As against the prevailing Gothic of the mighty Cathedral Vicar’s Walk stood out with a simple and fragrant charm of its own, so against the prevailing Gothic of Mark’s religious experience life at the Theological College remained in his memory as an unvexed interlude during which flesh and spirit never sought to trouble each other.  Perhaps if Mark had not been educated at Haverton House, had not experienced conversion, had not spent those years at Chatsea and Malford, but like his fellow students had gone decorously from public school to University and still more decorously from University to Theological College, he might with his temperament have wondered if this red-brick alley closed to traffic at either end by beautifully wrought iron gates was the best place to prepare a man for the professional service of Jesus Christ.

Sin appeared very remote in that sunny lecture-room where to the sound of cawing rooks the Principal held forth upon the strife between Pelagius and Augustine, when prevenient Grace, operating Grace, co-operating Grace and the donum perseverantiae all seemed to depend for their importance so much more upon a good memory than upon the inscrutable favours of Almighty God.  Even the Confessions of St. Augustine, which might have shed their own fierce light of Africa upon the dark problem of sin, were scarcely touched upon.  Here in this tranquil room St. Augustine lived in quotations from his controversial works, or in discussions whether he had not wrongly translated [Greek] in the Epistle to the Romans by in quo omnes peccaverunt instead of like the Pelagians by propter quod omnes peccaverunt.  The dim echoes of the strife between Semipelagian Marseilles and Augustinian Carthage resounded faintly in Mark’s brain; but they only resounded at all, because he knew that without being able to display some ability to convey the impression that he understood the Thirty-Nine Articles he should never be ordained.  Mark wondered what Canon Havelock would have done or said if a woman taken in adultery had been brought into the lecture-room by the beadle.  Yet such a supposition was really beside the point, he thought penitently.  After all, human beings would soon be degraded to wax-works if they could be lectured upon individually in this tranquil and sunny room to the sound of rooks cawing in the elms beyond the Deanery garden.

Mark made no intimate friendships among his fellows.  Perhaps the moderation of their views chilled him into an exceptional reserve, or perhaps they were an unusually dull company that year.  Of the thirty-one students, eighteen were from Oxford, twelve from Cambridge, and the thirty-first from Durham.  Even he was looked at with a good deal of suspicion.  As for Mark, nothing less than God’s prevenient grace could explain his presence at Silchester.  Naturally, inasmuch as they were going to be clergymen, the greatest charity, the sweetest toleration was shown to Mark’s