The priest looked at Mark with kindly and almost merry eyes.  “I can answer you better, my friend, by sticking to my own case.  I have never talked of it before; but, if it helps you, I can’t very well refuse to talk of it now.  I came to the Church with empty hands, having passed through the crisis that seems to be upon you.  She filled those empty hands, for she honored me and gave me power.  She set me in high places, and I honestly tried to be worthy.  I worked for her, and I seemed to succeed.  Then—­and very suddenly and quietly—­she pulled me down, and tore my robe of honor from me.  My fellow priests, my old friends, criticised me and judged me harshly.  They came no more to see me, though I had been generous with them.  In the college I built and directed, one of my old friends sits in my place and forgets who put him there.  Another is the Bishop who disgraced me.  Now, have I a right to feel angry and rebel?”

“To me,” said Mark, “it seems as if you have.”

“I have not,” and the priest spoke very earnestly.  “I have no such right.  I never knew—­for I did not ask—­the reason of my disgrace.  But one thing I did know; I knew it was for my good.  I knew that, though it was a trial given me by men, there was in it, too, something given by God.  You judge as I should have judged ten years ago—­by the standards of the world.  I judge now by other standards.  It took adversity to open my eyes.  We are not here, my dear Mark, for the little, but for the big things.  I had the little and I thought they were big.  My fall from a place of honor has taught me that they were really little, and that it is only now that I have the big.  What is religion for but to enlighten and to save—­enlighten here that the future may hold salvation?  What were my purple, power and title?  Nothing, unless I could make them help to enlighten and to save myself and others.  I ought to have fought them, but I was not big enough to see that they hindered where I could have made them help.  Like a bolt out of the sunlight came the stripping.  My shame was the best offering I have made during all the days of my life.  In my misery I went to God as naturally as the poor prodigal son went to his father when he was reduced to eating husks from the trough of the swine.  I asked nothing as to the cause of my fall.  I knew that, according to man’s standard—­even according to the laws that she herself had made—­that the Church had been unjust; but I did not ask to know anything about it, for the acceptance of the injustice was worth more to my soul than was the great cathedral I had been instrumental in building.  I was grieved that my friends had left me, but I knew at last that I had cultivated them at the expense of greater friends—­sacrifice and humility.  Shorn of my honors, in the rags and tatters left of my greatness, I lay before my Master—­and I gained more in peace than I had ever known was in life.”

“God!” Mark’s very soul seemed to be speaking, and the single word held the solemnity of a prayer.  “This, then, is religion!  Was it this that I lost?”