"Wells, H G - Soul Of A Bishop" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells H G)

them to agree? Of course they won't agree. We've got to fight it
out. They say we're their slaves for ever. Have you ever read
Lady Bell's 'At the Works'? A well-intentioned woman, but she
gives the whole thing away. We say, No! It's our sort and not
your sort. We'll do without you. We'll get a little more
education and then we'll do without you. We're pressing for all
we can get, and when we've got that we'll take breath and press
for more. We're the Morlocks. Coming up. It isn't our fault that
we've differentiated."

"But you haven't understood the drift of Christianity," said
the bishop. "It's just to assert that men are One community and
not two."

"There's not much of that in the Creeds," said a second labour
leader who was a rationalist. "There's not much of that in the
services of the church."

The vicar spoke before his bishop, and indeed he had plenty of
time to speak before his bishop. "Because you will not set
yourselves to understand the symbolism of her ritual," he said.

"If the church chooses to speak in riddles," said the
rationalist.

"Symbols," said Morrice Deans, "need not be riddles," and for a
time the talk eddied about this minor issue and the chief labour
spokesman and the bishop looked at one another. The vicar
instanced and explained certain apparently insignificant
observances, his antagonist was contemptuously polite to these
explanations. "That's all very pratty," he said....

The bishop wished that fine points of ceremonial might have
been left out of the discussion.

Something much bigger than that was laying hold of his
intelligence, the realization of a world extravagantly out of
hand. The sky, the wind, the telegraph poles, had been jabbing in
the harsh lesson of these men's voices, that the church, as
people say, "wasn't in it." And that at the same time the church
held the one remedy for all this ugliness and contention in its
teaching of the universal fatherhood of God and the universal
brotherhood of men. Only for some reason he hadn't the phrases
and he hadn't the voice to assert this over their wrangling and
their stiff resolution. He wanted to think the whole business out
thoroughly, for the moment he had nothing to say, and there was
the labour leader opposite waiting smilingly to hear what he had
to say so soon as the bout between the vicar and the rationalist
was over.