“When a man does try to follow the Gospel a little more closely than the rest,” Mark raged, “the bishops down him.  They exist to maintain the safety of their class.  They have reached their present position by knowing the right people, by condemning the wrong people, and by balancing their fat bottoms on fences.  Sometimes when their political patrons quarrel over a pair of mediocrities, a saintly man who is either very old or very ill like Bishop Crawshay is appointed as a stop-gap.”

“Yes,” the Rector agreed.  “But our present bishops are only one more aspect of Victorian materialism.  The whole of contemporary society can be criticized in the same way.  After all, we get the bishops we deserve, just as we get the politicians we deserve and the generals we deserve and the painters we deserve.”

“I don’t think that’s any excuse for the bishops.  I sometimes dream of worming myself up and stopping at nothing in order to be made a bishop, and then when I have the mitre at last of appearing in my true colours.”

“Our Protestant brethren think that is what many of our right reverend fathers in God do now,” the Rector laughed.

These discussions might have continued for ever without taking Mark any further.  His failure to experience Oxford had deprived him of the opportunity to whet his opinions upon the grindstone of debate, and there had been no time for academic argument in the three years of Keppel Street.  In Wych-on-the-Wold there never seemed much else to do but argue.  It was one of the effects of leaving, or rather of seeing destroyed, a society that was obviously performing useful work and returning to a society that, so far as Mark could observe performed no kind of work whatever.  He was loath to criticize the Rector; but he felt that he was moving along in a rut that might at any moment deepen to a chasm in which he would be spiritually lost.  He seemed to be taking his priestly responsibilities too lightly, to be content with gratifying his own desire to worship Almighty God without troubling about his parishioners.  Mark did not like to make any suggestions about parochial work, because he was afraid of the Rector’s retorting with an implied criticism of St. Agnes’; and that would have involved him in a bitter argument for which he would afterward be sorry.  Nor was it only in his missionary duties that he felt his old friend was allowing himself to rust.  Three years ago the Rector had said a daily Mass.  Now he was content with one on Thursdays except on festivals.  Mark began to take walks far afield, which was a sign of irritation with the inaction of the life round him rather than the expression of an interest in the life beyond.  On one of these walks he found himself at Wield in the diocese of Kidderminster thirty miles or more away from home.  He had spent the night in a remote Cotswold village, and all the morning he had been travelling through the level vale of Wield which, beautiful at the time of blossom, was now at midsummer a landscape without line, monotonously green, prosperous and complacent.  While he was eating his bread and cheese at the public bar of the principal inn, he picked up one of the local newspapers and reading it, as one so often reads in such surroundings, with much greater particularity than the journal of a metropolis, he came upon the following letter: