The Morrice Deans enquiry however demanded an amount of erudition that greatly fatigued the bishop.  He had a very fair general knowledge of vestments, but he had never really cared for anything but the poetry of ornaments, and he had to work strenuously to master the legal side of the question.  Whippham, his chaplain, was worse than useless as a helper.  The bishop wanted to end the matter as quickly, quietly, and favourably to Morrice Deans as possible; he thought Morrice Deans a thoroughly good man in his parish, and he believed that the substitution of a low churchman would mean a very complete collapse of church influence in Mogham Banks, where people were now thoroughly accustomed to a highly ornate service.  But Morrice Deans was intractable and his pursuers indefatigable, and on several occasions the bishop sat far into the night devising compromises and equivocations that should make the Kensitites think that Morrice Deans wasn’t wearing vestments when he was, and that should make Morrice Deans think he was wearing vestments when he wasn’t.  And it was Whippham who first suggested green tea as a substitute for coffee, which gave the bishop indigestion, as his stimulant for these nocturnal bouts.

Now green tea is the most lucid of poisons.

And while all this extra activity about Morrice Deans, these vigils and crammings and writings down, were using all and more energy than the bishop could well spare, he was also doing his quiet utmost to keep “The Light under the Altar” ease from coming to a head.

This man he hated.

And he dreaded him as well as hated him.  Chasters, the author of “The Light under the Altar,” was a man who not only reasoned closely but indelicately.  There was a demonstrating, jeering, air about his preaching and writing, and everything he said and did was saturated by the spirit of challenge.  He did not so much imitate as exaggerate the style of Matthew Arnold.  And whatever was done publicly against him would have to be done very publicly because his book had got him a London reputation.

From the bishop’s point of view Chasters was one of nature’s ignoblemen.  He seemed to have subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles and passed all the tests and taken all the pledges that stand on the way to ordination, chiefly for the pleasure of attacking them more successfully from the rear; he had been given the living of Wombash by a cousin, and filled it very largely because it was not only more piquant but more remunerative and respectable to be a rationalist lecturer in a surplice.  And in a hard kind of ultra-Protestant way his social and parochial work was not badly done.  But his sermons were terrible.  “He takes a text,” said one informant, “and he goes on firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly, like somebody tearing the petals from a flower.  ‘Finally,’ he says, and throws the bare stalk into the dustbin.”