It will never do to make generalizations from merely one of Mr. Marshall's novels. If we had only _Abington Abbey_, we might imagine that he detested the clergy, for the clergyman in this book is surely detestable; but in _The Greatest of These_ there are two clergymen who are admirable characters, and a third who is by no means wholly or even mainly evil. Like an honest student of life, Mr. Marshall never considers a man as a representative of a business, but as a human being. No man is good because he is a clergyman; but it would be well perhaps if every member of that highest of all professions were a clergyman because he was good. VIII There is an unconscious double meaning in the American name given to the novel published in 1914, _The Greatest of These_, for it can be taken not only in the Pauline significance, but as the greatest of these books we are considering. It is the most ambitious and on the whole the most effective of its author's productions, containing also the essence of his religion--charity contrasted with opinions. We have an illustration of his favourite method of portraying the shade and shine of human character by placing in opposition two leading representatives of two large classes of nominal Christians--a clergyman of the Church of England and a minister of the Dissenters. Mr. Marshall never wrote a better first chapter. The reader is instantly aware that he has in his hands a masterpiece. Every leading character is introduced in the opening chapter either in person or in allusive conversation, and we know that Mr. Marshall has what most novelists seek in vain--a real plot. This book, which eventually rises to the highest spiritual altitude attained thus far by its author, begins on a note of sordid sex-tragedy, as unusual in the stories of Mr. Marshall as a picture like the Price household is in the work of Jane Austen; here it serves to bring forward the forthright and self-satisfied Anglican, who little dreams of his approaching humiliation; he is brought into conflict with a kind of Zeal-of-the-land Busy, whose aggressive self-righteousness is to be softened by the very man who he hoped would harden it. Here too, as in _Exton Manor_, we come as near as we ever come in Mr. Marshall's books to meeting a villain--in each case it is a woman with a serpent's tongue.