fresh from school, however intellectually quick, could be expected
to follow with any precision. It was not, therefore, the argument,
or the logical structure of the sermon, which so profoundly affected
young Elsmere. It was the speaker himself, and the occasional
passages in which, addressing himself to the practical needs of his
hearers, he put before them the claims and conditions of the higher
life with a pregnant simplicity and rugged beauty of phrase. Conceit
selfishness, vice--how, as he spoke of them, they seemed to wither
from his presence! How the 'pitiful, earthy self' with its passions
and its cravings sank into nothingness beside the 'great ideas' and
the 'great causes' for which, as Christians and as men, he claimed
their devotion.

To the boy sitting among the crowd at the back of the room, his
face supported in his hands and his gleaming eyes fixed on the
speaker, it seemed as if all the poetry and history through which
a restless curiosity and ideality had carried him so far, took a
new meaning from this experience. It was by men like this that the
moral progress of the world had been shaped and inspired, he felt
brought near to the great primal forces breathing through the divine
workshop; and in place of natural disposition and reverent compliance,
there sprang up in him suddenly an actual burning certainty of
belief. 'Axioms are not axioms,' said poor Keats, 'till they have
been proved upon our pulses;' and the old familiar figure of the
Divine combat, of the struggle in which man and God are one, was
proved once more upon a human pulse on that May night, in the hush
of that quiet lecture-room.

As the little moving crowd of men dispersed over the main quadrangle
to their respective staircases, Langham and Robert stood together