not of Thy lowly
creatures ..."

It was a long prayer; and Dale, surmising it to be an extempore
composition, admired Mr. Osborn's flow of language, command of erudite
words, and success in bringing some very intricate sentences to an
appropriate period.

During the sermon Mr. Osborn several times aroused laughter by little
homely jokes coming unexpectedly in the midst of his serious
discourse; but Dale no longer felt surprise. He thought that he had
caught their point of view, got the hang of the main scheme. These
people were genuine believers, and entirely free from any affectation
or pretense. They possessed no church-manner: thus, when they spoke to
one another here, they did so as naturally as when they were speaking
in the fields or on the highroads. Only when they spoke to God, could
you hear the vibration and the thrill, the effort and the strain.

And all at once his own self-consciousness vanished. He felt
comfortable, quite at ease, and extraordinarily glad that he had
dedicated an hour to the purpose of coming here.

The lamplight enormously improved the appearance of the chapel; the
genial yellow glow was surrounded by fine dark shadows that draped the
ugly walls as if with soft curtains; there were golden glittering
bands on the roof beams, and above them all had become black,
impenetrable, mysterious. When one glanced up one might have had the
night sky over one's head, for all one could see of the roof. The
light shone bright on crooked backs, slightly distorted limbs, the
pallor of sickness, the stains of rough weather; on girls meekly
folding hands that daily scrub and scour; on laboring men stooping the
shoulders that habitually carry weights; on spectacled old women with
eyes worn out by incessantly peering at the tiny stitches of their
untiring needles; but one would have looked in vain for any types even
approximately similar to the stalwart well-balanced youths, the
smooth-cheeked game-playing maidens, the prosperously healthful
fathers and mothers of the established faith. Dale did not look for
them, did not miss them, would not have wished them here.

It might be said that there was not a single person of the whole
gathering on whom there was not plainly printed, in one shape or
another, the stamp of toil. That fact perhaps formed the root of the
difference between this and a Church of England congregation. To
Dale's mind, however, there was something else of a saliently
differentiating