Certainly he was making the best of the blunder that had led him up
into that pulpit! And on the other hand, whatever might be the
various judgments and opinions of his hearers in respect of the
sermon--a thing about which the less any preacher allows himself to
think the better--many of them did actually feel that he had been
preaching to them, which is saying much. Even Mrs. Ramshorn was more
silent than usual as they went home, and although--not having
acquainted herself, amongst others, with the sermons of Latimer--she
was profoundly convinced that such preaching was altogether contrary
to the tradition, usage, and tone of the English Church, of which
her departed dean remained to her the unimpeachable embodiment and
type, the sole remark she made was, that Mr. Wingfold took quite too
much pains to prove himself a pagan. Mr. Bascombe was in the same
mind as before.

"I like the fellow," he said. "He says what he means, fair and full,
and no shilly-shallying. It's all great rubbish, of course!"

And the widow of the dean of blessed memory had not a word to say in
defence of the sermon, but, for her, let it go as the great rubbish
he called it. Indeed, not knowing the real mind of her nephew, she
was nothing less than gratified to hear from him an opinion so
comfortably hostile to that of this most uncomfortable of curates,
whom you never could tell where to have, and whom never since he had
confessed to wrong in the reading of his uncle's sermons, and thus
unwittingly cast a reproach upon the memory of him who had departed
from the harassed company of deans militant to the blessed company
of deans triumphant, had she invited to share at her table of the
good things left behind.