, asked Elsmere to explain himself
further.

Robert began to pace up and down, talking out his thought, his eye
kindling.

But in a minute or two he stopped abruptly, with one of those striking
rapid gestures characteristic of him.

'But no mere social and educational body, mind you!' and his bright
commanding look swept round the circle. 'A good thing, surely, "yet is
there better than it." The real difficulty of every social effort--you
know it and I know it--lies not in the planning of the work, but in the
kindling of will and passion enough to carry it _through_. And that can
only be done by religion--by faith.'

He went back to his old leaning attitude, his hands behind him. The men
gazed at him--at the slim figure, the transparent changing face--with a
kind of fascination, but were still silent, till Macdonald said slowly,
taking off his glasses again and clearing his throat--

'You'll be aboot starrtin' a new church, I'm thinkin', Misther Elsmere?'

'If you like,' said Robert impetuously. 'I have no fear of the great
words. You can do nothing by despising the past and its products; you
can also do nothing by being too much afraid of them, by letting them
choke and stifle your own life. Let the new wine have its new bottles
if it must, and never mince words. Be content to be a new "sect,"
"conventicle," or what not, so long as you feel that you are _something_
with a life and purpose of its own, in this tangle of a world.'

Again he paused with knit brows, thinking. Lestrange sat with his elbows
on his knees studying him, the spare gray hair brushed back tightly from
the bony face, on the lips the slightest Voltairean smile. Perhaps it
was the coolness of his look which insensibly influenced Robert's next
words.

'However, I don't imagine we should call ourselves a church! Something
much humbler will do, if you choose ever to make anything of these
suggestions of mine. "Association," "society," "brotherhood," what you
will! But always, if I can persuade you, with something in the name, and
everything in the body itself, to show that for the members of it, life
rests still, as all life worth having has everywhere rested, on _trust_
and _memory!_--_trust_ in the God of experience and history; _memory_
of that God's work in man, by which alone we know Him, and can approach
Him. Well, of that work--I have tried to prove it to you a thousand
times--Jesus of Nazareth has become to us, by the evolution of
circu