denly a kind of inspiration seemed to
pass from them to him. Bending forward as the talk dropped a moment, he
asked them, with an accent more emphatic than usual, whether in view of
this collaboration of theirs, which was becoming more valuable to him
and his original helpers every week, it was not time for a new
departure.

'Suppose I drop my dictatorship,' he said, 'suppose we set up
parliamentary government, are you ready to take your share? Are you
ready to combine, to commit yourselves? Are you ready for an effort to
turn this work into something lasting and organic?'

The men gathered round him smoked on in silence for a minute. Old
Macdonald, who had been sitting contentedly puffing away in a corner
peculiarly his own, and dedicated to the glorification--in broad
Berwickshire--of the experimental philosophers, laid down his pipe and
put on his spectacles, that he might grasp the situation better. Then
Lestrange, in a dry cautious way, asked Elsmere to explain himself
further.

Robert began to pace up and down, talking out his thought, his eye
kindling.

But in a minute or two he stopped abruptly, with one of those striking
rapid gestures characteristic of him.

'But no mere social and educational body, mind you!' and his bright
commanding look swept round the circle. 'A good thing surely, "yet is
there better than it." The real difficulty of every social effort--you
know it and I know it--lies, not in the planning of the work, but in the
kindling of will and passion enough to carry it _through_. And that can
only be done by religion--by faith.'

He went back to his old leaning attitude, his hands behind him. The men
gazed at him--at the slim figure, the transparent changing face--with a
kind of fascination, but were still silent, till Macdonald said slowly,
taking off his glasses again and clearing his throat--

'You'll be aboot starrtin' a new church, I'm thinkin', Misther Elsmere?'

'If you like,' said Robert impetuously. 'I have no fear of the great
words. You can do nothing by despising the past and its products; you
can also do nothing by being too much afraid of them, by letting them
choke and stifle your own life. Let the new wine have its new bottles if
it must, and never mind words. Be content to be a new "sect,"
"conventicle," or what not, so long as you feel that you are _something_
with a life and purpose of its own, in this tangle of a world.'

Again he paused with knit brows, thinking. Le