Robert Elsmere

CHAPTER XLVIII.

After the little incident recorded at the end of the preceding chapter, Hugh Flaxman may be forgiven if, as he walked home along the valley that night toward the farmhouse where he had established himself, he entertained a very comfortable scepticism as to the permanence of that curious contract into which Rose had just forced him. However, he was quite mistaken. Rose’s maiden dignity avenged itself abundantly on Hugh Flaxman for the injuries it had received at the hands of Langham. The restraints, the anomalies, the hair-splittings of the situation delighted her ingenuous youth. ‘I am free—he is free. We will be friends for six months. Possibly we may not suit one another at all. If we do—then——’

In the thrill of that then lay, of course, the whole attraction of the position.

So that next morning Hugh Flaxman saw the comedy was to be scrupulously kept up. It required a tolerably strong masculine certainty at the bottom of him to enable him to resign himself once more to his part. But he achieved it, and being himself a modern of the moderns, a lover of half-shades and refinements of all sorts, he began very soon to enjoy it, and to play it with an increasing cleverness and perfection.

How Rose got through Agnes’ cross-questioning on the matter, history sayeth not. Of one thing, however, a conscientious historian may be sure, namely, that Agnes succeeded in knowing as much as she wanted to know. Mrs. Leyburn was a little puzzled by the erratic lines of Mr. Flaxman’s journeys. It was, as she said, curious that a man should start on a tour through the Lakes from Long Whindale.

But she took everything naively as it came, and as she was told. Nothing with her ever passed through any changing crucible of thought. It required no planning to elude her. Her mind was like a stretch of wet sand, on which all impressions are equally easy to make and equally fugitive. He liked them all, she supposed, in spite of the comparative scantiness of his later visit to Lerwick Gardens, or he would not have gone out of his way to see them. But as nobody suggested anything else to her, her mind worked no further, and she was as easily beguiled after his appearance as before it by the intricacies of some new knitting.

Things of course might have been different if Mrs. Thornburgh had interfered again; but, as we know, poor Catherine’s sorrows had raised a whole odd host of misgivings in the mind of the Vicar’s wife. She prowled nervously around Mrs. Leyburn, filled with contempt for her placidity; but she did not attack her. She spent herself, indeed, on Rose and Agnes, but long practice had made them adepts in the art of baffling her; and when Mr. Flaxman went to tea at the Vicarage in their company, in spite of an absorbing desire to get at the truth, which caused her to forget a new cap, and let fall a plate of tea-cakes, she was obliged to confess crossly to the Vicar afterward that ‘no one could, tell what a man like that was after. She supposed his manners were very aristocratic, but for her part she liked plain people.’

On the last morning of Mr. Flaxman’s stay in the valley he entered the Burwood drive about eleven o’clock, and Rose came down the steps to meet him. For a moment he flattered himself that her disturbed looks were due to the nearness of their farewells.

‘There is something wrong,’ he said, softly detaining her hand a moment—so much, at least, was in his right.

‘Robert is ill. There has been an accident at Petites Dalles. He has been in bed for a week. They hope to get home in a few days. Catherine writes bravely, but she evidently is very low.’

Hugh Flaxman’s face fell. Certain letters he had received from Elsmere in July had lain heavy on his mind ever since, so pitiful was the half-conscious revelation in them of an incessant physical struggle. An accident! Elsmere was in no state for accidents. What miserable ill-luck!

Rose read him Catherine’s account. It appeared that on a certain stormy day a swimmer had been observed in difficulties among the rocks skirting the northern side of the Patites Dalles bay. The old baigneur of the place, owner of the still primitive établissement des bains, without stopping to strip, or even to take off his heavy boots, went out to the man in danger with a plank. The man took the plank and was safe. Then to the people watching, it became evident that the baigneur himself was in peril. He became unaccountably feeble in the water, and the cry arose that he was sinking. Robert, who happened to be bathing near, ran off to the spot, jumped in, and swam out. By this time the old man had drifted some way. Robert succeeded, however, in bringing him in, and then, amid an excited crowd, headed by the baigneur’s wailing family, they carried the unconscious form on to the higher beach. Elsmere was certain life was not extinct, and sent off for a doctor. Meanwhile, no one seemed to have any common sense, or any knowledge of how to proceed but himself. For two hours he stayed on the beach in his dripping bathing-clothes, a cold wind blowing, trying every device known to him: rubbing, hot bottles artificial respiration. In vain. The man was too old and too bloodless. Directly after the doctor arrived he breathed his last, amid the wild and passionate grief of wife and children.

