Produced by Andrew Templeton, Juliet Sutherland, Mary
Meehan and PG Distributed Proofreaders
1911
May I ask those of my American readers who are not intimately acquaintedwith the conditions of English rural and religious life to remember thatthe dominant factor in it—the factor on which the story of RichardMeynell depends—is the existence of the State Church, of the greatecclesiastical corporation, the direct heir of the pre-ReformationChurch, which owns the cathedrals and the parish churches, whichby right of law speaks for the nation on all national occasions, whichcrowns and marries and buries the Kings of England, and, through herbishops in the House of Lords, exercises a constant and importantinfluence on the lawmaking of the country? This Church possesses half theelementary schools, and is the legal religion of the great public schoolswhich shape the ruling upper class. She is surrounded with the prestigeof centuries, and it is probable that in many directions she was never soactive or so well served by her members as she is at present.
At the same time, there are great forces of change ahead. Outside theAnglican Church stands quite half the nation, gathered in the variousnon-conformist bodies—Wesleyan, Congregational, Baptist, Presbyterian,and so on. Between them and the Church exists a perpetual warfare,partly of opinion, partly of social difference and jealousy. In everyvillage and small town this warfare exists. The non-conformist desires todeprive the Church of her worldly and political privileges; the churchmantalks of the sin of schism, or draws up schemes of reunion which dropstill-born. Meanwhile, alike in the Church, in non-conformity, and in theneutral world which owes formal allegiance to neither, vast movements ofthought have developed in the last hundred years, years as pregnant withthe germs of new life as the wonderful hundred years that followed thebirth of Christ. Whether the old bottles can be adjusted to the new wine,whether further division or a new Christian unity is to emerge from thestrife of tongues, whether the ideas of modernism; rife in all forms ofChristianity, can be accommodated to the ancient practices and given ashare in the great material possessions of a State Church; how individuallives are affected in the passionate struggle of spiritual faiths andpractical interests involved in such an attempt; how conscience may beenriched by its success or sterilized by its failure; how the fightitself, ably waged, may strengthen the spiritual elements, the power ofliving and suffering in men and women—it is with such themes that thisstory attempts to deal. Twenty-two years ago I tried a similar subject in"Robert Elsmere." Since then the movement of ideas in religion andphilosophy has been increasingly rapid and fruitful. I am deeplyconscious how little I may be able to express it. But those who twentyyears ago welcomed the earlier book—and how can I ever forget itsreception in America!—may perhaps be drawn once again to some of the oldthemes in their new dress.
"'My dear fellow! No woman ought to marry under nineteen or twenty'"
The Rectory
"Meynell, as he hesitatingly advanced, became the spectator of a scenenot