tled itself, and
Mr. Grey, standing by a small deal table with the gaslight behind him,
began his address.

All the main points of the experience which followed stamped themselves
on Robert's mind with extraordinary intensity. Nor did he ever lose the
memory of the outward scene. In after-years, memory could always recall
to him at will the face and figure of the speaker, the massive head, the
deep eyes sunk under the brows, the Midland accent, the make of limb
and feature which seemed to have some suggestion in them of the rude
strength and simplicity of a peasant ancestry; and then the nobility,
the fire, the spiritual beauty flashing through it all! Here, indeed,
was a man on whom his fellows might lean, a man in whom the generation
of spiritual force was so strong and continuous that it overflowed
of necessity into the poorer, barrener lives around him, kindling and
enriching. Robert felt himself seized and penetrated, filled with a
fervor and an admiration which he was too young and immature to analyze,
but which was to be none the less potent and lasting.

Much of the sermon itself, indeed, was beyond him. It was on the meaning
of St. Paul's great conception, 'Death unto sin and a new birth unto
righteousness.' What did the Apostle mean by a death to sin and self?
What were the precise ideas attached to the words 'risen with Christ?'
Are this, death and this resurrection necessarily dependent upon certain
alleged historical events? Or are they not primarily, and were they
not, even in the mind of St. Paul, two aspects of a spiritual process
perpetually re-enacted in the soul of man, and constituting the
veritable revelation of God? Which is the stable and lasting Witness of
the Father: the spiritual history of the individual and the world, or
the envelope of miracle to which hitherto mankind has attributed so much
Importance?

Mr. Grey's treatment of these questions was clothed, throughout a large
portion of the lecture in metaphysical language, which no boy fresh from
school, however intellectually quick, could be expected to follow with
any precision. It was not, therefore, the argument, or the logical
structure of the sermon, which so profoundly affected young Elsmere.
It was the speaker himself, and the occasional passages in which,
addressing himself to the practical needs of his hearers, he put before
them the claims and conditions of the higher life with a pregnant
simplicity and rugged beauty of phrase.