s companions; he could look easily over their heads and survey
the sea of people stretching away through the columns, under the shadows
of the high roof, as the tide spreads on a calm day into the pillared
cavern of Staffa, quiet as if the ocean hardly dared to breathe. The
light of many flambeaux fell, in flickering, uncertain rays, over
the assembly. At the end of the vista there was a circle of clearer,
steadier radiance. Hermas could see the bishop in his great chair,
surrounded by the presbyters, the lofty desks on either side for the
readers of the Scripture, the communion-table and the table of offerings
in the middle of the church.

The call to prayer sounded down the long aisle. Thousands of hands were
joyously lifted in the air, as if the sea had blossomed into waving
lilies, and the "Amen" was like the murmur of countless ripples in an
echoing place.

Then the singing began, led by the choir of a hundred trained voices
which the Bishop Paul had founded in Antioch. Timidly, at first, the
music felt its way, as the people joined with a broken and uncertain
cadence: the mingling of many little waves not yet gathered into rhythm
and harmony. Soon the longer, stronger billows of song rolled in,
sweeping from side to side as the men and the women answered in the
clear antiphony.

Hermas had often been carried on those

Tides of music's golden sea
Selling toward eternity.

But to-day his heart was a rock that stood motionless. The flood passed
by and left him unmoved.

Looking out from his place at the foot of the pillar, he saw a man
standing far off in the lofty bema. Short and slender, wasted by
sickness, gray before his time, with pale cheeks and wrinkled brow, he
seemed at first like a person of no significance--a reed shaken in
the wind. But there was a look in his deep-set, poignant eyes, as he
gathered all the glances of the multitude to himself, that belied his
mean appearance and prophesied power. Hermas knew very well who it was:
the man who had drawn him from his father's house, the teacher who was
instructing him as a son in the Christian faith, the guide and trainer
of his soul--John of Antioch, whose fame filled the city and began to
overflow Asia, and who was called already Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed
preacher.

Hermas had felt the magic of his eloquence many a time; and to-day, as
the tense voice vibrated through the stillness, and the sentences moved
onward, growing fuller