ssent has nothing like the hold which it has on similar
material in the great towns of the North. Toward religion in general
the prevailing attitude is, one of indifference tinged with hostility.
'Eight hundred thousand people in South London, of whom the enormous
proportion belong to the working class, and among them, Church and
Dissent nowhere--_Christianity not in possession_. Such is the estimate
of an Evangelical of our day; and similar laments come from all parts
of the capital. The Londoner is on the whole more conceited, more
prejudiced, more given over to crude theorizing, than his North-country
brother, the mill-hand, whose mere position, as one of a homogeneous
and tolerably constant body, subjects him to a continuous discipline
of intercourse and discussion. Our popular religion, broadly
speaking, means nothing to him. He is sharp enough to see through its
contradictions and absurdities; he has no dread of losing what he
never valued; his sense of antiquity, of history, is nil; and his
life supplies him with excitement enough without the stimulants of
'other-worldliness.' Religion has been on the whole irrationally
presented to him, and the result on his part has been an irrational
breach with the whole moral and religious order of ideas.

But the race is quick-witted and imaginative. The Greek cities which
welcomed and spread Christianity carried within them much the same
elements as are supplied by certain sections of the London working
class-elements of restlessness, of sensibility, of passion. The more
intermingling of races, which a modern city shares with those old
towns of Asia Minor, predisposes the mind to a greater openness and
receptiveness, whether for good or evil.

As the weeks passed on, and after the first inevitable despondency
produced by strange surroundings and an unwonted isolation had begun
to wear off; Robert often found himself filled with a strange flame and
ardor of hope! But his first steps had nothing to do with Religion.
He made himself quickly felt in the night school, and as soon as he
possibly could he hired a large room at the back of their existing room,
on the same floor, where, on the recreation evenings, he might begin
the storytelling which had been so great a success at Murewell. The
story-telling struck the neighborhood as a great novelty. At first
only a few youths straggled in from the front room, where dominoes and
draughts and the illustrated papers held seductive