He read the Gospels, and soon gave up trying to unravel the hard sayings, but he read again and again every passage in which the words Love and Mercy occurred. They soothed him, and, reading over and over the gentleness of Jesus under persecution, he became softened and very tender, and sought the company of children, his grandchildren. He rested for a fortnight and then took up his work, for one Sunday only. All the old business of threatening and hectoring and denouncing and holding the wrath of God back with prayer, and piling up mountains upon mountains of sin to teach the love and mercy of the Gospel through and after punishment, everlasting and relentless, was empty, all sound and fury. His conclusion was, not that the Christian religion had become theatrical, rhetorical, mechanical, inhuman and unjust, but that he himself by his own life had become unworthy to administer it. Like many Christians, faced with the difficult, almost (in these days) impossible, task of distilling the essential truth from its accumulation of tainted lumber, he took refuge, without seeing any inconsistency, in the ascetic ideal, thinking that a life of absolute chastity and poverty and abstraction from the things of this world would give a man the right to hurl thunder and the lightnings of the Jewish Bible at his fellow men. And yet in his heart, as, latent in the hearts of all men, was the true faith in the ineffable love, _. . . che muove 'l Sole e l'altre stelle._ He could not disentangle this love, this spirit of man, from the superstition of the ages, and could not therefore let it freely move his own existence. He told himself that he had failed, that he ought never to have entered the priesthood, that he was an old man and could not change. No other course lay open to him than to retire. He wrote to his Bishop to ask his leave, and, if it were granted, to apply for a pension from the Diocesan fund. Never again did he conduct Divine service in any church. * * *