Robert, with a cloak flung about him, still stayed to talk to the doctor, to carry one of the baigneur’s sobbing grandchildren to its mother in the village. Then, at last, Catherine got hold of him, and he submitted to be taken home, shivering, and deeply depressed by the failure of his efforts. A violent gastric and lung chill declared itself almost immediately, and for three days he had been anxiously ill. Catherine, miserable, distrusting the local doctor, and not knowing how to get hold of a better one, had never left him night or day. ‘I had not the heart to write even to you,’ she wrote to her mother. ‘I could think of nothing but trying one thing after another. Now he has been in bed eight days and is much better. He talks of getting up to-morrow, and declares he must go home next week. I have tried to persuade him to stay here another fortnight, but the thought of his work distresses him so much that I hardly dare urge it. I cannot say how I dread the journey. He is not fit for it in any way.’

Rose folded up the letter, her face softened to a most womanly gravity. Hugh Flaxman paused a moment outside the door, his hands on his sides, considering.

‘I shall not go on to Scotland,’ he said; ‘Mrs. Elsmere must not be left. I will go off there at once.’

In Rose’s soberly-sweet looks as he left her, Hugh Flaxman saw for an instant, with the stirring of a joy as profound as if was delicate, not the fanciful enchantress of the day before, but his wife that was to be. And yet she held him to his bargain. All that his lips touched as he said good-by was the little bunch of yellow briar roses she gave him from her belt.

Thirty hours later he was descending the long hill from Sassetôt to Petites Dalles. It was the first of September. A chilly west wind blew up the dust before him and stirred the parched leafage of the valley. He knocked at the door, of which the woodwork was all peeled and blistered by the sun. Catherine herself opened it.

‘This is kind—this is like yourself!’ she said, after a first stare of amazement, when he had explained himself. ‘He is in there, much better.’

Robert looked up, stupefied, as Hugh Flaxman entered. But he sprang up with his old brightness.

Well, this is friendship! What on earth brings you here, old fellow? Why aren’t you in the stubbles celebrating St. Partridge?’

Hugh Flaxman said what he had to say very shortly, but so as to make Robert’s eyes gleam, and to bring his thin hand with a sort of caressing touch upon Flaxman’s shoulder.

‘I shan’t try to thank you—Catherine can if she likes. How relieved she will be about that bothering journey of ours! However, I am really ever so much better. It was very sharp while it lasted; and the doctor no great shakes. But there never was such a woman as my wife; she pulled me through! And now then, sir, just kindly confess yourself, a little more plainly. What brought you and my sisters-in-law together? You-need not try and persuade me that Long Whindale is the natural gate of the Lakes, or the route intended by Heaven from London to Scotland, though I have no doubt you tried that little fiction on them.’

Hugh Flaxman laughed, and sat down, very deliberately.

‘I am glad to see that illness has not robbed you of that perspicacity for which you are so remarkable, Elsmere. Well, the day before yesterday I asked your sister Rose to marry me. She——’

‘Go on man,’ cried Robert, exasperated by his pause.

‘I don’t know how to put it,’ said Flaxman calmly. ‘For six months we are to be rather more than friends, and a good deal less than fiancés. I am to be allowed to write to her. You may imagine how seductive it is to one of the worst and laziest letter-writers in the three kingdoms, that his fortunes in love should be made to depend on his correspondence. I may scold her if she gives me occasion. And in six months, as one says to a publisher, “the agreement will be open to revision.”’

Robert stared.

‘And you are not engaged?’

‘Not as I understand it,’ replied Flaxman. ‘Decidedly not!’ he added with energy, remembering that very platonic farewell.

Robert sat with his hands on his knees, ruminating.

‘A fantastic thing, the modern young woman! Still I think I can understand. There may have been more than mere caprice in it.’

His eye met his friend’s significantly.

