Dogmas are not unintelligible intellectual propositions imposed on the world.  They are explanations, interpretations, attempts to link facts together.  They have the sacredness of ideas which people lived by, and for which they were prepared to die.  But many of them are scientific in form only, and the substance has gone out of them.  We know more in one sense about life and God than we did, but we also know less, because we realise there is so much more to know.  But now we want, I believe, two or three great ideas which everyone can understand—­like Fatherhood and Brotherhood, like peace and orderliness and beauty.  I think that a church service means all these things, or ought to.  What people need is simplicity and beauty of life—­joy and hope and kindness.  Anything which helps these things on is fine; anything which bewilders and puzzles and gives a sense of dreariness is simply injurious.  I want to be told to be quiet, to try again, not to be disheartened by failures, not to be angry with other people, to give up things, rather than to get them with a sauce of envy and spite—­the feeling of a happy and affectionate family, in fact.  The sort of thing I don’t want is the Athanasian Creed.  I can’t regard it simply as a picturesque monument of ancient and ferocious piety.  It seems to me an overhanging cloud of menace and mystification!  It doesn’t hurt the unintelligent Christian, of course—­he simply doesn’t understand it; but to the moderately intelligent it is like a dog barking furiously which may possibly get loose; a little more intelligence, and it is all right.  You know the dog is safely tied up!  Again, I don’t mind the cursing psalms, because they give the parson the power of saying:  ’We say this to remind ourselves that it was what people used to feel, and which Christ came to change.’  I don’t mind anything that is human—­what I can’t tolerate is anything inhuman or unintelligible.  No one can misunderstand the Beatitudes; very few people can follow the arguments of St. Paul!  You don’t want only elaborate reasons for clever people, you want still more beautiful motives for simple people.  It isn’t perfect, our service, I admit, but it does me good.”

“Tell me,” I said—­“to go back for a moment—­something more about meditating—­I like that!”

“Well,” said Father Payne, “it’s like anchoring to a thought.  Thought is a fidgety thing, restless, perverse.  It anchors itself very easily on to a grievance, or an unpleasant incident, or a squabble.  Don’t you know the misery of being jerked back, time after time, by an unpleasant thought?  I think one ought to practise the opposite—­and I know now by experience that it is possible.  I will make a confession.  I don’t care for many of the Old Testament lessons myself.  I think there’s too much fact, or let us say incident, in them, and not enough poetry.  Well, I take up my Bible, and I look at Job, or Isaiah, or the Revelation, and I read quietly on.  Suddenly there’s