Ego sum Episcopus!

One grinning gargoyle looked in from beneath the roof through an opening in a stained window.  It was the face of a mocking fiend, such as the old builders loved to place under the eaves to spout the rain through their open mouths.  It looked at him, as he sat in his mitred chair, with its hideous grin growing broader and broader, until it laughed out aloud, such a hard, stony, mocking laugh, that he awoke out of his second dream through his first into his common consciousness, and shivered, as he turned to the two yellow sermons which he was to pick over and weed of the little thought they might contain, for the next day’s service.

The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather was too much taken up with his own bodily and spiritual condition to be deeply mindful of others.  He carried the note requesting the prayers of the congregation in his pocket all day; and the soul in distress, which a single tender petition might have soothed, and perhaps have saved from despair or fatal error, found no voice in the temple to plead for it before the Throne of Mercy!

CHAPTER XXVIII.

The secret is whispered.

The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather’s congregation was not large, but select.  The lines of social cleavage run through religious creeds as if they were of a piece with position and fortune.  It is expected of persons of a certain breeding, in some parts of New England, that they shall be either Episcopalians or Unitarians.  The mansion-house gentry of Rockland were pretty fairly divided between the little chapel, with the stained window and the trained rector, and the meeting-house where the Reverend Mr. Fairweather officiated.

It was in the latter that Dudley Venner worshipped, when he attended service anywhere,—­which depended very much on the caprice of Elsie.  He saw plainly enough that a generous and liberally cultivated nature might find a refuge and congenial souls in either of these two persuasions, but he objected to some points of the formal creed of the older church, and especially to the mechanism which renders it hard to get free from its outworn and offensive formulae,—­remembering how Archbishop Tillotson wished in vain that it could be “well rid of” the Athanasian Creed.  This, and the fact that the meeting-house was nearer than the chapel, determined him, when the new rector, who was not quite up to his mark in education, was appointed, to take a pew in the “liberal” worshippers’ edifice.

Elsie was very uncertain in her feeling about going to church.  In summer, she loved rather to stroll over The Mountain, on Sundays.  There was even a story, that she had one of the caves before mentioned fitted up as an oratory, and that she had her own wild way of worshipping the God whom she sought in the dark chasms of the dreaded cliffs.  Mere fables, doubtless; but they showed the common belief,