e and your love do
not depend on your affection for an unworthy priest, but upon that
deeper, greater, nobler affection for the word of God. There is only one
way in which you can show Father Hungerford that Jesus Christ lives in
your hearts, and that is by going to Confession and to Communion and by
hearing Mass as you have done all this time. Show him by your behaviour
in the street, by your kindness and consideration at home, by your
devotion and reverence in church, that you appreciate the mercies of
God, that you appreciate what it means to have Jesus Christ upon your
altar, that you are, in a word, Christians.

"And now at last I must think of those words of our dear Lord as they
apply to myself: _Feed my lambs._ And as I repeat them, I ask myself
again if I have done right, for I am troubled in spirit, and I wonder if
I ought to have given up that third altar and to have remained here. But
even as I wonder this, even as at this moment I stand in this pulpit for
the last time, a voice within me forbids me to doubt. No, my clear folk,
I cannot surrender that altar. I cannot come to you and say that what I
have been teaching for ten years was of so little value, of so little
importance, of so little worth, that for the sake of policy it can be
abandoned with a stroke of the pen or a nod of the head. I stand here
looking out into the future, hearing like angelic trumpets those three
words sounding and resounding upon the great void of time: _Feed my
lambs!_ I ask myself what work lies before me, what lambs I shall have
to feed elsewhere; I ask myself in my misery whether God has found me
unworthy of the trust He gave me. I feel that if I leave St. Agnes'
to-morrow with the thought that you still cherish angry and resentful
feelings I shall sink to a lower depth of humiliation and depression
than I have yet reached. But if I can leave St. Agnes' with the
assurance that my work here will go steadily forward to the glory of God
from the point at which I renounced it, I shall know that God must have
some other purpose for the remainder of my life, some other mission to
which He intends to call me. To you, my dear people, to you who have
borne with me patiently, to you who have tolerated so sweetly my
infirmities, to you who have been kind to my failings, to you who have
taught me so much more of our dear Lord Jesus Christ than I have been
able to teach you, to you I say good-bye. I cannot harrow your feelings
or my own b