Page:Lesbia Newman - Dalton - 1889.djvu/175

 Church of which you are a pillar could never have been founded? After all that she has achieved and suffered through these semi-barbarous centuries, are you content at last to vegetate in the shade, existing upon sufferance, the sufferance of your inferiors, regarded with respectful pity by the vigorous, racy young sects springing up around you, and with pity the reverse of respectful by the rapidly-growing army of Freethinkers? To take a parallel case, it seems to me that there are few more lamentable sights than that of a person possessing some special gift which might be the means of conferring benefit and pleasure upon thousands, but who, not from stress of ill-health or penury or other adverse fortune, but solely from lack of courage, hides that talent away in a napkin, and allows it to be lost to the world. Then, if this be so where only an individual is concerned, how far more strongly does it apply to a venerable society whose avowed mission is to lead mankind to the light? What shall we say of such a body if it wilfully throw up its mission and slink into self-inflicted obscurity and impotence, and that too at a time when there is ample evidence that the mission promises to be successful, and needs only a determined effort to bring it to a glorious issue?’

Again the prelate, looking up, met Lesbia’s gaze, and again it shook him more than her uncle’s trenchant words. The latter resumed:—

‘What is the use of standing with folded hands, waiting for water to flow up hill or time to travel backwards? Your old priestly dominion is gone, you can no more recover it by dint of obstinacy than you can force us back into the pre-railway modes of life. The world is not what it was; it has cast off, for better or worse, its swaddling clothes, and that childish kind of faith which a claim to infallibility could sway is fading out of remembrance. You cannot resuscitate the past, but you can grasp the future; you can compel no