“I don’t doubt it.  But come now!—­you are a thoroughly good fellow—­that, a blind horse could see in the dimmits—­and I’m accountable for the parish—­couldn’t you draw it a little milder, you know? couldn’t you make it just a little less peculiar—­only the way of putting it, I mean—­so that it should look a little more like what they have been used to?  I’m only suggesting the thing, you know—­dictating nothing, on my soul, Mr. Wingfold.  I am sure that, whatever you do, you will act according to your own conscience, otherwise I should not venture to say a word, lest I should lead you wrong.”

“If you will allow me,” said the curate, “I will tell you my whole story; and then if you should wish it, I will resign my curacy, without saying a word more than that my rector thinks it better.  Neither in private shall I make a single remark in a different spirit.”

“Let me hear,” said the rector.

“Then if you will please take this chair, that I may know that I am not wearying you bodily at least.”

The rector did as he was requested, laid his head back, crossed his legs, and folded his hands over his worn waist-coat:  he was not one of the neat order of parsons; he had a not unwholesome disregard of his outermost man, and did not know when he was shabby.  Without an atom of pomposity or air rectorial, he settled himself to listen.

Condensing as much as he could, Wingfold told him how through great doubt, and dismal trouble of mind, he had come to hope in God, and to see that there was no choice for a man but to give himself, heart, and soul, and body, to the love, and will, and care of the Being who had made him.  He could no longer, he said, regard his profession as any thing less than a call to use every means and energy at his command for the rousing of men and women from that spiritual sleep and moral carelessness in which he had himself been so lately sunk.

“I don’t want to give up my curacy,” he concluded.  “Still less do I want to leave Glaston, for there are here some whom I teach and some who teach me.  In all that has given ground for complaint, I have seemed to myself to be but following the dictates of common sense; if you think me wrong, I have no justification to offer.  We both love God,——­”

“How do you know that?” interrupted the rector.  “I wish you could make me sure of that.”

“I do, I know I do,” said the curate earnestly.  “I can say no more.”

“My dear fellow, I haven’t the merest shadow of a doubt of it,” returned the rector, smiling.  “What I wished was, that you could make me sure I do.”

“Pardon me, my dear sir, but, judging from sore experience, if I could I would rather make you doubt it; the doubt, even if an utter mistake, would in the end be so much more profitable than any present conviction.”

“You have your wish, then, Wingfold:  I doubt it very much,” replied the rector.  “I must go home and think about it all.  You shall hear from me in a day or two.”