"It is very kind of you, sir, to take my presumption in such good part. Pray sit down, sir. You will find that chair a comfortable one."
"Presumption!" echoed Wingfold. "The presumption was all on my part, and the kindness on yours. But you must first hear my explanation, such as it is. It makes the matter hardly a jot the better, only a man would not willingly look worse, or better either, than he is, and besides, we must understand each other if we would be friends. However unlikely it may seem to you, Mr. Polwarth, I really do share the common weakness of wanting to be taken exactly for what I am, neither more nor less."
"It is a noble weakness, and far enough from common, I am sorry to think," returned Polwarth.
The curate then told the gate-keeper of his uncle's legacy, and his own ignorance of Jeremy Taylor.
"But," he concluded, "since you set me about it, my judgment has capsized itself, and it now seems to me worse to use my uncle's sermons than to have used the bishop's, which anyone might discover to be what they are."
"I see no harm in either," said Polwarth, "provided only it be above board. I believe some clergymen think the only evil lies in detection. I doubt if they ever escape it, and believe the amount of successful deception in that kind to be very small indeed. Many in a congregation can tell, by a kind of instinct, whether a man be preaching his own sermons or not. But the worse evil appears to me to lie in the tacit understanding that a sermon must SEEM to be a man's own, although all in the congregation know, and the would-be preacher knows that they know, that it is none of his."
"Then you mean, Mr. Polwarth, that I should solemnly acquaint my congregation next Sunday with the fact that the sermon I am about to read to them is one of many left me by my worthy uncle, Jonah Driftwood, D.D., who, on his death-bed, expressed the hope that I should support their teaching by my example, for, having gone over them some ten or fifteen times in the course of his incumbency, and bettered each every time until he could do no more for it, he did not think, save by my example, I could carry further the enforcement of the truths they contained:—shall I tell them all that?"
Polwarth laughed, but with a certain seriousness in his merriment, which however took nothing from its genuineness, indeed seemed rather to add thereto.
"It would hardly be needful to enter so fully into particulars," he said. "It would be enough to let them know that you wished it understood between them and you, that you did not profess to teach them anything of yourself, but merely to bring to bear upon them the teaching of others. It would raise complaints and objections, doubtless; but for that you must be prepared if you would do anything right."
Wingfold was silent, thoughtful, saying to himself—"How straight an honest bow can shoot!—But this involves something awful. To stand up in that pulpit and speak about myself! I who, even if I had any opinions, could never see reason for presenting them to other people! It's my office, is it—not me? Then I wish my Office would write his own sermons. He can read the prayers well enough!"