d, they wanted my Liddell and Scott to play
at forts with."

"Trust me, my dear sir. I will confine myself to the Master's
marginalia without spying upon the text."

Brother Copas, as Mr. Simeon yielded to his gentle insistence, laid
his own book on the table, and seated himself before the manuscript,
which he ran through at great speed.

"H'm--h'm . . . psyche here is _oxyton_--here and always . . . and
anoetos proparoxyton: you have left it unaccented."

"I was waiting to look it up, having some idea that it held a
contraction."

Brother Copas dipped pen and inserted the accent without comment.

"I see nothing else amiss," he said, rising.

"It is exceedingly kind of you."

"Well, as a matter of fact it is; for I came here expressly to
cultivate a bad temper, and you have helped to confirm me in a good
one. . . . Oh, I know what you would say if your politeness allowed:
'Why, if bad temper's my object, did I leave the Liberal Club and
come here?' Because, my dear sir, at the Club--though there's
plenty--it's of the wrong sort. I wanted a _religiously_ bad temper,
and an intelligent one to boot."

"I don't see what religion and bad temper have to do with one
another," confessed Mr. Simeon.

"That is because you are a good man, and therefore your religion
doesn't matter to you."

"But really," Mr. Simeon protested, flushing; "though one doesn't
willingly talk of these inmost things, you must allow me to say that
my religion is everything to me."

"You say that, and believe it. Religion, you believe, colours
all your life, suffuses it with goodness as with a radiance.
But actually, my friend, it is your own good heart that colours and
throws its radiance into your religion."

'O lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live'--

"--Or religion either. . . . Pardon me, but a thoroughly virtuous or a
thoroughly amiable man is not worth twopence as a touchstone for a
creed; he would convert even Mormonism to a thing of beauty. . . .
Whereas the real test of any religion is--as I saw it excellently
well put the other day--'not what form it takes in a virtuous mind,
but what effects it produces on those of another sort.' Well, I have
been studying those effects pretty well all my life, and they may be
summed up, roughly but with fair accuracy, as Bad Temper."

"Good men or bad," persisted Mr. Simeon, "what _can_ the Christian
religion do but make them both better