,
a Cambridge man besides, as chance would have it, of brilliant
attainments, and unusually commended from many quarters, even including
some Church ones of the Liberal kind. This curly-haired youth, as he was
then in reality, and as to his own quaint vexation he went on seeming to
be up to quite middle age, had the wit to perceive at the moment of his
entry on the troubled scene that behind all the mere brutal opposition
to the new church, and in contrast with the sheer indifference of
three-fourths of the district, there was a small party consisting of an
aristocracy of the artisans, whose protest against the Puseyite doings
was of a much quieter, sterner sort, and among whom the uproar had
mainly roused a certain crude power of thinking. He threw himself upon
this element, which he rather divined than discovered, and it responded.
He preached a simple creed, drove it home by pure and generous living;
he lectured, taught, brought down workers from the West End, and before
he had been five years in the harness had not only made himself a power
in R----, but was beginning to be heard of and watched with no small
interest by many outsiders.

This was the man on whom Robert had now stumbled. Before they had talked
twenty minutes each was fascinated by the other. They said good-by to
their host, and wandered out together into St. James's Park, where the
trees were white with frost and an orange sun was struggling through the
fog. Here Murray Edwardes poured out the whole story of his ministry to
attentive ears. Robert listened eagerly. Unitarianism was not a
familiar subject of thought to him. He had never dreamt of joining the
Unitarians, and was indeed long ago convinced that in the beliefs of
a Channing no one once fairly started on the critical road could
rationally stop. That common thinness and aridity too of the Unitarian
temper had weighed with him. But here, in the person of Murray Edwardes,
it was as though he saw something old and threadbare revivified. The
young man's creed, as he presented it, had grace, persuasiveness even
unction: and there was something in his tone of mind which was like a
fresh wind blowing over the fevered places of the other's heart.

They talked long and earnestly, Edwardes describing his own work, and
the changes creeping over the modern Unitarian body, Elsmere saying
little, asking much.

At last the young man looked at Elsmere with eyes of bright decision.

'You cannot work with