Unparalleled position for an endowed clergyman of the Church of England, the incumbent of an enviable living, an Oxford man, a man of family, a zealous High Churchman, an enlightened and alluring preacher, towards the latter end of the nineteenth century! Scandalous priest though he had also proved himself, his case was as pitiable as unique; a pariah in his own parish; the outcast of his own people; an inland Crusoe, driven to the traditional expedients of the castaway, and living the very life of such within sight and hail of a silent and unseeing world. It was a position which few men would have faced for an instant. This man maintained it throughout the winter. And throughout the winter his work went on. And the spring found him technically sane. But his brain bore it better than his heart. Some vital part of him was certain to suffer. His brain escaped altogether, his body for a time; but his heart was hard within him; all his prayers could not soften it; and presently he lost the power even to pray. This was the meaning of the changed face seen from the road, in the days and weeks succeeding the Long Stow celebration of the battle of Tel-el-Kebir. Thereafter it was the face of one in the coils of malignant despair. But the more gradual and substantial change, in such a man, was terrible beyond deduction from its mere outward shadow. Here was no sudden and sweeping infidelity; no plucking of loose roots from a shallow soil. Shallow this man was not, nor easily shaken in the least of his convictions. His general tenets stood intact. He still believed in the efficacy, under God, of earnest and worthy prayer. But he could no longer believe in the efficacy of his own prayers. They were not worthy: that was the whole truth. They were earnest enough, but utterly unworthy, and it was better not to pray at all.