So once again, as on their first meeting, only more intimately, her sympathy, her quick response, led him on. Soon lying back at his ease, his hands behind his head, he was painting for her the progress of the campaign; its astonishing developments; the kindling on all sides of the dry bones of English religion.
The new--or re-written--Liturgy of the Reform was, it seemed, almost completed. From all parts: from the Universities, from cathedral cloisters, from quiet country parishes, from the clash of life in the great towns, men had emerged as though by magic to bring to the making of it their learning and their piety, the stored passion of their hearts. And the mere common impulse, the mere release of thoughts and aspirations so long repressed, had brought about an extraordinary harmony, a victorious selflessness, among the members of the commission charged with the task. The work had gone with rapidity, yet with sureness, as in those early years of Christianity, which saw so rich and marvellous an upgrowth from the old soil of humanity. With surprising ease and spontaneity the old had passed over into the new; just as in the first hundred years after Christ's death the psalms and hymns and spiritual songs of the later Judaism had become, with but slight change, the psalms and hymns of Christianity; and a new sacred literature had flowered on the stock of the old.
"To-night--here!--we submit the new marriage service and the new burial service to the Church Council. And the same thing will be happening, at the same moment, in all the churches of the Reform--scattered through England."
"How many churches now?" she asked, with a quickened breath.
"Eighteen in July--this week, over a hundred. But before our cases come on for trial there will be many more. Every day new congregations come in from new dioceses. The beacon fire goes leaping on, from point to point!"
But the emotion which the phrase betrayed was instantly replaced by the business tone of the organizer as he went on to describe some of the practical developments of the preceding weeks: the founding of a newspaper; the collection of propagandist funds; the enrolment of teachers and missionaries, in connection with each Modernist church. Yet, at the end of it all, feeling broke through again.