and
stimulating, between the monotonous life of his own rural folk, and
the mad rush, the voracious hurry, the bewildering appearances and
disappearances, the sudden engulfments, of working London.

Moreover, he had spent a Sunday or two wandering among the East End
churches. There, rather than among the streets and courts outside, as
it had seemed to him, lay the tragedy of the city. Such emptiness, such
desertion, such a hopeless breach between the great craving need outside
and the boon offered it within! Here and there, indeed, a patch of
bright colored success, as it claimed to be, where the primitive
tendency of man toward the organized excitement of religious ritual,
visible in all nations and civilizations, had been appealed to with more
energy and more results than usual. But in general, blank failure, or
rather obvious want of success--as the devoted men now beating the
void there were themselves the first to admit, with pain, and patient
submission to the inscrutable Will of God.

But is it not time we assured ourselves, he was always asking, whether
God is still in truth behind the offer man is perpetually making to his
brother man on His behalf? He was behind it once, and it had efficacy,
had power. But now--What if all these processes of so-called destruction
and decay were but the mere workings of that divine plastic force which
is forever moulding human society? What if these beautiful venerable
things which had fallen from him, as from thousands of his follows,
represented, in the present stage of the world's history, not the props,
but the hinderances, of man?

And if all these large things were true, as he believed, what should be
the individual's part in this transition England? Surely, at the least,
a part of plain sincerity of act and speech--a correspondence as perfect
as could be reached between the inner faith and the outer word and deed.
So much, at the least, was clearly required of him!

'Do not imagine,' he said to himself, as though with a fierce dread
of possible self-delusion, 'that it is in you to play any great, any
commanding part. Shun the thought of it, if it were possible! But let
me do what is given me to do! Here in this human wilderness, may I
spend whatever of time or energy or faculty may be mine, in the faithful
attempt to help forward the new House of Faith that is to be, though my
utmost efforts should but succeed in laying some obscure stone in still
unseen foundations!