. . I repeat, Mr. Lidderdale, is it right
to fling all this away for the sake of a few--you will not
misunderstand me--if I call them a few excrescences?"
The Bishop helped himself to the cauliflower and paused to give his
rhetoric time to work.
"What you regard, my lord, as excrescences I regard as fundamentals of
our Holy Religion."
"Come, come, Mr. Lidderdale," the Bishop protested. "I do not think that
you expect to convince me that a ceremony like the--er--Asperges is a
fundamental of Christianity."
"I have taught my people that it is," said the Missioner. "In these days
when Bishops are found who will explain away the Incarnation, the
Atonement, the Resurrection of the Body, I hope you'll forgive a humble
parish priest who will explain away nothing and who would rather resign,
as I told you this morning, than surrender a single one of these
excrescences."
"I do not admit your indictment, your almost wholesale indictment of the
Anglican episcopate; but even were I to admit at lunch that some of my
brethren have been in their anxiety to keep the Man in the Street from
straying too far from the Church, have been as I was saying a little too
ready to tolerate a certain latitude of belief, even as I said just now
were that so, I do not think that you have any cause to suspect me of
what I should repudiate as gross infidelity.
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