ourself before God
will fill you.'

'Of what can I strip myself more? I know nothing; I can do nothing;
I hope nothing; I fear nothing; I am nothing.'

'And you would gain something. But for what purpose?--for on that
depends your whole success. To be famous, great, glorious,
powerful, beneficent?'

'As I live, the height of my ambition, small though it be, is only
to find my place, though it were but as a sweeper of chimneys. If I
dare wish--if I dare choose, it would be only this--to regenerate
one little parish in the whole world . . . To do that, and die, for
aught I care, without ever being recognised as the author of my own
deeds . . . to hear them, if need be, imputed to another, and myself
accursed as a fool, if I can but atone for the sins of . . .

He paused; but his teacher understood him.

'It is enough,' he said. 'Come with me; Tregarva waits for us near.
Again I warn you; you will hear nothing new; you shall only see what
you, and all around you, have known and not done, known and done.
We have no peculiar doctrines or systems; the old creeds are enough
for us. But we have obeyed the teaching which we received in each
and every age, and allowed ourselves to be built up, generation by
generation--as the rest of Christendom might have done--into a
living temple, on the foundation which is laid already, and other
than which no man can lay.'

'And what is that?'

'Jesus Christ--THE MAN.'

He took Lancelot by the hand. A peaceful warmth diffused itself
over his limbs; the droning of the organ sounded fainter and more
faint; the marble monuments grew dim and distant; and, half
unconsciously, he followed like a child through the cathedral door.

EPILOGUE

I can foresee many criticisms, and those not unreasonable ones, on
this little book--let it be some excuse at least for me, that I have
foreseen them. Readers will complain, I doubt not, of the very
mythical and mysterious denouement of a story which began by things
so gross and palpable as field-sports and pauperism. But is it not
true that, sooner or later, 'omnia exeunt in mysterium'? Out of
mystery we all came at our birth, fox-hunters and paupers, sages and
saints; into mystery we shall all return . . . at all events, when
we die; probably, as it seems to me, some of us will return thither
before we die. For if the signs of the times mean anything, they
portend, I humbly submit, a somewhat my