It is an arguable thesis that the Protestantism which broke off from catholic unity in the sixteenth century is now most authentically represented by the group calling itself ‘The Modern Churchmen’s Union for the advancement of Liberal Religious Thought.’ Not that these modern ecclesiastical Liberals have fewer inconsistencies in doctrine and practice than have the other insurgents against the de facto and de jure Catholic Church. Thus even the authentic ‘aims of the Modern Churchmen’s Union’ as authentically stated in the Report (p. xvii) contain the following :

(a) For the moment we are at a loss to know how the President of the Union, Dean Inge, has allowed the category of Progress to find a place in the aims. His broadside attack on the modern idea of Progress is remembered by us as one of the most refreshing draughts in modern English letters.

Most of us are aware that, at intervals during the last three centuries, efforts have been made by well-meaning persons to realise the pathetic dream of a re-united Church, something not quite Protestant and not quite Catholic, based upon those principles of compromise which are so dear to the English heart. But none of them, I suppose, has ever been made with so little appreciation of the facts, so quaint a misunderstanding of values, as that described by its author in a book entitled ‘Journal of a Tour in Italy in 1850,’ by George Townsend, D.D., Canon of Durham, published by Messrs. Rivington in 1851. I am suspected, I do not know why, of being infected with that April Fool’s Day spirit which delights to palm off literary frauds on the public. Let me explain, then, that the volume really exists, and that my quotations are all genuine. Nor let it be supposed that I am the victim, any more than I am the author, of an imposture. Canon Townsend has his niche in the Dictionary of National Biography; he is no fiction of a Tractarian humorist, he is solid fact. A visit to Durham might even supply us with his portrait, but I have felt the pilgrimage to be unnecessary. I think I see the old gentleman well enough as it is; white-chokered, well-tailored, earnest, whiskered after the fashion of his time. He had got his canonry, I suppose, before 1840, and was not therefore affected by the findings of the Ecclesiastical Commission, which cut down its value to a beggarly thousand a year; he liked, clearly, to do himself well, and was not infected with the enthusiasm of the Evangelicals.

Having learnt by experience how frequently the evil that a man does falls back upon his own head, our wise forefathers gave us the proverb which says that curses always come home to roost. This is brought back to our mind by the significance of the declarations of the recent Lambeth Conference along with the explanations or excuses since offered by the Anglican prelates responsible. It is another case of the proverb. It has taken three hundred years to overthrow the calumnious accusations of the reformers concerning the morality of the ancient monasteries, and it is to Protestant historians like Gairdner that we are indebted for much of the labour involved in the destruction of that false accusation. Does it not seem that the curse has come home to roost when we find the chief authorities of the Anglican body publicly and officially teaching that unnatural vice in sexual relationship is right and good provided that it be done ‘in the light of Christian principles’?

We should be tempted to laugh were the blasphemy not so horrible. All who had followed the trimming and compromising of the Anglican leaders were quite prepared to see them bow to expediency in this case also by declaring that birth-prevention was allowable. But it is the hypocrisy of that phrase ‘in the light of Christian principles’ which sticks in our throat: we were not prepared for that, for we did not think they had fallen so far from Christ.

Above the narrow valley of Champéry the Dent du Midi makes a dreadful caricature of the Trinity. The three great figures loom up against the sky, huddling together in evil conclave, leaning backwards in attitudes of insolence and pride. When the light is behind them their stony faces brood darkly in the shadow, a living monument to the mystery of evil; when the sun beats on them they stare over into Savoy, blank, cruel, unanswering; mouthless and eyeless, yet they grin and mock as if eternally amused at the helplessness of the human intellect faced with the unanswered question of evil. Their snow-streaked robes fall in gigantic folds about the granite cliffs where they sit enthroned; there is a suggestion of vast elbows and shoulders, of dreadful muscles and sinews, of huge limbs reposing, of fearful power waiting and held in reserve. Yet somewhere amidst that mighty solidity there is a hint of heaviness, of blankness, of —stupidity. They are a trio of darkness; and though the light is on them, it is never in them, and though the clouds gather about them as if to hide their great Council from human eyes, the frightened watcher has a suspicion, deep down, that their staring pride is valueless to the heavens and their mighty cogitations are empty and unwise.

Immediately beside the third great figure is a fourth point, the Haute Cime, higher than all three, standing up like the back of a throne; the cliff falls down from it in a great sweeping curve and gathers again into the solid bastion of golden granite called the Dent de Chaux.

It has been market-day across the water, and the market-folk are on their way home and bringing as it were, the market with them.

The boats are coming back from the other side of the bay heaped with empty baskets and with others still full of unsold goods, and crowded with servants and housewives and peasants squeezed together in a seething, bubbling mass, like sheep in a pen to whom have been given of a sudden the voice of jays. The noise is indescribable; quarrelling, arguing, shouting, laughing, with live ducks cackling and hens flapping their wings, with the thud and rattle of the wheezy engines, the splash of the paddles, and the shouting of porters and omnibus drivers on the quay :

—such a hurly-burly as surely only French lungs can produce.

Up the hill they come in an unending procession, huge hooded omnibuses that are evidently the direct offspring of the old diligences, donkey-carts rattling and important, wagons from the country with jingling bell-hung harness on the big horses that stamp and stumble on the uneven cobbles. They are filled—and over-filled—with peasants on their way to far-off villages, or ‘getting a lift’ to nearer ones, with men in blouses, women in gay shawls and linen coiffes, who sit on the shafts, on the sides, who crowd the seats of perch insecurely on the piles of empty baskets.