raised his head
in confusion at the thought of the profane handicraftsman who might
claim the vague tribute of his spirit. Then fell the flash by which
he saw deeply concealed in his bosom, and disguised with a host of
spiritual wrappings, what he uncompromisingly identified as the artistic
bias, the aesthetic point of view. The discovery worked upon him so that
he spent three days without consummated prayer at all, occupied in the
effort to find out whether he could yet indeed worship in purity of
spirit, or how far the paralysis of the ideal of mere beauty had crept
upon his devotions. In the end he cast the artistic bias, the aesthetic
point of view, as far from him as his will would carry, and walked away
in another direction, from which, if he turned his head, he could see
the Church of Rome sitting with her graven temptations gathered up in
her skirts, looking mournfully after him. He had been a priest of the
Clarke Mission to Calcutta, a "Clarke Brother," six years when he stood
in the door of Ahsing's little shop in Bentinck Street, while Lindsay
explained to Ahsing his objection to patent leather toe-caps; six years
which had not worn or chilled him, because, as he would have cheerfully
admitted, he had recognised the facts and lowered his personal hopes of
achievement--lowered them with a heroism which took account of himself
as no more than a spiritual molecule rightly inspired and moving to
the great future already shining behind coming aeons of the universal
Kingdom. Indeed, his humility was scientific; he made his deductions
from the granular nature of all change, moral and material. He never
talked or thought of the Aryan souls that were to shine with peculiar
Oriental brightness as stars in the crown of his reward; he saw rather
the ego and the energy of him merged in a wave of blessed tendency in
this world, thankful if, in that which is to come, it was counted worthy
to survive at all. It should be understood that Arnold did not hope to
attain the simplicity of this by means equally simple. He held vastly,
on the contrary, to fast days and flagellations, to the ministry of
symbols, the use of rigours. The spiritual consummation which the eye
of faith enabled him to anticipate upon the horizon of Bengal should be
hastened, however imperceptibly, by all that he could do to purify and
intensify his infinitesimal share of the force that was to bring it
about. Meanwhile he made friends with the fathers of Be