Page:Yeast. A Problem - Kingsley (1851).djvu/82

 'I want you to tell me that. Here I am, with youth, health, strength, money, every blessing of life—but one; and I am utterly miserable. I want some one to tell me what I want.'

'Is it not that you want—religion?'

'I see hundreds who have what you call religion, with whom I should scorn to change my irreligion.'

'But, Mr. Smith, are you not—are you not very wicked? They tell me so,' said Argemone, with an effort. 'And is not that the cause of your disease?'

Lancelot laughed.

'No, fairest prophetess, it is the disease itself. 'Why am I what I am, when I know more and more daily what I could be?'—That is the mystery; and my sins are the fruit, and not the root of it. Who will explain that?'

Argemone began,—

'The Church'

'Oh, Miss Lavington,' cried he, impatiently, 'will you, too, send me back to that cold abstraction? I came to you, however presumptuous, for living, human, advice to a living, human, heart; and will you pass off on me that Proteus-dream the Church, which in every man's mouth has a different meaning? In one book, meaning a method of education, only it has never been carried out; in another, a system of polity,—only it has never been realised;—now a set of words written in books, on whose meaning all are divided; now a body of men, who are daily excommunicating each other as heretics and apostates; now a universal idea; now the nar-