“Are you?” said the Bishop.  “I hope you will invite me to share.  I know what Felicia’s cooking is.”

“Bishop, dear Bishop!” said Felicia, and she did not pretend to hide her happiness; “indeed, you shall be the most honored guest.  Are you glad?”

“Yes, I am,” he replied, interpreting Felicia’s words as she wished.  Then he paused a moment and said gently:  “God bless you both!” and went his way with a tear in his eye and a prayer in his heart, and left them to their joy.

Yes.  Shall not the same divine power of love that belongs to earth be lived and sung by the disciples of the Man of Sorrows and the Burden-bearer of sins?  Yea, verily!  And this man and woman shall walk hand in hand through this great desert of human woe in this city, strengthening each other, growing more loving with the experience of the world’s sorrows, walking in His steps even closer yet because of their love for each other, bringing added blessing to thousands of wretched creatures because they are to have a home of their own to share with the homeless.  “For this cause,” said our Lord Jesus Christ, “shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife.”  And Felicia and Stephen, following the Master, love him with a deeper, truer service and devotion because of the earthly affection which Heaven itself sanctions with its solemn blessing.

But it was a little after the love story of the Settlement became a part of its glory that Henry Maxwell of Raymond came to Chicago with Rachel Winslow and Virginia Page and Rollin and Alexander Powers and President Marsh, and the occasion was a remarkable gathering at the hall of the Settlement arranged by the Bishop and Dr. Bruce, who had finally persuaded Mr. Maxwell and his fellow disciples in Raymond to come on to be present at this meeting.

There were invited into the Settlement Hall, meeting for that night men out of work, wretched creatures who had lost faith in God and man, anarchists and infidels, free-thinkers and no-thinkers.  The representation of all the city’s worst, most hopeless, most dangerous, depraved elements faced Henry Maxwell and the other disciples when the meeting began.  And still the Holy Spirit moved over the great, selfish, pleasure-loving, sin-stained city, and it lay in God’s hand, not knowing all that awaited it.  Every man and woman at the meeting that night had seen the Settlement motto over the door blazing through the transparency set up by the divinity student:  “What would Jesus do?”

And Henry Maxwell, as for the first time he stepped under the doorway, was touched with a deeper emotion than he had felt in a long time as he thought of the first time that question had come to him in the piteous appeal of the shabby young man who had appeared in the First Church of Raymond at the morning service.

Chapter Thirty

“Now, when Jesus heard these things, He said unto him, Yet lackest thou one thing:  sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven:  and come, follow Me.”