dying. How many souls would not be doomed to endless ages of
the most frightful torments that the mind could think of, before he could
bring his spiritual pathology engine to bear upon them? Why might he not
stand and preach as he saw the Dissenters doing sometimes in Lincoln's
Inn Fields and other thoroughfares? He could say all that Mr Hawke had
said. Mr Hawke was a very poor creature in Ernest's eyes now, for he was
a Low Churchman, but we should not be above learning from any one, and
surely he could affect his hearers as powerfully as Mr Hawke had affected
him if he only had the courage to set to work. The people whom he saw
preaching in the squares sometimes drew large audiences. He could at any
rate preach better than they.

Ernest broached this to Pryer, who treated it as something too outrageous
to be even thought of. Nothing, he said, could more tend to lower the
dignity of the clergy and bring the Church into contempt. His manner was
brusque, and even rude.

Ernest ventured a little mild dissent; he admitted it was not usual, but
something at any rate must be done, and that quickly. This was how
Wesley and Whitfield had begun that great movement which had kindled
religious life in the minds of hundreds of thousands. This was no time
to be standing on dignity. It was just because Wesley and Whitfield had
done what the Church would not that they had won men to follow them whom
the Church had now lost.

Pryer eyed Ernest searchingly, and after a pause said, "I don't know what
to make of you, Pontifex; you are at once so very right and so very
wrong. I agree with you heartily that something should be done, but it
must not be done in a way which experience has shown leads to nothing but
fanaticism and dissent. Do you approve of these Wesleyans? Do you hold
your ordination vows so cheaply as to think that it does not matter
whether the services of the Church are performed in her churches and with
all due ceremony or not? If you do--then, frankly, you had no business
to be ordained; if you do not, then remember that one of the first duties
of a young deacon is obedience to authority. Neither the Catholic
Church, nor yet the Church of England allows her clergy to preach in the
streets of cities where there is no lack of churches."

Ernest felt the force of this, and Pryer saw that he wavered.

"We are living," he continued more genially, "in an age of transition,
and in a country which, though it