th both hands resting on the stick he held in
front of him, intently listening, the perspiration of physical weakness
on his brow and round his finely curved mouth. Clearly he could hardly
see the lecturer, for the room had become inconveniently crowded, and
the men about him were mostly standing.

'One of the St. Wilfrid's priests, I suppose,' Flaxman said to himself.
'What on earth is he doing _dans cette galere?_ Are we to have a
disputation? That would be dramatic.'

He had no attention, however, to spare, and the intruder was promptly
forgotten. When he turned back to the platform he found that Robert,
with Mackay's help, had hung on a screen to his right, four or five
large drawings of Nazareth, of the Lake of Gennesaret, of Jerusalem, and
the Temple of Herod, of the ruins of that synagogue on the probable site
of Capernaum in which conceivably Jesus may have stood. They were bold
and striking, and filled the bare hall at once with suggestions of the
East. He had used them often at Murewell. Then, adopting a somewhat
different tone, he plunged, into the life of Jesus. He brought to it
all his trained historical power, all his story-telling faculty, all his
sympathy with the needs of feeling. And bit by bit, as the quick nervous
sentences issued and struck, each like the touch of a chisel, the
majestic figure emerged, set against its natural background, instinct
with some fraction at least of the magic of reality, most human, most
persuasive, most tragic. He brought out the great words of the new
faith, to which, whatever may be their literal origin, Jesus, and Jesus
only, gave currency and immortal force. He dwelt on the magic,
the permanence, the expansiveness, of the young Nazarene's central
conception--the spiritualized, universalized 'Kingdom of God.' Elsmere's
thought, indeed, knew nothing of a perfect man, as it knew nothing of an
incarnate God; he shrank from nothing that he believed true; but every
limitation, every reserve he allowed himself, did but make the whole
more poignantly real, and the claim of Jesus more penetrating.

'The world has grown since Jesus preached in Galilee and Judaea. We
cannot learn the _whole_ of God's lesson from him now--nay, we could not
then! But all that is most essential to man--all that saves the soul,
all that purifies the heart--that he has still for you and me, as he had
it for the men and women of his own time.'

Then he came to the last scenes. His voice sank a lit