le missed when he goes out of it. This was the point which
troubled Father Thomas's meditations. It was as if an angel had come
down to him, and pointed to the old smithy on the green, and said, "What
are you doing for those people? God will demand an account of their
souls, some day, and from somebody. Are you not your brothers' keeper?"
Hitherto Father Thomas had gone on very comfortably, with a reflection
which serves a great many of us to excuse our pride or our laziness--I
wish it might never be heard again from human lips--"It is not my
place." It was true, in one sense. The smithy was in Newport parish,
and Father Thomas belonged to the Cathedral. He tried to quiet the
angel--which was really his own conscience--with the thought that he had
no business to intrude into somebody else's parish. But the angel would
not be quiet.

"Will God take that answer at the Judgment Day?" he said. "You know
very well that the Vicar of Newport is an idle, careless man, who never
troubles himself about the souls of his people: that so long as you
observe the proper forms of civility, and ask his leave to visit these
people, he will give it you in a minute, and be glad enough to think he
is saved the trouble. That is the truth, and you know it."

Now, it is very unpleasant when one's conscience says in that blunt,
downright, cutting way, "You know it:" and Father Thomas found it so.
He made a few more excuses, which his conscience blew to the winds
before they were well finished: and at last it laid hold of him, as it
were, by the shoulders, and said, "Look there!"

Father Thomas looked there--at the cross which then hung in every
clergyman's room. There were two lines carved on the wood at the bottom
of this--lines which it was then not unusual to put at the bottom of
these crosses.

"This did I for thee; What dost thou for Me?"

"Look there!" cried the Angel Conscience. "Christ bore that heavy cross
for you--bore the reviling and the agony, the spitting, the scourging,
and the shame; and you won't face the Vicar of Newport for Him! You
can't walk half a mile, and ask a civil question of a man from whom you
expect a civil answer, for love of the Man who came down all the way
from Heaven to earth, and endured all the contradiction of sinners for
three-and-thirty years, and faced all the malice of the devil, for the
love of you! Are you ashamed of yourself, Thomas de Vaux, or are you
not?"

When it reached that