you, if you will do anything, and I and Miss St. John and twenty
others--and a great many more I don't know, for every one is a centre to
others. It is our work that binds us together.'

'Then when that stops you drop to pieces.'

'Yes, thank God. We shall then die. There will be no corporate
body--which means a bodied body, or an unsouled body, left behind to
simulate life, and corrupt, and work no end of disease. We go to ashes
at once, and leave no corpse for a ghoul to inhabit and make a vampire
of. When our spirit is dead, our body is vanished.'

'Then you won't last long.'

'Then we oughtn't to last long.'

'But the work of the world could not go on so.'

'We are not the life of the world. God is. And when we fail, he can and
will send out more and better labourers into his harvest-field. It is a
divine accident by which we are thus associated.'

'But surely the church must be otherwise constituted.'

'My dear sir, you forget: I said we were a church, not the church.'

'Do you belong to the Church of England?'

'Yes, some of us. Why should we not? In as much as she has faithfully
preserved the holy records and traditions, our obligations to her are
infinite. And to leave her would be to quarrel, and start a thousand
vermiculate questions, as Lord Bacon calls them, for which life is too
serious in my eyes. I have no time for that.'

'Then you count the Church of England the Church?' 'Of England, yes; of
the universe, no: that is constituted just like ours, with the living
working Lord for the heart of it.'

'Will you take me for a member?'

'No.'

'Will you not, if--?'

'You may make yourself one if you will. I will not speak a word to
gain you. I have shown you work. Do something, and you are of Christ's
Church.'

We were almost at the door of my lodging, and I was getting very weary
in body, and indeed in mind, though I hope not in heart. Before we
separated, I ventured to say,

'Will you tell me why you invited me to come and see you? Forgive my
presumption, but you seemed to seek acquaintance with me, although you
did make me address you first.'

He laughed gently, and answered in the words of the ancient mariner:--

'The moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.'

Without another word, he shook hands with me, and left me. Weary as I
was, I stood in the street until I could hear his footsteps no longer.

CHAPTER IX. TH