s seen the beginning and the end of many movements in
society and in the Church, and who has learned that the Church, for all
her decrepitude, is yet the most stable thing that the world has seen. I
have to thank you for coming to me, Holland."

"Your lordship has spoken to me with the greatest kindness," said George
Holland, as his spiritual father offered him his hand.

In a few minutes he was in his hansom once more.

CHAPTER XXIX.

I KNOW THAT IT DOESN'T MATTER MUCH TO GOD WHAT A MAN THINKS ABOUT
HIMSELF OR HIS SOUL.

For the next hour and a half the Rev. George Holland had an opportunity
of considering his position as a clergyman of the Church of England, and
as one whose chief desire was to advance the interests of the Church.
His bishop had assumed that he had been single-minded in his aims--that
his sole object in writing that book and that paper had been to cure the
complaint from which the old Church was suffering. His lordship had done
him justice where Phyllis had done him a gross injustice. What would
Phyllis have said he wondered, if she had heard that concession, made
not under pressure, but voluntarily by probably the highest authority in
the world, to his, George Holland's, singleness of aim?

But it was so like a girl to jump at conclusions--to assume that he
had been actuated by vanity in all that he had just done; that he was
desirous only of getting people to talk about him--being regardless
whether they spoke well of him or ill. He only wished that she could
have heard the bishop. He felt as a man feels whose character has just
been cleared in a court of law from an aspersion that has rested on
it for some time. He wondered if that truly noble man whom he was
privileged to call his Father in God, would have any objection to give
him a testimonial to the effect that in his opinion,--the opinion of his
Father in God,--there was no foundation for the accusation against him
and his singleness of aim.

But the bishop knew that it was not vanity which had urged him to write
what he had written. The bishop understood men.

He was right; the bishop understood men so well as to be able to
produce in a few words upon the man who had just visited the palace, the
impression that he believed that that man had been impelled by a strong
sense of duty without a touch of vanity. He understood man so well as
to cause that same visitor of his to make a resolution never again to
publish anything in the sa