‘I suppose so,’ said Flaxman quietly. Not even for Robert’s benefit was he going to reveal any details of that scene on High Fell. ‘Never mind, old fellow, I am content. And, indeed, faute de mieux, I should be content with anything that brought me nearer to her, were it but by the thousandth of an inch.’

Robert grasped his hand affectionately.

‘Catherine,’ he called through the door, ‘never mind the supper; let it burn. Flaxman brings news.’

Catherine listened to the story with amazement. Certainly her ways would never have been as her sister’s.

‘Are we supposed to know?’ she asked, very naturally.

‘She never forbade me to tell,’ said Flaxman, smiling. ‘I think, however, if I were you, I should say nothing about it—yet. I told her it was part of our bargain that she should explain my letters to Mrs. Leyburn. I gave her free leave to invent any fairy tale she pleased, but it was to be her invention, not mine.’

Neither Robert nor Catherine were very well pleased. But there was something reassuring as well as comic in the stoicism with which Flaxman took his position. And clearly the matter must be left to manage itself.

Next morning the weather had improved. Robert, his hand on Flaxman’s arm, got down to the beach. Flaxman watched him critically, did not like some of his symptoms, but thought on the whole he must be recovering at the normal rate, considering how severe the attack had been.

‘What do you think of him?’ Catherine asked him next day, with all her soul in her eyes. They had left Robert established in a sunny nook, and were strolling on along the sands.

‘I think you must get him home, call in a first-rate doctor, and keep him quiet,’ said Flaxman. ‘He will be all right presently.’

‘How can we keep him quiet?’ said Catherine, with a momentary despair in her fine pale face. ‘All day long and all night long he is thinking of his work. It is like something fiery burning the heart out of him.’

Flaxman felt the truth of the remark during the four days of calm autumn weather he spent with them before the return journey. Robert would talk to him for hours—now on the sands, with the gray infinity of sea before them-now pacing the bounds of their little room till fatigue made him drop heavily into his long chair; and the burden of it all was the religious future of the working-class. He described the scene in the club, and brought out the dreams swarming in his mind, presenting them for Flaxman’s criticism, and dealing with them himself, with that startling mixture of acute common-sense and eloquent passion which had always made him so effective as an initiator. Flaxman listened dubiously at first, as he generally listened to Elsmere, and then was carried away, not by the beliefs, but by the man. He found his pleasure in dallying with the magnificent possibility of the Church; doubt with him applied to all propositions, whether positive or negative; and he had the dislike of the aristocrat and the cosmopolitan for the provincialisms of religious dissent. Political dissent or social reform was another matter. Since the Revolution, every generous child of the century has been open to the fascination of political or social Utopias. But religion! What—what is truth? Why not let the old things alone?

However, it was through the social passion, once so real in him, and still living, in spite of disillusion and self-mockery, that Robert caught him, had in fact been slowly gaining possession of him all these months.

‘Well,’ said Flaxman one day, ‘suppose I grant you that Christianity of the old sort shows strong signs of exhaustion, even in England, and in spite of the Church expansion we hear so much about; and suppose I believe with you that things will go badly without religion: what then? Who can have a religion for the asking?’

‘But who can have it without? Seek, that you may find. Experiment; try new combinations. If a thing is going that humanity can’t do without, and you and I believe it, what duty is more urgent for us than the effort to replace it?’

Flaxman shrugged his shoulders.

‘What will you gain? A new sect?’

‘Possibly. But what we stand to gain is a new social bond,’ was the flashing answer-’a new compelling force in man and in society. Can you deny that the world wants it? What are you economists and sociologists of the new type always pining for? Why, for that diminution of the self in man which is to enable the individual to see the world’s ends clearly, and to care not only for his own but for his neighbor’s interest, which is to make the rich devote themselves to the poor, and the poor bear with the rich. If man only would, he could, you say, solve all the problems which oppress him. It is man’s will which is eternally defective, eternally inadequate. Well, the great religions of the world are the stimulants by which the power at the root of things has worked upon this sluggish instrument of human destiny. Without religion you cannot make the will equal to its tasks. Our present religion fails us; we must, we will have another!’

