or the Person of the Divine Saviour.

"But I believe," Mark argued, "I believe profoundly with the whole of my
intellectual, moral, and emotional self that the Blessed Sacrament _is_
our Divine Saviour. I maintain that only through the Blessed Sacrament
can we hope to form within our own minds the slightest idea of the
Person of the Divine Saviour. In the pulpit I would undertake to present
fifty human characters as moving as our Lord; but when I am at the Altar
I shall actually give Him to those who will take Him. I shall know that
I am doing as much for the lowest savage as for the finest product of
civilization. All are equal on the altar steps. Elsewhere man remains
divided into classes. You may rent the best pew from which to see and
hear the preacher; but you cannot rent a stone on which to kneel at your
Communion."

Mark rarely indulged in these outbursts. On him too Silchester exerted a
mellowing influence, and he gained from his sojourn there much of what
he might have carried away from Oxford; he recaptured the charm of that
June day when in the shade of the oak-tree he had watched a College
cricket match, and conversed with Hathorne the Siltonian who wished to
be a priest, but who was killed in the Alps soon after Mark met him.

The bells chimed from early morning until sombre eve; ancient clocks
sounded the hour with strikes rusty from long service of time; rooks and
white fantail-pigeons spoke with the slow voice of creatures that are
lazily content with the slumbrous present and undismayed by the sleepy
morrow. In Summer the black-robed dignitaries and white choristers,
themselves not more than larger rooks and fantails, passed slowly across
the green Close to their dutiful worship. In Winter they battled with
the wind like the birds in the sky. In Autumn there was a sound of
leaves along the alleys and in the Gothic entries. In Spring there were
daisies in the Close, and daffodils nodding among the tombs, and on the
grey wall of the Archdeacon's garden a flaming peacock's tail of
Japanese quince.

Sometimes Mark was overwhelmed by the tyranny of the past in
Silchester; sometimes it seemed that nothing was worth while except at
the end of living to have one's effigy in stone upon the walls of the
Cathedral, and to rest there for ever with viewless eyes and cold
prayerful hands, oneself in harmony at last with all that had gone
before.

"Yet this peace is the peace of God," he told himself. "And I who