pell.

The perceptions of the banker were as keen, and his sense of security was
brief. Somehow, as he met the searching eye of the rector, he was unable
to see the man as a visionary, but beheld--and, to do him justice--felt a
twinge of respect for an adversary worthy of his steel.

He, who was accustomed to prepare for clouds when they were mere specks
on his horizon, paused even now to marvel why he had not dealt with this.
Here was a man--a fanatic, if he liked--but still a man who positively
did not fear him, to whom his wrath and power were as nothing! A new and
startling and complicated sensation--but Eldon Parr was no coward. If he
had, consciously or unconsciously, formerly looked upon the clergyman as
a dependent, Hodder appeared to be one no more. The very ruggedness of
the man had enhanced, expanded--as it were--until it filled the room.
And Hodder had, with an audacity unparalleled in the banker's experience
arraigned by implication his whole life, managed to put him on the
defensive.

"But if that be your experience," the rector said, "and it has become
your philosophy, what is it in you that impels you to give these large
sums for the public good?"

"I should suppose that you, as a clergyman, might understand that my
motive is a Christian one."

Hodder sat very still, but a higher light came into his eyes.

"Mr. Parr," he replied, "I have been a friend of yours, and I am a friend
still. And what I am going to tell you is not only in the hope that
others may benefit, but that your own soul may be saved. I mean that
literally--your own soul. You are under the impression that you are a
Christian, but you are not and never have been one. And you will not be
one until your whole life is transformed, until you become a different
man. If you do not change, it is my duty to warn you that the sorrow and
suffering, the uneasiness which you now know, and which drive you on, in
search of distraction, to adding useless sums of money to your fortune
--this suffering, I say, will become intensified. You will die in the
knowledge of it, and live on after, in the knowledge of it."

In spite of himself, the financier drew back before this unexpected
blast, the very intensity of which had struck a chill of terror in his
inmost being. He had been taken off his guard,--for he had supposed the
day long past--if it had ever existed--when a spiritual rebuke would
upset him; the day long past when a minister could pronounc