anything inhuman or unintelligible. No one can misunderstand the
Beatitudes; very few people can follow the arguments of St. Paul! You don't
want only elaborate reasons for clever people, you want still more
beautiful motives for simple people. It isn't perfect, our service, I
admit, but it does me good."

"Tell me," I said--"to go back for a moment--something more about
meditating--I like that!"

"Well," said Father Payne, "it's like anchoring to a thought. Thought is a
fidgety thing, restless, perverse. It anchors itself very easily on to a
grievance, or an unpleasant incident, or a squabble. Don't you know the
misery of being jerked back, time after time, by an unpleasant thought? I
think one ought to practise the opposite--and I know now by experience that
it is possible. I will make a confession. I don't care for many of the Old
Testament lessons myself. I think there's too much fact, or let us say
incident, in them, and not enough poetry. Well, I take up my Bible, and I
look at Job, or Isaiah, or the Revelation, and I read quietly on. Suddenly
there's a gleam of gold in the bed of the stream--some splendid, deep, fine
thought. I follow it out; I think how it has appeared in my own life, or in
the lives of other people--it bears me away on its wings, I pray about it,
I hope to be more like that--and so on. Sometimes it is a sharp revelation
of something ugly and perverse in my own nature--I don't dwell long on
that, but I see in imagination how it is likely to trouble me, and I hope
that it will not delude me again; because these evil things delude one,
they call noxious tricks by fine names. I say to myself, 'What you pretend
is self-respect, or consistency, is really irritable vanity or stupid
unimaginativeness.' But it is a mistake, I think, to dwell long on one's
deficiencies: what one has got to do is to fill one's life full of
positive, active, beautiful things, until there is no room for the ugly