It was a cheerful scene on which my eye rested as I looked out upon it from the Rector’s study, while awaiting my introduction to the Rector himself. Two large bay windows opened on a terrace, from which a short flight of steps led down to a lawn, fringed with gaily-coloured flower beds. Through the open windows streamed into the room a veritable flood of light and air, creating an atmosphere in which sadness and depression would have been hopelessly out of place.

“Impossible,” I murmured, “to write a gloomy Calvinistic sermon in a room like this, though it’s strange, by the way, that his letters should have told me nothing of his views.”The emerald lawn in the foreground contrasted pleasantly with the violet haze that rested on the far horizon, and the very air itself seemed steeped in quiet and repose. Only the song of birds and the mysterious hum of insect-life broke the stillness of the summer day, to which the chafing of a trout stream, as it murmured over its rocky bed at the foot of the Rectory garden, sounded a soft accompaniment.

And out past the Rectory grounds, past the cheery meadow-land beyond, where reaping was now in progress, I caught a glimpse of the far off sea and the Isle of Portland lying on the line of the horizon, with a delicate veil of summer gauze folded about its head. The charm of it all wove a spell upon me like a dream.

“If the Rector is as nice as his Rectory, I shall have a pleasant time of it,” I said to myself. And the next moment the unspoken thought was answered in the affirmative, for I felt my hand warmly grasped by the gentlest-looking and most benevolent of men. And my heart went out to him on the instant, as to one whose help and guidance I knew would never fail me, even when my work under him should be ended, and, whether for good or evil, laid behind me among the retrospects of life.

“Yes, you’ll do,” he said, after studying me keenly for half-a-minute with eyes that pierced me through and through. “You look as if you’d work hard in the right way, and make friends with my villagers and parishioners. They are a queer lot—to be led, not driven. Above all, you look as if you had no foolish fads or fancies—the only things I can’t tolerate when there is so much real work to be done. And you’ll be content to do it closely on the lines laid down for us all in the Sermon on the Mount, before Christianity, as Christ left it, had lost its identity among a crowd of sects and superstitions. By the way, you must have been surprised, I imagine, that I asked no questions in my letters as to your opinions, and gave you no hints about my own.

“The fact is,” he continued, “I care more for what a man does than for what he thinks, and if you will look after my cottagers, soul and body—beginning with the body first—you and I will get on well together, no matter what opinions you hold on all the open questions of the day. Of course I don’t use the term ‘open’ of anything plainly taught us in the Gospel narrative and the precepts of our Church. Though even the latter, as it seems to me, might have been conceived in a somewhat wider spirit without being wide enough to embrace the Christianity of Christ. And for this reason I am altogether opposed to commissions and enquiries of any kind that might impose still further limits and restrictions where He Himself has made none. What are wanted for the Church are active energetic workmen, and the wider the doors are thrown open the more of them we shall get for the work. Think what missionary effort itself could accomplish if all its labourers were content to waive, one and all of them, their private specifics, and preach only the clear unquestioned truths which the Master Himself has sanctioned.

“On all questions but these you may hold what theories you will—that the world was created in six days or in six times as many millions of years; that the Old Testament miracles were literal facts, or allegories for the suggestion of much-needed truths. And you may hold, if you will, that no creature that has life will perish. We are told, are we not? that He ‘will save both man and beast,’ which means, if its means anything, that other creatures besides man will have a portion in the future state.

“But think well and carefully before you teach an Eternity of Punishment. The responsibility of doing so is far too grave to be carelessly incurred in the light of a wider and clearer-sighted knowledge. Almost it seems that the guess which Charlotte BrontË hazarded in the mouth of one of her characters will before long have crystallized into doctrine: ‘No; I cannot believe that. I hold another creed, which no one ever taught me, and which I never mention, but in which I delight, and to which I cling, for it extends hope to all; it makes eternity a rest—a mighty home, not a terror and an abyss.’

“Above all things, do not confuse your mind and paralyse your energies with the question, so all-engrossing now-a-days, of the co-existence of good and evil, of joy and sorrow, in the world, which is after all no mystery at all. Or, if there be a mystery, surely it lies in the fact that anyone should have thought a world of infinite perfection possible. Why, the fallacy was refuted by Plato himself, to whom it was a self-evident truth that the creations of The Infinite must needs be finite and imperfect: in other words, not ‘infinitely’ but only ‘very’ good.

“Limitation, imperfection and (by consequence) evil, with their natural development in sin and suffering and death, were the inevitable portion of created life, but accompanied (thank heaven!) with a birthright of possibilities for good, that, rightly used here and hereafter, shall make us worthy of association, at the last perhaps of union, with the Infinite Itself.

“Forgive me if my sermon has wearied you. I can at any rate summarise it in brief. Teach mainly what has come to us directly from our Master’s lips—first and foremost, the paramount duty of unselfishness; it embodies the whole duty of man to man, and a part at least of his duty to his Creator. And remember that those who came after Him were after all but men, not exempt from the bias of inclination and judgment, who sometimes (it is quite possible) may have obscured where they thought to enlighten. To be followed therefore with all care and caution whenever they defined or limited what He left wide enough to embrace the world.

“Of course you will dine with me to-night,” he added cheerily, “and I’ll try to make amends for the penance I have inflicted on you. Besides, I want your opinion on the trout from the Rectory stream.”