was supported
by the presence of a Duke and two High Church peers on the platform, and
half a dozen vicars and curates, all eloquent preachers and fashionable
exponents of ritualistic doctrine, were announced to speak in advocacy
of the protest which the meeting had been called to make.

The proceedings were very quiet and dignified--and very churchy. It was
the Church from beginning to end; it never seemed to strike either the
speakers or the audience that there was anything that might fairly be
called Christianity outside the Church. In fact, the words Christ and
Christianity were not used at all from the platform.

The only approach to unseemliness occurred when, in response to a formal
intimation that "discussion within reasonable limits" would be
permitted, one of the Kilburn Sisters, a woman who had given up a
fortune and relinquished a title, got up and asked the chairman
point-blank what _his_ interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount was,
and further, if any of the noble and reverend gentlemen on the platform
could give a better exposition of it as a rule of Christian life than
Vane Maxwell had done?

She had hardly uttered her question before murmurs of angry protest
began to run from lip to lip through the hall; but when she went on to
ask why the preacher of the now famous sermon should be denounced by his
fellow priests for giving an address to free-thinkers in a free-thought
hall, when Christ himself, for his own good purposes, associated himself
with publicans and sinners and thought none too low or too utterly lost
to take by the hand, her voice was at once drowned by a chorus of "Oh!
Oh's!" amidst which the chairman rose and said in his most dignified
manner:

"I hope that I have the sense and feeling of the meeting with me when I
say that the questions asked by our most respected sister seem to have
been asked under a total misconception of the circumstances. It is
obvious that they raise issues which could not possibly be discussed in
such a place, and on such an occasion as this. I would remind our dear
friend that this edifice is not a church, and this platform not a
pulpit; and that, therefore, I do not feel myself justified, even if
time and other circumstances permitted, to enter upon a doctrinal
subject which involves so many far-reaching considerations as this one
does."

The Canon sat down amidst a many-voiced murmur of approval, and the Duke
said audibly to him:

"A very proper way,