“It is not quite so bad as that, surely!” said Helen.

“If it is not worldly pride, what is it?  I do not think it is spiritual pride.  Few get on far enough to be much in danger of that worst of all vices.  It must then be church-pride, and that is the worst form of worldly pride, for it is a carrying into the kingdom of Heaven of the habits and judgments of the kingdom of Satan.  I am wrong! such things can not be imported into the kingdom of Heaven:  they can only be imported into the Church, which is bad enough.  Helen, the churchman’s pride is a thing to turn a saint sick with disgust, so utterly is it at discord with the lovely human harmony he imagines himself the minister of.  He is the Pharisee, it may be the good Pharisee, of the kingdom of Heaven; but if the proud churchman be in the kingdom at all, it must be as one of the least in it.  I don’t believe one in ten who is guilty of this pride is aware of the sin of it.  Only the other evening I heard a worthy canon say, it may have been more in joke than appeared, that he would have all dissenters burned.  Now the canon would not hang one of them—­but he does look down on them all with contempt.  Such miserable paltry weaknesses and wickednesses, for in a servant of the Kingdom the feeling which suggests such a speech is wicked, are the moth holes in the garments of the Church, the teredo in its piles, the dry rot in its floors, the scaling and crumbling of its buttresses.  They do more to ruin what such men call the Church, even in outward respects, than any of the rude attacks of those whom they thus despise.  He who, in the name of Christ, pushes his neighbor from him, is a schismatic, and that of the worst and only dangerous type!  But we had better be going.  It’s of no use telling you to take your waterproof; you’d only be giving it to the first poor woman we picked up.”

“I may as well have the good of it till then,” said Helen, and ran to fetch it, while the curate went to bring his boat to the house.

When he opened the door, there was no longer a spot of earth or of sky to be seen—­only water, and the gray sponge filling the upper air, through which coursed multitudinous perpendicular runnels of water.  Clad in a pair of old trowsers and a jersey, he went wading, and where the ground dipped, swimming, to the western gate of the churchyard.  In a few minutes he was at the kitchen window, holding the boat in a long painter, for the water, although quite up to the rectory walls, was not yet deep enough there to float the boat with any body in it.  The servants handed him out the great cans they used at school-teas, full of hot coffee, and baskets of bread, and he placed them in the boat, covering them with a tarpaulin.  Then Helen appeared at the door, in her waterproof, with a great fur-cloak—­to throw over him, she said, when she took the oars, for she meant to have her share of the fun:  it was so seldom there was any going on a Sunday!—­How she would have shocked her aunt, and better women than she!