This sermon was another milestone in Mark’s religious life.  It discovered in him a hidden treasure of humility, and it taught him to build upon the rock of human nature.  He divined the true meaning of Our Lord’s words to St. Peter:  Thou art Peter and on this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it. John was the disciple whom Jesus loved, but he chose Peter with all his failings and all his follies, with his weakness and his cowardice and his vanity.  He chose Peter, the bedrock of human nature, and to him he gave the keys of Heaven.

Mark knew that somehow he must pluck up courage to ask Father Rowley to let him come and work under him at Chatsea.  He was sure that if he could only make him grasp the spirit in which he would offer himself, the spirit of complete humility devoid of any kind of thought that he was likely to be of the least use to the Mission, Father Rowley might accept his oblation.  He would have liked to wait behind after Evensong and approach the Missioner directly, so that before speaking to Mr. Ogilvie he might know what chance the offer had of being accepted; but he decided against this course, because he felt that Father Rowley’s compassion might be embarrassed if he had to refuse his request, a point of view that was characteristic of the mood roused in him by the sermon.  He went back to sleep for the last time in an Oxford college, profoundly reassured of the rightness of his action in giving up the scholarship to Emmett, although, which was characteristic of his new mood, he had by this time begun to tell himself that he had really done nothing at all and that probably in any case Emmett would have been the chosen scholar.

If Mark had still any doubts of his behaviour, they would have vanished when on getting into the train for Shipcot he found himself in an otherwise empty third-class smoking carriage opposite Father Rowley himself, who with a small black bag beside him, so small that Mark wondered how it could possibly contain the night attire of so fat a man, was sitting back in the corner with a large pipe in his mouth.  He was wearing one of those square felt hats sometimes seen on the heads of farmers, and if one had only seen his head and hat without the grubby clerical attire beneath one might have guessed him to be a farmer.  Mark noticed now that his eyes of a limpid blue were like a child’s, and he realized that in his voice while he was preaching there had been the same sweet gravity of childhood.  Just at this moment Father Rowley caught sight of someone he knew on the platform and shouting from the window of the compartment he attracted the attention of a young man wearing an Old Siltonian tie.

“My dear man,” he cried, “how are you?  I’ve just made a most idiotic mistake.  I got it into my head that I should be preaching here on the first Sunday in term and was looking forward to seeing so many Silchester men.  I can’t think how I came to make such a muddle.”