Limitations by E.F. Benson

Tom went back to London about a fortnight after the baby's birth, and plunged into his work with more vigour and earnestness than ever. His new interest in religious matters was a thing apart from his work, just as was his love for May, and it did not get between him and his models, or interpose angular substances between his hand and eye. His religion was not fanatical or aggressive: it had come to him as the explanation of his human love, and inasmuch as the white heat of that had burned out of his life all that was sordid or impure, the conduct of his life was left unchanged. According to moralists, all sin partakes of the nature of decay, and Tom's nature was very vital. And as his religion was not fanatical, it did not fill him with any half self-conscious and wholly morbid convictions of sin, either in himself or others, and he pursued his cleanly honest life much as he had done before.

But as the days went on, and May got steadily stronger again, a doubt began to look him in the face. He remembered the Revivalist meeting at Cambridge, and his own rejection of the idea that one moment, one flash of seeming revelation could change any one. He himself had faced an anxiety blacker than death, had felt a relief purer than heaven. Did not that perhaps account for it all? Was not his own case as intelligible as that of the greengrocer who became a teetotaler? And because he was honest with himself he put himself a straightforward question: "Would he feel another and a fiercer anguish if he again got to believe that Christ was merely the best man who had ever lived and no more? " The question haunted him, but he was unwilling to answer it.