Here I must permit myself some necessary remarks on the subject of
Nonconformity, its influence on individualities and its direct
relationship to Romance. In the churches of England or of Rome,--though
he sometimes looked wistfully towards the latter,--Theophilus
Londonderry, with his disabilities of worldly condition, would have
found no place to be himself in. His was an organism that could not
long have breathed in any rigid organisation. It was the
non-establishment, the comparative free-field, of Nonconformity that
gave him his chance. Conscious, soon after his first few breaths, of a
personal force that claimed operation in some human employment, some
work not made with hands, but into which also entered the spirit of man,
and being quite poor, and entirely hopeless of family wealth or
influence, there were only two fields open to him, Art or Nonconformity.
To art in the usual sense of the word he was not called, but to the art
of Demosthenes he was unmistakably called; and for this
Nonconformity--with a side entrance into politics--was his opportunity.

This bourne of his faculties had indeed been predestined for him by no
remoter influence than his father, himself a lay-preacher, when he was
not the business manager of a large hardware store,--a lay-preacher with
a very gentle face, the face of a father, a woman, a saint, and a
failure all in one.

I say failure by no means unkindly. Londonderry's father was made to be
a good bishop, to radiate from a hallowed security sweet lights of
blessing. His talent was gentleness, not in itself a fighting
quality,--a quality that needs a place prepared for it, needs the hand
of strength or opportunity to set it upon the hill. That he had made
himself learned, that his sympathy knew much of the soul of man, that he
was conscious of a very near communion with the Divine--were