Seeming echoes of the hideous mockery of it rang in his ears:  where is the God that this man proclaimed? he saw the newspaper headlines, listened in imagination to cynical comments, beheld his name trailed through the soiled places of the cities, the shuttlecock of men and women.  “To him that overcometh, to him will I give of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and upon the stone a new name written, which no one knoweth but he that receiveth it.”  Might he ever win that new name, eat of the hidden manna of a hidden power, become the possessor of the morning star?

Unless there be in the background a mother, no portrait of a man is complete.  She explains him, is his complement.  Through good mothers are men conceived of God:  and with God they sit, forever yearning, forever reaching out, helpless except for him:  with him, they have put a man into the world.  Thus, into the Supreme Canvas, came the Virgin.

John Hodder’s mother was a widow, and to her, in the white, gabled house which had sheltered stern ancestors, he travelled in the June following his experience.  Standing under the fan-light of the elm-shaded doorway, she seemed a vision of the peace wherein are mingled joy and sorrow, faith and tears!  A tall, quiet woman, who had learned the lesson of mothers,—­how to wait and how to pray, how to be silent with a clamouring heart.

She had lived to see him established at Bremerton, to be with him there awhile . . . .

He awoke from these memories to gaze down through the criss-cross of a trestle to the twisted, turbid waters of the river far below.  Beyond was the city.  The train skirted for a while the hideous, soot-stained warehouses that faced the water, plunged into a lane between humming factories and clothes-draped tenements, and at last glided into semi-darkness under the high, reverberating roof of the Union Station.

CHAPTER III

THE PRIMROSE PATH

I

Nelson Langmaid’s extraordinary judgment appeared once more to be vindicated.

There had been, indeed, a critical, anxious moment, emphasized by the agitation of bright feminine plumes and the shifting of masculine backs into the corners of the pews.  None got so far as to define to themselves why there should be an apparent incompatibility between ruggedness and orthodoxy—­but there were some who hoped and more who feared.  Luther had been orthodox once, Savonarola also:  in appearance neither was more canonical than the new rector.

His congregation, for the most part, were not analytical.  But they felt a certain anomaly in virility proclaiming tradition.  It took them several Sundays to get accustomed to it.