The call to prayer sounded down the long aisle. Thousands
of hands were joyously lifted in the air, as if the sea had
blossomed into waving lilies, and the "Amen" was like the
murmur of countless ripples in an echoing place.

Then the singing began, led by the choir of a hundred
trained voices which the Bishop Paul had founded in Antioch.
Timidly, at first, the music felt its way, as the people
joined with a broken and uncertain cadence: the mingling of
many little waves not yet gathered into rhythm and harmony.
Soon the longer, stronger billows of song rolled in, sweeping
from side to side as the men and the women answered in the
clear antiphony.

Hermas had often been carried on those

Tides of music's golden sea
Selling toward eternity.

But to-day his heart was a rock that stood motionless. The
flood passed by and left him unmoved.

Looking out from his place at the foot of the pillar, he
saw a man standing far off in the lofty bema. Short and
slender, wasted by sickness, gray before his time, with pale
cheeks and wrinkled brow, he seemed at first like a person of
no significance--a reed shaken in the wind. But there was a
look in his deep-set, poignant eyes, as he gathered all the
glances of the multitude to himself, that belied his mean