Charred Wood

"To me," said Mark, "it seems as if you have."

"I have not," and the priest spoke very earnestly. "I have no such right. I never knew--for I did not ask--the reason of my disgrace. But one thing I did know; I knew it was for my good. I knew that, though it was a trial given me by men, there was in it, too, something given by God. You judge as I should have judged ten years ago--by the standards of the world. I judge now by other standards. It took adversity to open my eyes. We are not here, my dear Mark, for the little, but for the big things. I had the little and I thought they were big. My fall from a place of honor has taught me that they were really little, and that it is only now that I have the big. What is religion for but to enlighten and to save--enlighten here that the future may hold salvation? What were my purple, power and title? Nothing, unless I could make them help to enlighten and to save myself and others. I ought to have fought them, but I was not big enough to see that they hindered where I could have made them help. Like a bolt out of the sunlight came the stripping. My shame was the best offering I have made during all the days of my life. In my misery I went to God as naturally as the poor prodigal son went to his father when he was reduced to eating husks from the trough of the swine. I asked nothing as to the cause of my fall. I knew that, according to man's standard--even according to the laws that she herself had made--that the Church had been unjust; but I did not ask to know anything about it, for the acceptance of the injustice was worth more to my soul than was the great cathedral I had been instrumental in building. I was grieved that my friends had left me, but I knew at last that I had cultivated them at the expense of greater friends--sacrifice and humility. Shorn of my honors, in the rags and tatters left of my greatness, I lay before my Master--and I gained more in peace than I had ever known was in life."

"God!" Mark's very soul seemed to be speaking, and the single word held the solemnity of a prayer. "This, then, is religion! Was it this that I lost?"

"No one has lost, Mark, what he sincerely wishes to find."