llars of London Unitarianism had made his will and died. His great
warehouses lay in one of the Eastern riverside districts of the city,
and in his will he endeavored to do something according to his lights
for the place in which he had amassed his money. He left a fairly
large bequest wherewith to build and endow a Unitarian chapel and found
certain Unitarian charities, in the heart of what was even then one of
the densest and most poverty-stricken of London parishes. For a long
time, however, chapel and charities seemed likely to rank as one of the
idle freaks of religious wealth and nothing more. Unitarianism of the
old sort is perhaps the most illogical creed that exists, and certainly
it has never been the creed of the poor. In old days it required the
presence of a certain arid stratum of the middle classes to live and
thrive at all. This stratum was not to be found in R----, which rejoiced
instead in the most squalid types of poverty and crime, types wherewith
the mild shrivelled Unitarian minister had about as much power of
grappling as a Poet Laureate with a Trafalgar Square Socialist.

Soon after the erection of the chapel, there arose that shaking of the
dry bones of religious England which we call the Tractarian movement.
For many years the new force left R---- quite undisturbed. The parish
church droned away, the Unitarian minister preached decorously to empty
benches, knowing nothing of the agitations outside. At last however,
toward the end of the old minister's life, a powerful church of the
new type, staffed by friends and pupils of Pussy, rose in the centre of
R----, and the little Unitarian chapel was for a time more snuffed out
than ever, a fate which this time it shared dismally with the parish
church. As generally happened, however, in those days, the proceedings
at this now and splendid St. Wilfrid's were not long in stirring up the
Protestantism of the British rough,--the said Protestantism being always
one of the finest excuses for brickbats of which the modern cockney is
master. The parish lapsed into a state of private war--hectic clergy
heading exasperated processions or intoning defiant Litanies on the one
side,--mobs, rotten eggs, dead cats, and blatant Protestant orators on
the other.

The war went on practically for years, and while it was still raging,
the minister of the Unitarian chapel died, and the authorities concerned
chose in his place a young fellow, the son of a Bristol minister