, but to read prayers in his own church! She was not the only
one, however, who remarked how devoutly he read them, and his presence
was a great comfort to Wingfold. He often objected to what his curate
preached--but only to his face, and seldom when they were not alone.
There was policy in this restraint: he had come to see that in all
probability he would have to give in--that his curate would most likely
satisfy him that he was right. The relation between them was marvelous
and lovely. The rector's was a quiet awakening, a gentle second birth
almost in old age. But then he had been but a boy all the time, and a
very good sort of boy. He had acted in no small measure according to the
light he had, and time was of course given him to grow in. It is not the
world alone that requires the fullness of its time to come, ere it can
receive a revelation; the individual also has to pass through his
various stages of Pagan, Guebre, Moslem, Jew, Essene--God knows what
all--before he can begin to see and understand the living Christ. The
child has to pass through all the phases of lower animal life; when,
change is arrested, he is born a monster; and in many a Christian the
rudiments of former stages are far from extinct--not seldom revive, and
for the time seem to reabsorb the development, making indeed a monstrous
show.

"For myself,"--I give a passage from Wingfold's note-book, written for
his wife's reading--"I feel sometimes as if I were yet a pagan,
struggling hard to break through where I see a glimmer of something
better, called Christianity. In any case what I have, can be but a
foretaste of what I have yet to _be_; and if so, then indeed is there a
glory laid up for them that will have God, the _I_ of their _I_, to
throne it in the temple he has built, to pervade the life he has _lifed_
out of himself. My soul is now as a chaos with a hungry heart of order
buried beneath its slime, that longs and longs for the moving of the
breath of God over its water and mud."

The foundation-stone of the chapel was to be laid with a short and
simple ceremony, at which no clergy but themselves were to be present.
The rector had not consented, and the curate had not urged, that it
should remain unconsecrated; it was therefore uncertain, so far at least
as Wingfold knew, whether it was to be chapel or lecture hall. In either
case it was for the use and benefit of the villagers, and they were all
invited to be present. A few of the neig