He rose, and began to pace along the sands, now gently glowing in the warm September evening, Flaxman beside him.

A new religion! Of all words, the most tremendous? Flaxman pitifully weighed against it the fraction of force fretting and surging in the thin elastic frame beside him. He knew well, however—few better—that the outburst was not a mere dream and emptiness. There was experience behind it—a burning, driving experience of actual fact.

Presently Robert said, with a change of tone, ‘I must have that whole block of warehouses, Flaxman.’

‘Must You? said Flaxman, relieved by the drop from speculation to the practical. ‘Why?’

‘Look here!’ And sitting down again on a sandhill overgrown with wild grasses and mats of seathistle, the poor pale reformer began to draw out the details of his scheme on its material side. Three floors of rooms brightly furnished, well lit and warmed; a large hall for the Sunday lectures, concerts, entertainments, and story-telling; rooms for the boys’ club; two rooms for women and girls, reached by a separate entrance; a library and reading-room open to both sexes, well stored with books, and made beautiful by pictures; three or four smaller rooms to serve as committee rooms and for the purposes of the Naturalist Club which had been started in May on the Murewell plan; and, if possible, a gymnasium.

‘Money!’ he said, drawing up with a laugh in mid-career. ‘There’s the rub, of course. But I shall manage it.’

To judge from the past, Flaxman thought it extremely likely that he would. He studied the cabalistic lines Elsmere’s stick had made in the sand for a minute or two; then he said dryly, ‘I will take the first expense; and draw on me afterward up to five hundred a year, for the first four years.’

Robert turned upon him and grasped his hand.

‘I do not thank you,’ he said quietly, after a moment’s pause; ‘the work itself will do that.’

Again they strolled on, talking, plunging into details, till Flaxman’s pulse beat as fast as Robert’s; so full of infectious hope and energy was the whole being of the man before him.

‘I can take in the women and girls now,’ Robert said at once. ‘Catherine has promised to superintend it all.’

Then suddenly something struck the mobile mind, and he stood an instant looking at his companion. It was the first time he had mentioned Catherine’s name in connection with the North R—— work. Flaxman could not mistake the emotion, the unspoken thanks in those eyes. He turned away, nervously knocking off the ashes of his cigar. But the two men understood each other.

CHAPTER XLIX.

Two days later they were in London again. Robert was a great deal better, and beginning to kick against invalid restraints. All men have their pet irrationalities. Elsmere’s irrationality was an aversion to doctors, from the point of view of his own ailments. He had an unbounded admiration for them as a class, and would have nothing to say to them as individuals that he could possibly help. Flaxman was sarcastic; Catherine looked imploring in vain. He vowed that he was treating himself with a skill any professional might envy, and went his way. And for a time the stimulus of London and of his work seemed to act favorably upon him. After his first welcome at the Club he came home with bright eye and vigorous step, declaring that he was another man.

Flaxman established himself in St. James’ Place. Town was deserted, the partridges at Greenlaws clamored to be shot; the head-keeper wrote letters which would have melted the heart of a stone. Flaxman replied recklessly that any decent fellow in the neighborhood was welcome to shoot his birds—a reply which almost brought upon him the resignation of the outraged keeper by return of post. Lady Charlotte wrote and remonstrated with him for neglecting a landowner’s duties, inquiring at the same time what he meant to do with regard to ‘that young lady.’ To which Flaxman replied calmly that he had just come back from the Lakes, where he had done, not indeed all that he meant to do, but still something. Miss Leyburn and he were not engaged, but he was on probation for six months, and found London the best place for getting through it.

‘So far,’ he said, ‘I am getting on well, and developing an amount of energy, especially in the matter of correspondence, which alone ought to commend the arrangement to the relations of an idle man. But we must be left “to dream our dream unto ourselves alone.” One word from anybody belonging to me to anybody belonging to her on the subject, and——. But threats are puerile. For the present, dear Aunt,

‘On probation!’

Flaxman chuckled as he sent off the letter.

He stayed because he was too restless to be anywhere else, and because he loved the Elsmeres for Rose’s sake and his own. He thought moreover that a cool-headed friend with an eye for something else in the world than religious reform might be useful just then to Elsmere, and he was determined at the same time to see what the reformer meant to be at.

