with addresses to flowers, with the worship of waterfalls and flying clouds, and with the incessant portraiture of a thousand moods and variations of love, while their neighbours lie grovelling in the mire, and never know anything more of life or its duties than is afforded them by a police report in a bit of newspaper picked out of the kennel.  We went one evening to hear a great violin-player, who played such music, and so exquisitely, that the limits of life were removed.  But we had to walk up the Haymarket home, between eleven and twelve o’clock, and the violin-playing became the merest trifling.  M’Kay had been brought up upon the Bible.  He had before him, not only there, but in the history of all great religious movements, a record of the improvement of the human race, or of large portions of it, not merely by gradual civilisation, but by inspiration spreading itself suddenly.  He could not get it out of his head that something of this kind is possible again in our time.  He longed to try for himself in his own poor way in one of the slums about Drury Lane.  I sympathised with him, but I asked him what he had to say.  I remember telling him that I had been into St. Paul’s Cathedral, and that I pictured to myself the cathedral full, and myself in the pulpit.  I was excited while imagining the opportunity offered me of delivering some message to three or four thousand persons in such a building, but in a minute or two I discovered that my sermon would be very nearly as follows:  “Dear friends, I know no more than you know; we had better go home.”  I admitted to him that if he could believe in hell-fire, or if he could proclaim the Second Advent, as Paul did to the Thessalonians, and get people to believe, he might change their manners, but otherwise he could do nothing but resort to a much slower process.  With the departure of a belief in the supernatural departs once and for ever the chance of regenerating the race except by the school and by science. {2} However, M’Kay thought he would try.  His earnestness was rather a hindrance than a help to him, for it prevented his putting certain important questions to himself, or at any rate it prevented his waiting for distinct answers.  He recurred to the apostles and Bunyan, and was convinced that it was possible even now to touch depraved men and women with an idea which should recast their lives.  So it is that the main obstacle to our success is a success which has preceded us.  We instinctively follow the antecedent form, and consequently we either pass by, or deny altogether, the life of our own time, because its expression has changed.  We never do practically believe that the Messiah is not incarnated twice in the same flesh.  He came as Jesus, and we look for Him as Jesus now, overlooking the manifestation of to-day, and dying, perhaps, without recognising it.

M’Kay had found a room near Parker Street, Drury Lane, in which he proposed to begin, and that night, as we trod the pavement of Portland Place, he propounded his plans to me, I listening without much confidence, but loth nevertheless to take the office of Time upon myself, and to disprove what experience would disprove more effectually.  His object was nothing less than gradually to attract Drury Lane to come and be saved.