Page:Religion of a Sceptic (IA religionofscepti00powy).djvu/13

iar and beautiful words of the ancient liturgy?

But, in the second case, moving hesitatingly into the porch of the mellow eighteenth-century building on Second Avenue, already faintly suspicious of the queer "Dutch Pink" with which they have tricked up that monument of quiet customs, would he not be teased and disconcerted, as soon as he got inside, as though by something quite alien to his mood of poetic reverie?

Would it not seem to him that between what he sought just there—a consolatory sense of the binding together of the generations—and the humility of his expectation, there obtruded itself an element that was more adapted to the eclectic platform of some new Psychic Cult than to an altar where Jeremy Taylor could have worshipped or where Bishop Ken could have prayed?

If such a visitor had turned away rather peevishly from the orthodox discourse of his first venture, he would turn away now, we may be quite sure, with a much more indignant emotion.

In the first case no amount of pedantic explanation could interfere with the sober dignity of the time-hallowed words. In the second case between these words and his own reserved and taciturn piety there had intervened so many distracting modern sensations that the familiar charm was altogether destroyed.

To the mind of our imaginary visitor the great