as attributed so much
importance?

Mr. Grey's treatment of these questions was clothed, throughout a large
portion of the lecture, in metaphysical language, which no boy fresh
from school, however intellectually quick, could be expected to follow
with any precision. It was not, therefore, the argument, or the logical
structure of the sermon, which so profoundly affected young Elsmere. It
was the speaker himself, and the occasional passages in which,
addressing himself to the practical needs of his hearers, he put before
them the claims and conditions of the higher life with a pregnant
simplicity and rugged beauty of phrase. Conceit, selfishness, vice--how,
as he spoke of them, they seemed to wither from his presence! How the
'pitiful, earthy self' with its passions and its cravings sank into
nothingness beside the 'great ideas' and the 'great causes' for which,
as Christians and as men, he claimed their devotion.

To the boy sitting among the crowd at the back of the room, his face
supported in his hands and his gleaming eyes fixed on the speaker, it
seemed as if all the poetry and history through which a restless
curiosity and ideality had carried him so far, took a new meaning from
this experience. It was by men like this that the moral progress of the
world had been shaped and inspired; he felt brought near to the great
primal forces breathing through the divine workshop; and in place of
natural disposition and reverent compliance, there sprang up in him
suddenly an actual burning certainty of belief. 'Axioms are not axioms,'
said poor Keats, 'till they have been proved upon our pulses;' and the
old familiar figure of the Divine combat, of the struggle in which man
and God are one, was proved once more upon a human pulse on that May
night, in the hush of that quiet lecture room.

As the little moving crowd of men dispersed over the main quadrangle to
their respective staircases, Langham and Robert stood together a moment
in the windy darkness, lit by the occasional glimmering of a cloudy
moon.

'Thank you, thank you, sir!' said the lad, eager and yet afraid to
speak, lest he should break the spell of memory. 'I should be sorry
indeed to have missed that!'

'Yes, it was fine, extraordinarily fine, the best he has ever given, I
think. Good-night.'

And Langham turned away, his head sunk on his breast, his hands behind
him. Robert went to his room conscious of a momentary check of feeling.
But it soon passed, an