From a college window by A.C. Benson — Read

I have been fortunate in the course of my life in knowing, more or less intimately, several eminent priests; and by this I do not mean necessarily eminent ecclesiastics; several famous ecclesiastics 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.