is madness to its proper
bounds.

He seemed to Maggie at first rather pathetic with his little twisted
body and his large round head. Very soon it was emotions quite other
than pity that she was feeling. She saw at once that he was a practised
preacher, and she who had, with the exception of Mr. Warlock, never
heard a fine preacher, was at once under the sway of one of the ablest
and most dramatic orators of his time. His voice was sweet and clear,
and seemed strange enough coming from that ugly and malevolent
countenance. Only the head and the grasping hands could be seen, but
sometimes the invisible body was driven with such force against the
desk that it seemed that it must fling the thing over, down into the
congregation.

"My brothers and sisters," he began, "I have come to-night to give you
a warning, and this warning is given to you not as the expression of a
personal opinion but as the declaration of an assumed fact. Disregard
it or not as you please, but I shall have done my duty in pointing out
to you the sure and certain meaning of my message."

"I, a sinner like the rest of you, live nevertheless in the fear of
hell fire. Hell fire has become, I think, to many of the present
generation a mockery and a derision. I come to tell you that it is no
mockery, that it as surely lies there, a blazing furnace, in front of
us as though we saw it with our own eyes ..."

With his own eyes he had surely seen it. They were fixed now in a
frenzy of realisation upon some distant vision, and, with a shiver, the
Chapel followed his gaze. It is easy enough to laugh at bare and
conventional words stripped of the atmosphere and significance of their
original surroundings. The merest baby in this twentieth century can
laugh at the flames of hell and advance a string of easy arguments
against the probability of any such melodramatic fulfilment of the
commonplace and colourless lives that the majority of us lead, but
Maggie was in no mood to laugh that night.

Before five minutes had passed she found herself shivering where she
sat. The Chapel was convicted of Sin, and of Sin of no ordinary
measure. The head that rested like a round ball on the surface of the
desk thrust conviction into every heart: "You think that you may
escape, you look at your neighbours, every one of you, and say, 'He is
worse than I. I am safe,' but I tell you that not one man or woman here
shall be secure unless he turn instantly now to God and beg for