Club-hall on the night of
Robert's address--sour, stolid, brutalised, hostile to all things in
heaven and earth?

'And we go on prating that the age of saints is over, the role 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 haloed, 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, w