eak will,
incapable, indeed, of the clever brutalities by which the wicked
flourish; incapable also of virtues that must, after all, be tolerably
common, or the world would run much more lamely than it does. Straight,
honorable, unselfish fellows--Lankester knew scores of them, rich and
poor, clever and slow, who could and did pass the tests of life without
flinching; who could produce in any society--as politicians or
green-grocers--an impression of uprightness and power, an effect of
character, that Marsham, for all his ability, had never produced, or, in
the long run, and as he came to be known, had never sustained.

Well, what then? In the man looking down on Marsham not a tinge of
pharisaic condemnation mingled with the strange clearness of his
judgment. What are we all--the best of us? Lankester had not parted,
like the majority of his contemporaries, with the "sense of sin." A
vivid, spiritual imagination, trained for years on prayer and reverie,
showed him the world and human nature--his own first and
foremost--everywhere flecked and stained with evil. For the man of
religion the difference between saint and sinner has never been as sharp
as for the man of the world; it is for the difference between holiness
and sin that he reserves his passion. And the stricken or repentant
sinner is at all times nearer to his heart than the men "who need no
repentance."

Moreover, it is in men like Lankester that the ascetic temper common to
all ages and faiths is perpetually reproduced, the temper which makes of
suffering itself a divine and sacred thing--the symbol of a mystery. In
his own pity for this emaciated arrested youth he read the pledge of a
divine sympathy, the secret voice of a God suffering for and with man,
which, in its myriad forms, is the primeval faith of the race. Where a
thinker of another type would have seen mere aimless waste and
mutilation, this evangelical optimist bared the head and bent the knee.
The spot whereon he stood was holy ground, and above this piteous
sleeper heavenly dominations, princedoms, powers, hung in watch.

He sank, indeed, upon his knees beside the sleeper. In the intense and
mystical concentration, which the habit of his life had taught him, the
prayer to which he committed himself took a marvellous range without
ever losing its detail, its poignancy. The pain, moral and physical, of
man--pain of the savage, the slave, the child; the miseries of
innumerable persons he had kn