vation, and the sufferings of those
dear to them, he was confident that only the personal communion of
friendship could make it possible for them to believe in God. Christians
must be in the world as He was in the world; and in proportion as the
truth radiated from them, the world would be able to believe in Him.
Money he saw to be worse than useless, except as a gracious outcome of
human feelings and brotherly love. He always insisted that the Saviour
healed only those on whom his humanity had laid hold; that he demanded
faith of them in order to make them regard him, that so his personal
being might enter into their hearts. Healing without faith in its source
would have done them harm instead of good--would have been to them a
windfall, not a Godsend; at best the gift of magic, even sometimes the
power of Satan casting out Satan. But he must not therefore act as if
he were the only one who could render this individual aid, or as if
men influencing the poor individually could not aid each other in their
individual labours. He soon found, I say, that there were things he
could not do without help, and Nancy was his first perplexity. From this
he was delivered in a wonderful way.

One afternoon he was prowling about Spitalfields, where he had made many
acquaintances amongst the silk-weavers and their families. Hearing a
loud voice as he passed down a stair from the visit he had been paying
further up the house, he went into the room whence the sound came,
for he knew a little of the occupant. He was one De Fleuri, or as
the neighbours called him, Diffleery, in whose countenance, after
generations of want and debasement, the delicate lines and noble cast of
his ancient race were yet emergent. This man had lost his wife and
three children, his whole family except a daughter now sick, by a
slow-consuming hunger; and he did not believe there was a God that ruled
in the earth. But he supported his unbelief by no other argument than
a hopeless bitter glance at his empty loom. At this moment he sat
silent--a rock against which the noisy waves of a combative Bible-reader
were breaking in rude foam. His silence and apparent impassiveness
angered the irreverent little worthy. To Falconer's humour he looked a
vulgar bull-terrier barking at a noble, sad-faced staghound. His foolish
arguments against infidelity, drawn from Paley's Natural Theology, and
tracts about the inspiration of the Bible, touched the sore-hearted
unbelief of th