by their wives and children, were trudging to other
open spaces farther out. It was the panic terror. Afterward it was
calculated that fifty thousand persons from all parts of London had
quitted the doomed city that day to await the expected catastrophe under
the open sky.

The look of fierce passion had faded from his face by the time he reached
his church, but there another ordeal awaited him. Though it still wanted
an hour of the time of evening service a great crowd had gathered in the
square. He tried to escape observation, but the people pressed upon him,
some to shake his hand, others to touch his cassock, and many to kneel at
his feet and even to cover them with kisses. With a sense of shame and
hypocrisy he disengaged himself at length, and joined Brother Andrew in
the sacristy. The simple fellow was full of marvellous stories. There had
been wondrous manifestations of the workings of the Holy Spirit during
the day. The knocker-up, who was a lame man, had shaken hands with the
Father on his way home that morning, and now he had thrown away his stick
and was walking firmly and praising God.

The church was large and rectangular and plain, and looked a well-used
edifice, open every day and all day. The congregation was visibly
excited, but the service appeared to calm them. The ritual was full, with
procession and incense, but without vestments, and otherwise monastic in
its severity. John Storm preached. The epistle for the day had been from
First Corinthians, and he took his text from that source also: "Deliver
him up to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be
saved in the day of the Lord."

People said afterward that they had never heard anything like that
sermon. It was delivered in a voice that was low and tremulous with
emotion. The subject was love. Love was the first inheritance that God
had given to his creatures--the purest and highest, the sweetest and
best. But man had degraded and debased it, at the temptation of Satan and
the lust of the world. The expulsion of our first parents from Eden was
only the poetic figure of what had happened through all the ages. It was
happening now--and London, the modern Sodom, would as surely pay its
penalty as did the cities of the ancient East. No need to think of flood
or fire or tempest--of any given day or hour. The judgment that would
fall on England, like the plagues that fell on Egypt, would be of a kind
with the offence. She had wron