The Inside of the Cup — Complete. Winston Churchill

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      “We are indebted to Mr. Langmaid for Mr. Hodder.” This was one of Mr. Waring's rare remarks.

      Eleanor Goodrich caught her husband's eye, and smiled.

      “I wonder why it is,” she said, “that we are so luke-warm about church in these days? I don't mean you, Lucy, or Laureston,” she added to her sister, Mrs. Grey. “You're both exemplary.” Lucy bowed ironically. “But most people of our ages with whom we associate. Martha Preston, for instance. We were all brought up like the children of Jonathan Edwards. Do you remember that awful round-and-round feeling on Sunday afternoons, Sally, and only the wabbly Noah's Ark elephant to play with, right in this house? instead of THAT!” There was a bump in the hall without, and shrieks of laughter. “I'll never forget the first time it occurred to me—when I was reading Darwin—that if the ark were as large as Barnum's Circus and the Natural History Museum put together, it couldn't have held a thousandth of the species on earth. It was a blow.”

      “I don't know what we're coming to,” exclaimed Mrs. Waring gently.

      “I didn't mean to be flippant, mother,” said Eleanor penitently, “but I do believe the Christian religion has got to be presented in a different way, and a more vital way, to appeal to a new generation. I am merely looking facts in the face.”

      “What is the Christian religion?” asked Sally's husband, George Bridges, who held a chair of history in the local flourishing university. “I've been trying to find out all my life.”

      “You couldn't be expected to know, George,” said his wife. “You were brought up an Unitarian, and went to Harvard.”

      “Never mind, professor,” said Phil Goodrich, in a quizzical, affectionate tone. “Take the floor and tell us what it isn't.”

      George Bridges smiled. He was a striking contrast in type to his square-cut and vigorous brother-in-law; very thin, with slightly protruding eyes the color of the faded blue glaze of ancient pottery, and yet humorous.

      “I've had my chance, at any rate. Sally made me go last Sunday and hear Mr. Hodder.”

      “I can't see why you didn't like him, George,” Lucy cried. “I think he's splendid.”

      “Oh, I like him,” said Mr. Bridges.

      “That's just it!” exclaimed Eleanor. “I like him. I think he's sincere. And that first Sunday he came, when I saw him get up in the pulpit and wave that long arm of his, all I could think of was a modern Savonarola. He looks one. And then, when he began to preach, it was maddening. I felt all the time that he could say something helpful, if he only would. But he didn't. It was all about the sufficiency of grace—whatever that may be. He didn't explain it. He didn't give me one notion as to how to cope a little better with the frightful complexities of the modern lives we live, or how to stop quarrelling with Phil when he stays at the office and is late for dinner.”

      “Eleanor, I think you're unjust to him,” said Lucy, amid the laughter of the men of the family. “Most people in St. John's think he is a remarkable preacher.”

      “So were many of the Greek sophists,” George Bridges observed.

      “Now if it were only dear old Doctor Gilman,” Eleanor continued, “I could sink back into a comfortable indifference. But every Sunday this new man stirs me up, not by what he says, but by what he is. I hoped we'd get a rector with modern ideas, who would be able to tell me what to teach my children. Little Phil and Harriet come back from Sunday school with all sorts of questions, and I feel like a hypocrite. At any rate, if Mr. Hodder hasn't done anything else, he's made me want to know.”

      “What do you mean by a man of modern ideas, Eleanor?” inquired Mr. Bridges, with evident relish.

      Eleanor put down her coffee cup, looked at him helplessly, and smiled.

      “Somebody who will present Christianity to me in such a manner that it will appeal to my reason, and enable me to assimilate it into my life.”

      “Good for you, Nell,” said her husband, approvingly. “Come now, professor, you sit up in the University' Club all Sunday morning and discuss recondite philosophy with other learned agnostics, tell us what is the matter with Mr. Hodder's theology. That is, if it will not shock grandmother too much.”

      “I'm afraid I've got used to being shocked, Phil,” said Mrs. Waring, with her quiet smile.

      “It's unfair,” Mr. Bridges protested, “to ask a prejudiced pagan like me to pronounce judgment on an honest parson who is labouring according to his lights.”

      “Go on, George. You shan't get out of it that way.”

      “Well,” said George, “the trouble is, from the theological point of view, that your parson is preaching what Auguste Sabatier would call a diminished and mitigated orthodoxy.”

      “Great heavens!” cried Phil. “What's that?”

      “It's neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, nor good red herring,” the professor declared. “If Mr. Hodder were cornered he couldn't maintain that he, as a priest, has full power to forgive sins, and yet he won't assert that he hasn't. The mediaeval conception of the Church, before Luther's day, was consistent, at any rate, if you once grant the premises on which it was based.”

      “What premises?”

      “That the Almighty had given it a charter, like an insurance company, of a monopoly of salvation on this portion of the Universe, and agreed to keep his hands off. Under this conception, the sale of indulgences, masses for the soul, and temporal power are perfectly logical—inevitable. Kings and princes derive their governments from the Church. But if we once begin to doubt the validity of this charter, as the Reformers did, the whole system flies to pieces, like sticking a pin into a soap bubble.

      “That is the reason why—to change the figure—the so-called Protestant world has been gradually sliding down hill ever since the Reformation. The great majority of men are not willing to turn good, to renounce the material and sensual rewards under their hands without some definite and concrete guaranty that, if they do so, they are going, to be rewarded hereafter. They demand some sort of infallibility. And when we let go of the infallibility of the Church, we began to slide toward what looked like a bottomless pit, and we clutched at the infallibility of the Bible. And now that has begun to roll.

      “What I mean by a mitigated orthodoxy is this: I am far from accusing Mr. Hodder of insincerity, but he preaches as if every word of the Bible were literally true, and had been dictated by God to the men who held the pen, as if he, as a priest, held some supernatural power that could definitely be traced, through what is known as the Apostolic Succession, back to Peter.”

      “Do you mean to say, George,” asked Mrs. Waring, with a note of pain in her voice, “that the Apostolic Succession cannot be historically proved?”

      “My dear mother,” said George, “I hope you will hold me innocent of beginning this discussion. As a harmless professor of history in our renowned University (of which we think so much that we do not send our sons to it) I have been compelled by the children whom you have brought up to sit in judgment on the theology of your rector.”

      “They will leave us nothing!” she sighed.

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