Grey's introduction. He had gone with this good man on several occasions
through some little fraction of that teeming world, now so hidden and
peaceful between the murky river mists and the cleaner light-filled
grays of the sky. He had heard much, and pondered a good deal, the quick
mind caught at once by the differences, some tragic, some merely curious
and stimulating, between the monotonous life of his own rural folk, and
the mad rush, the voracious hurry, the bewildering appearances and
disappearances, the sudden ingulfments, of working London.

Moreover, he had spent a Sunday or two wandering among the East End
churches. There, rather than among the streets and courts outside, as it
had seemed to him, lay the tragedy of the city. Such emptiness, such
desertion, such a hopeless breach between the great craving need outside
and the boon offered it within! Here and there, indeed, a patch of
bright coloured success, as it claimed to be, where the primitive
tendency of man towards the organised excitement of religious ritual,
visible in all nations and civilisations, had been appealed to with more
energy and more results than usual. But in general, blank failure, or
rather obvious want of success--as the devoted men now beating the void
there were themselves the first to admit, with pain and patient
submission to the inscrutable Will of God.

But is it not time we assured ourselves, he was always asking, whether
God is still in truth behind the offer man is perpetually making to his
brother man on His behalf? He was behind it once, and it had efficacy,
had power. But now--what if all these processes of so-called
destruction and decay were but the mere workings of that divine plastic
force which is for ever moulding human society? What if these beautiful
venerable things which had fallen from him, as from thousands of his
fellows, represented, in the present stage of the world's history, not
the props, but the hindrances, of man?

And if all these large things were true, as he believed, what should be
the individual's part in this transition England? Surely, at the least,
a part of plain sincerity of act and speech--a correspondence as perfect
as could be reached between the inner faith and the outer word and deed.
So much, at the least, was clearly required of him!

'Do not imagine, he said to himself, as though with a fierce dread of
possible self-delusion, 'that it is in you to play any great, any
commanding part.