rich hues, their moving tones, yet the raiment
of the priest may hide a proud and greedy heart, and the very altar may
be cold.

XIII

AMBITION

I am afraid that Milton's great line about ambition,

"That last infirmity of noble minds,"

is responsible for a good deal of harm, because it induces high-minded
persons of inexact ideas to think ambition a noble infirmity, or at
least to believe that they need not try to get rid of their personal
ambitions until they have conquered all their other evil dispositions.
I suppose that what Milton meant was that it was the hardest of all
faults to get rid of; and the reason why it is so difficult to eject
it, is because it is so subtle and ingenious a spirit, and masquerades
under such splendid disguises, arrayed in robes of light. A man who
desires to fill a high position in the world is so apt to disguise his
craving to himself by thinking, or trying to think, that he desires a
great place because of the beneficent influence he can exert, and all
the good that he will be able to do, which shall stream from him as
light from the sun. Of course to a high-minded man that is naturally
one of the honest pleasures of an important post; but he ought to be
quite sure that his motive is that the good should be done, and not
that he should have the credit of doing it. I have burnt my own fingers
not once nor twice at the fire of ambition, and the subject has been
often in my mind. But my experiences were so wholly unlike anything
that I had anticipated, though I suppose they are in reality normal
enough, that I will venture to set them down here. The first curious
experience was how, on a nearer survey of the prospect of obtaining an
important post, all the incidental advantages and conveniences of the
position sank into nothingness. This was a quite unexpected
development; I had imagined that a prospect of dignity and importance
would have had something vaguely sustaining about it. A brilliant
satirist once said that a curate did not as a rule desire to be a
bishop that he might exercise a wide and useful influence, but
primarily that he might be called "my lord." I myself was brought, as a
child, in contact with one who was somewhat unexpectedly called to a
high office. I was much with him in the days when his honours first
invested him, and I confess with a certain shame that it did
undoubtedly seem to me that the dignity of the office, the sense of
power, the obvi