, and said:--

"Magnificently done!" as I went on. It was some moments before the
words which the choir sang assumed any vividness in my mind. When they
did I found that they were these;--

"_For God is a Spirit. God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must
worship Him in spirit_"--

Now it fell out that my steps were directed to the hospital; and to the
hospital I straightway went. I experienced some faint comfort at this
improvement in my lot, and hurried up the avenue and up the steps and
into the familiar wards with eagerness. All the impulses of the healer
were alive in me. I felt it a mercy for my nature to be at its own
again. I hastened in among my sick impetuously.

The hospital had been a favourite project of mine; from its start,
unreasonably dear to me. Through the mounting difficulties which
blockade such enterprises, I had hewn and hacked, I had fathered and
doctored, I had trusteed and collected, I had subscribed and directed
and persisted and prophesied and fulfilled, as one ardent person must
in most humanitarian successes; and I had loved the success
accordingly. I do not think it had ever once occurred to me to
question myself as to the chemical proportions of my motives in this
great and popular charity. Now, as I entered the familiar place, some
query of this nature did indeed occupy my mind; it had the strangeness
of all mental experiences consequent upon my new condition, and
somewhat, if I remember, puzzled me.

The love of healing? The relief of suffering? Sympathy with the
wretched? Chivalry for the helpless? Generosity to the poor?
Friendship to the friendless? Were these the motives, all the motives,
the _whole_ motives, of him who had in my name ministered in that place
so long? Even the love of science? Devotion to a therapeutic creed?
Sacrifice for a surgical doctrine? Enthusiasm for an important
professional cause? Did these, and only these, sources of conduct
_explain_ the great hospital? Or the surgeon who had created and
sustained it?

Where did the motive deteriorate? Where did the alloy come in? How
did the sensitiveness to self, the passion for fame, the joy of power,
amalgamate with all that noble feeling? How much residuum was there in
the solution of that absorption which (outside of my own home) I had
thought the purest and highest of my interests in life?

For the first of all the uncounted times that I had entered the
hospital for now these