Mr. Sant was a bachelor, a tough militant Churchman and Church reformer. He taught me the uses of my fists as well as of the Decalogue. No doubt it was this constitution of his which made such way with the villagers, for Englishmen respect piety the better for its being knocked into them. I took my share of his excellent influence, and I trust it helped to make a man of me. You shall hear by-and-by about the first practical use to which I put it. He had the motto from Cicero framed and hung over the mantelpiece in his study. I will quote it to you, because it speaks the man more perfectly than I can do. _Quidquid agas, agere pro viribus_! Whatever you do, to do with your whole strength--that was it. It was a maxim very apt to one whose own strength, both of will and body, was of tempered steel. One among his many characteristic innovations was “The Feast of Lanterns,” as he called it. A lecture, to combine instruction with amusement, would be called for delivery in the church after dark. Whosoever listed might, on a single condition, attend this. He would find set up, spectrally discernible in the chancel, which, like the rest of the building, would be unlighted, a screen of white linen, on which had been roughly sketched in crayon, by the courageous lecturer himself, a number of objects--to become, in their turn, subjects--which might range, say, from a leg of mutton to the dome of St. Paul’s. The condition of attendance was simply that each comer should bring his or her own lantern, with the natural consequence that the greater the company the brighter the illumination. Now, with the first arrival began hymns, and were so continued until sufficient lights were congregated to reveal the drawings on the screen, a right identification of any one of which, by any member of the audience, at the close of any verse, put a period to the singing and started a disquisition on the object named. It must be said that the identification was not always accurate, in which case the singing was continued. For religious and artistic fervour are not necessarily associated, and the splendid daring which Mr. Sant put into his work sometimes obscured its intentions, as when his bellows, designed to introduce a dissertation on pulmonics, were taken for a ham. But the vigour and resourcefulness of the lecturer neither allowed an _impasse_, nor, while he was always quite ready to join in the laughter over his own artistic shortcomings, permitted criticism to degenerate into fooling. He did not object to laughter; on the contrary (I am afraid it will scandalize some people), he credited the Almighty with an almighty sense of humour, only he insisted upon its being tempered to the sacredness of the place in which it was evoked. And, for the rest, he had a fund of bright and ready information at his constant disposal.