In the first place, Robert’s attention was directed to getting possession of the whole block of buildings, in which the existing school and lecture-rooms took up only the lowest floor. This was a matter of some difficulty, for the floors above were employed in warehousing goods belonging to various minor import trades, and were hold on tenures of different lengths. However, by dint of some money and much skill, the requisite clearances were effected during September and part of October. By the end of that month all but the top floor, the tenant of which refused to be dislodged, fell into Elsmere’s hands.

Meanwhile at a meeting held every Sunday after lecture—a meeting composed mainly of artisans of the district, but including also Robert’s helpers from the West, and a small sprinkling of persons interested in the man and his work from all parts—the details of ‘The New Brotherhood of Christ’ were being hammered out. Catherine was generally present, sitting a little apart, with a look which Flaxman, who now knew her well, was always trying to decipher afresh—a sort of sweet aloofness, as though the spirit behind it saw down the vistas of the future, ends and solutions which gave it courage to endure the present. Murray Edwardes too was always there. It often struck Flaxman afterward that in Robert’s attitude toward Edwardes at this time, in his constant desire to bring him forward, to associate him with himself as much as possible in the government and formation of the infant society, there was a half-conscious prescience of a truth that as yet none knew, not even the tender wife, the watchful friend.

The meetings were of extraordinary interest. The men, the great majority of whom had been disciplined and moulded for months by contact with Elsmere’s teaching and Elsmere’s thought, showed a responsiveness, a receptivity, even a power of initiation which often struck Flaxman with wonder. Were these the men he had seen in the Club-hall on the night of Robert’s address—sour, stolid, brutalized, hostile to all things in heaven and earth?

‘And we go on prating that the age of saints is over, the rôle of the individual lessening day by day! Fool! go and be a saint, go and give yourself to ideas; go and live the life hid with Christ in God, and see,’—so would run the quick comment of the observer.

But incessant as was the reciprocity, the interchange and play of feeling between Robert and the wide following growing up around him, it was plain to Flaxman that although he never moved a step without carrying his world with him, he was never at the mercy of his world. Nothing was ever really left to chance. Through all these strange debates, which began rawly and clumsily enough, and grew every week more and more absorbing to all concerned, Flaxman was convinced that hardly any rule or formula of the new society was ultimately adopted which had not been for long in Robert’s mind—thought out and brought into final shape, perhaps, on the Petites Dalles sands. It was an unobtrusive art, his art of government, but a most effective one.

At any moment, as Flaxman often felt, at any rate in the early meetings, the discussions as to the religious practices which were to bind together the new association might have passed the line, and become puerile or grotesque. At any moment the jarring characters and ambitions of the men Elsmere had to deal with might have dispersed that delicate atmosphere of moral sympathy and passion in which the whole new birth seemed to have been conceived, and upon the maintenance of which its fruition and development depended. But as soon as Elsmere appeared, difficulties vanished, enthusiasm sprang up again. The rules of the new society came simply and naturally into being, steeped and halloed, as it were, from the beginning, in the passion and genius of one great heart. The fastidious critical instinct in Flaxman was silenced no less than the sour, half-educated analysis of such a man as Lestrange.

In the same way all personal jars seemed to melt away beside him. There were some painful things connected with the new departure. Wardlaw, for instance, a conscientious Comtist refusing stoutly to admit anything more than ‘an unknowable reality behind phenomena,’ was distressed and affronted by the strongly religious bent Elsmere was giving to the work he had begun. Lestrange, who was a man of great though raw ability, who almost always spoke at the meetings, and whom Robert was bent on attaching to the society, had times when the things he was half inclined to worship one day he was much more inclined to burn the next in the sight of all men, and when the smallest failure of temper on Robert’s part might have entailed a disagreeable scene, and the possible formation of a harassing left wing.

But Robert’s manner to Wardlaw was that of a grateful younger brother. It was clear that the Comtist could not formally join the Brotherhood. But all the share and influence that could be secured him in the practical working of it, was secured him. And what was more, Robert succeeded in infusing his own delicacy, his own compunctions on the subject into the men and youths who had profited in the past by Wardlaw’s rough self-devotion. So that if, through much that went on now, he could only be a spectator, at least he was not allowed to feel himself an alien or forgotten.

