Mark was impressed by the appearance of the Bishop of Devizes; a portly courtly man, he brought to the dingy little Mission House in Lima Street that very sense of richness and grandeur which Mark had anticipated.  The Bishop’s pink plump hands of which he made such use contrasted with the lean, scratched, and grimy hands of his father; the Bishop’s hair white and glossy made his father’s bristly, badly cut hair look more bristly and worse cut than ever, and the Bishop’s voice ripe and unctuous grew more and more mellow as his father’s became harsher and more assertive.  Mark found himself thinking of some lines in The Jackdaw of Rheims about a cake of soap worthy of washing the hands of the Pope.  The Pope would have hands like the Bishop’s, and Mark who had heard a great deal about the Pope looked at the Bishop of Devizes with added interest.

“While we are at lunch, Mr. Lidderdale, you will I am sure pardon me for referring again to our conversation of this morning from another point of view—­the point of view, if I may use so crude an expression, the point of view of—­er—­expediency.  Is it wise?”

“I’m not a wise man, my lord.”

“Pardon me, my dear Mr. Lidderdale, but I have not completed my question.  Is it right?  Is it right when you have an opportunity to consolidate your great work . . .  I use the adjective advisedly and with no intention to flatter you, for when I had the privilege this morning of accompanying you round the beautiful edifice that has been by your efforts, by your self-sacrifice, by your eloquence, and by your devotion erected to the glory of God . . .  I repeat, Mr. Lidderdale, is it right to fling all this away for the sake of a few—­you will not misunderstand me—­if I call them a few excrescences?”

The Bishop helped himself to the cauliflower and paused to give his rhetoric time to work.

“What you regard, my lord, as excrescences I regard as fundamentals of our Holy Religion.”

“Come, come, Mr. Lidderdale,” the Bishop protested.  “I do not think that you expect to convince me that a ceremony like the—­er—­Asperges is a fundamental of Christianity.”

“I have taught my people that it is,” said the Missioner.  “In these days when Bishops are found who will explain away the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection of the Body, I hope you’ll forgive a humble parish priest who will explain away nothing and who would rather resign, as I told you this morning, than surrender a single one of these excrescences.”

“I do not admit your indictment, your almost wholesale indictment of the Anglican episcopate; but even were I to admit at lunch that some of my brethren have been in their anxiety to keep the Man in the Street from straying too far from the Church, have been as I was saying a little too ready to tolerate a certain latitude of belief, even as I said just now were that so, I do not think that you have any cause to suspect me of what I should repudiate as gross infidelity.  It was precisely because the Bishop of London supposed that I should be more sympathetic with your ideals that he asked me to represent him in this perfectly informal—­er—­”