The extraordinary thing, which many of Father Ripon's staff were almost unable to understand, was that more people did not avail themselves of what they regarded — viewing the thing from a standpoint of personal experience — such helpful opportunities.
"They are always coming to me," Father Ripon had said on one occasion, "and complaining that they find such a tremendous difficulty in leading a holy life — say that the worldly surroundings and so forth kill their good impulses — and yet they won't come to church. People are such fools! My young men imagine that they can become good Christians by a sort of sudden magic — a low beast on Saturday night, the twentieth of August, and, after a nerve storm in church and a few tears in the vestry, a saint for evermore! And then when they get drunk or do something beastly the next week, they rail against the Christian Faith because it isn't a sort of spiritual hand cuffs! And yet if you told them you could manage a bank after merely experience in a shipping office, they would see the absurdity of that at once. Donkeys!"
This with a genial smile of tenderness and compassion, for this Whirlwind in a Cassock loved his flock.
So from the very first Basil had found his life congenial. Privately he blessed his good fortune in living in Lincoln's Inn with Spence. On the nights when the journalist was free from the office, and not otherwise engaged, the two men sat late with pipes and coffee, enjoying that vigorous communion of two keen, young, and virile brains which is one of the truly stimulating pleasures of life.
Gortre admired Spence greatly for some of his qualities. His intellect was, of course, first class—his high position on the great daily paper guaranteed that. His reading and sympathies were wide. Moreover, the
