ity, newly caught, newly conceived, behind it. There is no
approaching the idea for the masses except through the human life;
there is no lasting power for the man except as the slave of the idea!'

A week later he wrote to his aunt as follows. He could not write to her
of Rose, he did not care to write of himself, and he knew that Elsmere's
club address had left a mark even on her restless and overcrowded mind.
Moreover, he himself was absorbed.

'We are in the full stream of religion-making. I watch it with a
fascination you at a distance cannot possibly understand, even when my
judgment demurs, and my intelligence protests that the thing cannot live
without Elsmere, and that Elsmere's life is a frail one. After the
ceremony of enrolment which I described to you yesterday the Council of
the New Brotherhood was chosen by popular election, and Elsmere gave an
address. Two-thirds of the council, I should think, are working-men, the
rest of the upper class; Elsmere, of course, president.

'Since then the first religious service under the new constitution has
been held. The service is extremely simple, and the basis of the whole
is "new bottles for the new wine." The opening prayer is recited by
everybody present standing. It is rather an act of adoration and faith
than a prayer, properly so called. It represents, in fact, the placing
of the soul in the presence of God. The mortal turns to the eternal; the
ignorant and imperfect look away from themselves to the knowledge and
perfection of the All-Holy. It is Elsmere's drawing up, I imagine--at
any rate it is essentially modern, expressing the modern spirit,
answering to modern need, as I imagine the first Christian prayers
expressed the spirit and answered to the need of an earlier day.

'Then follows some passage from the life of Christ. Elsmere reads it and
expounds it, in the first place, as a lecturer might expound a passage
of Tacitus, historically and critically. His explanation of miracle, his
efforts to make his audience realise the germs of miraculous belief
which each man carries with him in the constitution and inherited
furniture of his mind, are some of the most ingenious--perhaps the most
convincing--I have ever heard. My heart and my head have never been very
much at one, as you know, on this matter of the marvellous element in
religion.

'But then when the critic has done, the poet and the believer begins.
Whether he has got hold of the true Christ is a