prepared the popular mind
for the revelation. He had quoted in his peroration passage after
passage from the Jewish prophets, telling of the City of Peace whose
walls rose now before their eyes.

"_Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is
risen upon thee.... For behold I create new heavens and a new earth; and
the former shall not be remembered nor come into mind.... Violence shall
no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy
borders. O thou so long afflicted, tossed with tempest and not
comforted; behold I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and thy
foundations with sapphires.... I will make thy windows of agates and thy
gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones. Arise,
shine, for thy light is come._"

As the chink of the censer-chains had sounded in the stillness, with one
consent the enormous crowd had fallen on its knees, and so remained, as
the smoke curled up from the hands of the rebel figure who held the
thurible. Then the organ had begun to blow, and from the huge massed
chorus in the transepts had rolled out the anthem, broken by one
passionate cry, from some mad Catholic. But it had been silenced in an
instant....

It was incredible--utterly incredible, Percy had told himself. Yet the
incredible had happened; and England had found its worship once
more--the necessary culmination of unimpeded subjectivity. From the
provinces had come the like news. In cathedral after cathedral had been
the same scenes. Markenheim's masterpiece, executed in four days after
the passing of the bill, had been reproduced by the ordinary machinery,
and four thousand replicas had been despatched to every important
centre. Telegraphic reports had streamed into the London papers that
everywhere the new movement had been received with acclamation, and that
human instincts had found adequate expression at last. If there had not
been a God, mused Percy reminiscently, it would have been necessary to
invent one. He was astonished, too, at the skill with which the new cult
had been framed. It moved round no disputable points; there was no
possibility of divergent political tendencies to mar its success, no
over-insistence on citizenship, labour and the rest, for those who were
secretly individualistic and idle. Life was the one fount and centre of
it all, clad in the gorgeous robes of ancient worship. Of course the
thought had been Felsenburgh's, though a German name had be