The congregation rustled softly everywhere as the people settled themselves to listen—­they listened always to him.  And across the hush that followed came the Bishop’s voice again, tranquilly breaking, not jarring, the silence.  “Not disobedient to the heavenly vision,” were the words he was saying, and Fielding dropped at once the thread of his own thought to listen.

He spoke quickly, clearly, in short Anglo-Saxon words—­the words that carry their message straightest to hearts red with Saxon blood—­of the complex nature of every man—­how the angel and the demon live in each and vary through all the shades of good and bad.  How yet in each there is always the possibility of a highest and best that can be true for that personality only—­a dream to be realized of the lovely life, blooming into its own flower of beauty, that God means each life to be.  In his own rushing words he clothed the simple thought of the charge that each one has to keep his angel strong, the white wings free for higher flights that come with growth.

“The vision,” he said, “is born with each of us, and though we lose it again and again, yet again and again it comes back and beckons, calls, and the voice thrills us always.  And we must follow, or lose the way.  Through ice and flame we must follow.  And no one may look across where another soul moves on a quick, straight path and think that the way is easier for the other.  No one can see if the rocks are not cutting his friend’s feet; no one can know what burning lands he has crossed to follow, to be so close to his angel, his messenger.  Believe always that every other life has been more tempted, more tried than your own; believe that the lives higher and better than your own are so not through more ease, but more effort; that the lives lower than yours are so through less opportunity, more trial.  Believe that your friend with peace in his heart has won it, not happened on it—­that he has fought your very fight.  So the mist will melt from your eyes and you will see clearer the vision of your life and the way it leads you; selfishness will fall from your shoulders and you will follow lightly.  And at the end, and along the way you will have the glory of effort, the joy of fighting and winning, the beauty of the heights where only an ideal can take you.”

What more he said Fielding did not hear—­for him one sentence had been the final word.  The unlaid ghost of the Bishop’s puzzling talk an hour before rose up and from its lips came, as if in full explanation, “He has fought your very fight.”  He sat in his shadowy, dark corner of the cool, little stone church, and while the congregation rose and knelt and sang and prayed, he was still.  Piece by piece he fitted the mosaic of past and present, and each bit slipped faultlessly into place.  There was no question in his mind now as to the fact, and his manliness and honor rushed to meet the situation.  He had said that where his friend had gone he would