with whom circumstances have brought me into contact have not been
priestly persons at all; they have been vigorous, wise, energetic,
statesmanlike men, such as I suppose the Pontifex Maximus at Rome
might have been, with a kind of formal, almost hereditary,
priesthood. And, on the other hand, I have known more than one
layman of distinctly priestly character, priestly after the order
of Melchizedek, who had not, I suppose, received any religious
consecration for his ministry, apart from perhaps a kingly
initiation.

The essence of the priest is that he should believe himself,
however humbly and secretly, to be set in a certain sense between
humanity and God. He is conscious, if not of a mission, at least of
a vocation, as an interpreter of secrets, a guardian of mysteries;
he would believe that there are certain people in the world who are
called to be apostles, whose work it is to remind men of God, and
to justify the ways of God to men. He feels that he stands, like
Aaron, to make atonement; that he is in a certain definite relation
to God, a relation which all do not share; and that this gives him,
in a special sense, something of the divine and fatherly relation
to men. In the hands of a perfectly humble, perfectly disinterested
man, this may become a very beautiful and tender thing. Such a man,
from long and intimate relations with humanity, will have a very
deep knowledge of the human heart. He will be surprised at no
weakness or frailty; he will be patient with all perverseness and
obduracy; he will be endlessly compassionate, because he will
realize the strength and insistence of temptation; he will be
endlessly hopeful, because he will have seen, a hundred times over,
the flower of virtue and love blooming in an arid and desolate
heart. He will have seen close at hand the transforming power of