So, as nearly as one can phrase the matter, it was really as a proof of confidence in his Author’s literary abilities that Felix Kennaston was presently confirmed at our little country church, to the delight of his wife and the approbation of his neighbors. It was felt to be eminently suitable: that such a quiet well-to-do man of his years and station should not be a communicant was generally, indeed, adjudged unnatural. And when William T. Vartrey (of the Lichfield Iron Works) was gathered to his grandfathers, in the following autumn, Mr. Kennaston was rather as a matter of course elected to succeed him in the vestry. And Kennaston was unfeignedly pleased and flattered. * * * * * To the discerning it is easy enough to detect in all this fantastic theorizing the man’s obsessing love of ordered beauty and his abhorrence of slovenliness—of shapelessness—which make his writings so admirable, here alluring him to believe that such ideals must also be cherished by Omnipotence. This poet loved his formal art to the extent of coming to assume it was the purpose and the origin of terrestrial life. Life seemed to him, in short, a God’s chosen form of artistic self-expression; and as a confrère, Kennaston found the result praiseworthy. Even inanimate nature, he sometimes thought, might be a divine experiment in _vers libre_.... But neither the justice of Kennaston’s airdrawn surmises, nor their wildness, matters; the point is that they made of him a vestryman who in appearance and speech and actions, and in essential beliefs, differed not at all from his associates in office, who had comfortably acquired their standards by hearsay. So that the moral of his theorizing should be no less obvious than salutary. * * * * * Thus, he too entered at last into that belief which is man’s noble heritage.... “Or I would put it, rather, that belief is man’s _métier_,” Kennaston once corrected me—“for the sufficient reason that man has nothing to do with certainties. He cannot ever get in direct touch with reality. Such is the immutable law, the true cream of the jest. Felix Kennaston, so long as he wears the fleshly body of Felix Kennaston, is conscious only of various tiny disturbances in his brain-cells, which entertain and interest him, but cannot pretend to probe to the roots of reality about anything. By the nature of my mental organs, it is the sensation the thing arouses in my brain of which I am aware, and never of the thing itself. I am conscious only of appearances. They may all be illusory. I cannot ever tell. But it is my human privilege to believe whatever I may elect.” “And, my dear sir,” as I pointed out, “is not this hair-splitting, really, a reduction of human life to the very shallowest sort of mysticism, that gets you nowhere?”