houses, the ramshackle saloon, the ugly, yellow gleam from the street
lamps in a line along the glistening pavement; beside him, a towering
hill of granite with a real estate sign, "This lot for sale." And he had
stood staring at it, thinking of the rock that would have to be cut away
before a man could build there,--and so read his own parable.

How much rock would have to be cut away, how much patient chipping before
the edifice of which he had been dreaming could be reared! Could he ever
do it? Once removed, he would be building on rock. But could he remove
it? . . . To help revive a faith, a dying faith, in a material age,
--that indeed were a mission for any man! He found his way to an
elevated train, and as it swept along stared unseeing at the people who
pushed and jostled him. Still under the spell, he reached his room and
wrote to the lawyer thanking him, but saying that he had reconsidered
coming to New York. It was not until he had posted the letter, and was
on his way back to Cambridge that he fully realized he had made the
decision of his life.

Misgivings, many of them, had come in the months that followed,
misgivings and struggles, mocking queries. Would it last? There was
the incredulity and amazement of nearest friends, who tried to dissuade
him from so extraordinary a proceeding. Nobody, they said, ever became
a parson in these days; nobody, at least, with his ability. He was
throwing himself away. Ethics had taken the place of religion;
intelligent men didn't go to church. And within him went on an endless
debate. Public opinion made some allowance for frailties in other
professions; in the ministry, none: he would be committing himself to
be good the rest of his life, and that seemed too vast an undertaking
for any human.