Yet he could not deny that this reading and expounding of the Scriptures by the ignorant and unlearned led almost invariably to those other sins of blasphemy and irreverence which curdled the very blood in his veins.  Again and again had his heart burned within him to go forth amongst the people himself; to take upon himself and put in practice the office of evangelist, which he knew to be a God-appointed ministry, and yet which was so seldom worthily fulfilled, and himself to proclaim aloud the gospel, that all might have news of the Son of God, yet might be taught to reverence the holy sacraments more rather than less for the sake of Him who established them upon earth, and to respect the priesthood, even though it might in its members show itself unworthy, because it was a thing given by Christ for the edification of the body, and because He Himself, the High Priest passed into the heavens, must needs have His subordinate priests working with Him and by Him on earth.

Again and again had longings such as these filled his soul, and he had implored leave to go forth preaching and teaching.  But he had never won permission to do this.  The request had been treated with contempt, and he himself had been suspected of ambition and other unworthy motives.  He had submitted to the will of his superiors, as his vow of obedience obliged him to do; but none the less did his heart burn within him as he saw more and more plainly how men were thirsting for living waters, and realized with ever-increasing intensity of pain and certainty that if the Church herself would not give her children to drink out of pure fountains, they would not be hindered from drinking of poisoned springs, and thus draw down upon themselves all manner of evils and diseases.

He had never doubted for a moment the pureness of the source from which he himself drank.  He was not blind to the imperfections many and great of individuals in high places, and the corruptions which had crept within the pale of the Church, but these appeared to him incidental and capable of amendment.  He never guessed at any deeper poison at work far below, tainting the very waters at their source.  He was in all essential points an orthodox son of Rome; but he had imbibed much of the spirit of the Oxford Reformers, of whom Colet was at this time the foremost, and his more enlightened outlook seemed to the blind and bigoted of his own order to savour something dangerously of heresy.

He did not know himself seriously suspected.  His conscience was too clear, his devotion to the Church too pure, to permit of his easily fearing unworthy suspicions.  He knew himself no favourite with the stately but self-indulgent Prior of Chadwater; knew that Brother Fabian, whom he had once sternly rebuked for an act of open sin, was his bitter enemy.  But he had not greatly heeded this, strong in his own innocence, and he had been far happier at Chad in the more truly pure atmosphere of that secular house than in the so-called sanctity of the cloister.