but if we say
'Take me, use me, let me help!' it is different, because we want to share
whatever is given us, to hand it on, not to pile it up. Of course it's
little enough that we can do: but think of old Mrs. Chetwynd again--what
has she to give? Yet it is more than Solomon in all his beauty had to
offer. We must be simple, we mustn't be ambitious. Do you remember the old
statesman who, praising a disinterested man, said that he was that rare and
singular type of man who did public work for the sake of the public? That's
what I want you to do--that is what a writer can do. He can remind the
world of beauty and simplicity and purity. He can be 'a messenger, an
interpreter, one among a thousand, _to show unto man his
uprightness_!' That's what you have got to do, old boy! Don't show unto
man his nastiness--don't show him up! Keep on reminding him of what he
really is or can be."

He went on after a moment. "I ought not to talk like this," he said,
"because I have failed all along the line. 'I put in my thumb and pull out
a plum,' like Jack Homer. I try a little to hand it on, but it is awfully
nice, you know, that plum! I don't pretend it isn't."

"Why, Father," I said, much moved at his kind sincerity, "I don't know
anyone in the world who eats fewer of his plums than you!"

"Ah, that's a friendly word!" said Father Payne. "But you can't count the
plum-stones on my plate."

We did not say much after this. We walked back in the summer twilight, and
my mind began to stir and soar, as indeed it often did when Father Payne
showed me his heart in all its strength and cleanness. No one whom I ever
met had his power of lighting a flame of pure desire and beautiful
hopefulness, in the fire of which all that was base and mean seemed to
shrivel away.

XLV

OF A CHANGE OF RELIGION

I was walking one day with Father Payne; he said to me, "I have been
reading Newman's _Apologia_ over again--I must have read it a dozen
times! It is surely one of the most beautiful and singular books in the
whole world?--and I think that the strangest sentence in it is this,--'Who
would ever dream of making the world his confidant?' Did Newman, do you
suppose, not realise that he had done that? And what is stranger still, did
he not know that he had told the world, not the trivial things, the little
tastes and fancies which anyone might hear, but the most intimate and
sacred things, which a man would hardly dare to say to God upon his