pastime. Their churches were and still in many parts of the country usually are quite handsome buildings, good to look at both from the outside and the inside—but your Scottish Presbyterian conventicles—Oh my! Besides, the English Church service, however you may regard it through your Scottish "no popery" blinkers, is not at all a bad sort of way of making believe that you are grateful to Heaven for the good things and happiness of life, being that it is not Heaven's fault, but your own or somebody else's, if you don't happen to possess yourself of them and enjoy them.'
This idea of his, whimsically put as it was, that religion or religious worship, if we are to have religion at all, should be some mode of expressing the happiness of life, even as art should be, appears to have been deeply rooted in his mind. A story is related of him in connection with the Hammersmith Branch of the Socialist League meetings which is characteristic of this persuasion of his.
The branch was accustomed, as my readers know, to hold a meeting at Hammersmith Bridge on Sunday mornings in which Morris often took part. The possession of the ground was, however, contested by a group of Salvationists, who were usually on the scene an hour earlier than the Socialists. By a friendly arrangement it was eventually agreed that the Salvationists should wind up promptly at 11.30, provided the Socialists desisted until that time from any rival oratory. As often as not, however, the Salvationists, either from absorption in their mission or from, as was suspected, a desire to hold the crowd away from the 'infidel' teaching and 'worldly' hopes of the Socialists, far exceeded their allotted span of time: a breach of contract which always aroused Morris' 'dander.'
On one such occasion, losing all patience, Morris broke into the Salvationist ring, and addressing the Salvationist who was speaking exclaimed, 'Look here, my friend, you may think you are pleasing God by continuing your meeting beyond the agreed-upon time, but you are playing a nasty
