An Ambitious Man

Meanwhile Senator Cheney's purse was always open to any demand the

church made; he believed in churches as benevolent if not soul-saving

institutions, and cheerfully aided their charitable work.

The rector of St Blank's, the fashionable edifice where the ladies of

the Cheney household obtained spiritual manna in New York, died when

Alice was sixteen years old. He was a good old man, and a sincere

Episcopalian, and whatever originality of thought or expression he

may have lacked, his strict observance of the High Church code of

ethics maintained the tone of his church and rendered him an object

of reverence to his congregation. His successor was Reverend Arthur

Emerson Stuart, a young man barely thirty years of age, heir to a

comfortable fortune, gifted with strong intellectual powers and

dowered with physical attractions.

It was not a case of natural selection which caused Arthur Stuart to

adopt the church as a profession. It was the result of his middle

name. Mrs Stuart had been an Emerson--in some remote way her family

claimed relationship with Ralph Waldo. Her father and grandfather

and several uncles had been clergymen. She married a broker, who

left her a rich widow with one child, a son. From the hour this son

was born his mother designed him for the clergy, and brought him up

with the idea firmly while gently fixed in his mind.

Whatever seed a mother plants in a young child's mind, carefully

watches over, prunes and waters, and exposes to sun and shade, is

quite certain to grow, if the soil is not wholly stony ground.

Arthur Stuart adored his mother, and stifling some commercial

instincts inherited from the parental side, he turned his attention

to the ministry and entered upon his chosen work when only twenty-

five years of age. Eloquent, dramatic in speech, handsome, and

magnetic in person, independent in fortune, and of excellent lineage

on the mother's side, it was not surprising that he was called to

take charge of the spiritual welfare of fashionable St Blank's Church

on the death of the old pastor; or that, having taken the charge, he

became immensely popular, especially with the ladies of his

congregation. And from the first Sabbath day when they looked up

from their expensive pew into the handsome face of their new rector,

there was but one man in the world for Mabel Cheney and her daughter

Alice, and that was the Reverend Arthur Emerson Stuart.

It has been said by a great and wise teacher, that we may worship the

god in the human being, but never the human being as God. This

distinction is rarely drawn by women, I fear, when their spiritual

teacher is a young and handsome man. The ladies of the Rev. Arthur

Stuart's congregation went home to dream, not of the Creator and

Maker of all things, nor of the divine Man, but of the handsome face,

stalwart form and magnetic voice of the young rector. They feasted

their eyes upon his agreeable person, rather than their souls upon

his words of salvation. Disappointed wives, lonely spinsters and

romantic girls believed they were coming nearer to spiritual truths

in their increased desire to attend service, while in fact they were

merely drawn nearer to a very attractive male personality.