hing to check its
ravages, men like General Booth, and the men and women inspired by his
abhorrence, save every year from physical and moral destruction
thousands of unhappy people who become at once the apostles of an
extreme goodness.

Such evidences of mediocrity as exist in the Salvationist are purely
intellectual; morally and spiritually he is in the advance guard of the
human race.

DR. W.E. ORCHARD

ORCHARD, Rev. WILLIAM EDWIN, Minister of the King's Weigh House Church,
Duke Street, W., since 1914; b. 20 Nov., 1887; e.s. of John Orchard,
Rugby; m. 1904, Anna Maria (d. 1920), widow of Rev. Ellis Hewitt of
Aldershot. Educ.: Board School; private tuition; Westminster College,
Cambridge. Ordained, Enfield, 1904, B.D., London, 1905; D.D., London,
1909.

[Illustration: DR. W.E. ORCHARD]

CHAPTER IX

DR. W.E. ORCHARD

_O, you poor creatures in the large cities of wide-world politics,
you young, gifted, ambition-tormented men, who consider it your
duty to give your opinion on everything that occurs; who, by thus
raising dust and noise, mistake yourselves for the chariot of
history; who, being always on the look-out for an opportunity to
put in a word or two, lose all true productiveness. However
desirous you may be of doing great deeds, the profound silence of
pregnancy never comes to you. The event of the day sweeps you along
like chaff, while you fancy that you are chasing it_.--NIETZSCHE.

Until quite the other day I looked upon Dr. Orchard as a person unique
in his generation. But I am now told by an authority in the
nonconformist world that there are "two others of him"--one, I think, in
Birmingham, the second in Clapham.

I am still permitted to think, however, that to Dr. Orchard belongs the
distinction of being the first person of this erratic trinity, and
therefore we may still regard him with that measure of curiosity which
is the tribute paid by simple people to the eccentric and the abnormal.

But let me warn the reader against expectations of an original genius.
Dr. Orchard does not create; he copies. His innovations are all made
after visits to the lumber-room. It is by going back such a long
distance into the past that he startles, and by coming round full circle
that he appears to surprise the future.

But where originality is rare, eccentricity must not be discounted.

Dr. Orchard is a ritualist in the midst of nonconformity; the