While he sat thus in the pulpit, his wife was praying for him ere she rose.  She had not learned to love him in the vestibule of society, that court of the Gentiles, but in the chamber of torture and the clouded adytum of her own spiritual temple.  For there a dark vapor had hid the deity enthroned, until the words of His servant melted the gloom.  Then she saw that what she had taken for her own innermost chamber of awful void, was the dwelling-place of the most high, most lovely, only One, and through its windows she beheld a cosmos dawning out of chaos.  Therefore the wife walked beside the husband in the strength of a common faith in absolute Good; and not seldom did the fire which the torch of his prophecy had kindled upon her altar, kindle again that torch, when some bitter wind of evil words, or mephitis of human perversity, or thunder-rain of foiled charity, had extinguished it.  She loved every hair upon his head, but loved his well-being infinitely more than his mortal life.  A wrinkle on his forehead would cause her a pang, yet would she a thousand times rather have seen him dead than known him guilty of one of many things done openly by not a few of his profession.

And now, as one sometimes wonders what he shall dream to-night, she sat wondering what new thing, or what old thing fresher and more alive than the new, would this day flow from his heart into hers.  The following is the substance of what, a few hours after, she did hear from him.  His rector, sitting between Mrs. Bevis and Mrs. Ramshorn, heard it also.  The radiance of truth shone from Wingfold’s face as he spoke, and those of the congregation who turned away from his words were those whose lives ran counter to the spirit of them.  Whatever he uttered grew out of a whole world of thought, but it grew before them—­that is, he always thought afresh in the presence of the people, and spoke extempore.

“‘Ye can not serve God and mammon.’

“Who said this?  The Lord by whose name ye are called, in whose name this house was built, and who will at last judge every one of us.  And yet how many of you are, and have been for years, trying your very hardest to do the thing your Master tells you is impossible!  Thou man!  Thou woman!  I appeal to thine own conscience whether thou art not striving to serve God and mammon.

“But stay! am I right?—­It can not be.  For surely if a man strove hard to serve God and mammon, he would presently discover the thing was impossible.  It is not easy to serve God, and it is easy to serve mammon; if one strove to serve God, the hard thing, along with serving mammon, the easy thing, the incompatibility of the two endeavors must appear.  The fact is there is no strife in you.  With ease you serve mammon every day and hour of your lives, and for God, you do not even ask yourselves the question whether you are serving Him or no.  Yet some of you are at this very moment indignant that I call you servers of mammon.  Those of you who know that God knows you are His servants, know also that I do not mean you; therefore, those who are indignant at being called the servants of mammon, are so because they are indeed such.  As I say these words I do not lift my eyes, not that I am afraid to look you in the face, as uttering an offensive thing, but that I would have your own souls your accusers.