But the danger for the prophet himself is great.  Arrogance, complacency, self-confidence, all the Pharisaical vices flourish briskly in such a soil.  He loses all sense of proportion, all sense of dependence.  Instead of being a humble learner in a mysterious world, he expects to find everything made after the pattern revealed to him in the Mount.  The good that he does may be permanent and fruitful; but in some dark valley of humiliation and despair he will have to learn that God tolerates us and uses us; He does not need us, “He delighteth not in any man’s legs,” as the Psalmist said with homely vigour.  To save others and be oneself a castaway is the terrible fate of which St. Paul saw so clearly the possibility; and thus any one who is conscious of the dramatic sense, or even dimly suspects that it is there, ought to pray very humbly to be delivered from it, as he would from any other darling bosom-sin.  He ought to eschew diplomacy and practise frankness, he ought to welcome failure and to rejoice when he makes humiliating mistakes.  He ought to be grateful even for palpable faults and weaknesses and sins and physical disabilities.  For if we have the hope that God is educating us, is moulding a fair statue out of the frail and sordid clay, such a faith forbids us to reject any experience, however disagreeable, however painful, however self-revealing it may be, as of no import; and thus we can grow into a truer sense of proportion, till at last we may come

                      “to learn that Man
     Is small, and not forget that Man is great.”

XI

KELMSCOTT AND WILLIAM MORRIS

I had been at Fairford that still, fresh, April morning, and had enjoyed the sunny little piazza, with its pretty characteristic varieties of pleasant stone-built houses, solid Georgian fronts interspersed with mullioned gables.  But the church!  That is a marvellous place; its massive lantern-tower, with solid, softly-moulded outlines—­for the sandy oolite admits little fineness of detail—­all weathered to a beautiful orange-grey tint, has a mild dignity of its own.  Inside it is a treasure of mediaevalism.  The screens, the woodwork, the monuments, all rich, dignified, and spacious.  And the glass!  Next to King’s College Chapel, I suppose, it is the noblest series of windows in England, and the colour of it is incomparable.  Azure and crimson, green and orange, yet all with a firm economy of effect, the robes of the saints set and imbedded in a fine intricacy of white tabernacle-work.  As to the design, I hardly knew whether to smile or weep.  The splendid, ugly faces of the saints, depicted, whether designedly or artlessly I cannot guess, as men of simple passions and homely experience, moved me greatly, so unlike the mild, polite, porcelain visages of even the best modern glass.  But the windows are as thick with demons as a hive with bees; and oh! the irresponsible levity displayed in these