eeking truth and finding it.
Always, like the wireless, he was pushing his antennae into uncharted
space, never resting content with the achievements of yesterday. It was
only in the St. Viateur's that men still sat mumbling forgotten ritual,
praying to shattered idols, rotting in the darkness. Outside, in the
sunshine, the world forged ahead, living always in struggle, dying only
in content.

His had been death in life, thought Imrie with something between a
thrill and a shudder. But there were years left to him yet. He threw
back his shoulders and set his jaws as he turned homeward.

For the first time he felt that he had a key to the great mystery of
life. Paradox vanished, conflict dissolved. It seemed amazingly simple.
His call to the ministry was a phenomenon, an aberration of adolescence.
He still looked upon it with tenderness, but no longer with seriousness.
Beside this new call now sounding bell-like in his heart, that other was
but a beating of pans to drive the ghosts away, an empty relic of
childhood. To expound creeds was a petty matter of business. He had been
no nobler than the barrister who seeks to make right the wrong of his
client for a consideration of sundry pieces of silver. He had been a
mere tradesman in the things of the soul. It had seemed enough. Now,
crystal-clear, stretched the true road toward which he was summoned. He
had dallied long and comfortably in the well-tilled fields of the Past:
he was called now to the hard, never-ending conquest of the Future. He
would learn the Truth, and it would set him free ... and then, mayhap,
he would set others free.

He was restless that evening, after dinner. The self-imposed solitude of
the hotel had begun to be irksome. Forgetting momentarily that it was
Sunday, he decided to visit a theatre. But as he ran through the blatant
announcements of plays, an inconspicuous little advertisement caught his
eye.

Half an hour later, in consequence of what he felt was a veritably
inspired accident, he was in a theatre, listening to a sermon by a man
who repeatedly assured his audience that he was not a clergyman.

Imrie noticed with surprise that the congregation was largely of men,
and the thought struck him with unpleasant force that they were present
quite entirely of their own volition. He wondered ironically how many
people would attend St. Viateur's if there were no social ends to be
achieved.

The man who sat next to him answered some of the que