organ-harmony,” he heard “wings flutter, voices hover clear.”  In a moment the mood changed; and I was sorry, not that the dear organ was dead for the night, but actually felt gently-mournful that the wonderful old thing never had and never could have a conscious life of its own.  So strangely does the passion—­which I had not invented, reader, whoever thou art that thinkest love and a church do not well harmonize—­so strangely, I say, full to overflowing of its own vitality, does it radiate life, that it would even of its own superabundance quicken into blessed consciousness the inanimate objects around it, thinking what they would feel had they a consciousness correspondent to their form, were their faculties moved from within themselves instead of from the will and operation of humanity.

I lingered on long in the dark church, as my reader knows I had done often before.  Nor did I move from the seat I had first taken till I left the sacred building.  And there I made my sermon for the next morning.  And herewith I impart it to my reader.  But he need not be afraid of another such as I have already given him, for I impart it only in its original germ, its concentrated essence of sermon—­these four verses: 

    Had I the grace to win the grace
      Of some old man complete in lore,
    My face would worship at his face,
      Like childhood seated on the floor.

    Had I the grace to win the grace
      Of childhood, loving shy, apart,
    The child should find a nearer place,
      And teach me resting on my heart.

    Had I the grace to win the grace
      Of maiden living all above,
    My soul would trample down the base,
      That she might have a man to love.

    A grace I have no grace to win
      Knocks now at my half-open door: 
    Ah, Lord of glory, come thou in,
      Thy grace divine is all and more.

This was what I made for myself.  I told my people that God had created all our worships, reverences, tendernesses, loves.  That they had come out of His heart, and He had made them in us because they were in Him first.  That otherwise He would not have cared to make them.  That all that we could imagine of the wise, the lovely, the beautiful, was in Him, only infinitely more of them than we could not merely imagine, but understand, even if He did all He could to explain them to us, to make us understand them.  That in Him was all the wise teaching of the best man ever known in the world and more; all the grace and gentleness and truth of the best child and more; all the tenderness and devotion of the truest type of womankind and more; for there is a love that passeth the love of woman, not the love of Jonathan to David, though David said so:  but the love of God to the men and women whom He has made.  Therefore, we must be all God’s; and all our aspirations, all our worships, all our honours, all our loves, must centre in Him, the Best.