Reverend Horace Pedrick was a skeletal ignorant man of sixty. His delusions centred about money. He had never himself had enough. A poor boy from a Maine fishing family, he had entered the ministry after two business bankruptcies brought about by his extreme caution and fear of poverty. Too timid and old to acquire a city church, worn out with fiver-year-stints in skimping New England towns, he imagined his flock to be composed of ‘practical men’, businessmen whose operations had the scope and harshness of natural processes. In the pulpit, his white hair standing erect as the water on it dried, he held himself braced against imagined mockery, and his sermons, with contortions that now and then bent his body double, sought to transpose the desiccated forms of Christianity into financial terms. ‘The man Jesus’ – one of his favourite phrases – ‘the man Jesus does not ask us to play a long shot. He does not come to us and say, “Here is a stock for speculation. Buy at eight-and-one-eighth, and in the Promised Land you can sell at one hundred.” No, he offers us present security, four-and-a-half per cent compounded every quarter! Now I realize I am speaking to hard-headed men, businessmen whose decisions are far-ranging in the unsentimental world beyond this sanctuary…’