There seems a strange, almost grotesque impossibility in
the thought that such an one should ever have come to be regarded as
"a stickler for the canons."
But we look a little deeper than the surface, and all that is
incongruous straightway disappears. His was the realm of a divine
order,--his was the office of his Lord's servant. God had called him.
He had put him where he was. He had set his Church to be His witness
in the world, and in it, all His children, the greatest with the
least, to walk in ways of reverent appointment. Those ways might irk
and cramp him sometimes. They did: he might speak of them with sharp
impatience and seeming disesteem sometimes. He did that too, now and
then,--for he was human like the rest of us! But mark you this, my
brothers, for, in an age which, under one figment or another,
whether of more ancient or more modern license, is an age of much
self-will,--we shall do well to remember it,--his was a life of
orderly and consistent obedience to rule. He kept to the Church's
plain and stately ways: kept to them and prized them too.
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