So, there he was after all. The service would not be canceled this Sunday, as it had been the previous Sunday and many Sundays before that.

The minister was young, tall, slender, and radiantly handsome. If you had set a helmet on his head and hung a sword and breastplate on him, you could have chiseled him in marble and named the image after the most beautiful of the Athenians.

The minister had the deep eyes of a poet and the firm, rounded chin of a general; everything about him was lovely, fine, expressive, glowing through and through with genius and spiritual life.

The people in the church felt strangely subdued seeing him like that. They were more accustomed to seeing him stagger out of the inn in the company of merry companions, such as Beerencreutz, the colonel with the ample white mustaches, and the strong Captain Kristian Bergh.

He had been drinking so excessively that he had not been able to perform his duties for several weeks, and the congregation had been compelled to complain about him, first to his dean and then to the bishop and the consistory. Now the bishop had come to the parish to conduct an inquiry. He was sitting in the chancel with a gold cross on his chest, with clergymen from Karlstad and ministers from the neighboring parishes seated around him.

There was no doubt that the minister’s conduct had exceeded the bounds of what was permitted. At that time, in the 1820s, there was a certain degree of indulgence in matters of drinking, but this man had neglected his office for the sake of drinking, and now he would lose it.

He stood in the pulpit, waiting, while the last verse of the pulpit hymn was being sung.

A sense of certainty came over him, as he was standing there, that he had nothing but enemies in the church, enemies in every pew. Among the gentry in the balcony, among the farmers down in the church, enemies among the confirmands in the chancel, nothing but enemies. An enemy was pumping the organ, an enemy played it. He had enemies in the church wardens’ pew. Everyone hated him, everyone—from the little children who were carried into the church, up to the church sexton, a formal and arthritic soldier who had been at the battle of Leipzig.

The minister would have liked to fall down on his knees and beg them for mercy.

But the very next moment a dull anger came over him. He remembered well what he had been like a year ago, when he ascended this pulpit for the first time. He was an irreproachable man at that time, and now he was standing there, looking down at the man with the gold cross around his neck who had come there to judge him.

While he read the introduction, wave after wave of blood rushed up to his face; this was anger.

Yes, it was true that he’d been drunk, but who had the right to accuse him on that account? Had anyone seen the parsonage where he had to live? The spruce forest was dark and gloomy and grew right up to the windows. Water dripped down through the black ceiling, along the damp, moldy walls. Wasn’t liquor a necessity to keep your courage up, when rain or drifting snow swept in through cracked windowpanes, when the poorly tended earth wouldn’t yield bread enough to keep hunger at bay?

His next thought was that he was precisely the kind of minister they deserved. They drank, all of them. Why should he alone restrain himself? The man who buried his wife got drunk at the funeral reception; the father who had christened his child had a drinking bout afterward. The churchgoers drank on the way home from church; most of them were drunk by the time they arrived home. It served them right to have a drunken minister.

It was while making his official rounds, when dressed in his thin vestments he’d driven for miles across frozen lakes, where all the cold winds seemed to meet; it was as he was tossed around on these same lakes in a boat in storm and pouring rain; it was when he had to get out of the sleigh in a blizzard and clear a path for the horse through drifts as high as a house, or as he waded through the forest marsh, it was then that he’d learned to love liquor.

The days of that year had plodded along in heavy gloom. Farmers and gentry kept all their thoughts fixed on matters of the soil, but in the evening their spirits cast off their chains, liberated by liquor. Inspiration came, hearts were warmed, life became radiant, song resounded, there was a scent of roses. Then the serving room at the inn had become a Mediterranean flower garden to him: grapes and olives hung down above his head, marble pillars glistened in the dark foliage, wise men and poets strolled under palms and plantains.

No, he, the minister up there in the pulpit, knew that without liquor, life couldn’t go on in this part of the country; all of his listeners knew that, yet now they wanted to condemn him.

They wanted to tear the minister’s gown off of him, because he had entered the house of their God drunk. Oh, all of these people, did they themselves have, could they believe that they had, any other God than liquor!

He had read the introduction, and he lowered his head to recite the Lord’s Prayer.

There was dead silence in the church during the prayer. But suddenly with both hands the minister took firm hold of the cords that fastened his vestments. It seemed to him as though the whole congregation, with the bishop in the lead, was stealing up the stairs of the pulpit to tear the vestments off of him. He got down on his knees without turning his head, but he could just feel them tugging, and he saw them so clearly, the bishop and the other clergymen, the deans, the church wardens, the organist and the whole congregation in a long line, tearing and pulling to get his vestments loose. And he imagined to himself vividly how all of these people who were tugging so eagerly would fall over one another on the steps when his vestments came loose, and the whole line down there, who hadn’t been able to actually pull on this clothing, but rather just on the coattails of those standing in front of them, would also fall down.

He saw this so clearly that he had to smile, there on his knees, but at the same time a cold sweat broke out on his brow. The whole thing was simply too dreadful.

So, he was now to be a condemned man because of liquor. He would be a defrocked minister. Was there anything more wretched on this earth?

He would become one of the beggars on the road, lying intoxicated by the edge of the ditch, go dressed in rags, associate with vagabonds.

The prayer was over.