he very incarnation of
brotherliness, and the people, whether they agreed with him or not,
loved him. In the place where the religion of Christ had been reviled
as well by the Christians as by the atheist, he spoke of the revealer
of the Father, and a hush fell on the listening men; he spoke of the
Founder of the great brotherhood, and by the very reality, by the fervor
of his convictions, touched a new chord in many a heart. It was no time
for argument, the meeting was almost over; he scarcely attempted to
answer to many of the difficulties and objections raised by Raeburn
earlier in the evening. But there was in his ten minutes' speech the
whole essence of Christianity, the spirit of loving sacrifice to
self, the strength of an absolute certainty which no argument, however
logical, can shake, the extraordinary power which breathes in the
assertion: "I KNOW Him whom I have believed."

To more than one of Raeburn's followers there came just the slightest
agitation of doubt, the questioning whether these things might not be.
For the first time in her life the question began to stir in Erica's
heart. She had heard many advocates of Christianity, and had regarded
them much as we might regard Buddhist missionaries speaking of a
religion that had had its day and was now only fit to be discarded, or
perhaps studied as an interesting relic of the past, about which in its
later years many corruptions had gathered.

Raeburn, being above all things a just man, had been determined to give
her mind no bias in favor of his own views, and as a child he had left
her perfectly free. But there was a certain Scotch proverb which he did
not call to mind, that "As the auld cock crows the young cock learns."
When the time came at which he considered her old enough really to study
the Bible for herself, she had already learned from bitter experience
that Christianity--at any rate, what called itself Christianity--was the
religion whose votaries were constantly slandering and ill-treating
her father, and that all the privations and troubles of their life were
directly or indirectly due to it. She, of course, identified the conduct
of the most unfriendly and persecuting with the religion itself; it
could hardly be otherwise.

But tonight as she toiled away, bravely acting up to her lights,
taking down the opponent's speech to the best of her abilities, though
predisposed to think it all a meaningless rhapsody, the faintest attempt
at a ques