“He will,” the Missioner prophesied.  “He will because he is a wise and tender and godly man and therefore will never be more than a Bishop Suffragan as long as he lives.  Mark!”

Mark looked up at the severity of the tone.

“Mark!  Correct me when I fall into the habit of sneering at the episcopate.”

That night Father Rowley was attending a large temperance demonstration in the Town Hall for the purpose of securing if possible a smaller proportion of public houses than one for every eighty of the population, which was the average for Chatsea.  The meeting lasted until nearly ten o’clock; and it had already struck the hour when Father Rowley with Mark and two or three others got back to Keppel Street.  There was nothing Father Rowley disliked so much as arriving home himself after ten, and he hurried up to his room without inquiring if everybody was in.

Mark’s window looked out on Keppel Street; and the May night being warm and his head aching from the effects of the meeting, he sat for nearly an hour at the open window gazing down at the passers by.  There was not much to see, nothing more indeed than couples wandering home, a bluejacket or two, an occasional cat, and a few women carrying jugs of beer.  By eleven o’clock even this slight traffic had ceased, and there was nothing down the silent street except a salt wind from the harbour that roused a memory of the beach at Nancepean years ago when he had sat there watching the glow-worm and decided to be a lighthouse-keeper keeping his lamps bright for mariners homeward bound.  It was of streets like Keppel Street that they would have dreamed, with the Stag Light winking to port, and the west wind blowing strong astern.  What a lighthouse-keeper Father Rowley was!  How except by the grace of God could one explain such goodness as his?  Fashions in saintliness might change, but there was one kind of saint that always and for every creed spoke plainly of God’s existence, such saints as St. Francis of Assisi or St. Anthony of Padua, who were manifestly the heirs of Christ.  With what a tender cynicism Our Lord had called St. Peter to be the foundation stone of His Church, with what a sorrowful foreboding of the failure of Christianity.  Such a choice appeared as the expression of God’s will not to be let down again as He was let down by Adam.  Jesus Christ, conscious at the moment of what He must shortly suffer at the hands of mankind, must have been equally conscious of the failure of Christianity two thousand years beyond His Agony and Bloody Sweat and Crucifixion.  Why, within a short time after His life on earth it was necessary for that light from heaven to shine round about Saul on the Damascus road, because already scoffers, while the disciples were still alive, may have been talking about the failure of Christianity.  It must have been another of God’s self-imposed limitations that He did not give to St. John that capacity of St. Paul for organization which might have made practicable