himself of the fact, that he knew not to the full the nature of the
advantages he took, for he knew that he had known them such as
shrunk from the light, not coming thereto to be made manifest. He
was now doing his best to banish them from his business, and yet
they were a painful presence to his spirit--so grievous to be borne,
that the prospect held out by the preacher of an absolute and final
deliverance from them by the indwelling presence of the God of all
living men and true merchants, was a blessedness unspeakable. Small
was the suspicion in the Abbey Church of Olaston that morning, that
the well-known successful man of business was weeping. Who could
once have imagined another reason for the laying of that round,
good-humoured, contented face down on the book-board, than pure
drowsiness from lack of work-day interest! Yet there was a human
soul crying out after its birthright. Oh, to be clean as a
mountain-river! clean as the air above the clouds, or on the middle
seas! as the throbbing aether that fills the gulf betwixt star and
star!--nay, as the thought of the Son of Man himself, who, to make
all things new and clean, stood up against the old battery of
sin-sprung suffering, withstanding and enduring and stilling the
recoil of the awful force wherewith his Father had launched the
worlds, and given birth to human souls with wills that might become
free as his own!

While Wingfold had been speaking in general terms, with the race in
his mind's, and the congregation in his body's eye, he had yet
thought more of one soul, with its one crime and its intolerable
burden, than all the rest: Leopold was ever present to him, and
while he strove to avoid absorption in a personal interest however
justifiable, it was of necessity that the thought of the most
burdened sinner he knew should colour the whole of his utterance. At