attracted almost universal
attention at Tyre, and his achievement before the Conference at
Tecumseh, if it did fail to receive practical reward, had admittedly
distanced all the other preaching there. It was a part of the evil luck
pursuing him that here in this perversely enigmatic Octavius his special
gift seemed to be of no use whatever. There were times, indeed, when he
was tempted to think that bad preaching was what Octavius wanted.

Somewhere he had heard of a Presbyterian minister, in charge of a big
city church, who managed to keep well in with a watchfully Orthodox
congregation, and at the same time establish himself in the affections
of the community at large, by simply preaching two kinds of sermons. In
the morning, when almost all who attended were his own communicants,
he gave them very cautious and edifying doctrinal discourses, treading
loyally in the path of the Westminster Confession. To the evening
assemblages, made up for the larger part of outsiders, he addressed
broadly liberal sermons, literary in form, and full of respectful
allusions to modern science and the philosophy of the day. Thus he
filled the church at both services, and put money in its treasury and
his own fame before the world. There was of course the obvious danger
that the pious elders who in the forenoon heard infant damnation
vigorously proclaimed, would revolt when they heard after supper that
there was some doubt about even adults being damned at all. But either
because the same people did not attend both services, or because the
minister's perfect regularity in the morning was each week regarded as a
retraction of his latest vagaries of an evening, no trouble ever came.

Theron had somewhat tentatively tried this on in Octavius. It was no
good. His parishioners were of the sort who would have come to church
eight times a day on Sunday, instead of two, if occasion offered. The
hope that even a portion of them would stop away, and that their places
would be taken in the evening by less prejudiced strangers who wished
for intellectual rather than theological food, fell by the wayside. The
yearned-for strangers did not come; the familiar faces of the morning
service all turned up in their accustomed places every evening. They
were faces which confused and disheartened Theron in the daytime.
Under the gaslight they seemed even harder and more unsympathetic. He
timorously experimented with them for an evening or two, then abandoned