Then and there, with singular unanimity and despatch, his relations came to the conclusion that he was mad.  To this hour, indeed, those who stand in his place and enjoy the wealth and position that were his by right, speak of him as “poor Thomas,” and mark their disapprobation of his peculiar conduct by refusing with an unvarying steadiness to subscribe even a single shilling to a missionary society.  How “poor Thomas” speaks of them in the place where he is we may wonder, but as yet we cannot know—­probably with the gentle love and charity that marked his every action upon earth.  But this is by the way.

He had entered the Church, but what had he done in its shadow?  This was the question which Owen asked himself as he sat that night by the open window, arraigning his past before the judgment-seat of conscience.  For three years he had worked hard somewhere in the slums; then this living had fallen to him.  He had taken it, and from that day forward his record was very much of a blank.  The parish was small and well ordered; there was little to do in it, and the Salvation Army had seized upon and reclaimed two of the three confirmed drunkards it could boast.

His guest’s saying echoed in his brain like the catch of a tune—­“that you might lead that life and attain that death.”  Supposing that he were bidden so to do now, this very night, would he indeed “think differently”?  He had become a priest to serve his Maker.  How would it be were that Maker to command that he should serve Him in this extreme and heroic fashion?  Would he flinch from the steel, or would he meet it as the martyrs met it of old?

Physically he was little suited to such an enterprise, for in appearance he was slight and pale, and in constitution delicate.  Also, there was another reason against the thing.  High Church and somewhat ascetic in his principles, in the beginning he had admired celibacy, and in secret dedicated himself to that state.  But at heart Thomas was very much a man, and of late he had come to see that which is against nature is presumably not right, though fanatics may not hesitate to pronounce it wrong.  Possibly this conversion to more genial views of life was quickened by the presence in the neighbourhood of a young lady whom he chanced to admire; at least it is certain that the mere thought of seeing her no more for ever smote him like a sword of sudden pain.

*****

That very night—­or so it seemed to him, and so he believed—­the Angel of the Lord stood before him as he was wont to stand before the men of old, and spoke a summons in his ear.  How or in what seeming that summons came Thomas Owen never told, and we need not inquire.  At the least he heard it, and, like the Apostles, he arose and girded his loins to obey.  For now, in the hour of trial, it proved that this man’s faith partook of the nature of their faith.  It was utter and virgin; it was not clogged with nineteenth-century qualifications; it had never dallied with strange doctrines, or kissed the feet of pinchbeck substitutes for God.  In his heart he believed that the Almighty, without intermediary, but face to face, had bidden him to go forth into the wilderness there to perish.  So he bowed his head and went.