* * * * *

Two hours later he walked out into the cool night air a new man, with
head erect, his brain clear, swept clean of many sickly phantoms. His
virility was renewed, he looked out once more upon life with eyes
militant and brave heart. He was full of the sense of having passed
through some purging and beneficent experience. It was not that his
religious belief or disbeliefs had been affected, or even quickened by
anything he had heard--yet, from first to last, those two hours had been
full of delight to him. The vast, dimly-lit building, with its imposing
array of statuary, shadowy figures of great statesmen, soldiers, and
priests seen by him then, as it chanced, for the first time, woke him at
once from his lethargy. Religion seemed brought in a single moment into
touch with the great things of life. There were men there who had been
creedless, but great; genius was honoured side by side with sanctity.
The rolling music, the pure, fresh voices of the boys appealed to his
sense of the beautiful, as those historical associations reawakened his
ambition. The white-robed priest, who stood in the centre of the great
building, yet whose voice without effort seemed able to penetrate to its
furthest corner, seemed both in his personal self and in his scholarly
diction exquisitely in accord with his great surroundings. Without a
manuscript, with scarcely a note, he stood there, calm and imposing, the
prototype of the modern priest, pleading against worldliness for the
sake of beauty and of God. With delicately chosen words and exquisite
imagery, the calm enthusiasm of the orator, always self-controlled and
sweetly convincing, seemed to Douglas like the transmutation of a
beautiful picture into a beautiful poem, instinct with life, vivid and
thrilling. He stayed till the sermon was over and the solemn words of
the benediction pronounced, till the deep, throbbing notes of the organ