ciousness of
human life, so that there was no one who heard him but was fain to weep
for those young bluejackets and marines taken in their prime. He
inspired in Mark a sense of shame that he had ever thought of people in
the aggregate, that he had ever walked along a crowded street without
perceiving the importance of every single human being that helped to
compose its variety. While he sat there listening to the Missioner and
watching the large tears roll slowly down his cheeks from beneath the
closed lids, Mark wondered how he could have dared to suppose last night
that he was qualified to become a friar and preach the Gospel to the
poor. While Father Rowley was speaking, he began to apprehend that
before he could aspire to do that he must himself first of all learn
about Christ from those very poor whom he had planned to convert.

This sermon was another milestone in Mark's religious life. It
discovered in him a hidden treasure of humility, and it taught him to
build upon the rock of human nature. He divined the true meaning of Our
Lord's words to St. Peter: _Thou art Peter and on this rock I will build
my church and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it._ John was
the disciple whom Jesus loved, but he chose Peter with all his failings
and all his follies, with his weakness and his cowardice and his vanity.
He chose Peter, the bedrock of human nature, and to him he gave the keys
of Heaven.

Mark knew that somehow he must pluck up courage to ask Father Rowley to
let him come and work under him at Chatsea. He was sure that if he could
only make him grasp the spirit in which he would offer himself, the
spirit of complete humility devoid of any kind of thought that he was
likely to be of the least use to the Mission, Father Rowley might accept
his oblation. He would have liked to wait behind after Evensong and
approach the Missioner directly, so that before speaking to Mr. Ogilvie
he might know what chance the offer had of being accepted; but he
decided against this course, because he felt that Father Rowley's
compassion might be embarrassed if he had to refuse his request, a point
of view that was characteristic of the mood roused in him by the sermon.
He went back to sleep for the last time in an Oxford college, profoundly
reassured of the rightness of his action in giving up the scholarship to
Emmett, although, which was characteristic of his new mood, he had by
this time begun to tell himself that he had r