Then, too, how often must the intractible material be impressed again and again and again before it begins to wear the first trace of your image.  Once a poet has impressed himself with mastery upon words, the impression remains for ever, the words do not disperse in idle crowds when he has done speaking to them, never again to reassemble in a like combination; whereas the greatest oratorical mover of men is doomed, even after his most electrical self-impression, to see his image, as soon as taken, fade away, with a shuffle of escaping feet and a scramble for hats and cloaks.  It was a masterpiece; but with the last touch, see, the colours are flying in a hundred directions, and the very canvas itself is off in a thousand threads of hurried disintegration!

But all this, of course, has to do entirely with the poetry of the ministerial life; prosaic even as preaching and praying to the New Zioners may sound, there was yet a drearier prose.  For these artistic materials had not only to be preached and prayed to,—­they had to be in a measure lived with, listened to, personally studied, and individually considered.  Each was an atom to be set in vibration, and each needed to be set or kept going in his own way.  All this prose had to be made help in the poetry.  How skilful you had to be to rouse the interest you needed and escape the many interests you did not need, to awaken the single gift without bringing upon you all the rest, to suffer the fool wisely,—­that is, to the extent of his tiny wisdom, and no more.  To encourage say Miss Annie Smith in her district-visiting—­what a talent she has for that!—­but firmly to forget her at concerts; to welcome Mr. Jones’s services at collections, but gently to discourage him at prayer meetings; in short, to meet all at the point where their natures were really and usefully alive, but at no other point of their circumferences.

However, nature had made this as easy as breathing to the Reverend Theophilus, for, apart from his humour and good nature, he was a lover of character for its own sake, and to the student of character there is no such person as a bore.  Brother Saunderson was no doubt as wearisome an old man as the world holds, but his manner of neighing to the Lord in prayer was worth it all.  And it is rather a pity if the reader imagines that to laugh at his neigh is to forget respect for his venerable faith.

Thus mightily, gently, cunningly, coaxingly, Theophilus Londonderry breathed upon New Zion, and Eli Moggridge was a noble second, according to his word.  At every service of every kind, and at all times, he was there, swelling out from a pewful of ruddy daughters, and endlessly beaming round at his fellow-worshippers, as much as to say, “Didn’t I say he was the man for New Zion?”