Reverend Arnold Imrie, sometime stroke of the Yale crew, Fellow of
Oxford, and one of the strongest heads that ever succumbed to a
Heidelberg _kneipe_.

He was a well-built, good-looking young man, with close cropped curly
blonde hair, and a clear skin and eyes. His complexion was ruddy, but
bronzed, as if he were still not unused to out-of-doors. Yet there were
two lines between his eyes, and a stoop to his shoulders that seemed to
betoken an equal familiarity with the study. Indeed his whole manner and
appearance gave the same paradoxical impression. It seemed to Good, as
he studied him, that Doctor Imrie was the product of a victory of the
mind over the body. He was the conscious ascetic, triumphing over the
instinctive sensualist. It was not hard to imagine that the clergyman
was very fond of the good things of the world, however much he might
neglect them in favour of the things of the spirit.

And in that estimate he was substantially correct. Imrie had gone into
the ministry, not really from choice, but from a painfully acute sense
of duty inherited from his Knoxian forbears. Contradicting an abounding
vitality was an overwhelming consciousness of sin, based, it must be
confessed, on a fair modicum of actuality, impelling him, irresistibly,
toward a fear and a hatred of the flesh. Some men enter the Church
positively, out of love for their God and their fellow men: but Imrie
had entered it negatively, from a fear and a distrust of the devil in
himself. Of his fellow men, in the mass, at least, he never thought at
all.

All these things Good sensed very clearly. But, he thought to himself,
Imrie was a young man, whose life had progressed in one channel ... and
there were a great many channels in the world. If anything should ever
occur to move him from his channel, a great many things might happen.
There were more Imries than the congregation, gazing respectfully with
tranquil eyes, saw.

It was quite characteristic of Imrie's neglect for the human equation in
life, that he should choose for his text that morning, the Evils of
Idleness--when fully two-thirds of his auditors represented the very
apotheosis of idleness. But it was equally explanatory of his popularity
among them. He had the faculty, wholly unconscious though it was, of
being able to castigate them eloquently for their sins, but in such an
abstract and impersonal fashion as to leave them quite untroubled at its
close.

His words, now, uttered w