I should have a church of my own. This
library is my church, and men and women of all creeds come here by the
thousands. But you must pardon me. I have been carried away--I forgot
myself."

"Mr. Engel," replied the rector, "I want you to regard me as one of your
parishioners."

The librarian looked at him mutely, and the practical, desiccated little
person seemed startlingly transformed into a mediaeval, German mystic.

"You are a great man, Mr. Hodder," he said. "I might have guessed it."

It was one of the moments when protest would have been trite,
superfluous. And Hodder, in truth, felt something great swelling within
him, something that was not himself, and yet strangely was. But just
what--in view of his past strict orthodoxy and limited congregation
--Mr. Engel meant, he could not have said. Had the librarian recognized,
without confession on his part, the change in him? divined his future
intentions?

"It is curious that I should have met you this morning, Mr. Engel," he
said. "I expressed surprise when you declared this was a religious age,
because you corroborated something I had felt, but of which I had no
sufficient proof. I felt that a great body of unsatisfied men and women
existed, but that I was powerless to get in touch with them; I had
discovered that truth, as you have so ably pointed out, is disguised and
distorted by ancient dogmas; and that the old Authority, as you say, no
longer carries weight."

"Have you found the new one?" Mr. Engel demanded.

"I think I have," the rector answered calmly, "it lies in personality.
I do not know whether you will agree with me that the Church at large has
a future, and I will confess to you that there was a time when I thought
she had not. I see now that she has, once given to her ministers that
freedom to develop of which you speak. In spite of the fact that truth
has gradually been revealed to the world by what may be called an
Apostolic Succession of Personalities,--Augustine, Dante, Francis of
Assisi, Luther, Shakespeare, Milton, and our own Lincoln and Phillips
Brooks,--to mention only a few,--the Church as a whole has been blind to
it. She has insisted upon putting the individual in a straitjacket, she
has never recognized that growth is the secret of life, that the clothes
of one man are binding on another."

"Ah, you are right--a thousand times right," cried the librarian. "You
have read Royce, perhaps, when he says, 'This mortal shall put on
i