ontent to get no
further: and that is what makes idolatry so ingenious a device of the
devil, that it persuades people to stop still and not to get on."

"But aren't you making too much out of it?" I said. "At the worst, this is
a harmless literary blunder, a foolish bit of hero-worship?"

"Yes," said Father Payne, "in a sense that is true, that these little
literary hucksters and pedlars don't do any very great harm--I don't mean
that they cause much mischief: but they are the symptom of a grave disease.
It is this d----d _bookishness_ which is so unreal. I would like to
say a word about it to you, if you have time, instead of doing our work
to-day--for if you will allow me to say so, my boy, you have got a touch of
it about you--only a touch--and I think if I can show you what I mean, you
can throw it off--I have heard you say rather solemn things about books!
But I want you to get through that. It reminds me of the talk of
ritualists. I have a poor friend who is a very harmless sort of parson--but
I have heard him talk of a bit of ceremonial with tears in his eyes. 'It
was exquisite, exquisite,' he will say,--'the celebrant wore a cope--a bit,
I believe of genuine pre-Reformation work--of course remounted--and the
Gospeller and Epistoller had copes so perfectly copied that it would have
been hard to say which was the real one. And then Father Wynne holds
himself so nobly--such a mixture of humility and pride--a priest ought to
exhibit both, I think, at that moment?--and his gestures are so
inevitable--so inevitable--that's the only word: there's no sense of
rehearsal about it: it is just the supreme act of worship expressing itself
in utter abandonment'--He will go on like that for an hour if he can find a
great enough goose to listen to him. Now, I don't mean to say that the man
hasn't a sense of beauty--he has the real ritual instinct, a perfectly
legitimate branch of art. But he doesn't know it's art--he thinks it is
religion. He thinks that God is preoccupied with such things; 'a full
choral High Mass, at nine o'clock, that's a thing to live and die for,' I
have heard him say. Of course it's a sort of idealism, but you must know
what you are about, and what you are idealising: and you mustn't think that
your kind is better than any other kind of idealising."

He made a pause, and then held out his hand for the book.

"Now here is the same sort of intemperate rapture," he said. "Look at this
introduction! 'It is