he was sure that perception of what the Sacraments could do for human nature must be given by the grace of God, and that the most exhaustive process of inductive logic would not avail in the least to convince somebody on whom the fact had not dawned in a swift and comprehensive inspiration of his inner life.  Sometimes indeed Mark would defend himself from attack, as when it was suggested that his reliance upon the Sacraments was only another aspect of Justification by Faith Alone, in which the effect of a momentary conversion was prolonged by mechanical aids to worship.

“But I should prefer my idolatry of the outward form to your idolatry of the outward form,” he would maintain.

“What possible idolatry can come from the effect upon a congregation of a good sermon?” they protested.

“I don’t claim that a preacher might not bring the whole of his congregation to the feet of God,” Mark allowed.  “But I must have less faith in human nature than you have, for I cannot believe that any preacher could exercise a permanent effect without the Sacraments.  You all know the person who says that the sound of an organ gives him holy thoughts, makes him feel good, as the cant phrase goes?  I’ve no doubt that people who sit under famous preachers get the same kind of sensation Sunday after Sunday.  But sooner or later they will be worshipping the outward form—­that is to say the words that issue from the preacher’s mouth and produce those internal moral rumblings in the pit of the soul which other listeners get from the diapason.  Have your organs, have your sermons, have your matins and evensong; but don’t put them on the same level as the Blessed Sacrament.  The value of that is absolute, and I refuse to consider It from the point of view of pragmatic philosophy.”

All would protest that Mark was putting a wrong interpretation upon their argument; what they desired to avoid was the substitution of the Blessed Sacrament for the Person of the Divine Saviour.

“But I believe,” Mark argued, “I believe profoundly with the whole of my intellectual, moral, and emotional self that the Blessed Sacrament is our Divine Saviour.  I maintain that only through the Blessed Sacrament can we hope to form within our own minds the slightest idea of the Person of the Divine Saviour.  In the pulpit I would undertake to present fifty human characters as moving as our Lord; but when I am at the Altar I shall actually give Him to those who will take Him.  I shall know that I am doing as much for the lowest savage as for the finest product of civilization.  All are equal on the altar steps.  Elsewhere man remains divided into classes.  You may rent the best pew from which to see and hear the preacher; but you cannot rent a stone on which to kneel at your Communion.”

Mark rarely indulged in these outbursts.  On him too Silchester exerted a mellowing influence, and he gained from his sojourn there much of what he might have carried away from Oxford; he recaptured the charm of that June day when in the shade of the oak-tree he had watched a College cricket match, and conversed with Hathorne the Siltonian who wished to be a priest, but who was killed in the Alps soon after Mark met him.