they themselves felt need of forgiveness? He had been deeply shocked by the docility with which they followed the codes of the service: even when he had committed his blunder of the contradictory prayers, they had murmured the words automatically, without protest. To the terrific solemnities of the Litany they had made the responses with prompt gabbling precision, and with a rapidity that frankly implied impatience to take the strain off their knees. Somehow he felt that to account for a world of unutterable strangeness they had invented a God far too cheaply simple. His mood was certainly not one of ribald easy scoff. It was they (he assured himself) whose theology was essentially cynical; not he. He was a little weary of this just, charitable, consoling, hebdomadal God; this God who might be sufficiently honoured by a decorously memorized ritual. Yet was he too shallow? Was it not seemly that his fellows, bound on this dark, desperate venture of living, should console themselves with decent self-hypnosis? No, he thought. No, it was not entirely seemly. If they pretended that their God was the highest thing knowable, then they must bring to His worship the highest possible powers of the mind. He had a strange yearning for a God less lazily conceived: a God perhaps inclement, awful, master of inscrutable principles. Yet was it desirable to shake his congregation's belief in their traditional divinity? He thought of them--so amiable, amusing, spirited and generous, but utterly untrained for abstract imaginative thought on any subject whatever. His own strange surmisings about deity would only shock and horrify them And after all, was it not exactly their simplicity that made them lovable? The great laws of truth would work their own destinies without assistance from him! Even if these pleasant creatures did not genuinely believe the rites they so politely observed (he knew they did not, for BELIEF is an intellectual process of extraordinary range and depth), was it not socially useful that they should pretend to do so?