Canon Nicholls bent forward, and held out his long, white hands with an eager gesture, as though he were wrestling with his infirmity in his great longing to gain an outlook which would enable him to read a little further into the souls of men.

“I cannot explain more definitely.  It is a case of fighting for a soul, or rather fighting with a soul against the devil in a terrible crisis.  I don’t know what to compare it to.  Perhaps it is like performing a surgical operation while the patient is scratching your eyes out.  If I can leave my own point of view out of sight for the present I can be of use, but I must let the scratching out of my eyes go on.”

Mark went to the church early that evening, as it was his turn to be in the confessional.  One or two people came to confession, and then the church seemed to be empty.  He knelt down to his prayers and soon became absorbed.  To-night he was oppressed in a new way by the sins, the temptations, and the unutterable weakness of man; his failures; his uselessness.  Nothing else in Art had ever impressed him so much as the figure of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  That beautiful figure, with all the freshness of its primal grace, stretching out its arms from a new-born world towards the infinite Creator, had expressed, with extraordinary pathos, the weakness, the failure, almost the non-existence of what is finite.  “I Am Who Am” thundered Almighty Power, and how little, how helpless, was man!

And then, as Mark, weary with the misery of human life, almost repined at the littleness of it all, he felt rebuked.  Could anything be little that was so loved of God?  If the primal truth, if Purity Itself and Love Itself could make so amazing a courtship of the human soul, how dared anyone despise what was so honoured of the King?  No, under all the self-seeking, the impure motives, the horrid cruelties of life, he must never lose sight of the delicate loveliness, the pathetic aspiration, the exquisite powers of love that are never completely extinguished.  He must see with God’s eyes, if he were to do God’s work.  And in the thought that it was, after all, God’s work and not his own, Mark found comfort.  He had come into the church feeling the burden on his shoulders very hard to bear, and now he made the discovery that it was not he who was carrying it at all; he only appeared to have it laid upon him while Another bore it for him.

CHAPTER XXXV

THE CONDEMNATION OF MARK

Two excellent and cheerful old persons were engaged in conversation on the subject of Father Molyneux.  The Vicar-General of the diocese, a Monsignor of the higher, or pontifical rank, had called to see the Rector of Mark’s church, and had already rapidly discussed other matters of varying importance when he said, leaning back in an old and faded leather chair: 

“What’s all this about young Molyneux?”