To have been born amongst these people; to know at home and in the church a shared religious life. … They were in Heaven already. Through acting on their belief. Where two or three are gathered together. Nearer than thoughts; nearer than breathing; nearer than hands and feet. The church knew it; but put the cart before the horse; the surface before the reality. The beautiful surroundings, the bridge of music and then, the moment the organ stopped a booming or nasal voice at top speed, “T’ th’ Lordour God b’long mahcies ’n f’giveness.” … Anger and excited discovery and still more time wasted, in glancing across to find Michael, small and exposed at the gangway end, his head decorously bent, the Jew in him paying respect, but looking up and keenly about him from under his bent brows, observing on the only terms he knew, through eye and brain. …
Michael was a determinist. … But to assume the presence of the holy spirit was also determinism? … Beyond him Dr. Oldfield, huge and eagerly bowed, conforming to Quaker usages, describing the occasion in his mind as he went. It was just then, turning to get away from his version, that the quality of the silence had made the impression that had come back to her now.
Dr. McHibbert said pure being was nothing. But there is no such thing as nothing … being in the silence was being in something alive and positive; at the centre of existence; being there with others made the sense of it stronger than when it was experienced alone. Like lonely silence it drove away the sense of enclosure. There had been no stuffiness of congregated humanity; the air, breathed in, had held within it a freshness, spreading coolness and strength through the secret passages of the nerves.
It had felt like the beginning of a life that was checked and postponed into the future by the desire to formulate it; and by the nudging of a homesickness for daily life with these people who lived from the centre, admitted, in public, that life brims full all the time, away below thoughts and the loud shapes of things that happen. … And just as she had longed for the continuance of the admission, the spell had been broken. Suddenly, not in continuance, not coming out of the stillness, but interrupting it, an urbane, ingratiating voice. Standing up in the corner of the platform, turned towards the congregation, as if he were a lecturer facing an audience, a dapper little man in a new spring suit, with pink cheeks and a pink rose in his buttonhole. … Afterwards it had seemed certain that he had broken the silence because the time was running out. Strangers were present and the spirit must move. …
It had been a little address, a thought-out lecture on natural history, addressed by a specialist to people less well informed. He had talked his subject not with, but at them. … While his voice went on, the gathering seemed to lose all its religious significance. His informing air; his encouraging demonstrator’s smiles; his obvious relish of the array of facts. They fell on the air like lies, losing even their own proper value, astray and intruding in the wrong context. When he sat down the silence was there again, but within it were the echoes of the urbane, expounding, professorial voice. Then, just afterwards, the breaking forth of that old man’s muffled tones; praying; quietly, as if he were alone. No one to be seen; a humbled life-worn old voice, coming out of the heart of the gathering, carrying with it, gently, all the soreness and groaning that might be there. No whining or obsequiousness; no putting on of a special voice; patient endurance and longing; affection and confidence. And far away within the indistinct aged tones, a clarion note; the warm glow of sunlight; his own strong certainty beating up unchanged beneath the heavy weight of his years. A gentle, clean, clear-eyed old man, with certainly a Whitman beard. Beautiful. For a moment it had been perfectly beautiful.
If he had stopped abruptly. … But the voice cleared and swelled. Life dropped away from it; leaving a tiresome old gentleman in full blast; thoughts coming in to shape carefully the biblical phrases describing God; to God. In the end he too was lecturing the congregation, praying at them, expressing his judgment. … Bleakness spread through the air. It was worse than the little pink man, who partly knew what he was doing and was ashamed. But this old chap was describing, at awful length, without knowing it, the secret of his own surface misery, the fact that he had never got beyond the angry, jealous, selfish, male God of the patriarchate.
Almost at once after that, the stirring and breaking up; and those glimpses, as people moved and turned towards each other, shaking hands, of the faces of some of the women, bringing back the lost impression. The inner life of the meeting was more fully with the women? It was they who spread the pure, live atmosphere? But they were obviously related. They had a household look, but not narrowly; none of the air of isolation that spread from churchwomen; the look of being used up by men and propping up a man’s world with unacknowledged, or simply unpondered, private reservations. Nor any of the jesting air of those women who “make the best of things.” They looked enviably, deeply, richly alive, on the very edge of the present, representing their faith in their own persons, entirely self-centred and self-controlled; poised and serene and withdrawn, yet not withholding. They had no protesting competing eagerness, and none of the secret arrogance of churchwomen. Their dignity was not dignified. Seen from behind they had none of the absurdity of churchwomen, devoutly uppish about the status of an institution which was a standing insult to their very existence. … It was they, the
