Gabriel is hammering up a little theatre and the child looks at his hands, and finds them torn with nails.
_Clergyman_. The Church should stand by the powers that be.
_Gabriel_. Yes? . . . That is a handsome crucifix you have there at your chain.
That the clergy, that the Christian people, should have settled down to an acceptance of a faulty established order, should not be alert to all that Our Lord's life signified, was one of the problems. It was, too, a matter of that cosmic loyalty which he analyses more fully in _Orthodoxy_. Here he simply writes:
It is not a question of Theology, It is a question of whether, placed as a sentinel of an unknown watch, you will whistle or not.
Sentinels do go to sleep and he was coming to feel that this want of vigilance ran through the whole of humanity. In "White Wynd," a sketch written at this time,* he adumbrates an idea to which he was to return again in _Manalive_ especially, and in _Orthodoxy_--that we can by custom so lose our sense of reality that the only way to enjoy and be grateful for our possessions is to lose them for a while. The shortest way home is to go round the world. In this story of "White Wynd" he applies the parable only to each man's life and the world he lives in. But in _Orthodoxy_ he applies it to the human race who have lost revealed truth by getting so accustomed to it that they no longer look at it. And already in the Notebook he is calling the attention of a careless multitude to "that great Empire upon which the sun never sets. I allude to the Universe."
[* It is published in _The Coloured Lands_.]
Most of the quotations about Our Lord come in the later part of the book: in the earlier pages he dreams that "to this age it is given to write the great new song, and to compile the new Bible, and to found the new Church, and preach the new Religion." And in one rather obscure passage he seems to hint at the thought that Christ might come again to shape this new religion.
Going round the world, Gilbert was finding his way home; the explorer was rediscovering his native country. He himself has given us all the metaphors for what was happening now in his mind. Without a single Catholic friend he had discovered this wealth of Catholic truth and he was still travelling. "All this I felt," he later summed it up in _Orthodoxy_, "and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had not even thought of Catholic theology."