“When one thinks what a great centre of learning and faith like
Oxford ought to be—that its highest educational work should just be
the deliverance of us all from flunkeyism and money-worship—and then
looks at matters here without rose-colored spectacles, it gives one
sometimes a sort of chilly, leaden despondency, which is very hard to
struggle against.”
“I am sorry to hear you talk like that, Jack, for one can’t help loving
the place after all.”
“So I do, God knows. If I didn’t, I shouldn’t care for its
shortcomings.”
“Well, the flunkeyism and money-worship were bad enough, but I don’t
think they were the worst things—at least not in my day. Our neglects
were almost worse than our worships.”
“You mean the want of all reverence for parents? Well, perhaps that
lies at the root of the false worships. They spring up on the vacant
soil.”
“And the want of reverence for women, Jack. The worst of all, to my
mind!”
“Perhaps you are right. But we are not at the bottom yet.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean that we must worship God before we can reverence parents or
women, or root out flunkeyism and money-worship.”
“Yes. But after all can we fairly lay that sin on Oxford? Surely,
whatever may be growing up side by side with it, there’s more
Christianity here than almost anywhere else.”
“Plenty of common-room Christianity—belief in a dead God. There, I have
never said it to any one but you, but that is the slough we have got to
get out of. Don’t think that I despair for us. We shall do it yet; but
it will be sore work, stripping off the comfortable wine-party religion
in which we are wrapped up—work for our strongest and our wisest.”