called; for religious terms were avoided, and a severe neutrality of description forbade the possibility of the Retreat itself seeming to take any side in the various mental battles for which it afforded a clear field, remote from interruption and from the bias alike of the world and of previous religious prepossessions.  A man was entirely left to himself at the Retreat.  Save at the dinner hour, no one spoke to him except the Superintendent.  The rule of his office was that he should always be ready to listen on all subjects, and to talk on all indifferent subjects.  Advice and exhortation were forbidden to him.  If a man wanted the ordinary consolations of religion, his case was not the special case the Retreat was founded to meet.  When nobody could help a man, and nothing was left for him but to go through with the struggle in his own soul, then he came to the Retreat.  There he stayed till he reached some conclusion:  that is, if he could reach one within a reasonable time; for the pretense of unconquerable hesitation was not received.  When he arrived at his resolve, he went away:  what the resolve was, and where he was going, whether to High or Low, to Rome or Islington, to Church or Dissent, or even to Mohammed or Theosophy, or what not, or nothing, nobody asked.  Such a foundation had struck many devoted followers of the Founder as little better than a negation or an abdication.  The Founder thought otherwise.  “If forms and words are of any use to him, a man will never come,” he said; “if he comes, let him alone.”  And it may be that this difference between the Founder and his disciples was due to the fact that the Founder believed that, given a fair field in any honest mind, his views must prevail, whereas the disciples were not so strong in faith.

It is very possible the disciples were right, in a way; but still the Founder’s scheme now and then caught a great prize that the disciples would have lost through their overgreat meddling.  The Founder would have repudiated the idea of differences in value between souls.  But men sometimes act on ideas they repudiate, and with very good results.

Whatever the merits or demerits of the Retreat might be, it was just the place Stafford wanted.  He shrank, almost with loathing, from the thought of exposing himself to well meant ministrations from men who were his inferiors:  the theory of the equalizing effect of the sacred office, which appears to be held in great tranquillity by many who see the absurdity of parallel ideas applied in other spheres, was one of the fictions that proved entirely powerless over his mind at this juncture.  He did not say to himself that fools were fools and blind men blind, whatever their office, degree, or profession, but he was driven to the Retreat by a thought that a brutal speaker might have rendered for him in those words without essential misrepresentation.  Above all, he wanted quiet—­time to understand the new forces and to estimate the good or evil of the new ideas.