although they were on a holiday, owed a duty to the natives. It did not,
in truth, differ very much from a leading article upon topics of general
interest in the weekly newspapers. It rambled with a kind of amiable
verbosity from one heading to another, suggesting that all human beings
are very much the same under their skins, illustrating this by the
resemblance of the games which little Spanish boys play to the games
little boys in London streets play, observing that very small things do
influence people, particularly natives; in fact, a very dear friend of
Mr. Bax's had told him that the success of our rule in India, that vast
country, largely depended upon the strict code of politeness which the
English adopted towards the natives, which led to the remark that small
things were not necessarily small, and that somehow to the virtue of
sympathy, which was a virtue never more needed than to-day, when we
lived in a time of experiment and upheaval--witness the aeroplane and
wireless telegraph, and there were other problems which hardly presented
themselves to our fathers, but which no man who called himself a man
could leave unsettled. Here Mr. Bax became more definitely clerical, if
it were possible, he seemed to speak with a certain innocent craftiness,
as he pointed out that all this laid a special duty upon earnest
Christians. What men were inclined to say now was, "Oh, that
fellow--he's a parson." What we want them to say is, "He's a good
fellow"--in other words, "He is my brother." He exhorted them to keep
in touch with men of the modern type; they must sympathise with their
multifarious interests in order to keep before their eyes that whatever
discoveries were made there was one discovery which could not be
superseded, which was indeed as much of a necessity to the most
successful and most brilliant of them all as it had been to their
fathers. The humblest could help; the least important things had an
influence (here his manner became definitely priestly and his remarks
seemed to be directed to women, for indeed Mr. Bax's congregations were