and there sprang up no less than three ecclesiastical scandals in
the diocese. First, the Kensitites set themselves firmly to make
presentations and prosecutions against Morrice Deans, who was reserving
the sacrament, wearing, they said, "Babylonish garments," going beyond
all reason in the matter of infant confession, and generally brightening
up Mogham Banks; next, a popular preacher in Wombash, published a book
under the exasperating title, "The Light Under the Altar," in which
he showed himself as something between an Arian and a Pantheist, and
treated the dogma of the Trinity with as little respect as one would
show to an intrusive cat; while thirdly, an obscure but overworked
missioner of a tin mission church in the new working-class district at
Pringle, being discovered in some sort of polygamous relationship, had
seen fit to publish in pamphlet form a scandalous admission and defence,
a pamphlet entitled "Marriage True and False," taking the public
needlessly into his completest confidence and quoting the affairs of
Abraham and Hosea, reviving many points that are better forgotten about
Luther, and appealing also to such uncanonical authorities as
Milton, Plato, and John Humphrey Noyes. This abnormal concurrence of
indiscipline was extremely unlucky for the bishop. It plunged him into
strenuous controversy upon three fronts, so to speak, and involved
a great number of personal encounters far too vivid for his mental
serenity.

The Pringle polygamist was the most moving as Morrice Deans was the most
exacting and troublesome and the Wombash Pantheist the most insidiously
destructive figure in these three toilsome disputes. The Pringle man's
soul had apparently missed the normal distribution of fig-leaves; he
was an illiterate, open-eyed, hard-voiced, freckled, rational-minded
creature, with large expository hands, who had come by a side way into
the church because he was an indefatigable worker, and he insisted upon