erchandise. Every
church is parcelled out into so many square feet, and these are bought
and sold as ecclesiastical allotments. Did you ever think of that
gruesome traffic, and the weirdness of it? That good news of Love
brooding over all, caring even for the grass and the sparrow, has now
become the monopoly of the renter, while the poor are shut out. And it
was at first proclaimed to the poor without money and without price,
committed to the winds of Galilee.'

'Put like that,' I said, 'it is rather weird.'

'Aye,' he went on, 'and every half-year managers and deacons assemble
in the houses of God to traffic in these square feet of pews. There is
a story how One long ago knotted a whip of cords and drove the
traffickers out of His Father's house, His eyes blazing with anger.
Would He not wield the same whip on these deacons and managers, and
drive them out to-day? How astonished they would be, with all the law
and all the vested interest on their side ... and yet that whip!'

The little man fell silent, and his strange eye looked as if he were
seeing it all. And he smiled curiously.

'Did you ever trespass on an ecclesiastical allotment?' he asked
jerkily. 'No! Well, it is a thing not to be done. I once trespassed
on a garden allotment out in Kelvinside, just to admire some wonderful
sweet-peas, and the man who owned it found me and welcomed me like a
brother, and sent me away with a radiant bunch of flowers; but an
ecclesiastical allotment is another story. An old heritor once said to
me that the only thing that really roused the devil in a Scotsman's
heart was trespassing on his ecclesiastical allotment.'

'That only shows,' I retorted, 'how dear to a Scotsman's heart his part
in the Church is.'

'That is only quibbling,' jerked out the bald man.

III

'Last Sunday evening,' went on the bald man, speaking very rapidly and
walking up and down the room in his excitement, 'I went to a church
situated in a mean street, surrounded by closes that each holds the
population of a sparse parish. A tattered bill on the door proclaimed
the traffic in seats. There seemed to be no demand. There were only
eighteen present. A cheap church, with varnished pews, that could hold
a thousand--and only eighteen there--old people and two or three
children--none who could lay hold on life with both hands. To that
handful a discouraged and hopeless preacher proclaimed the evangel of
the love of God ... but his vo