opposite--and I know now by experience that
it is possible. I will make a confession. I don't care for many of the Old
Testament lessons myself. I think there's too much fact, or let us say
incident, in them, and not enough poetry. Well, I take up my Bible, and I
look at Job, or Isaiah, or the Revelation, and I read quietly on. Suddenly
there's a gleam of gold in the bed of the stream--some splendid, deep, fine
thought. I follow it out; I think how it has appeared in my own life, or in
the lives of other people--it bears me away on its wings, I pray about it,
I hope to be more like that--and so on. Sometimes it is a sharp revelation
of something ugly and perverse in my own nature--I don't dwell long on
that, but I see in imagination how it is likely to trouble me, and I hope
that it will not delude me again; because these evil things delude one,
they call noxious tricks by fine names. I say to myself, 'What you pretend
is self-respect, or consistency, is really irritable vanity or stupid
unimaginativeness.' But it is a mistake, I think, to dwell long on one's
deficiencies: what one has got to do is to fill one's life full of
positive, active, beautiful things, until there is no room for the ugly
intruders. And, to put it shortly, a service makes me think about other
people and about God; I fear it doesn't make me contrite or sorrowful. I
don't believe in any sort of self-pity, nor do I think one ought to
cultivate shame; those things lie close to death, and it is life that I am
in search of--fulness of life. Don't let us bemoan ourselves, or think that
a sign of grace!"

"But if you find yourself grubby, nasty, suspicious, irritable, isn't it a
good thing to rub it in sometimes?" I said.

"No, no," said Father Payne, "life will do that hard enough. Turn your back
on it all, look at the beautiful things, leave a thief to catch a thief,
and the dead to bury the dead. Don't sniff at the evil thing; go and get a
breath of fresh air."

XIII

OF NEWSPAPERS

Father Payne was a very irregular reader of the newspaper; he was not
greedy of news, and he was incurious about events, while he disliked the
way in which they were professionally dished up for human consumption. At
times, however, he would pore long and earnestly over a daily paper with
knitted brows and sighs. "You seem to be suffering a good deal over your
paper to-day, Father!" said Barthrop once, regarding him with amusement.
Father Payne lifted up his he