Wingfold had come upon Richard again at his grandfather’s, talked a little more with him, and found him not so far from the kingdom of heaven but that he cared to deny a false god. And he had just discovered in Barbara, who so seldom went to church and who came of such strange parents, one in whom the love of God was not merely innate, but keenly alive. The heart of the one recoiled from a god that was not. The heart of the other was drawn to a God of whom she knew little. Were not the two upon converging tracks? What to most clergymen would have seemed the depth of a winter of unbelief seemed to Wingfold a springtime full of the sounds of rising sap.

“What man,” he said to himself, “knowing the compassion that some men have for their fellowmen, can doubt that, loving the children, they must one day love the father! Who more welcome to the heart of the eternal father than the man who loves his brother, whom also the unchanging father loves!”

Personally, I find the whole matter of religious teaching and observance in general a very dull business—as dull as most secular teaching. If salvation is anything like what are commonly considered its means, it is to me a consummation devoutly to be deprecated.

But no one ever found Wingfold dull. For one thing he scarcely thought about the church, and never mistook it for the kingdom of God. Its worldly affairs gave him no concern, and party-spirit was loathsome to him as the very antichrist. He was a servant of the church universal, of all that believed or ever would believe in the Lord Christ, therefore of all men, of the whole universe—and first, of every man, woman, and child in his own parish. But though he was the servant of the boundless church, no church was his master. He had no master but the one lord of life.

Therefore the so-called prosperity of the church did not interest him. He knew that the Master works from within outward, and believed no danger possible to the church, except from such of its nominal pastors as know nothing of the life that works leavening from within.

The will of God was all Wingfold cared about, and if the church was not content with that, the church was nothing to him, and might do to him as it would. He did not spend his life for the people because he was a parson, but he was a parson because the church of England gave him facilities for spending his life for the people. He gave himself altogether to the Lord, and therefore to his people. He believed in Jesus Christ as the everyday life of the world, whose presence is just as needful in bank, or shop, or house of lords, as at what so many of the clergy call the altar.