substitute for coffee, which gave the bishop indigestion, as his
stimulant for these nocturnal bouts.

Now green tea is the most lucid of poisons.

And while all this extra activity about Morrice Deans, these vigils and
crammings and writings down, were using all and more energy than the
bishop could well spare, he was also doing his quiet utmost to keep "The
Light under the Altar" ease from coming to a head.

This man he hated.

And he dreaded him as well as hated him. Chasters, the author of "The
Light under the Altar," was a man who not only reasoned closely
but indelicately. There was a demonstrating, jeering, air about his
preaching and writing, and everything he said and did was saturated by
the spirit of challenge. He did not so much imitate as exaggerate the
style of Matthew Arnold. And whatever was done publicly against him
would have to be done very publicly because his book had got him a
London reputation.

From the bishop's point of view Chasters was one of nature's ignoblemen.
He seemed to have subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles and passed all
the tests and taken all the pledges that stand on the way to ordination,
chiefly for the pleasure of attacking them more successfully from the
rear; he had been given the living of Wombash by a cousin, and filled it
very largely because it was not only more piquant but more remunerative
and respectable to be a rationalist lecturer in a surplice. And in a
hard kind of ultra-Protestant way his social and parochial work was not
badly done. But his sermons were terrible. "He takes a text," said one
informant, "and he goes on firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly, like
somebody tearing the petals from a flower. 'Finally,' he says, and
throws the bare stalk into the dustbin."

The bishop avoided "The Light under the Altar" for nearly a year. It
was only when a second book was announced with the winning title of "The
Core of Truth in Christianity" that he perceived he must take action.
He sat up late one night with a marked copy, a very indignantly marked
copy, of the former work that an elderly colonel, a Wombash parishioner,
an orthodox Layman of the most virulent type, had sent him. He perceived
that he had to deal with a dialectician of exceptional ability, who had
concentrated a quite considerable weight of scholarship upon the task of
explaining away every scrap of spiritual significance in the Eucharist.
From Chasters the bishop was driven by reference to the