Then all of a sudden we did begin to talk; and not of those matters of which the well-bred naturally converse—the habits of the rarer kinds of ducks, and the careers of our College friends, but of something never mentioned in polite society.
At lunch our hostess had told me the sad story of an unhappy marriage, and I had itched spiritually to find out what my friend, who seemed so far away from me, felt about such things. And now I determined to find out.
“Tell me,” I asked him, “which do you consider most important—the letter or the spirit of Christ's teachings?”
“My dear fellow,” he answered gently, “what a question! How can you separate them?”
“Well, is it not the essence of His doctrine that the spirit is all important, and the forms of little value? Does not that run through all the Sermon on the Mount?”
“If, then,” I said, “Christ's teaching is concerned with the spirit, do you consider that Christians are justified in holding others bound by formal rules of conduct, without reference to what is passing in their spirits?”
“What enables you to decide what is for their good?”
“Oh! but we do not, ourselves, judge; we are but impersonal ministers of the rules of God.”
“Ah! Do general rules of conduct take account of the variations of the individual spirit?”
He looked at me hard, as if he began to scent heresy.
“You had better explain yourself more fully,” he said. “I really don't follow.”
“Well, let us take a concrete instance. We know Christ's saying of the married that they are one flesh! But we know also that there are wives who continue to live the married life with dreadful feelings of spiritual revolt wives who have found out that, in spite of all their efforts, they have no spiritual affinity with their husbands. Is that in accordance with the spirit of Christ's teaching, or is it not?”
“I have admitted the definite commandment: 'They twain shall be one flesh.' There could not be, seemingly, any more rigid law laid down; how do you reconcile it with the essence of Christ's teaching? Frankly, I want to know: Is there or is there not a spiritual coherence in Christianity, or is it only a gathering of laws and precepts, with no inherent connected spiritual philosophy?”