his
question according to their judgment.

*****

The time was a Sunday afternoon in summer, and the place a church in
the Midland counties. It was a beautiful church, ancient and spacious;
moreover, it had recently been restored at great cost. Seven or eight
hundred people could have found sittings in it, and doubtless they
had done so when Busscombe was a large manufacturing town, before the
failure of the coal supply and other causes drove away its trade. Now
it was much what it had been in the time of the Normans, a little
agricultural village with a population of 300 souls. Out of this
population, including the choir boys, exactly thirty-nine had elected to
attend church on this particular Sunday; and of these, three were fast
asleep and four were dozing.

The Rev. Thomas Owen counted them from his seat in the chancel, for
another clergyman was preaching; and, as he counted, bitterness and
disappointment took hold of him. The preacher was a "Deputation," sent
by one of the large missionary societies to arouse the indifferent to
a sense of duty towards their unconverted black brethren in Africa, and
incidentally to collect cash to be spent in the conversion of the
said brethren. The Rev. Thomas Owen himself suggested the visit of the
Deputation, and had laboured hard to secure him a good audience. But
the beauty of the weather, or terror of the inevitable subscription,
prevailed against him. Hence his disappointment.

"Well," he thought, with a sigh, "I have done my best, and I must make
it up out of my own pocket."

Then he settled himself to listen to the sermon.

The preacher, a battered-looking individual of between fifty and sixty
years of age, was gaunt with recent sickness, patient and unimaginative
in aspect. He preached extemporarily, with the aid of notes; and it
cannot be said that his discourse was remarkable for interest, at any
rate in its beginning. Doubtless the sparse congregation, so prone to
slumber, discouraged him; for offering exhortations to empty benches is
but weary work. Indeed he was meditating the advisability of bringing
his argument to an abrupt conclusion when, chancing to glance round, he
became aware that he had at least one sympathetic listener, his host,
the Rev. Thomas Owen.

From that moment the sermon improved by degrees, till at length it
reached a really high level of excellence. Ceasing from rhetoric, the
speaker began to tell of his own experience and sufferings in