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
Setting 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 appearance and prophesied power. Hermas knew very well who
it was: the man who had drawn him from his father's house, the
teacher who was instructing him as a son in the Christian faith, the
guide and trainer of his soul--John of Antioch, whose fame filled
the city and began to overflow Asia, and who was called already
Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed preacher.