From this time the tone of the discussion changed.  Not that Mr. Penrose devoutly listened; indeed, he was listless, only recovering himself, now and again, as some striking sentence, or scrap of rude philosophy, fell on his indifferent ear.  Leaning back in his chair, his eye rested on the hard features of the men sitting on either side of the deacons’ table.  They were men of grit, men of the hills, men whose religious ancestry was right royal.  Their fathers had fayed out well the foundations on which the old chapel stood, and hewn the stones, and reared the walls, and all for love—­and after the close of hard days of toil.  They were men who knew nothing of moral half-lights—­there were no gradations in their sense of right and wrong.  Sin was sin, and righteousness was righteousness—­the one night and the other day.  They drew a line, narrow and inflexible, and knew no debatable zone where those who lingered were neither sinners nor saints.  And so with the doctrines they held.  Severity characterized them.  Justice became cruelty, and faith superstition.  They knew nothing of progressive revelations.  The old Sinaitic God still ruled; the mountain was still terrible, and dark with the clouds of wrath.  Fatherhood in the Deity was an unknown attribute, and tenderness a note never sounded in the creed they held.  They had been bred on meat, and they were strong men.  They knew nothing of the tender tones of Him whose feet became the throne of the outcast.  Their God was a consuming fire.

As Mr. Penrose looked into their faces, many bitter thoughts poisoned the waters of his soul.  He thought of Simon the Pharisee; he thought, too, of St. Dominic; and of Calvin with the cry for green wood, so that Servetus might slowly burn.  He thought, too, of the curse of spiritual pride—­pride that enthroned men as judges over the destiny of their fellows, and damned souls as freely and as coolly as a commander marched his forlorn hope into the yawning breach.  And then, realizing that among such his lot was thrown—­realizing also the dead hand that rested on his teaching and preaching—­his heart went down into a sea of hopelessness, and he felt the chill of despair.

The gong of the chapel clock announced the hour of nine, in thin, metallic beats, and looking up, he noted the swealing tapers in the candelabra over his head.  In his over-wrought, nervous condition, he imagined he saw in one of the flickering, far-spent lights the waning life of Amanda Stott, and the horrible thought of eternal extinction at death laid its cold hand on the larger hope which he was struggling to keep aflame in his darkening soul.  Turning his glances towards the pulpit that rose gaunt and square above the deacons’ pew, and over which hung the old sounding-board, as though to mock the voices, now for ever silent, that from time to time had been wont to reverberate from its panels, he began to wonder whether the message the Church called revelation was not, after all, as vain as ‘laughter over wine’; and as he looked on the frowning galleries and the distant corners of the chapel, gloomy and fearsome—­the high-backed pews, peopled with shadows thrown from the waning lights—­he felt the force of the words of one of his masters:  ’What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.’