In a wider sense, perhaps, there was a more rational basis for the outcry. For Temple, with all his good and great qualities, was too little of the mystic to appeal to those who regarded the Church as something above and beyond a useful (or even indispensable) organisation. His sense of professional duty was high, but his mind was eminently that of a practical man of affairs, and he would probably have acted more wisely, in other interests as well as his own, if he had remained in the scholastic work to which the earlier part of his life was devoted. When he went to Exeter Temple had behind him a great record as an educational bureaucrat, and a still greater record as head-master of Rugby. But he had never served as a parish priest; his disposition was aloof, his temper autocratic, his manner rugged, his voice harsh and rasping; he had little imagination, and the quality of his mind fitted him more for politics, for high finance, for law, or even for soldiering than for the duties of a Christian high priest. A great spiritual leader in the full sense Temple could never have been. But he “made good” as a Bishop as he had “made good” as a head-master, and in much the same way. His diocese became a well-managed school, and his clergy were put in their places much like the boys of Rugby; some, perhaps, regarded him as a “beast,” none could call him other than a “just beast” and an energetic one. With the laity he had a certain popularity, partly because he was severe on any sacerdotal eccentricities that annoyed them, partly because with ordinary people he was more prone to unbend than with his professional brethren. He was at his very easiest in dealing with boys.