“That is always the danger of a temperament like yours?” he mused.  “By all means keep your eyes on the high ground ahead of you; but do not forget that the more intently you look up, the more liable you are to slip on some unnoticed slippery stone in your path.  If you abandoned yourself to the formalities that are a necessary preliminary to Ordination, you did wisely.  Our Blessed Lord usually gave practical advice, and some of His miracles like the turning of water into wine at Cana were reproofs to carelessness in matters of detail.  It was only when people worshipped utility unduly that He went to the other extreme as in His rebuke to Judas over the cruse of ointment.”

The Bishop raised his head and gave Mark absolution.  When they came out of the sacristy he invited him to come up to his library and have a talk.

“I’m glad that you are going to Galton,” he said, wagging his long neck over a crumpet.  “I think you’ll find your experience in such a parish extraordinarily useful at the beginning of your career.  So many young men have an idea that the only way to serve God is to go immediately to a slum.  You’ll be much more discouraged at Galton than you can imagine.  You’ll learn there more of the difficulties of a clergyman’s life in a year than you could learn in London in a lifetime.  Rowley, as no doubt you’ve heard, has just accepted a slum parish in Shoreditch.  Well, he wrote to me the other day and suggested that you should go to him.  But I dissented.  You’ll have an opportunity at Galton to rely upon yourself.  You’ll begin in the ruck.  You’ll be one of many who struggle year in year out with an ordinary parish.  There won’t be any paragraphs about St. Luke’s in the Church papers.  There won’t be any enthusiastic pilgrims.  There’ll be nothing but the thought of our Blessed Lord to keep you struggling on, only that, only our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ.”

The Bishop’s head wagged slowly to and fro in the silence that succeeded his words, and Mark pondering them in that silence felt no longer that he was saying “Lord, Lord,” but that he had been called to follow and that he was ready without hesitation to follow Him whithersoever He should lead.

The quiet Ember Friday came to an end, and on the Saturday there were more formalities, of which Mark dreaded most the taking of the oath before the Registrar.  He had managed with the help of subtle High Church divines to persuade himself that he could swear he assented to the Thirty-nine Articles without perjury.  Nevertheless he wished that he was not bound to take that oath, and he was glad that the sense in which the Thirty-nine Articles were to be accepted was left to the discretion of him who took the oath.  Of one thing Mark was positive.  He was assuredly not assenting to those Thirty-nine Articles that their compilers intended when they framed them.  However, when it came to it, Mark affirmed: