a hazy and emotional order, has contrived to
effect an immense amount of good, besides amassing a colossal
fortune, and assuming almost Divine pretensions, without being widely
discredited. The human race is, speaking generally, so anxious for any
leading that it can get, that if a man or woman can persuade themselves
that they have a mission to humanity, and maintain a pontifical air,
they will generally be able to attract a band of devoted adherents,
whose faith, rising superior to both intelligence and common-sense,
will endorse almost any claim that the prophet or prophetess likes to
advance.

But the danger for the prophet himself is great. Arrogance, complacency,
self-confidence, all the Pharisaical vices flourish briskly in such a
soil. He loses all sense of proportion, all sense of dependence. Instead
of being a humble learner in a mysterious world, he expects to find
everything made after the pattern revealed to him in the Mount. The good
that he does may be permanent and fruitful; but in some dark valley of
humiliation and despair he will have to learn that God tolerates us and
uses us; He does not need us, "He delighteth not in any man's legs," as
the Psalmist said with homely vigour. To save others and be oneself
a castaway is the terrible fate of which St. Paul saw so clearly the
possibility; and thus any one who is conscious of the dramatic sense,
or even dimly suspects that it is there, ought to pray very humbly to
be delivered from it, as he would from any other darling bosom-sin. He
ought to eschew diplomacy and practise frankness, he ought to welcome
failure and to rejoice when he makes humiliating mistakes. He ought
to be grateful even for palpable faults and weaknesses and sins and
physical disabilities. For if we have the hope that God is educating us,
is moulding a fair statue out of the frail and sordid clay, such a
faith forbids us to reject any experience, however disagreeable, however
painful, however self-revealing it may be, as of no import; and thus we
can grow into a truer sense of proportion, till at last we may come

"to learn that Man
Is small, and not forget that Man is great."

XI. KELMSCOTT AND WILLIAM MORRIS

I had been at Fairford that still, fresh, April morning, and had enjoyed
the sunny little piazza, with its pretty characteristic varieties of
pleasant stone-built houses, solid Georgian fronts interspersed with
mullioned gables. But the c