bit, he will have to keep his half-broken clerical colts a bit better in
hand; I'm not going to support a church to be insulted in it."

Many other similar conversations were going on just then in the Park, in
fact, Vane and his sermon were already being discussed by half
fashionable London, so fast does the news of so startling an event
travel from lip to lip when a crowd of somewhat _blase_ people, who have
nothing in particular to talk about, get together. Most of the comments
were quite similar to those just quoted, for Society felt generally by
dinner time that night that it had been deliberately insulted, outraged,
in fact, through its representatives in the congregation of St.
Chrysostom.

Nevertheless the church was packed to its utmost capacity at evening
service. It was known that Father Baldwin was to preach, but it was
hoped that Vane would take some part in the service, and of course
everyone wanted to see him; still, the audience went away disappointed.
Vane was far away, helping Ernshaw at his mission in Bethnal Green, and
was telling his congregation truths just as uncompromising and perhaps
as unpalatable as those he had told to his wealthy and aristocratic
hearers in the morning.

Father Baldwin preached, but his sermon was rather a homily on the
duties of the rich towards the poor, especially at a time when the rich
were about to migrate like gay-plumaged birds of passage to other lands
and climes in search of pleasure, leaving behind the millions of their
fellow mortals and fellow Christians, whose ceaseless life-struggle left
no leisure for the delights which they had come to look upon as the
commonplaces of their existence.

He only made one brief allusion to Vane's sermon. He knew perfectly
well that these thronging hundreds of people had not come to hear him.
He felt, not without sorrow, that quite half of them had come to hear,
or at least see, the man whose name was already the talk of fashionable
London.

"Some of you," he said, "who are present now heard this morning from
this pulpit words which must have sunk deep into the heart of every man
and woman who feels an earnest desire to follow in the footsteps of the
Master as closely as imperfect human nature will permit you. It is not
for me to tell you to what extent those words must be taken literally.
They were spoken earnestly and from the inmost depths of the preacher's
own soul--may they sink into the inmost depths of yours! They pu