their brilliance to open up with one who had missed fire.

The parish of St. Mary's, Ibbotsfield, had an enormous rectory,
falling to pieces; an enormous church, crumbling away; an enormous
area, purely agricultural; and a cure of a very few hundred
agricultural souls, enormously-scattered. Years and years before,
prior to railways, prior to mechanical reapers and thrashers, and
prior to everything that took men to cities or whirled them and
their produce farther in an hour than they ever could have gone in
a week, Ibbotsfield and its surrounding villages and hamlets were
a reproach to the moral conditions of the day in that they had no
sufficiently enormous church. Well-intentioned persons removed this
reproach, adding in their zeal an enormous rectory; and the time
they chose for their beneficent and lavish action was precisely
the time when Ibbotsfield, through its principal land-owners, was
stoutly rejecting the monstrous idea of encouraging a stinking,
roaring, dangerous railway in their direction, and combining together
by all means in their power to keep the roaring, dangerous atrocity
as far away from them as possible.

It thus, and by like influences, happened that, whereas
one generation of the devoutly intentioned sat stolidly under the
reproach of an enormous and thickly populated area without a church,
later generations with the same stolidity sat under the reproach
of an enormous church, an enormous rectory and an infinitesimal
stipend, in an area which a man might walk all day without meeting
any other man.

But the devout of the day, not having to live in this rectory or
preach in this church or laboriously trudge about this area, did