"What? stand no longer without! work with you! with a Church whose head hath launched bull after bull against my master and his teachings? Come within a Church that sets the ruling of a man above the words of Holy Writ? The chief article of my creed is that the Gospel suffices for the salvation of Christians without the keeping of ceremonials and statutes that have been made by sinful and unknowing men. What work has Holy Church for me? Surely there are others who can mouth more glibly than I the words of the Mass, and who are more deeply versed in the labyrinths of canonical lore."
"What canst thou?" replied the Bishop, warmly, "everything! Once within the Church, thou canst raise the authority of the Scriptures, beat down the vicious barriers that exist between the people and the prelates. Remember, one blow from within counts for ten from without. Come within, and help me in my fight against foreigners who care naught for the people who are their charge, foreigners who never deign to approach these shores, save perchance to count the moneys that are yielded from their sees." Then with a swift change his voice softened, and there was a pathetic appeal in it. "I have fought hard for more than thirty years," he pleaded. "I am worn in body and spirit; if I die to-morrow without providing for a successor, doubtless all that I have accomplished will be as naught. The old conditions in this diocese will arise again. There are many priests and abbots—ay! and some higher than they—who will click their heels gleefully over my grave. Come to Ely and be its Archdeacon. I—nay!—the Church of Christ has need of thee. Come!"
The poor priest was astounded. How could this be that the archdeaconate of Ely should be offered to a poor priest, one of Wyclif's band, so distrusted and hated by Rome?
"You, the Bishop of Ely, you offer me this? It is no jest?"
The Bishop smiled. "Well, I do not mind confessing that it was no easy matter to bring about. Yet why should we go on permitting you to take people away from the Church? I am persuaded that the people need the Church as much as the Church needs the people. They have your confidence; I want you to bring them back to the altar."
"But, Father, the instant I doff this russet gown and don the albe and stole, that instant the people's confidence in me is gone."
"I cannot believe it has gone so far as that."
"Yea, I say it. It is too late to try to drag the people back. They have grown weary of having fat and lazy priests prate to them, with white hand on full belly, of patience and humility and duty to their overlords. Why do the people believe in me? Why do they follow me? Because they wot well that my meals are as uncertain as their own, that my face is roughened by the same wind that roughens theirs. Because I can look into their faces and say, 'I too have a-hungered, I too have a-thirsted, I too have sweated in the fields.'"
The Bishop looked very old and tired. A sob rose suddenly in the poor priest's throat. To his own surprise, suddenly he flung himself upon his knees before the couch.
"Little thought I, Father, when I came here with defiance and distrust in my heart, that I would fling myself on my knees before you; yet it is true that I feel it as a great personal sorrow that I cannot both stay with you and also answer the call of my master. But I cannot desert my people. Where they turn up the soil, where they guide the plough, where their tired backs bend, where the wind and the hail beat down upon them in the fields, there is my place, and there I must go."