summarize what that
sermon had meant to him, how a gray and hopeless existence had taken on a
new colour. Next Sunday he would bring a friend who lived in the same
boarding house . . . . Hodder read every word of these, and all were
in the same strain: at last they could perceive a meaning to religion,
an application of it to such plodding lives as theirs . . . .

One or two had not understood, but had been stirred, and were coming to
talk to him. Another was filled with a venomous class hatred. . . .

The first intimation he had of the writer of another letter seemed from
the senses rather than the intellect. A warm glow suffused him, mounted
to his temples as he stared at the words, turned over the sheet, and read
at the bottom the not very legible signature. The handwriting, by no
means classic, became then and there indelibly photographed on his brain,
and summed up for him the characteristics, the warring elements in Alison
Parr. "All afternoon," she wrote, "I have been thinking of your sermon.
It was to me very wonderful--it lifted me out of myself. And oh, I want
so much to believe unreservedly what you expressed so finely, that
religion is democracy, or the motive power behind democracy--the service
of humanity by the reborn. I understand it intellectually. I am willing
to work for such a Cause, but there is something in me so hard that I
wonder if it can dissolve. And then I am still unable to identify that
Cause with the Church as at present constituted, with the dogmas and
ceremonies that still exist. I am too thorough a radical to have your
patience. And I am filled with rage--I can think of no milder word--on
coming in contact with the living embodiments of that old creed, who hold
its dogmas so precious. 'Which say to the seers, See not; and to the
prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things,
prophesy deceits.'"

"You see, I have been reading Isaiah, and when I came to that paragraph
it seemed so appropriate. These people have always existed. And will
they not always continue to exist? I wish I could believe, wholly and
unreservedly, that this class, always preponderant in the world, could be
changed, diminished--done away with in a brighter future! I can, at
least, sympathize with Isaiah's wrath.

"What you said of the longing, the yearning which exists to-day amongst
the inarticulate millions moved me most--and of the place of art in
religion, to express that yearning. Re