As too many British officers treat the army as a review, so I had treated
the Church Militant as if it were the Church Pageant. Hoxton cures that.
Then I realized that for eighteen hundred years the Church Militant
had not been a pageant, but a riot--and a suppressed riot.
There, still living patiently in Hoxton, were the people to whom
the tremendous promises had been made. In the face of that I had
to become a revolutionary if I was to continue to be religious.
In Hoxton one cannot be a conservative without being also an atheist--
and a pessimist. Nobody but the devil could want to conserve Hoxton.
"On the top of all this comes Hawkins. If he had cursed all the Hoxton men,
excommunicated them, and told them they were going to hell, I should
have rather admired him. If he had ordered them all to be burned
in the market-place, I should still have had that patience that all
good Christians have with the wrongs inflicted on other people.
But there is no priestcraft about Hawkins--nor any other kind of craft.
He is as perfectly incapable of being a priest as he is of being a carpenter
or a cabman or a gardener or a plasterer. He is a perfect gentleman;
that is his complaint.
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