triumphantly, as a boy might show a bird's egg or butterfly. His devil
dwelt at penny readings, at fairs and festivals, in the brushes of the
artists, in a walk on a Sunday afternoon undertaken without a definite
object, sometimes in a primrose given by a boy to a girl. Of all these
bitter, self-righteous, censorious little sects which raise each its own
ladder to the Throne of Grace at Newlyn, the Luke Gospelers was the most
bitter, most self-righteous, most censorious. And of all those burning
lights which reflected the primitive savagery of the Pentateuch from that
fold, Gray Michael's beacon flamed the fiercest and most bloody red. There
was not a Gospeler, including the pastor of the flock, but feared the
austere fisherman while admiring him.

Concerning his creed, at the risk of wearying you, it must be permitted to
speak here; for only by grasping its leading features and its vast
unlikeness to the parent tree can a just estimate of Michael Tregenza be
arrived at. Luke Gospeldom had mighty little to do with the Gospel of Luke.
The sect numbered one hundred and thirty-four just persons, at war with
principalities and powers. They were saturated with the spirit of Israel in
the Wilderness, of Esau, when every man's hand was against him. At their
chapel one heard much of Jehovah, the jealous God, of the burning lakes and
the damnation reserved for mankind, as a whole. Every Luke Gospeler was a
Jehovah in his own right. They walked hand in hand with God; they realized
the dismay and indignation Newlyn must occasion in His breast; they
sympathized heartily with the Everlasting and would have called down fire
from Heaven themselves if they could. Many openly wondered that He delayed
so long, for, from a Luke Gospeler's point of view, the place with its
dozen other chapels--each held in error by the rest, and all at deadly war
among themselves--its most vile ritualistic church of St. Peter, its
public-houses, scandals, and strifes, was riper for destruction than Sodom.
However, the hundred and thirty-four served to stave off celestial