.

From the first morning of his reading service at Saint Peter's, Brenton
had been aware that he was opening a fresh chapter of his life. In the
old hillside parish, there had been things to do and souls to save.
Here, it seemed to him that all the souls had been saved prenatally. As
for the things to do, these people were too critical, too self-reliant
to take kindly to the intimate sort of ministrations in which, of old,
he had delighted. For the future, it would be the quality of his
sermons that counted most, rather than his personal contact with his
people.

The congregation seemed to him conglomerate, a jumble of conflicting
elements. There were the old, old residents and their offspring, people
who squabbled violently among themselves as to whose ancestor came
aboard the _Mayflower_ first, and which in what capacity. There were
the mediaeval spinsters who always reach their best development in the
semi-small New England town, spinsters who have clubs and theories, and
yet play golf, and frivol delightfully above their luncheon tables. And
there were college girls in hordes, alert young things, critical alike
of evil and of good, of the hang of the back of a surplice where the
shoulders stoop a little, and of the turning of the final phrases that
naturally lead up to the _And now_--To Scott Brenton, looking down
upon the students in the congregation, his first Sunday morning at
Saint Peter's, their befeathered hats and their intent young faces
seemed to him the masking labels upon a store of frozen dynamite.
Thawed, it might serve for any amount of useful tunneling; it might go
off explosively in the open, at almost any given instant.

Taken all in all, it was upon the student fraction of his congregation
that Brenton looked with greatest interest; it was to them, in greatest
measure, that the best of his sermons preached themselves. The phrase
is no slipshod inversion of the fact. The best of all sermons do preach
themselves, both in their original inception and their ultimate
delivery. All the so-called preacher does about it is to give the
intermediate polishing to his projectile, and then to hold himself
still, while it is going off, and watch what happens, by way of
preparation for aiming his next shot.

As a matter of course, with a target so unstable as a student audience,
Brenton by no means hit the bull's-eye every time. That he did hit it
occasionally, however, argues no mean ability, no paltry know