ful
blindness is the most desperate of all faults, perhaps the only one
that can hardly be condoned, because it argues a confidence in one's
own opinion, a self-sufficiency, a self-estimation, which shut out, as
by an opaque and sordid screen, the light of heaven from the soul.

XII

PRIESTS

I have been fortunate in the course of my life in knowing, more or less
intimately, several eminent priests; and by this I do not mean
necessarily eminent ecclesiastics; several famous ecclesiastics with
whom circumstances have brought me into contact have not been priestly
persons at all; they have been vigorous, wise, energetic, statesmanlike
men, such as I suppose the Pontifex Maximus at Rome might have been,
with a kind of formal, almost hereditary, priesthood. And, on the other
hand, I have known more than one layman of distinctly priestly
character, priestly after the order of Melchizedek, who had not, I
suppose, received any religious consecration for his ministry, apart
from perhaps a kingly initiation.

The essence of the priest is that he should believe himself, however
humbly and secretly, to be set in a certain sense between humanity and
God. He is conscious, if not of a mission, at least of a vocation, as
an interpreter of secrets, a guardian of mysteries; he would believe
that there are certain people in the world who are called to be
apostles, whose work it is to remind men of God, and to justify the
ways of God to men. He feels that he stands, like Aaron, to make
atonement; that he is in a certain definite relation to God, a relation
which all do not share; and that this gives him, in a special sense,
something of the divine and fatherly relation to men. In the hands of a
perfectly humble, perfectly disinterested man, this may become a very
beautiful and tender thing. Such a man, from long and intimate
relations with humanity, will have a very deep knowledge of the human
heart. He will be surprised at no weakness or frailty; he will be
patient with all perverseness and obduracy; he will be endlessly
compassionate, because he will realize the strength and insistence of
temptation; he will be endlessly hopeful, because he will have seen, a
hundred times over, the flower of virtue and love blooming in an arid
and desolate heart. He will have seen close at hand the transforming
power of faith, even in natures which have become the shuddering
victims of evil habit.

Such a priest as I describe had occasion