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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: other reference by serious people to a mystery of their faith; but
when something had happened to warm, as it were, the air for it,
they came as near as they could come to calling their Dead by name.
They felt it was coming very near to utter their thought at all.
The word "they" expressed enough; it limited the mention, it had a
dignity of its own, and if, in their talk, you had heard our
friends use it, you might have taken them for a pair of pagans of
old alluding decently to the domesticated gods. They never knew -
at least Stransom never knew - how they had learned to be sure
about each other. If it had been with each a question of what the
other was there for, the certitude had come in some fine way of its
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