“You are the man to find what fits your own need if the thing be there,” said Polwarth. “But to ease your mind for the task: I know pretty well some of our best English writers of the more practical and poetic sort in theology--the two qualities go together--and if you will do me the favour to come again to-morrow, I shall be able, I trust, to provide you wherewithal to feed your flock, free of that duplicity which, be it as common as the surplice, and as fully connived as laughed at by that flock, is yet duplicity. There is no law that sermons shall be the preacher’s own, but there is an eternal law against all manner of humbug. Pardon the word.” “I will not attempt to thank you,” said Wingfold, “but I will do as you tell me. You are the first real friend I have ever had--except my brother, who is dead.” “Perhaps you have had more friends than you are aware of. You owe something to the man, for instance, who, with his outspoken antagonism, roused you first to a sense of what was lacking to you.” “I hope I shall be grateful to God for it some day,” returned Wingfold. “I cannot say that I feel much obligation to Mr. Bascombe. And yet when I think of it,--perhaps--I don’t know--what ought a man to be more grateful for than honesty?” After a word of arrangement for next day the curate took his leave, assuredly with a stronger feeling of simple genuine respect than he had ever yet felt for man. Rachel bade him good night with her fine eyes filled with tears, which suited their expression, for they always seemed to be looking through sorrow to something beyond it. “If this be a type of the way the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children,” said the curate to himself, “there must be more in the progression of history than political economy can explain. It would drive us to believe in an economy wherein rather the well-being of the whole was the result of individual treatment, and not the well-being of the individual the result of the management of the whole?” I will not count the milestones along the road on which Wingfold now began to journey. Some of the stages, however, will appear in the course of my story. When he came to any stiff bit of collar-work, the little man generally appeared with an extra horse. Every day during the rest of that week he saw his new friends. CHAPTER XX. A STRANGE SERMON.