That afternoon, as Alison sat motionless on a distant hillside of the Park, gazing across the tree-dotted, rolling country to the westward, she recalled the breathless silence in the church when he had reached this point and paused, looking down at the congregation.  By the subtle transmission of thought, of feeling which is characteristic at dramatic moments of bodies of people, she knew that he had already contrived to stir them to the quick.  It was not so much that these opening words might have been startling to the strictly orthodox, but the added fact that Hodder had uttered them.  The sensation in the pews, as Alison interpreted it and exulted over it, was one of bewildered amazement that this was their rector, the same man who had preached to them in June.  Like Paul, of whom he spoke, he too was transformed, had come to his own, radiating a new power that seemed to shine in his face.

Still agitated, she considered that discourse now in her solitude, what it meant for him, for her, for the Church and civilization that a clergyman should have had the courage to preach it.  He himself had seemed unconscious of any courage; had never once—­she recalled—­been sensational.  He had spoken simply, even in the intensest moments of denunciation.  And she wondered now how he had managed, without stripping himself, without baring the intimate, sacred experiences of his own soul, to convey to them, so nobly, the change which had taken place in him....

He began by referring to the hope with which he had come to St. John’s, and the gradual realization that the church was a failure—­a dismal failure when compared to the high ideal of her Master.  By her fruits she should be known and judged.  From the first he had contemplated, with a heavy heart, the sin and misery at their very gates.  Not three blocks distant children were learning vice in the streets, little boys of seven and eight, underfed and anaemic, were driven out before dawn to sell newspapers, little girls thrust forth to haunt the saloons and beg, while their own children were warmed and fed.  While their own daughters were guarded, young women in Dayton Street were forced to sell themselves into a life which meant slow torture, inevitable early death.  Hopeless husbands and wives were cast up like driftwood by the cruel, resistless flood of modern civilization—­the very civilization which yielded their wealth and luxury.  The civilization which professed the Spirit of Christ, and yet was pitiless.

He confessed to them that for a long time he had been blind to the truth, had taken the inherited, unchristian view that the disease which caused vice and poverty might not be cured, though its ulcers might be alleviated.  He had not, indeed, clearly perceived and recognized the disease.  He had regarded Dalton Street in a very special sense as a reproach to St. John’s, but now he saw that all such neighbourhoods were in reality a reproach to the city, to the state, to the