innermost chambers of his heart to them, taking them into his confidence
as he had never before taken even himself. For the first time, he did
not preach: it was rather a mutual inventory before the God they
worshipped, a dispassionate analysis of the institutions they revered,
to see if, since they had become idols, they had deteriorated or no.

Only once did his emotionless manner desert him. Then without euphemism,
he lashed them for their luxuries, for the repletion of their bellies,
for the ideals of the spirit that they had allowed to die of starvation.
For a few minutes he waxed eloquent and bitter and cruel. With a crash
of his fist on the pulpit rail he repeated the words, "_let him take up
his cross and follow me_," and hammered home to them, with brutal logic
and remorseless clarity, what they meant.

It was a new Jesus which he painted for them, in bold sharp strokes. The
Lamb of God, the doe-eyed martyr to vicarious atonement, vanished, and
in his place stood a virile battler for human rights.

The strongest sentiment in the minds of the listeners was one of
bewilderment. They watched, with something approaching admiration, the
portrait as it grew more vivid before their eyes, and a few even
admitted in it a specious fidelity. But none could comprehend at all
clearly the reason for their rector's complete and sudden estrangement
from the conceptions which he had worshipped hitherto with an orthodoxy
beyond suspicion.

And yet the explanation was profoundly simple. In the first place he had
come away from his talk with Judith to study Scripture with new eyes. In
words so familiar that he could quote them he had found new meaning. He
had realised, with a shock, that always until then he had given a
superficial acceptance to the interpretations of others, and in natural
consequence he had set himself to the business of interpretation
assisted by nothing but his own powers of logic and analysis. Once the
new keystone was placed, the change in the entire arch was inevitable
and immediate. He had only to secure a new postulate: the rest of the
syllogism followed as a matter of course.

The second part of the explanation was simpler still. From the time that
man emerged from his female origin, man has been doing things, both
sublime and foolish, to win the regard of woman. In the little boy who
jumps off a high place because a little girl "dared" him to jump, may be
found the key to Imrie's puzzling transfor