indignation upon them. They have a hell of their own; words can add no
bitterness to it. It is no light thing to have secured a livelihood on
condition of going through life masked and gagged. To be compelled, week
after week, and year after year, to recite the symbols of ancient faith
and lift up his voice in the echoes of old hopes, with the blighting
thought in his soul that the faith is a lie, and the hope no more than
the folly of the crowd; to read hundreds of times in a twelvemonth with
solemn unction as the inspired word of the Supreme what to him are
meaningless as the Abracadabras of the conjuror in a booth; to go on to
the end of his days administering to simple folk holy rites of
commemoration and solace, when he has in his mind at each phrase what
dupes are those simple folk and how wearisomely counterfeit their rites:
and to know through all that this is really to be the one business of
his prostituted life, that so dreary and hateful a piece of play-acting
will make the desperate retrospect of his last hours--of a truth here is
the very [Greek: bdhelygma tês erêmhôseôs], the abomination of
desolation of the human spirit indeed.

No one will suppose that this is designed for the normal type of priest.
But it is well to study tendencies in their extreme catastrophe. This is
only the catastrophe, in one of its many shapes, of the fatal doctrine
that money, position, power, philanthropy, or any of the thousand
seductive masks of the pseudo-expedient, may carry a man away from love
of truth and yet leave him internally unharmed. The depravation that
follows the trucking for money of intellectual freedom and self-respect,
attends in its degree each other departure from disinterested following
of truth, and each other substitution of convenience, whether public or
private, in its place. And both parties to such a compromise are losers.
The world which offers gifts and tacitly undertakes to ask no questions
as to the real state of the timeserver's inner mind, loses no less than