have changed you, which have been strong enough to impel you to risk the
position you have achieved."

By this unlooked-for appeal Hodder was not only disarmed, but smitten
with self-reproach at the thought of his former misjudgment and
underestimation of the man in whose presence he sat. And it came over
him, not only the extent to which, formerly, he had regarded the bishop
as too tolerant and easygoing, but the fact that he had arrived here
today prepared to find in his superior anything but the attitude he was
showing. Considering the bishop's age, Hodder had been ready for a lack
of understanding of the step he had taken, even for querulous reproaches
and rebuke.

He had, therefore, to pull himself together, to adjust himself to the
unexpected greatness of soul with which he was being received before he
began to sketch the misgivings he had felt from the early days of his
rectorship of St. John's; the helplessness and failure which by degrees
had come over him. He related how it had become apparent to him that by
far the greater part of his rich and fashionable congregation were
Christians only in name, who kept their religion in a small and
impervious compartment where it did not interfere with their lives.
He pictured the yearning and perplexity of those who had come to him for
help, who could not accept the old explanations, and had gone away empty;
and he had not been able to make Christians of the poor who attended the
parish house. Finally, trusting in the bishop's discretion, he spoke of
the revelations he had unearthed in Dalton Street, and how these had
completely destroyed his confidence in the Christianity he had preached,
and how he had put his old faith to the test of unprejudiced modern
criticism, philosophy, and science. . .