As to Lestrange, against a man who was as ready to laugh as to preach, and into whose ardent soul nature had infused a saving sense of the whimsical in life and character, cynicism and vanity seemed to have no case. Robert’s quick temper had been wonderfully disciplined by life since his Oxford days. He had now very little of that stiff-neckedness, so fatal to the average reformer, which makes a man insist on all or nothing from his followers. He took what each man had to give. Nay, he made it almost seem as though the grudging support of Lestrange, or the critical half-patronizing approval of the young barrister from the West who came down to listen to him, and made a favor of teaching in his night-school, were as precious to him as was the wholehearted, the self-abandoning veneration, which the majority of those about him had begun to show toward the man in whom, as Charles Richards said, they had ‘seen God.’

At last by the middle of November the whole great building, with the exception of the top floor, was cleared and ready for use. Robert felt the same joy in it, in it’s clean paint, the half-filled shelves in the library, the pictures standing against the walls ready to be hung, the rolls of bright-colored matting ready to be laid down, as he had felt in the Murewell Institute. He and Flaxman, helped by a voluntary army of men, worked at it from morning till night. Only Catherine could ever persuade him to remember that he was not yet physically himself.

Then came the day when the building was formally opened, when the gilt letters over the door, ‘The New Brotherhood of Christ,’ shone out into the dingy street, and when the first enrolment of names in the book of the Brotherhood took place.

For two hours a continuous stream of human beings surrounded the little table beside which Elsmere stood, inscribing their names, and receiving from him the silver badge, bearing the head of Christ, which was to be the outward and conspicuous sign of membership. Men came of all sorts: the intelligent well-paid artisan, the pallid clerk or small accountant, stalwart warehouse men, huge carters and dray-men, the boy attached to each by the laws of the profession often straggling lumpishly behind his master. Women were there: wives who came because their lords came, or because Mr. Elsmere had been ‘that good’ to them that anything they could do to oblige him ‘they would, and welcome;’ prim pupil-teachers, holding themselves with straight superior shoulders; children, who came trooping in, grinned up into Robert’s face and retreated again with red cheeks, the silver badge tight clasped in hands which not even much scrubbing could make passable.

Flaxman stood and watched it from the side. It was an extraordinary scene: the crowd, the slight figure on the platform, the two great inscriptions, which represented the only ‘articles’ of the new faith, gleaming from the freshly colored walls:—

—the recesses on either side of the hall lined with white marble, and destined, the one to hold the names of the living members of the Brotherhood; the other to commemorate those who had passed away (empty this last save for the one poor name of ‘Charles Richards’); the copies of Giotto’s Paduan Virtues—Faith, Fortitude, Charity, and the like-which broke the long wall at intervals. The cynic in the onlooker tried to assert itself against the feeling with which the air seemed overcharged in vain.

Whatever comes of it, Flaxman said to himself with strong, involuntary conviction, ‘whether he fails or no, the spirit that is moving here is the same spirit that spread the Church, the spirit that sent out Benedictine and Franciscan into the world, that fired the children of Luther, or Calvin, or George Fox; the spirit of devotion, through a man, to an idea; through one much-loved, much-trusted soul to some eternal verity, newly caught, newly conceived, behind it. There is no approaching the idea for the masses except through the human life; there is no lasting power for the man except as the slave of the idea!’

A week later he wrote to his aunt as follows. He could not write to her of Rose, he did hot care to write of himself, and he knew that Elsmere’s Club address had left a mark even on her restless and overcrowded mind. Moreover he himself was absorbed.

‘We are in the full stream of religion—making. I watch it with a fascination you at a distance cannot possibly understand, even when my judgement demurs, and my intelligence protests that the thing cannot live without Elsmere, and that Elsmere’s life is a frail one. After the ceremony of enrolment which I described to you yesterday the Council of the New Brotherhood was chosen by popular election, and Elsmere gave an address. Two-thirds of the council, I should think, are workingmen, the rest of the upper class; Elsmere, of course, President.’

