Turning to _Christmas Eve_, we find the case reversed, and the soliloquist occupying the position of one of those outsiders to whom the Bishop believed himself compelled to present an unquestioning and unquestionable orthodoxy. For the Prelate is substituted the man of active critical instinct, inclined to pass judgment with data insufficient to prove a satisfactory basis for the decision: of perceptions readily responsive to the glories of nature and their inspiration: but, we surely are not wrong in adding, of imaginative faculty unequal to the realization of those spiritual suggestions afforded to minds of different calibre by the symbolism of a ritualistic worship. The solemn silence of the vast crowd assembled in the cathedral makes stronger appeal to his sympathies than does the gorgeous display of ritual following. Hence it is a not illogical outcome of the position that he will but hear in the music of the service "hog-grunts and horse-neighings" that he will but see in the ceremonial observed "buffoonery--posturings and petticoatings." This man of spiritual and intellectual capacity so far developed is yet numbered amongst the congregation of the Calvinistic meeting-house, where the preacher is without erudition, the flock of mental outlook metaphorically as limited as the space bounded by the four walls within which they are assembled. How is the presence of this presumably unsympathetic personality to be accounted for in their midst? How otherwise than by the recognition of this peculiar deficiency in the nature which, whilst leaving it capable of looking directly upwards to the God of all creeds, yet renders it unable, in looking downwards, to see below the surface, and realize the worth of symbolism in worship where spiritual insight is not of the keenest. The utterance of the _Third Speaker_ of the _Epilogue_[79] may well be his as he awaits the coming of the Vision on the common without the Chapel: Why, where's the need of Temple, when the walls O' the world are that? And in his anxiety to avoid the "narrow shrines" of man's erection, he is ultimately driven to worship at one of the narrowest, chosen because the veil of ritual there interposed between the worshipper and his God is of the thinnest. The urgency of the desire to be freed from all outward ceremonial causes him to overlook the real faults of spiritual pride and exclusiveness characteristic of the Calvinistic congregation. True of heart, he would reject all shows of things; but there is in his nature a Puritanic strain which refuses to be eradicated, and this it is which finally leads him to become a member of the religious community whose failings he at first unsparingly condemned.