unch it would make. There! But you can't think what it's like
sometimes. One's soul is thrown at one, so to speak, morning, noon, and
night. I don't believe it's a good thing, anyway, to be always taking
one's soul out to feel its pulse. Except that mother's uneducated and
ignorant about it, she reminds me very much of a woman at that vicarage
in Somerset I used to go to sometimes in the holidays. She was the aunt
of the family and was what she called a deaconess. It's a sort of half
and half thing, not like a Sister of Mercy exactly...."

"A Cousin of Mercy, shall we say?" suggested the Parson. "I think I once
met the lady and I know what you mean. She had rows of little books,
hadn't she?"

"Yes, and thought it was the sin against the Holy Ghost if she missed
saying what she called her Hours. I'm sorry to be profane, but she did
annoy me so though I was only a youngster. And now mother seems to be
getting very like it. I wouldn't mind a bit if it made her happy, but it
doesn't, not a bit of it."

"Nothing would make your mother happy--she wouldn't think it right; but
she's only like a lot of women in that. The evils of Puritanism seem to
have taken a deeper root in women than in men, and in some it has kept
on cropping up generation after generation. Your mother is a born
Puritan, which is why I wish her to stay a Wesleyan. There is no more
arduous combination than the Puritan by instinct labouring under
acquired Catholicism. I am a bad missionary, I suppose, but I have seen
too much of these women."

"Women make such a fuss about nothing!" complained Ishmael.

"What has always seemed to me the mistake about the religious life as it
is lived to-day," said Boase, "is the overweening importance given to
trifles. The distortion of the sweeping-a-room-to-the-glory-of-God
theory. If the mind is properly attuned to the spiritual sphere temporal
things should lose significance, not gain them. I don't mean that we
must leave off seeing to them--that would result in our all lying down,
shutting our eyes, and starving ourselves gently into futurity. I mean
that we should do the things, and do them well; because they are of such
an insignificance they may just as well be done right as not. Get
yourself into the habit of washing dishes so well that instinctively you
are thorough over the job, and you won't have to think about it while
you do it. But the self-consciousness put into mundane affairs by the
average religious bea