‘Since then the first religious service under the new constitution has been held. The service is extremely simple, and the basis of the whole is “new bottles for the new wine.” The opening prayer is recited by everybody present standing. It is rather an act of adoration and faith than a prayer, properly so called. It represents, in fact, the placing of the soul in the presence of God. The mortal turns to the eternal; the ignorant and imperfect look away from themselves to the knowledge and perfection of the All-Holy. It is Elsmere’s drawing up, I imagine—at any rate it is essentially modern, expressing the modern spirit, answering to modern need, as I imagine the first Christian prayers expressed the spirit and answered to the need of an earlier day.’

‘Then follows some passage from the life of Christ. Elsmere reads it and expounds it, in the first place, as a lecturer might expound a passage of Tacitus, historically and critically. His explanation of miracle, his efforts to make his audience realize the germs of miraculous belief which each mass carries with him in the constitution and inherited furniture of his mind, are some of the most ingenious—perhaps the most convincing—I have ever heard. My heart and my head have never been very much at one, as you know, on this matter of the marvelous element in religion.

‘But then when the critic has done, the poet and the believer begins. Whether he has got hold of the true Christ is another matter; but that the Christ he preaches moves the human heart as much as—and in the case of the London artisan, more than—the current orthodox presentation of him, I begin to have ocular demonstration.

‘I was present, for instance, at his children’s Sunday class the other day. He had brought them up to the story of the Crucifixion, reading from the Revised Version, and amplifying wherever the sense required it. Suddenly a little girl laid her head on the desk before her, and with choking sobs implored him not to go on. The whole class seemed ready to do the same. The pure human pity of the story—the contrast between the innocence and the pain of the sufferer—seemed to be more than they could bear. And there was no comforting sense of a jugglery by which the suffering was not real after all, and the sufferer not man but God.

‘He took one of them upon his knee and tried to console them. But there is something piercingly penetrating and austere even in the consolations of this new faith. He did but remind the children of the burden of gratitude laid upon them. “Would you let him stiffer so much in vain? His suffering has made you and me happier and better to-day, at this moment, than we could have been without Jesus. You will understand how, and why, more clearly when you grow up. Let us in return keep him in our hearts always, and obey his words! It is all you can do for his sake, just as all you could do for a mother who died would be to follow her wishes and sacredly keep her memory.”

‘That was about the gist of it. It was a strange little scene, wonderfully suggestive and pathetic.

‘But a few more words about the Sunday service. After the address came a hymn. There are only seven hymns in the little service book, gathered out of the finest we have. It is supposed that in a short time they will become so familiar to the members of the Brotherhood that they will be sung readily by heart. The singing of them in the public service alternates with an equal number of Psalms. And both Psalms and hymns are meant to be recited or sung constantly in the homes of the members, and to become part of the every-day life of the Brotherhood. They have been most carefully chosen, and a sort of ritual importance has been attached to them from the beginning. Each day in the week has its particular hymn or Psalm.

‘Then the whole wound up with another short prayer, also repeated standing, a commendation of the individual, the Brotherhood, the nation, the world, to God. The phrases of it are terse and grand. One can see at once that it has laid hold of the popular sense, the popular memory. The Lord’s Prayer followed. Then, after a silent pause of “recollection,” Elsmere dismissed them.

‘“Go in peace, in the love of God, and in the memory of His servant, Jesus.”

‘I looked, carefully at the men as they were tramping out. Some of them were among the Secularist speakers you and I heard at the club in April. In my wonder, I thought of a saying of Vinet’s: “C’est pour la religion que le peuple a le plus de talent; c’est en religion qu’il montre le plus d’esprit.”

In a later letter he wrote:——

‘I have not yet described to you what is perhaps the most characteristic, the most binding practice of the New Brotherhood. It is that which has raised most angry comment, cries of “profanity,” “wanton insult,” and whatnot. I came upon it yesterday in an interesting Way. I was working with Elsmere at the arrangement of the library, which is now becoming a most fascinating place, under the management of a librarian chosen from the neighborhood, when he asked me to go and take a message to a carpenter who has been giving us voluntary help in the evening, after his day’s work. He thought that as it was the dinner hour, and the man worked in the dock close by, I might find him at home. I went off to the model lodging-house where I was told to look for him, mounted the common stairs, and knocked at his door. Nobody seemed to hear me, and as the door was ajar I pushed it open.

