e forgiveness of
sins, the Resurrection of the body, and the life everlastin'. Amen."

Meanwhile Hirst took out an envelope and began scribbling on the back of
it. When Mr. Bax mounted the pulpit he shut up Sappho with his envelope
between the pages, settled his spectacles, and fixed his gaze intently
upon the clergyman. Standing in the pulpit he looked very large and fat;
the light coming through the greenish unstained window-glass made his
face appear smooth and white like a very large egg.

He looked round at all the faces looking mildly up at him, although
some of them were the faces of men and women old enough to be his
grandparents, and gave out his text with weighty significance. The
argument of the sermon was that visitors to this beautiful land,
although they were on a holiday, owed a duty to the natives. It did not,
in truth, differ very much from a leading article upon topics of general
interest in the weekly newspapers. It rambled with a kind of amiable
verbosity from one heading to another, suggesting that all human beings
are very much the same under their skins, illustrating this by the
resemblance of the games which little Spanish boys play to the games
little boys in London streets play, observing that very small things do
influence people, particularly natives; in fact, a very dear friend of
Mr. Bax's had told him that the success of our rule in India, that vast
country, largely depended upon the strict code of politeness which the
English adopted towards the natives, which led to the remark that small
things were not necessarily small, and that somehow to the virtue of
sympathy, which was a virtue never more needed than to-day, when we
lived in a time of experiment and upheaval--witness the aeroplane and
wireless telegraph, and there were other problems which hardly presented
themselves to our fathers, but which no man who called himself a man
could leave unsettled. Here Mr. Bax became more definitely clerical, if
it were possible, he seemed to speak with a certain innocent craftiness,
as he pointed out that all this laid a special duty upon earnest
Christians. What men were inclined to say now was, "Oh, that
fellow--he's a parson." What we want them to say is, "He's a good
fellow"--in other words, "He is my brother." He exhorted them to keep
in touch with men of the modern type; they must sympathise with their
multifarious interests in order to keep before their eyes that whatever
discoveries were m