Perhaps there was something in the priestly dress that affected not only the congregation in the chapel, but all the neighborhood in which Father Damon lived.  There was in the long robe, with its feminine lines, an assurance to the women that he was set apart and not as others were; and, on the other hand, the semi-feminine suggestion of the straight-falling garment may have had for the men a sort of appeal for defense and even protection.  It is certain, at any rate, that Father Damon had the confidence of high and low, rich and poor.  The forsaken sought him out, the hungry went to him, the dying sent for him, the criminal knocked at the door of his little room, even the rich reprobate would have opened his bad heart to him sooner than to any one else.  It is evident, therefore, that Father Damon was dangerously near to being popular.  Human vanity will feed on anything within its reach, and there has been discovered yet no situation that will not minister to its growth.  Suffering perhaps it prefers, and contumely and persecution.  Are not opposition, despiteful anger, slander even, rejection of men, stripes even, if such there could be in these days, manna to the devout soul consciously set apart for a mission?  But success, obsequiousness, applause, the love of women, the concurrent good opinion of all humanitarians, are these not almost as dangerous as persecution?  Father Damon, though exalted in his calling, and filled with a burning zeal, was a sincere man, and even his eccentricities of saintly conduct expressed to his mind only the high purpose of self-sacrifice.  Yet he saw, he could not but see, the spiritual danger in this rising tide of adulation.  He fought against its influence, he prayed against it, he tried to humiliate himself, and his very humiliations increased the adulation.  He was perplexed, almost ashamed, and examined himself to see how it was that he himself seemed to be thwarting his own work.  Sometimes he withdrew from it for a week together, and buried himself in a retreat in the upper part of the island.  Alas! did ever a man escape himself in a retreat?  It made him calm for the moment.  But why was it, he asked himself, that he had so many followers, his religion so few?  Why was it, he said, that all the humanitarians, the reformers, the guilds, the ethical groups, the agnostics, the male and female knights, sustained him, and only a few of the poor and friendless knocked, by his solicitation, at the supernatural door of life?  How was it that a woman whom he encountered so often, a very angel of mercy, could do the things he was doing, tramping about in the misery and squalor of the great city day and night, her path unilluminated by a ray from the future life?

Perhaps he had been remiss in his duty.  Perhaps he was letting a vague philanthropy take the place of a personal solicitude for individual souls.  The elevation of the race!  What had the land question to do with the salvation of man?  Suppose everybody on the East Side should become as industrious, as self-denying, as unselfish as Ruth Leigh, and yet without belief, without hope!  He had accepted the humanitarian situation with her, and never had spoken to her of the eternal life.  What unfaithfulness to his mission and to her!  It should be so no longer.