‘Inside was a curious sight. The table was spread with the mid-day meal, a few bloaters, some potatoes, and bread. Round the table stood four children, the eldest about fourteen, and the youngest six or seven. At one end of it stood the carpenter himself in his working apron, a brawny Saxon, bowed a little by his trade. Before him was a plate of bread, and his horny hands were resting on it. The street was noisy; they had not heard my knock; and as I pushed open the door there was an old coat hanging over the corner of it which concealed me.

‘Something in the attitudes of all concerned reminded me, kept me where I was, silent.

‘The father lifted his right hand.

‘The Master said, “This do in remembrance of Me!”

‘The children stooped for a moment in silence, then the youngest said slowly, in a little softened cockney voice that touched me extraordinarily,—

‘“Jesus, we remember Thee always!”

‘It was the appointed response. As she spoke I recollected the child perfectly at Elsmere’s class. I also remembered that she had no mother; that her mother had died of cancer in June, visited and comforted to the end by Elsmere and his wife.

‘Well, the great question of course remains—is there a sufficient strength of feeling and conviction behind these things? If so, after all, everything was new once, and Christianity was but modified Judaism.’

‘I believe I shall soon be as deep in this matter as Elsmere. In Elgood Street great preparations are going on for Christmas. But it will be a new sort of Christmas. We shall hear very little, it seems, of angels and shepherds, and a great deal of the humble childhood of a little Jewish boy whose genius grown to maturity transformed the Western world. To see Elsmere, with his boys and girls about him, trying to make them feel themselves the heirs and fellows of the Nazarene child, to make them understand something of the lessons that child must have learnt, the sights he must have seen, and the thoughts that must have come to him, is a spectacle of which I will not miss more than I can help. Don’t imagine, however, that I am converted exactly!—but only that I am more interested and stimulated than I have been for years. And don’t expect me for Christmas. I shall stay here.’

‘I am writing from the library of the New Brotherhood. The amount of activity, social, educational, religious, of which this great building promises to be the centre is already astonishing. Everything, of course, including the constitution of the infant society, is as yet purely tentative and experimental. But for a scheme so young, things are falling into working order with wonderful rapidity. Each department is worked by committees under the central council. Elsmere, of course, is ex-officio chairman of a large proportion; Wardlaw, Mackay, I, and a few other fellows, “run” the rest for the present. But each committee contains workingmen; and it is the object of everybody concerned to make the workman element more and more real and efficient. What with the “tax”, on the members which was fixed by a general meeting, and the contributions from outside, the society already commands a fair income. But Elsmere is anxious not to attempt too much at once, and will go slowly and train his workers.

‘Music, it seems, is going to be a great feature in the future. I have my own projects as to this part of the business, which, however, I forbid you to guess at.

‘By the rules of the Brotherhood, every member is bound to some work in connection with it during the year, but little or much, as he or she is able. And every meeting, every undertaking of whatever kind, opens with the special “word” or formula of the society, “This do in remembrance of me.”’

‘Besides the Sunday lectures, Elsmere is pegging away on Saturday evenings at “The History of the Moral Life in Man.” It is a remarkable course, and very largely attended by people of all sorts. He tries to make it an exposition of the principles of the new movement, of ‘“that continuous and leading only revelation of God in life and nature,”’ which is in reality the basis of his whole thought. By the way, the letters that are pouring in upon him from all parts are extraordinary. They show an amount and degree of interest in ideas of the kind which are surprising to a Laodicean like me. But he is not surprised—says he always expected it—and that there are thousands who only want a rallying-point.

‘His personal effect, the love that is felt for him, the passion and energy of the nature—never has our generation seen anything to equal it. As you perceive, I am reduced to taking it all seriously, and don’t know what to make of him or myself.

‘She, poor soul! is now always with him, comes down with him day after day, and works away. She no more believes in his ideas, I think, than she ever did; but all her antagonism is gone. In the midst of the stir about him her face often haunts me. It has changed lately; she is no longer a young woman, but so refined, so spiritual!

‘But he is ailing and fragile. There is the one cloud on a scene that fills me with increasing wonder and reverence.