e setting up of the Beacon. There were those who
claimed that they had seen the error from the first, though they had
kept quiet, as such people always do, from breadth of mind. There were
those who had felt years before how it would end, but their lips were
sealed from humility of spirit. What was worse was that there were
others who grew dissatisfied with the whole conduct of the church.

Yodel, the auctioneer, for example, narrated how he had been to the city
and had gone into a service of the Roman Catholic church: I believe, to
state it more fairly, he had "dropped in,"--the only recognized means
of access to such a service. He claimed that the music that he had heard
there was music, and that (outside of his profession) the chanting and
intoning could not be touched.

Ed Moore, the photographer, also related that he had listened to a
sermon in the city, and that if anyone would guarantee him a sermon like
that he would defy you to keep him away from church. Meanwhile, failing
the guarantee, he stayed away.

The very doctrines were impeached. Some of the congregation began to
cast doubts on eternal punishment,--doubts so grave as to keep them
absent from the Lenten Services of Sorrow. Indeed, Lawyer Macartney took
up the whole question of the Athanasian Creed one afternoon with Joe
Milligan, the dentist, and hardly left a clause of it intact.

All this time, you will understand, Dean Drone kept on with his special
services, and leaflets, calls, and appeals went out from the Ark of
Gideon like rockets from a sinking ship. More and more with every month
the debt of the church lay heavy on his mind. At times he forgot it. At
other times he woke up in the night and thought about it. Sometimes
as he went down the street from the lighted precincts of the Greater
Testimony and passed the Salvation Army, praying around a naphtha lamp
under the open sky, it smote him to the heart with a stab.

But the congregation were wrong, I think, in imputing fault to the
sermons of Dean Drone. There I do think they were wrong. I can speak
from personal knowledge when I say that the rector's sermons were not
only stimulating in matters of faith, but contained valuable material
in regard to the Greek language, to modern machinery and to a variety
of things that should have proved of the highest advantage to the
congregation.

There was, I say, the Greek language. The Dean always showed the
greatest delicacy of feeling in regard to