has risen up for me, and now I am content to be a humble member of the company who have agreed in their hundreds to aid in my life’s work.  I am but an instrument to be laid aside when my weary day is over and my Master’s behests fulfilled.  I see light spreading, darkness waning, kindness growing warmer, purity and sobriety become the rule in quarters where they were unknown; and I am thankful—­not proud, only thankful—­to have helped in a work which, I believe, is of God.  We are now near the attainment of a long dream of mine, thanks to Robert Cassall; and, when the fulfilment is complete, I care not when I may be called on to say my ‘Nunc dimittis.’  And now I will not stand longer between you and Mr. Ferrier.”  Thus, with one dexterous push Ferrier found himself projected into the unknown depths of his speech.  He was easy enough before students, but the quick whispers, the lightning flash of raised eye-glasses, the calm, bovine stare of certain ladies, rather disconcerted him at first.  But he warmed to his work, and in deliberate, mathematical fashion wrought through his subject.  He told of the long Night; the dark age of the North Sea.  The little shivering cabin-boy lay on his dank wooden couch, and curled under the wrench of the bitter winter nights; he had to bear a hard struggle for existence, and, if he were a weakling, he soon went under.  Alas! there had been instances, only too well authenticated, of boys being subjected to the most shocking treatment—­though we would not saddle upon the majority of fishermen the responsibility for this cruelty on the part of a few.  “What could a boy know of good?” said the speaker, with a sharp ring of the voice.  “Why, the very name of God was not so much as a symbol to him; it was a sound to curse with—­no more; and it might have seemed to a man of bitter soul that God had turned away His face from those of His human works that lived, and sinned, and suffered and perished on the grey sea.”  Then Ferrier showed how the light of new faith, the light of new kindness, had suddenly shot in on the envenomed darkness, like the purifying lightning that leaps and cleans the obscured face of a murky sky.  He told of the incredulity which greeted the first missionaries, and he explained that the men could not think it possible that any one should care to show them human sympathy; he traced the gradual growth of belief, and passionate gratitude, and he then turned dexterously off and asked, “But how could you touch men’s souls with transforming effect, where the poor body—­the humble mask through which the soul gazes—­was torn with great pain, or perplexed with pettier ills?  My lords, ladies, and gentlemen, I have seen, in one afternoon, suffering home with sombre acquiescence, suffering the very sight of which in all its manifold dreariness would have driven you homeward shuddering from this beautiful place.  Till this good man—­I will say this great man—­carried his baffling compound of sacred zeal and keen sense into that weary