strange sat with his elbows
on his knees studying him, the spare gray hair brushed back tightly from
the bony face, on the lips the slightest Voltairean smile. Perhaps it
was the coolness of his look which insensibly influenced Robert's next
words.

'However, I don't imagine we should call ourselves a church! Something
much humbler will do, if you choose ever to make anything of these
suggestions of mine. "Association," "society," "brotherhood," what you
will! But always, if I can persuade you, with something in the name, and
everything in the body itself, to show that for the members of it life
rests still, as all life worth having has everywhere rested on _trust_
and _memory_!--_trust_ in the God of experience and history; _memory_ of
that God's work in man, by which alone we know Him and can approach Him.
Well, of that work--I have tried to prove it to you a thousand
times--Jesus of Nazareth has become to _us_, by the evolution of
circumstance, the most moving, the most efficacious of all types and
epitomes. We have made our protest--we are daily making it--in the face
of society, against the fictions and overgrowths which at the present
time are excluding him more and more from human love. But now, suppose
we turn our backs on negation, and have done with mere denial! Suppose
we throw all our energies into the practical building of a new house of
faith, the gathering and organising of a new Company of Jesus!'

Other men had been stealing in while he was speaking. The little room
was nearly full. It was strange, the contrast between the squalid
modernness of the scene, with its incongruous sights and sounds, the
Club-room, painted in various hideous shades of cinnamon and green, the
smoke, the lines and groups of working-men in every sort of working
dress, the occasional rumbling of huge waggons past the window, the
click of glasses and cups in the refreshment bar outside, and this stir
of spiritual passion which any competent observer might have felt
sweeping through the little crowd as Robert spoke, connecting what was
passing there with all that is sacred and beautiful in the history of
the world.

After another silence a young fellow, in a shabby velvet coat, stood up.
He was commonly known among his fellow-potters as 'the hartist,' because
of his long hair, his little affectations of dress, and his aesthetic
susceptibilities generally. The wits of the Club made him their target,
but the teasing of him that we