“I see the necessity for right living, Mr. Conyers, for right feeling; but--there is something more. I know it as well as you.” Conyers’s glance sought Sylvia’s. Usually his eyes were rather cold and expressionless, but now they were full of a strange distress, an untold misery. Here was the first human being who had ever asked him for knowledge, and he was as helpless to answer her as a little child. And he aspired to be a teacher of men! He went home and studied furiously at some expurgated copies of the Fathers he possessed, and at a few more or less acute commentaries upon them: they did not give him one ray of light. He had two or three one-sided histories of the Reformation: these he read, and cast them aside in disgust. The readiness with which creeds were made, changed, made again, in the fifteenth century had always astounded and disheartened him. The old, old difficulty came back to him--provision was made everywhere for man’s moral nature, and he earnestly believed that provision had been made for man’s spiritual nature, but he could not find that provision in the narrow sphere to which his learning and his observation was confined. But cast, as he was, upon a vast and unknown sea of doubt, and feeling that he knew nothing, and could explain nothing, he confined himself to a plain and evangelical style of preaching and an ascetic strictness of life. He made some vain appeals for help from his ecclesiastical superior, the bishop, but the bishop plainly did not understand what Conyers was after, and bade him rather sharply to cease from troubling. He reminded Conyers of what a good salary Abingdon church paid him, and in what a very agreeable and hospitable community his lot was cast. As for the salary, it was very good on paper. But the laity had a fearful power over the clergy, for all of a clergyman’s comfort depended upon whether he made himself agreeable to his parishioners or not. Conyers found this the most harrowing, debasing, unapostolic circumstance in all his long list of miseries. He earned a living, but he had trouble in getting it. He was distinctly unpopular, and one of his first acts after taking charge of the parish was calculated to foment his unpopularity. He had scruples about slavery, as he had about everything, for he was a man tormented by a devil of scrupulosity. He had inherited five negroes, and these he set free and commended them to God. The result was appalling. Of the five, two became confirmed criminals, two died of exposure and neglect of themselves, and one was hanged for murder. The planters, seeing their own well-fed, well-cared-for slaves around them, pointed to Conyers’s experiment with triumph. _That_ was what freeing a lot of irresponsible half-monkeys meant! This humble tragedy haunted Conyers night and day, and almost drove him mad. Conyers had not been a young man when he was ordained, but after this he lost every vestige of youth.