“’I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.’”

CHAPTER XXV.

Our Church-Garden.

One needs no other evidence that Maurice Mapleson is working a wonderful transformation in this parish than is afforded by the change which has been made in the external appearance of the church.  It is true that Miss Moore always was a worker.  But I do not believe that even Miss Moore could have carried out her plan of a church garden under Mr. Work.  And Mr. Work was a good minister too.

When I first came to Wheathedge the Calvary Presbyterian church was externally, to the passer-by, distinguished chiefly for the severe simplicity of its architecture, and the plainness, not to say the homeliness, of its surroundings.  It is a long, narrow, wooden structure, as destitute of ornament as Squire Line’s old fashioned barn.  Its only approximation to architectural display is a square tower surmounted by four tooth-picks pointing heavenward, and encasing the bell.  A singular, a mysterious bell that was and is.  It expresses all the emotions of the neighborhood.  It passes through all the moods and inflections of a hundred hearts.  To-day it rings out with soft and sacred tones its call to worship.  To-morrow from its watch-tower it sees the crackling flame in some neighboring barn or tenement, and utters, with loud and hurried and anxious voice, its alarm.  Anon, heavy with grief, it seems to enter, as a sympathising friend, into the very heart experiences of bereaved and weeping mourners.  And when the rolling year brings round Independence day, all the fluctuations of feeling which mature and soften others are forgotten, and it trembles with the excitement of the occasion, and laughs, and shouts, and capers merrily in its homely belfry, as though it were a boy again.

Pardon the digression.  But I love the dear old bell.  And its voice is musical to me, albeit I sometimes fancy, like many another singer’s it is growing weak and thin with age.

The surroundings of the church were no better than the external aspect.  The fence was broken down.  The cows made common pasture in the field-there is an acre of ground with the church, I believe-till the grass was eaten so close to the ground that even they disdained it.  A few trees eked out a miserable existence.  Most of them, girdled by cattle, were dead.  A few still maintained their “struggle for life,” but looked as though they pined for the freedom of the woods again.  Within, the church justified the promise of its external condition.  The board of trustees are poor.  Every man had been permitted to upholster his own pew.  Some, without owners, were also without upholstering.  In the rest, the only merit was variety.  The church looked as though it had clothed itself in a