thed many an impatient half-hour on
debating nights. He had an unexpected artistic gift, a kind of 'sport'
as compared with the rest of his character, which made him a valued
designer in the pottery works; but his real interests were speculative
and argumentative, concerned with 'common nawtions and the praimary
elements of reason,' and the appearance of Robert in the district seemed
to offer him at last a foeman worthy of his steel. Elsmere shrewdly
suspected that the last two looked forward to any teaching he might give
mostly as a new and favourable exercising ground for their own wits; but
he took the risk, gladly accepted the invitation, and fixed Sunday
afternoons for a weekly New Testament lecture.

His first lecture, which he prepared with great care, was delivered to
thirty-seven men a fortnight later. It was on the political and social
state of Palestine and the East at the time of Christ's birth; and
Robert, who was as fervent a believer in 'large maps' as Lord Salisbury,
had prepared a goodly store of them for the occasion, together with a
number of drawings and photographs which formed part of the collection
he had been gradually making since his own visit to the Holy Land. There
was nothing he laid more stress on than these helps to the eye and
imagination in dealing with the Bible. He was accustomed to maintain in
his arguments with Hugh Flaxman that the orthodox traditional teaching
of Christianity would become impossible as soon as it should be the
habit to make a free and modern use of history and geography and social
material in connection with the Gospels. Nothing tends so much, he would
say, to break down the irrational barrier which men have raised about
this particular tract of historical space, nothing helps so much to let
in the light and air of scientific thought upon it, and therefore
nothing prepares the way so effectively for a series of new conceptions.

By a kind of natural selection Richards became Elsmere's chief helper
and adjutant in the Sunday lectures,--with regard to all such matters as
beating up recruits, keeping guard over portfolios, handing round maps
and photographs, etc.,--supplanting in this function the jealous and
sensitive Mackay, who, after his original opposition, had now arrived at
regarding Robert as his own particular property, and the lecturer's
quick smile of thanks for services rendered as his own especial right.
The bright, quicksilvery, irascible little workman,