an of pure white paint.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XX

MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY

It was eleven o'clock at night. Mrs. Betty had retired, while her
husband was still struggling to finish a sermon on the importance of
foreign missions. Ordinarily, the work would have been congenial and
easy for him, because he was an enthusiast in the matter of missionary
work: but now for some reason his thoughts were confused; his
enthusiasm was lacking, and his pen dragged. He tried hard to pull
himself together, but over and over again the question kept repeating
itself in his tired brain: Why should the Church support foreign
missions, while she lets her hard working clergy at home suffer and
half starve in their old age, and even fails to give them decent
support while they are working in their prime? Why should a doctor
reach his highest professional value at seventy, and a parson be past
the "dead-line" at forty-five? Here he was, subject to the caprice and
ill-will of a sour and miserly Senior Warden, and a cowed and at least
partially "bossed" vestry--and he, the rector, with no practical power
of appeal for the enforcement of his legal contract. It was only
thanks to Jonathan Jackson, the Junior Warden, that any revenue at all
reached him; for Bascom had used every grain of influence he possessed
to reduce or stop Maxwell's salary. Mrs. Betty, plucky and cheery
though she was, already showed the results of the weary struggle: it
was not the work that took the color from her cheeks and the freshness
from her face, but the worry incidental to causes which, in any other
calling in life but his, would be removable.

Already he had parted with a considerable number of his books to eke
out, and meet the many calls upon him--urgent and insistent calls. It
became abundantly clear, as his mind strayed from the manuscript
before him and turned to their immediate situation, that he was
already forced to choose between two alternatives: either he must give
up, and own himself and all the better influences in the place beaten
by Bascom and his satellites; or he must find some means of augmenting
his means of living, without allowing his time and energy to be
monopolized to the neglect of essential parish and church duties.

As he thought on these things, somehow his enthusiasm for foreign
missions ebbed away, and left him desperately tired and worried. He
made several abortive attempts to put some fire into his missionary
plea, b