a fashionable confectioner, or haggling over the price of turtle soup.
Or again, at the higher thought-levels, it is very easy to imagine the departed friend going on dropping germs of philosophy into one's mind as he had been doing for half a century before he passed over. It would be much more difficult to imagine him inspiring one with thoughts about which looks the more chic of two drawing-room wallpapers. The worldliness, the thing-y-ness of a life which has separated itself from idolatrous beliefs and has not yet attained to religious philosophy, is loosening imagination from its old attachments, without, in most cases, providing it as yet with any fresh ones.
In some families, therefore, the imagination is left loose and batters faith to pieces. In others it is clumsily nailed up so that faith is etiolated for want of air and exercise.
Again, when the church life provided rhythm, joy, interest, and perpetual change, there was less need for people to seek pleasures for themselves or each other. But life without some joy is very dull. If there is no joy in life except what comes from immediate sensation connected with the mechanical apparatus of enjoyment, one cannot be very scrupulous as to one's way of acquiring the possibility of providing enjoyment for the dear ones. And if we cannot get it out of that which is permanent, one must snatch incessantly at the transitory forms of it. Whereas, where life is one perpetual revel in the joys of either mystic belief or still more mystic truth-seeking, it becomes too valuable to be wasted on vices, and so full that over-much sensuous pleasure is not a temptation but an intrusion, a nuisance and a bore.
