chasuble had
swung open like that of such another as he turned to the altar again
after having blessed the people. And above all it had pleased him to
fill the second place in those dim scenes of his imagining. He shrank
from the dignity of celebrant because it displeased him to imagine that
all the vague pomp should end in his own person or that the ritual
should assign to him so clear and final an office. He longed for the
minor sacred offices, to be vested with the tunicle of subdeacon at
high mass, to stand aloof from the altar, forgotten by the people, his
shoulders covered with a humeral veil, holding the paten within its
folds or, when the sacrifice had been accomplished, to stand as deacon
in a dalmatic of cloth of gold on the step below the celebrant, his
hands joined and his face towards the people, and sing the chant ITE
MISSA EST. If ever he had seen himself celebrant it was as in the
pictures of the mass in his child's massbook, in a church without
worshippers, save for the angel of the sacrifice, at a bare altar, and
served by an acolyte scarcely more boyish than himself. In vague
sacrificial or sacramental acts alone his will seemed drawn to go forth
to encounter reality; and it was partly the absence of an appointed
rite which had always constrained him to inaction whether he had
allowed silence to cover his anger or pride or had suffered only an
embrace he longed to give.

He listened in reverent silence now to the priest's appeal and through
the words he heard even more distinctly a voice bidding him approach,
offering him secret knowledge and secret power. He would know then what
was the sin of Simon Magus and what the sin against the Holy Ghost for
which there was no forgiveness. He would know obscure things, hidden
from others, from those who were conceived and born children of wrath.
He would know the sins, the sinful longings and sinful thoughts and
sinful acts, of others, hearing them murmured into his ears in the
confessional under the shame of a darkened chapel by the lips of women
and of girls; but rendered immune mysteriously at his ordination by the
imposition of hands, his soul would pass again uncontaminated to the
white peace of the altar. No touch of sin would linger upon the hands
with which he would elevate and break the host; no touch of sin would
linger on his lips in prayer to make him eat and drink damnation to
himself not discerning the body of the Lord. He would hold his secret