aned over the lych-gate
looking at the church.

Not long ago I went one Sunday evening to Westminster Cathedral. It was
winter, and the streets of tall and sullen houses in that gloomy
neighbourhood were darkening with fog. This fog crept slowly into the
cathedral. The surpliced boy who presented an alms-dish just within the
doors was stamping his feet and snuffling with cold. The leaves of
tracts and pamphlets on the table blew up and chattered in the wind
every time the door was thrust open.

The huge building was only half filled, perhaps hardly that. Through the
fog it was not easy to see the glittering altar, and when three priests
appeared before it their vestments so melted into the cloth that they
were visible only when they bowed to the monstrance. The altar bell rang
snappishly through this cold fog like the dinner bell of a boarding
house, and in that yellow mist, which deepened with every minute, the
white flames of the candles lost nearly all their starlike brightness.
There seemed to be depression and resentment in the deep voices of the
choir rumbling and rolling behind the screen; there seemed to be haste,
a desire to get it over, in the nasal voice of the priest praying almost
squeakily at the altar.

People were continually entering the cathedral, many of them having the
appearance of foreigners, many of them young men who looked like
waiters: one was struck by their reverence, and also by their look of
intellectual apathy.

Father Knox appeared in the pulpit, which is stationed far down the
nave, having come from his work of teaching at Ware to preach to the
faithful at Westminster. He looked very young, and rather apprehensive,
a slight boyish figure, swaying uneasily, the large luminous eyes, of an
extraordinary intensity, almost glazed with light, the full lips, so
obviously meant for laughter, parted with a nervous uncertainty, a wave
of thick brown hair falling across the narrow forehead with a look of
tiredness, the long slender hands never still for a moment.

I will endeavour to summarise his remarkable sermon, which was delivered
through the fog in a soft and throaty voice, the body of the preacher
swaying monotonously backward and forward, the congregation sitting back
in its little chairs and coughing inconveniently from beginning to end.
It was the strangest sermon I have listened to for many years, and all
the stranger for its unimpassioned delivery. He spoke of the Fall of Man
as a