the voice. "Why, the very name of God was
not so much as a symbol to him; it was a sound to curse with--no more;
and it might have seemed to a man of bitter soul that God had turned
away His face from those of His human works that lived, and sinned, and
suffered and perished on the grey sea." Then Ferrier showed how the
light of new faith, the light of new kindness, had suddenly shot in on
the envenomed darkness, like the purifying lightning that leaps and
cleans the obscured face of a murky sky. He told of the incredulity
which greeted the first missionaries, and he explained that the men
could not think it possible that any one should care to show them human
sympathy; he traced the gradual growth of belief, and passionate
gratitude, and he then turned dexterously off and asked, "But how could
you touch men's souls with transforming effect, where the poor body--the
humble mask through which the soul gazes--was torn with great pain, or
perplexed with pettier ills? My lords, ladies, and gentlemen, I have
seen, in one afternoon, suffering home with sombre acquiescence,
suffering the very sight of which in all its manifold dreariness would
have driven you homeward shuddering from this beautiful place. Till this
good man--I will say this great man--carried his baffling compound of
sacred zeal and keen sense into that weary country, those toiling
sailors were hopeless, loveless, comfortless, joyless, and--I say it
with awe--heavenless; for scarcely a man of them had knowledge or
expectation of a life wherein the miseries of this one may be redressed
in some far land where Time is not." Then the youngster coldly, gravely
told of his surgical work, and it seemed as if he were drawing an
inexorable steel edge across the nerves of his terrified hearers. He
watched the impression spread, and then sprang at his peroration with
lightning-footed tact. "We English are like barbarians who have been
transferred from a chilly land to a kind of hot-house existence. We are
too secure; no predatory creature can harm us, and we cultivate the
lordlier and lazier vices. Our middle class, as Bismarck says, has 'gone
to fat,' and is too slothful to look for the miseries of others. The
middle-class man, and even the aristocrat, are both too content to think
of looking beyond their own horizon. And yet we are good in essentials,
and no tale of pity is unheeded--if only it be called forth loudly
enough. Let us wake our languid rich folk. They suffe