No More Learning

'

'Do not tell me anything more about him,' she answered; 'I will try to
be civil to him, but you know I never liked curates. I have been an
agnostic for many years. You, I believe, are orthodox. '

As Sherman was on his way home he met a fellow-clerk, and stopped him
with: 'Are you an agnostic? '

'No. Why, what is that? '

'Oh, nothing! Good-bye,' he made answer, and hurried on his way.


III

The letter reached the Rev. William Howard at the right moment,
arriving as it did in the midst of a crisis in his fortunes. In the
course of a short life he had lost many parishes. He considered
himself a martyr, but was considered by his enemies a clerical coxcomb.
He had a habit of getting his mind possessed with some strange opinion,
or what seemed so to his parishioners, and of preaching it while the
notion lasted in the most startling way. The sermon on unbaptized
children was an instance. It was not so much that he thought it true as
that it possessed him for a day.
It was not so much the thought as his
own relation to it that allured him. Then, too, he loved what appeared
to his parishioners to be the most unusual and dangerous practices. He
put candles on the altar and crosses in unexpected places. He delighted
in the intricacies of High Church costume, and was known to recommend
confession and prayers for the dead.

Gradually the anger of his parishioners would increase. The rector,
the washerwoman, the labourers, the squire, the doctor, the
school-teachers, the shoemakers, the butchers, the seamstresses,
the local journalist, the master of the hounds, the innkeeper, the
veterinary surgeon, the magistrate, the children making mud pies,
all would be filled with one dread--popery. Then he would fly for
consolation to his little circle of the faithful, the younger
ladies, who still repeated his fine sentiments and saw him in their
imaginations standing perpetually before a wall covered with tapestry
and holding a crucifix in some constrained and ancient attitude. At
last he would have to go, feeling for his parishioners a gay and lofty
disdain, and for himself that reverent approbation one gives to the
captains who lead the crusade of ideas against those who merely sleep
and eat. An efficient crusader he certainly was--too efficient, indeed,
for his efficiency gave to all his thoughts a certain over-completeness
and isolation, and a kind of hardness to his mind. His intellect was
like a musician's instrument with no sounding-board. He could think
carefully and cleverly, and even with originality, but never in such
a way as to make his thoughts an illusion to something deeper than
themselves. In this he was the reverse of poetical, for poetry is
essentially a touch from behind a curtain.

This conformation of his mind helped to lead him into all manner of
needless contests and to the loss of this last parish among much
else. Did not the world exist for the sake of these hard, crystalline
thoughts, with which he played as with so many bone spilikins,
delighting in his own skill? and were not all who disliked them
merely--the many?

In this way it came about that Sherman's letter reached Howard at the
right moment.