This long afternoon, spent face to face with a project born of his own brain but yesterday, yet already so much bigger than himself, was really a most fruitful time for the young clergyman.  The lessons which cut most deeply into our consciousness are those we learn from our children.  Theron, in this first day’s contact with the offspring of his fancy, found revealed to him an unsuspected and staggering truth.  It was that he was an extremely ignorant and rudely untrained young man, whose pretensions to intellectual authority among any educated people would be laughed at with deserved contempt.

Strangely enough, after he had weathered the first shock, this discovery did not dismay Theron Ware.  The very completeness of the conviction it carried with it, saturated his mind with a feeling as if the fact had really been known to him all along.  And there came, too, after a little, an almost pleasurable sense of the importance of the revelation.  He had been merely drifting in fatuous and conceited blindness.  Now all at once his eyes were open; he knew what he had to do.  Ignorance was a thing to be remedied, and he would forthwith bend all his energies to cultivating his mind till it should blossom like a garden.  In this mood, Theron mentally measured himself against the more conspicuous of his colleagues in the Conference.  They also were ignorant, clownishly ignorant:  the difference was that they were doomed by native incapacity to go on all their lives without ever finding it out.  It was obvious to him that his case was better.  There was bright promise in the very fact that he had discovered his shortcomings.

He had begun the afternoon by taking down from their places the various works in his meagre library which bore more or less relation to the task in hand.  The threescore books which constituted his printed possessions were almost wholly from the press of the Book Concern; the few exceptions were volumes which, though published elsewhere, had come to him through that giant circulating agency of the General Conference, and wore the stamp of its approval.  Perhaps it was the sight of these half-filled shelves which started this day’s great revolution in Theron’s opinions of himself.  He had never thought much before about owning books.  He had been too poor to buy many, and the conditions of canvassing about among one’s parishioners which the thrifty Book Concern imposes upon those who would have without buying, had always repelled him.  Now, suddenly, as he moved along the two shelves, he felt ashamed at their beggarly showing.

“The Land and the Book,” in three portly volumes, was the most pretentious of the aids which he finally culled from his collection.  Beside it he laid out “Bible Lands,” “Rivers and Lakes of Scripture,” “Bible Manners and Customs,” the “Genesis and Exodus” volume of Whedon’s Commentary, some old numbers of the “Methodist Quarterly Review,” and a copy of “Josephus” which had belonged to his grandmother, and had seen him through many a weary Sunday afternoon in boyhood.  He glanced casually through these, one by one, as he took them down, and began to fear that they were not going to be of so much use as he had thought.  Then, seating himself, he read carefully through the thirteen chapters of Genesis which chronicle the story of the founder of Israel.