interpretations of
Calvin and Strauss. The congregation grew more and more critical, and
could agree upon no candidate for settlement. They demanded the
respectability of belief with the showy talents of skepticism,--an
impossible combination, at least for a parish which offered only eight
hundred dollars and a decrepit house. At length Colonel Prowley took a
pew in the Orthodox Church;--it was a temporary arrangement, he said, to
be terminated whenever a settled minister should be provided for the
First Parish.

The Reverend Charles Clifton seldom left the rooms which he had taken in
a farmer's family on the outskirts of the town. We have seen how this
man had once believed that Providence had called him to an exceptional
and brilliant destiny. The total renouncement of what once glowed as a
mission requires a sturdy nature and plenty of active work. Clifton
possessed an exceeding susceptibility of nervous organization; he was
full of subtile intimations of what was passing in the minds of other
men, and at times seemed to have a strange power of controlling them.
The deep passion for metaphysical knowledge, which in his youth had been
kindled, was stilled, but never overcome. Wifeless, childless, he was
put under no bonds to struggle with the world. He knew the coldness of
the church in which he had been ordained to minister,--the hard and
dreary lives of those whom he had undertaken to illumine. But he made
the fatal mistake--inexcusable, it would seem, in a man of his liberal
nurture--of supposing that this world's evil was owing to the absence of
right opinion, and not of right feeling. It is to be feared that it was
not principle, but only a paroxysm of cowardice, which caused Clifton to
bury Vannelle's legacy in the Mather Safe. At all events, the minister
found himself unable to dismiss a certain thin and impalpable fantasy
which lingered behind that ponderous speculation of an all-embracing
philosophy. For the past two years he had fitfully sought, or rather
persuaded himself that he sought, some clue through the sad labyrinth of
his fate. He had indulged in the most morbid conditions of his physical
organism; there was neither steadiness in his purpose nor firmness in
his action. He yearned for that proximity to hidden things, which, if
not forbidden to all men, yet is dangerous to most men. At length he
succeeded in freeing his soul from the weight of conscious intellectual
life which had become too heavy for