oncerned you, only as an historical figure, I should
not be here to-night.

'But if I am to talk religion to you, and I have begun by telling you I
am not this and not that, it seems to me that for mere clearness' sake,
for the sake of that round and whole image of thought which I want to
present to you, you must let me run through a preliminary confession of
faith--as short and simple as I can make it. You must let me describe
certain views of the universe and of man's place in it, which make the
framework, as it were, into which I shall ask you to fit the picture of
Jesus which will come after.'

Robert stood a moment considering. An instant's nervousness, a momentary
sign of self-consciousness, would have broken the spell and set the room
against him. He showed neither.

'My friends,' he said at last, speaking to the crowded benches of London
workmen with the same simplicity he would have used toward his boys at
Murewell, 'the man who is addressing you to-night believes in _God_;
and in _Conscience_, which is God's witness in the soul; and in
_Experience_, which is at once the record and the instrument of man's
education at God's hands. He places his whole trust, for life, and
death, "_in God the Father Almighty!_"--in that force at the root of
things which is revealed to us whenever a man helps his neighbor, or a
mother denies herself for her child; whenever a soldier dies without a
murmur for his country, or a sailor puts out in the darkness to rescue
the perishing; whenever a workman throws mind and conscience into his
work, or a statesman labors not for his own gain but for that of the
State! He believes in an Eternal Goodness---and an Eternal Mind--of
which Nature and Man are the continuous and the only revelation.'...

The room grew absolutely still. And into the silence, there fell, one
by one, the short, terse sentences, in which the seer, the believer,
struggled to express what God has been, is, and will ever be to the soul
which trusts Him. In them the whole effort of the speaker was really
to restrain, to moderate, to depersonalize the voice of faith. But the
intensity of each word burnt it into the hearer as it was spoken. Even
Lady Charlotte turned a little pale--the tears stood in her eyes.

Then, from the witness of God in the soul, and in the history of man's
moral life, Elsmere turned to the glorification of _Experience_, 'of
that unvarying and rational order of the world which has been the
appo