being made comfortable. And then, in a moment, almost with the giving out
of the text, the sudden stillness and that tense sensation which told
that the young orator had gripped his congregation.

Thereafter she hardly heard him, as it were, and she certainly lost the
feeling of ownership that had been hers before. As he leaned over the
pulpit, and the words rang out almost harshly from their intensity, she
began to see, as the rest of the congregation began to see, the images
that the preacher conjured up before her. A sense of coming disaster
riveted her--the feeling that she was already watching the end of
an age.

"Jesus had compassion on the multitude"--that had been the short and
simple text. Simple words, the preacher had said, but how when one
realised Who had had compassion, and on what? Almighty God Himself, with
His incarnate Mind set on the working out of immense and agelong plans,
had, as it were, paused for a moment to have compassion on hungry women
and crying babies and folk whose petty confused affairs could have seemed
of no consequence to anyone in the drama of the world. And then, with a
few terse sentences, the preacher swung from that instance to the world
drama of to-day. Did they realise, he asked, that peaceful bright Sunday
morning, that millions of simple men were at that moment being hurled at
each other to maim and kill? At the bidding of powers that even they
could hardly visualise, at the behest of world politics that not one in
a thousand would understand and scarcely any justify, houses were being
broken up, women were weeping, and children playing in the sun before
cottage doors were even now being left fatherless. It was incredible,
colossal, unimaginable, but as one tried to picture it, Hell had opened
her mouth and Death gone forth to slay. It was terrible enough that
battlefields of stupendous size should soon be littered with the dying