Page:The Soul of a Bishop.djvu/297

Rh coughing reality of Phœbe, God was something as unsubstantial as the Binomial Theorem....

Very like the Binomial Theorem as one thought over that comparison....

By this time he had reached the banks of the Serpentine and was approaching the grey stone bridge that crosses just where Hyde Park ends and Kensington Gardens begins. Following upon his doubts of his religious faith had come another still more extraordinary question: "Although there is a God, does he indeed matter more in our ordinary lives than that same demonstrable Binomial Theorem? Isn't one's duty to Phœbe plain and clear?" Old Likeman's argument came back to him with novel and enhanced powers. Wasn't he after all selfishly putting his own salvation in front of his plain duty to those about him? What did it matter if he told lies, taught a false faith, perjured and damned himself, if after all those others were thereby saved and comforted?

"But that is just where the whole of this state of mind is false and wrong," he told himself. "God is something more than a priggish devotion, an intellectual formula. He has a hold and a claim he should have a hold and a claim  exceeding all the claims of Phœbe, Miriam, Daphne, Clementina  all of them...."

But he hasn't'!...

It was to that he had got after he had left Lady Sunderbund, and to that he now returned. It was the thinness