Given, then, a man of rawboned frame, of virile physical health, and of pronouncedly good opinion of himself, this is perhaps the very profession of all others which would be most apt to build up that man in his own eyes into a personage of considerable stature. Such a man might easily regard himself as set apart from his fellow human beings--a feeling which Christ Himself never had, nor any great man in or out of history before Him or after Him. It is understandable that such a man, of such a profession, might be the very one to find his philosophy feeding upon itself; with the net result of an inordinate, ingrown egotism. And this ingrown egotism in himself might, in the case of his son, become an egotism congenital. There are ministers of the gospel, and other ministers of the gospel. John Rawn, Senior, was of this particular and less desirable sort. We mention him, having promised our hero all the analysis and all the generations he may desire; and being, moreover, commendably anxious fully to account for him and his many noteworthy peculiarities. V Had John Rawn, our hero, been able in his childhood to figure out that, after all, God and the undying stars had no special grudge against him in assigning his birth to a humble inland village; had he been able to picture to himself his real value as a human unit; had he been able to understand his own explanation,--that is to say this explanation of him which we so patiently have given--had he been able to qualify his own mind as that of a congenital egotist, and hence to see himself naturally come by certain phases of his character--he might have smiled and have been different. He might one day have extended his hand to his fellow-man understandingly, might have gone through life much as other men indeed, dying simply and without much outcry about it, as most of us do, and living with small disturbance of the world's equilibrium, as most of us also do. But in that deplorable case there would have been no John Rawn as we know him, and no story about him worth the telling. Let us, therefore, beg to disagree even with him, and not hold it as entire misfortune that he was born in an unstoried spot, and of parents one of whom, by reason of his natural character and of his calling, was wont to consider himself the partner, and not necessarily the junior partner, of a Divine Providence. CHAPTER II PURELY INCIDENTAL I To be sure John Rawn had a mother, but that is merely an incidental matter for one who really was brooded among the spheres, and who accepted a mother only as a necessary means to incarnation. We need accord no more than scant time to a mere mother.