to dismiss, of course in
a Christian spirit, all the professors who are not, in the most
reverential sense of the term, fit for their jobs.

No doubt many of the clergy of the diocese had suffered more or less
just as the Dean had from lack of mathematical training. But the Dean
always felt that his own case was especially to be lamented. For you
see, if a man is trying to make a model aeroplane--for a poor family in
the lower part of the town--and he is brought to a stop by the need of
reckoning the coefficient of torsion of cast-iron rods, it shows plainly
enough that the colleges are not truly filling their divine mission.

But the figures that I speak of were not those of the model aeroplane.
These were far more serious. Night and day they had been with the rector
now for the best part of ten years, and they grew, if anything, more
intricate.

If, for example, you try to reckon the debt of a church--a large church
with a great sweep of polished cedar beams inside, for the special
glorification of the All Powerful, and with imported tiles on the roof
for the greater glory of Heaven and with stained-glass windows for the
exaltation of the All Seeing--if, I say, you try to reckon up the debt
on such a church and figure out its interest and its present worth, less
a fixed annual payment, it makes a pretty complicated sum. Then if you
try to add to this the annual cost of insurance, and deduct from it
three-quarters of a stipend, year by year, and then suddenly remember
that three-quarters is too much, because you have forgotten the
boarding-school fees of the littlest of the Drones (including French, as
an extra--she must have it, all the older girls did), you have got a sum
that pretty well defies ordinary arithmetic. The provoking part of it
was that the Dean knew perfectly well that with the help of logarithms
he could have done the thing in a moment. But at the Anglican college
they had stopped short at that very place in the book. They had simply
explained that Logos was a word and Arithmos a number, which at the
time, seemed amply sufficient.

So the Dean was perpetually taking out his sheets of figures, and adding
them upwards and downwards, and they never came the same. Very often
Mr. Gingham, who was a warden, would come and sit beside the rector and
ponder over the figures, and Mr. Drone would explain that with a book of
logarithms you could work it out in a moment. You would simply open the
book and run