discuss his future. Sunday intervened. Obeying a wayward impulse, he
had gone to one of the metropolitan churches to hear a preacher renowned
for his influence over men. There is, indeed, much that is stirring to
the imagination in the spectacle of a mass of human beings thronging
into a great church, pouring up the aisles, crowding the galleries,
joining with full voices in the hymns. What drew them? He himself was
singing words familiar since childhood, and suddenly they were fraught
with a startling meaning!

"Fill me, radiancy divine,
Scatter all my unbelief!"

Visions of the Crusades rose before him, of a friar arousing France,
of a Maid of Orleans; of masses of soiled, war-worn, sin-worn humanity
groping towards the light. Even after all these ages, the belief, the
hope would not down.

Outside, a dismal February rain was falling, a rain to wet the soul.
The reek of damp clothes pervaded the gallery where he sat surrounded by
clerks and shop girls, and he pictured to himself the dreary rooms from
which they had emerged, drawn by the mysterious fire on that altar. Was
it a will-o'-the-wisp? Below him, in the pews, were the rich. Did they,
too, need warmth?

Then came the sermon, "I will arise and go to my father."

After the service, far into the afternoon, he had walked the wet streets
heedless of his direction, in an exaltation that he had felt before, but
never with such intensity. It seemed as though he had always wished to
preach, and marvelled that the perception had not come to him sooner.
If the man to whom he had listened could pour the light into the dark
corners of other men's souls, he, John Hodder, felt the same hot spark
within him,--despite the dark corners of his own!

At dusk he came to himself, hungry, tired, and wet, in what proved to be
the outskirts of Harlem. He could see the place now: the lonely, wooden
houses, the ramshackle saloon, the ugly, yellow gleam from the street
lamps in a line along the glistening pavement; beside him, a towering
hill of granite with a real estate sign, "This lot for sale." And he had
stood staring at it, thinking of the rock that would have to be cut away
before a man could build there,--and so read his own parable.

How much rock would have to be cut away, how much patient chipping
before the edifice of which he had been dreaming could be reared! Could
he ever do it? Once removed, he would be building on rock. But could
he remove it?