The Greater Trumps (Williams)

Williams can be much funnier than I'd given him credit for; Chapter 8, for example, has some rather scathing descriptions of church-goers.

A door opened; the congregation stirred; a voice from the vestry said: "Hymn 61.  'Christians, awake,' Hymn 61."  Everyone awoke, found the place, and stood up.  (107)

We have entered the church with the Coningsby family on Christmas Day: the patriarch Lothair, his sister Sybil and his daughter Nancy.  We already know something of their characters: from the first page of the novel, Sybil shows extraordinary spiritual fruit in her unshakable everyday love, patience, and joy; Lothair is small-minded and mean-spirited; and Nancy is infatuated with her fiancé Henry Lee.

Mr Coningsby held strongly that going to church, if and when he did go, ought to be as much a part of normal life as possible, and ought not to demand any peculiar demonstration of energy on the part of the church-goer. (104)

Coningsby attends church sporadically, and has clearly not allowed the gospel to make any inroads on his actions and attitudes, let alone his spirit.  The hypocrisy underlying his spotty church attendance is shown slyly and indirectly by contrast with his sister Sybil: "He wasn't very clear whether she usually went to church or not; if she did, she said nothing much aboout it, and was always back in time for meals." (id., emphasis added).

Still strangely moved by a recent mystical experience foisted upon her by her conniving fiancé, Nancy is oddly vulnerable to spiritual "attack" (my word) even in the all-too-familiar Christmas service which she attends with her father merely as an annual custom.

"The mystery of love."  But what else was in her heart?  The Christmas associations of the verse had fallen away; there was the direct detached cry, bidding her do precisely and only what she was burning to do.  "Rise to adore the mystery of love."  What on earth were they doing, singing about the mystery of love in church?  They couldn't possibly be meaning it.  Or were they meaning it and had she misunderstood the whole thing?  (108)

By the end of the service, "her respect for her aunt had become someting much more like awe" (110), and her scorn for her father has been replaced by a sense of humility and an awareness that she owes him "something which she had not troubled to give" (111) -- presumably the filial devotion or respect suggested in the Fifth Commandment.  This is all the more fascinating because we, as readers, are well aware that her prior view of him as an "absurd, slightly despicable, affected and pompous and irritating elderly man" (id.) is fully justified and accurate.  Indeed, she does not exactly disbelieve it, but realizes it is entirely "unimportant" (id.) and understands her own moral responsibility for setting her heart against him.