work because it may happen to be dirty)--I say, as I wanted to do my
work well, or rather, perhaps, because I dreaded drudgery as much as
any poor fellow who comes to the treadmill in consequence--I wanted
to interest myself in it; and therefore I would go and fall in love,
first of all, if I could, with the country round about. And my first
step beyond my own gate was up to the ankles, in mud.

Therewith, curiously enough, arose the distracting thought how I
could possibly preach TWO good sermons a Sunday to the same people,
when one of the sermons was in the afternoon instead of the evening,
to which latter I had been accustomed in the large town in which I
had formerly officiated as curate in a proprietary chapel. I, who
had declaimed indignantly against excitement from without, who had
been inclined to exalt the intellect at the expense even of the
heart, began to fear that there must be something in the darkness,
and the gas-lights, and the crowd of faces, to account for a man's
being able to preach a better sermon, and for servant girls
preferring to go out in the evening. Alas! I had now to preach, as I
might judge with all probability beforehand, to a company of
rustics, of thought yet slower than of speech, unaccustomed in fact
to THINK at all, and that in the sleepiest, deadest part of the day,
when I could hardly think myself, and when, if the weather should be
at all warm, I could not expect many of them to be awake. And what
good might I look for as the result of my labour? How could I hope
in these men and women to kindle that fire which, in the old days of
the outpouring of the Spirit, made men live with the sense of the
kingdom of heaven about them, and the expectation of something
glorious at hand just outside that invisible door which lay between
the worlds?