ed round us order, love, and light,
And shine unto the perfect day.'

The precious relic, with all its shattered hopes, came at the right
moment to soften his hard-worn heart. The sight, the touch of it,
shot like an electric spark through the black stifling thunder-cloud
of his soul, and dissolved it in refreshing showers of tears.

Barnakill led him gently within the area of the railings, where he
might conceal his emotion, and it was but a few seconds before
Lancelot had recovered his self-possession and followed him up the
steps through the wicket door.

They entered. The afternoon service was proceeding. The organ
droned sadly in its iron cage to a few musical amateurs. Some
nursery maids and foreign sailors stared about within the spiked
felon's dock which shut off the body of the cathedral, and tried in
vain to hear what was going on inside the choir. As a wise author--
a Protestant, too--has lately said, 'the scanty service rattled in
the vast building, like a dried kernel too small for its shell.'
The place breathed imbecility, and unreality, and sleepy life-in-
death, while the whole nineteenth century went roaring on its way
outside. And as Lancelot thought, though only as a dilettante, of
old St. Paul's, the morning star and focal beacon of England through
centuries and dynasties, from old Augustine and Mellitus, up to
those Paul's Cross sermons whose thunders shook thrones, and to
noble Wren's masterpiece of art, he asked, 'Whither all this?
Coleridge's dictum, that a cathedral is a petrified religion, may be
taken to bear more meanings than one. When will life return to this
cathedral system?'

'When was it ever a living system?' answered the other. 'When was
it ever anything but a transitionary makeshift since the dissolution
of the monasteries?'

'Why, then, not away with it at once?'

'You English have not done with it yet. At all events, it is
keeping your cathedrals rain-proof for you, till you can put them to
some better use than now.'

'And in the meantime?'

'In the meantime there is life enough in them; life that will wake
the dead some day. Do you hear what those choristers are chanting
now?'

'Not I,' said Lancelot; 'nor any one round us, I should think.'

'That is our own fault, after all; for we were not good churchmen
enough to come in time for vespers.'

'Are you a churchman then?'

'Yes, thank God. There may be other churches tha