And the result was, willy-nilly, that he was led away to a private sanitarium for mental disease, while in the newspapers appeared pathetic accounts of his mental breakdown and of the saintliness of his character.  He was held a prisoner in the sanitarium.  I called repeatedly, but was denied access to him; and I was terribly impressed by the tragedy of a sane, normal, saintly man being crushed by the brutal will of society.  For the Bishop was sane, and pure, and noble.  As Ernest said, all that was the matter with him was that he had incorrect notions of biology and sociology, and because of his incorrect notions he had not gone about it in the right way to rectify matters.

What terrified me was the Bishop’s helplessness.  If he persisted in the truth as he saw it, he was doomed to an insane ward.  And he could do nothing.  His money, his position, his culture, could not save him.  His views were perilous to society, and society could not conceive that such perilous views could be the product of a sane mind.  Or, at least, it seems to me that such was society’s attitude.

But the Bishop, in spite of the gentleness and purity of his spirit, was possessed of guile.  He apprehended clearly his danger.  He saw himself caught in the web, and he tried to escape from it.  Denied help from his friends, such as father and Ernest and I could have given, he was left to battle for himself alone.  And in the enforced solitude of the sanitarium he recovered.  He became again sane.  His eyes ceased to see visions; his brain was purged of the fancy that it was the duty of society to feed the Master’s lambs.

As I say, he became well, quite well, and the newspapers and the church people hailed his return with joy.  I went once to his church.  The sermon was of the same order as the ones he had preached long before his eyes had seen visions.  I was disappointed, shocked.  Had society then beaten him into submission?  Was he a coward?  Had he been bulldozed into recanting?  Or had the strain been too great for him, and had he meekly surrendered to the juggernaut of the established?

I called upon him in his beautiful home.  He was woefully changed.  He was thinner, and there were lines on his face which I had never seen before.  He was manifestly distressed by my coming.  He plucked nervously at his sleeve as we talked; and his eyes were restless, fluttering here, there, and everywhere, and refusing to meet mine.  His mind seemed preoccupied, and there were strange pauses in his conversation, abrupt changes of topic, and an inconsecutiveness that was bewildering.  Could this, then, be the firm-poised, Christ-like man I had known, with pure, limpid eyes and a gaze steady and unfaltering as his soul?  He had been man-handled; he had been cowed into subjection.  His spirit was too gentle.  It had not been mighty enough to face the organized wolf-pack of society.

I felt sad, unutterably sad.  He talked ambiguously, and was so apprehensive of what I might say that I had not the heart to catechise him.  He spoke in a far-away manner of his illness, and we talked disjointedly about the church, the alterations in the organ, and about petty charities; and he saw me depart with such evident relief that I should have laughed had not my heart been so full of tears.