You couldn’t help laughing a little at Mr. Moggridge at first, soon you couldn’t help respecting him,—­Theophilus Londonderry was almost to know what it was to love him.  Indeed, that Mr. Moggridge was just the man he was was a matter of no small importance to the young minister.  A chief deacon is nothing less than a fate, and it is in his power to be no little of a tyrant.  Had Mr. Moggridge’s interest in New Zion been of a different character, he would inevitably have been as great a hindrance as he was to prove a help.  Fortunately that interest was recreative rather than severely religious.  It was to be for him a sort of Sunday-business to which he was to devote his vast spare energies.  He wanted to see it a “going concern,” and, hating stagnation in his neighbourhood, he looked about for a specialist whom he could trust to make it move and hum and whizz.

Luckily, in so far as he was an amateur theologian, he was broad, with further mental allowances for expansion.  What was wanted at New Zion, he explained to the young minister at supper after the close of an evening service which had more than kept the promise of the morning, was not Dogma, but common-sense every-day religion, a religion to help a man in his business, not a Sunday-coat religion, a cheerful human religion; and it happened that something of this very sort was what Theophilus Londonderry was eagerly prepared to supply.

The stipend was small, a poor sixty pounds a year, but Mr. Moggridge guaranteed to swell it to a hundred if necessary from his own resources, and he wanted it clearly understood that, short, of course, of the broad general principles of Christian teaching, no restrictions were to be placed either by him or anyone else on the young man’s expression of the faith that was in him.  “All we want you to do,” he said in conclusion, “is to make the place go, give it new blood, new fire; as to how you do it, that is your own business—­and I shall no more interfere with you in that than I should expect you to instruct me on the subject of York hams.  We must all be specialists nowadays,—­specialists,” repeated Mr. Moggridge, with a feeling that he too had discovered planets.

So it came to pass that “The Rev. Theophilus Londonderry, Pastor,” presently lit up with a sudden vehemence of new gold-leaf the faded dusty name board of the chapel, and that, his own home being at too great a distance for his ministrations, he came to lodge with some nice old-fashioned people called Talbot at No. 3, Zion Lane.

I want you to like funny old Mrs. Talbot, and I want you to love her little daughter Jenny; so, to make it the easier, I shall not describe them at too great a length.  Old Mr. and Mrs. Talbot were the sole survivors of the less active founders of New Zion, meekly not militantly pious, stubborn as sheep in a dumb obstinacy of ancient faith, but in no sense dialectical, and in every sense harmless.