value.

To Stephen Archer, for instance, when I saw him first, his chapel was
the sole door out of the common world into the infinite. When he
entered, as certainly did the awe and the hush of the sacred place
overshadow his spirit as if it had been a gorgeous cathedral-house
borne aloft upon the joined palms of its Gothic arches. The Master is
truer than men think, and the power of His presence, as Browning has
so well set forth in his "Christmas Eve," is where two or three are
gathered in His name. And inasmuch as Stephen was not a man of
imagination, he had the greater need of the undefined influences of
the place.

He had been chief in establishing a small mission amongst the poor in
the neighbourhood, with the working of which he occupied the greater
part of his spare time. I will not venture to assert that his mind was
pure from the ambition of gathering from these to swell the flock at
the little chapel; nay, I will not even assert that there never arose
a suggestion of the enemy that the pence of these rescued brands might
alleviate the burden upon the heads and shoulders of the poorly
prosperous caryatids of his church; but I do say that Stephen was an
honest man in the main, ever ready to grow honester: and who can
demand more?

One evening, as he was putting up the shutters of his window, his
attention was arrested by a shuffling behind him. Glancing round, he
set down the shutter, and the next instant boxed a boy's ears, who ran
away howling and mildly excavating his eyeballs, while a young,
pale-faced woman, with the largest black eyes he had ever seen,
expostulated with him on the proceeding.