as it could in our own land!"

"A City of Refuge'" Kirkbright repeated the words gravely,
earnestly; like those of some message of an angel of the Lord, that
sounded with self-attested authority in his ears.

After a pause, in which his thought followed out the word of
suggestion into a swift dream of possible fulfillment, he said to
his companion,--

"I believe there was nothing in that old Jewish economy, Vireo, that
was not given as a 'pattern of things' that should be. That whole
Old Testament is a type and prophecy of the kingdom coming. Only it
was but the first Adam. It was given right into the very conditions
that illustrated its need. It would have meant nothing, given into a
society of angels. Yet because men were not angels, but very mortal
and sinful men, we of to-day must fling contempt upon the Myth of
the Salvation of God! It will stand, for all that,--that history of
God's intimacy with men. It was _lived_, not told as a vision, that
it _might_ stand! It was lived, to show how near, in spite of sin,
God came, and stayed. The second coming shall be without sin unto
salvation."

"I'm not sure, Kirkbright, but you ought to be a minister."

"Not to stand in a pulpit. God helping me, I mean to be a minister.
Wouldn't a preacher be satisfied to have studied a week upon a
sermon, if he knew that on Sunday, preaching it, he had sent it,
live, into one living soul? Fifty-two souls a year, to reach and
save,--would not that be enough? Well, then, every day a man might
be giving the Lord's word out somewhere, in some fashion, I think.
He needn't wait for the Sundays. Everybody has a congregation in the
course of the week. I don't doubt the week-day service is often you
preachers' best."

"I _know_ it is," Hilary Vireo replied.

"Come down into the cabin with me," said Mr. Kirkbright. "I want to
look up that old pattern. It will tell me something."

Down in the cabin they seated themselves together where they had
had many a talk before, at a corner table near Mr. Kirkbright's
state-room door. Out of the state-room he had brought his Bible.

He got hold of one word in that old ordination,--"unawares."

"'He that doeth it _unawares_," he repeated, holding the Bible with
his finger between the half-shut leaves, at that thirty-fifth
chapter of Numbers. "How that reminds of, and connects with, the
Atoning Prayer,--'Forgive them, for they know not what they do!'
'Sins, negligences, ignorances;' how they shad