One misses in him all feeling, all tone, of mellowness.  His mind, at present, shows no lightest, trace of the hallowing marks of time; it suggests rather the very architecture he takes so savage a pleasure in denouncing—­a kind of mock Gothic mind, an Early Doulton personality.  He has a thin voice, rather husky, and a recent accent.

In his most vigorous moments, when he is bubbling over with epigrams and paradoxes, ridiculing the dull people who do not agree with him, and laughing to scorn those who think they can maintain the Christian spirit outside the mysterious traditions of the Catholic Church, or when he is describing a recent church as a Blancmange Cathedral, and paraphrasing an account, given I think by Mr. James Douglas, of the building of a certain tabernacle in London—­first it started out to be a Jam Factory, then a happy idea occurred to the builder that he should turn it into a Waterworks, then the foreman suggested that it would make an ideal swimming-bath, but finally the architect came on the scene and said, “Here, half a minute; there’s an alteration wanted here; we’re going to make it into a church”—­at such moments, Dr. Orchard might be likened to a duo-decimo Chesterton—­but a Chesterton of nonconformity.  For he is a little crude, a little recent; a mind without mellowness, a spirit without beauty, a soul which feeds upon aggression.

He makes an amusing figure with a black cloak wrapped round his little body in Byronic folds, and a soft hat of black plush on his head, a Vesta Tilley quickness informing both his movements and his speech, as he nips forward in conversation with a friend, the arms, invisible beneath their cloak, pressed down in front of him, his body leaning forward, his peering eyes dancing behind their spectacles.

Nevertheless, those who most find him only amusing or worse still thoroughly dislikeable, who are antipathetic to the whole man, and who thus cannot come at the secret of his influence, must confess that there is nothing about him either of the smooth and oily or of the adroit and compromising.  He is the last man on earth to be called an opportunist.  This is in his favour.  His aggressiveness must put all but the toughest against him.  He is tremendously in earnest.  It would be difficult I think to exceed his sincerity.

But not to mind whose toes one may tread on is hardly in the style of St. Francis; and, after all, it is possible to be tremendously earnest about wrong things, and consumingly sincere in matters which are not perhaps definitely certain to advance the higher life of the human race.  Humility is always safest; indeed, it is essential to all earnestness and sincerity, if those energies are not to repel as many as they attract.