ce then the first religious service under the new constitution has
been held. The service is extremely simple, and the basis of the whole
is "new bottles for the new wine." The opening prayer is recited by
everybody present standing. It is rather an act of adoration and faith
than a prayer, properly so called. It represents, in fact, the placing
of the soul in the presence of God. The mortal turns to the eternal; the
ignorant and imperfect look away from themselves to the knowledge and
perfection of the All-Holy. It is Elsmere's drawing up, I imagine--at
any rate it is essentially modern, expressing the modern spirit,
answering to modern need, as I imagine the first Christian prayers
expressed the spirit and answered to the need of an earlier day.'

'Then follows some passage from the life of Christ. Elsmere reads it and
expounds it, in the first place, as a lecturer might expound a passage
of Tacitus, historically and critically. His explanation of miracle,
his efforts to make his audience realize the germs of miraculous belief
which each mass carries with him in the constitution and inherited
furniture of his mind, are some of the most ingenious--perhaps the most
convincing--I have ever heard. My heart and my head have never been very
much at one, as you know, on this matter of the marvelous element in
religion.

'But then when the critic has done, the poet and the believer begins.
Whether he has got hold of the true Christ is another matter; but that
the Christ he preaches moves the human heart as much as--and in the case
of the London artisan, more than--the current orthodox presentation of
him, I begin to have ocular demonstration.

'I was present, for instance, at his children's Sunday class the other
day. He had brought them up to the story of the Crucifixion, reading
from the Revised Version, and amplifying wherever the sense required it.
Suddenly a little girl laid her head on the desk before her, and with
choking sobs implored him not to go on. The whole class seemed ready to
do the same. The pure human pity of the story--the contrast between
the innocence and the pain of the sufferer--seemed to be more than they
could bear. And there was no comforting sense of a jugglery by which the
suffering was not real after all, and the sufferer not man but God.

'He took one of them upon his knee and tried to console them. But there
is something piercingly penetrating and austere even in the consolations
of this new