I say failure by no means unkindly.  Londonderry’s father was made to be a good bishop, to radiate from a hallowed security sweet lights of blessing.  His talent was gentleness, not in itself a fighting quality,—­a quality that needs a place prepared for it, needs the hand of strength or opportunity to set it upon the hill.  That he had made himself learned, that his sympathy knew much of the soul of man, that he was conscious of a very near communion with the Divine—­were qualifications that alone might not avail.  Yet were they not lost, for, apart from their own restricted exercise in the circle of his own little “cause” and the other causes for which, in the technical phrase, he would occasionally “supply,” they had passed into his son, and met in him other more energetic qualities, such as a magnetic eloquence, a love of laughter, and a mighty humanity.

Thus Theophilus Londonderry was partly his father licked into shape and partly something bigger and more effectively vital.

At sixteen he was learned in all the theologies; at nineteen he was said to have preached a great sermon; at twenty-two he was the success of a big political meeting; and at twenty-four he was the new lay-pastor at New Zion.

This is not to be the theological history of a soul, so I shall not attempt to decide upon the exact proportion of literal acceptance of Christian dogma underlying the young pastor’s sermons.  I doubt if he could have told you himself, and I am sure he would have considered the point as unimportant as I do.  His was a message of humanity delivered in terms of Christianity.  The message was good, the meaning honest.  He would, no doubt, have preferred another pulpit with other formulas, but that pulpit was not forthcoming; so, like all the strong and the wise, he chose the formulas offered to him, using as few as possible, and humanising all he used; and never for a single second of time, whatever the apparent contradictions on the surface, was Theophilus Londonderry that poorest of all God’s creatures,—­a hypocrite.  However you may judge him, you must never make that mistake about him.

CHAPTER III

OF ELI MOGGRIDGE AND THE NEW SPIRIT

New Zion, despite its name, was, as I have hinted, no longer new.  The fiery zeal which had once made it a living schism had long since died out of it.  Carried years before, a little blazing ember of faith, from a flourishing hearth of Nonconformity some streets away, it had puffed and gleamed a little space in the eloquence of the offended zealots who carried it hotfoot that Sunday morning, but its central fire had been poor, and for a long time no evangelistic bellows had awakened in it even a spark.

Its original elders had long since lost heart and passed away.  A dwindling remnant of their children, from old association, just kept its doors from actually closing, and made a mournful interruption in its musty silence on Sundays.  Life was too low to support a Wednesday prayer-meeting, and Sunday by Sunday that life ebbed lower.  New life from the outside must come, and speedily, or it must die.