Is the gap above large enough to include an inspection of a market-cross, a pump, a camp, and a village church? Perhaps, considering how little was left of the last--though, of course, some of the walls had ancient invisible cores. But hardly for tea at the Rectory, which had to be fresh-made; rather like the church, though in the case of the latter a few of the old leaves were preserved from the first brew, so to speak. Poor old leaves!--poor conscious objects of active conservation, each paroxysm of which left a little less of the flavour of the _moyen âge_ behind it--a shadow less of excuse for another subscription list on their behalf, or another paper in the Journal of the local Society of Antiquaries. They were being handed down to posterity with such solicitude that whatever of bloom the axe and hammer of Puritanism had left behind seemed like to come off on the gloves of Ecclesiastical Archæology.
Is it necessary to say that the foregoing is only a peep into the ill-regulated mind of Mr. Alfred Challis at about the time that the fresh-made tea at the Rectory had begun to reanimate it? But, of course, Mr. Challis never said a word to this effect to his host, and that reverend gentleman naturally didn't want to talk about local matters. He was sick of his interesting surroundings, and wanted to hear about the new motor-car and wireless telegraphy and aerostation and coloured photography, and all sorts of things that were up-to-date three years ago, and for that matter are still, to a certain extent. About which and other things the literary gentleman was silent and absent-minded, in spite of the tea. Had he been bound to account to himself for this, he would have found it very difficult to do so. Not being bound, he allowed his mind to recognize the fact that he never did talk much to Parsons--you could never be sure you wouldn't give offence!--and to feel that reserve, short of incivility of course, was plausible at least.
For he was one of those unpractical persons who, never having been thrashed into a Creed in childhood, and being liberally ready to doubt any Creed of his own concoction, associated Religions, broadly speaking, with the opening or closing of shops on Sunday, the suppression of bands in the parks, and the singing of the same tune over and over again in unison at street-corners. When he came by chance on the sound of a harmonium making an unintelligible droning, he conceived of it as Christianity going on in a corner, fraught with a quaint old-world feeling to the passer-by, but scarcely to be encouraged by enlightenment. He had cultivated Ritual so far as to be ready, on emergency, to take off his hat and look intently into it, watching anxiously the while for subsidence of religious symptoms without. At old-fashioned houses, where Prayers might be expected to occur at any moment, he used to become in a sense demoralised, and felt lost when he found himself out of reach of a chair or convenient _prie-Dieu_ of some sort. His only really heart-felt expression of gratitude to his own or anyone else's Maker was the "Thank God that's over!" that he didn't say aloud at the end. Messiahs of all ranks, from the highest to the lowest, he regarded as mere bones of contention along interminable sectaries, all ready to fang each other, but kept in check by Scotland Yard. Qualified practitioners of Religion, whether Priest or Presbyter, he looked on as mere survivals of a past age perishing slowly of Civilization. He was not prepared to take the responsibility of hurrying their extinction, and, indeed, was ready to make concession on minor points, complying in literature with the public conviction that the pronoun standing for the name of the Maker of the Stellar Universe, and possibly others, really ought to be printed with a capital letter. We are merely putting him on record--not hinting at any opinion how far he was right or wrong.