In a few minutes Mr. Penrose ascended the pulpit.  Never before was there such a congregation to greet him; and as the people rose to join in singing the old tune, Devizes, the worm-eaten galleries trembled and creaked beneath the mass of worshippers.  Then followed prayer and the lessons, the hymn before the address being

     ‘Come, ye that love the Lord.’

With a great swell of harmony from five hundred voices, whose training for song had been the moors, the words of Dr. Watts went up to heaven, and when the second verse was reached—­

     ’Let those refuse to sing,
     Who never knew our Lord,’

little Milly, who had hobbled to chapel on her crutch, turned to Abraham Lord, and said: 

‘Sithee, owd Moses is singing, faither.’

And it was even so.  Poor Moses! for so many years a mute worshipper, and whose voice had been raised only to harry and distress, no longer was silent in the service of song.

Mr. Penrose’s address was brief.  Taking for his text, ’The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost,’ he said: 

’It was the best in man that was longest in being discovered.  That which was lost was not the false man, but the true man—­the heavenly.  We were none of us vile in the sight of God, because God saw Himself in us.  It was this God-self in us that was lost to us.  Not knowing it to be the hidden root of our true life, we did not claim our dignity, nor walk as became the sons of God.  A man who lost the sense of his freedom, though free, would be fettered still.  A man whose sense of beauty was lost would be as in a desert in the paradise of God.  A lost sense of freedom meant a slavish mind, and a lost sense of beauty meant a prosaic mind, no matter how free the man, nor how beautiful his environment.  So men had lost the sense of their sonship.  They did not know their royal descent, their kinship with the Father, and therefore they did not act as became sons.  A lost sense of relationship begat in them disobedience and alienation.  They possessed gold, but were content with brass; and instead of iron they built with clay.  The eternal and abiding was in them, but lost to them, covered with incrustations of self and buried deep beneath the lesser and the meaner man.  There were times in a man’s life when the better nature gave hints of its existence.  The mission of Christ was to awaken these hints.  He came to tell them they were men, that they were souls, that they were sons and not servants, friends and not enemies of God.  When He stirred these powers in men He stirred the lost.  He set it before the eye of man, and made man see what he had within him, what he was really, and at the root of his being—­a man, a Son of Man, a Child of God.  How hard this was only Christ knew.  Spiritually, men put themselves, through spiritual ignorance, in false relations.  This wrong relationship lay at the root of all disorder.