y alive, dominant; whose heart
was summer-warm with charity. He taught it to-night. He held up Humanity
in its grand total; showed the great world-cancer to his people. Who
could show it better? He was a Christian reformer; he had studied the
age thoroughly; his outlook at man had been free, world-wide, over all
time. His faith stood sublime upon the Rock of Ages; his fiery zeal
guided vast schemes by which the Gospel was to be preached to all
nations. How did he preach it to-night? In burning, light-laden words he
painted Jesus, the incarnate Life, Love, the universal Man: words
that became reality in the lives of these people,--that lived again in
beautiful words and actions, trifling, but heroic. Sin, as he defined
it, was a real foe to them; their trials, temptations, were his. His
words passed far over the furnace-tender's grasp, toned to suit another
class of culture; they sounded in his ears a very pleasant song in an
unknown tongue. He meant to cure this world-cancer with a steady eye
that had never glared with hunger, and a hand that neither poverty nor
strychnine-whiskey had taught to shake. In this morbid, distorted heart
of the Welsh puddler he had failed.

Eighteen centuries ago, the Master of this man tried reform in the
streets of a city as crowded and vile as this, and did not fail.
His disciple, showing Him to-night to cultured hearers, showing the
clearness of the God-power acting through Him, shrank back from one
coarse fact; that in birth and habit the man Christ was thrown up from
the lowest of the people: his flesh, their flesh; their blood, his
blood; tempted like them, to brutalize day by day; to lie, to steal: the
actual slime and want of their hourly life, and the wine-press he trod
alone.

Yet, is there no meaning in this perpetually covered truth? If the son
of the carpenter had stood in the church that night, as he stood with
the fishermen and harlots by the sea of Galilee, before His Father and
their Father, despised and rejected of men, without a place to lay His
head, wounded for their iniquities, bruised for their transgressions,
would not that hungry mill-boy at least, in the back seat, have "known
the man"? That Jesus did not stand there.

Wolfe rose at last, and turned from the church down the street. He
looked up; the night had come on foggy, damp; the golden mists had
vanished, and the sky lay dull and ash-colored. He wandered again
aimlessly down the street, idly wondering what