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+Project Gutenberg's The Supply at Saint Agatha's, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Supply at Saint Agatha's
+
+Author: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
+
+Illustrator: E. Boyd Smith
+             Marcia Oakes Woodbury
+
+Release Date: November 8, 2010 [EBook #34256]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SUPPLY AT SAINT AGATHA'S ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: "_The kneeling people lifted their wet faces ... But the
+chancel was empty_"]
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+SUPPLY AT SAINT AGATHA'S
+
+
+BY
+
+ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS
+
+
+
+
+_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_
+
+BY
+
+E. BOYD SMITH AND MARCIA OAKES WOODBURY
+
+
+
+
+
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
+
+The Riverside Press, Cambridge
+
+1896
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1896,
+
+BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WARD AND
+
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
+
+
+_All rights reserved._
+
+
+
+_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
+
+Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
+
+
+
+
+THE SUPPLY AT SAINT AGATHA'S.
+
+
+
+
+At the crossing of the old avenue with the stream of present traffic,
+in a city which, for obvious reasons, will not be identified by the
+writer of these pages, there stood--and still stands--the Church of
+Saint Agatha's.
+
+The church is not without a history, chiefly such as fashion and sect
+combine to record.  It is an eminent church, with a stately date upon
+its foundation stone, and a pew-list unsurpassed for certain qualities
+among the worshipers of the Eastern States.  Saint Agatha's has long
+been distinguished for three things, its money, its music, and its
+soundness.
+
+When the tax-list of the town is printed in the daily papers once a
+year, the wardens and the leading parishioners of Saint Agatha's stand
+far upwards in the score, and their names are traced by slow, grimy
+fingers of mechanics and strikers and socialists laboriously reading on
+Saturday nights.
+
+The choir of Saint Agatha's, as all the world knows, is superior.  Her
+soprano alone (a famous prima donna) would fill the house.  Women
+throng the aisles to hear the tenor, and musical critics, hat in hand,
+and pad on hat, drop in to report the anthem and the offertory for the
+Monday morning press.
+
+In ecclesiastical position, it is needless to add, Saint Agatha's has
+always been above reproach.  When did Saint Agatha's question a canon?
+When did she contend with a custom?  When did she criticise a creed?
+Why should she contest a tradition?  She accepts, she conforms, she
+prospers.
+
+In one particular Saint Agatha's has been thrust into an attitude of
+originality foreign to her taste.  Her leading men feel called upon
+occasionally to explain how the eternal feminine came--a little
+contrary to the fashion of our land--to be recognized in the name of
+the church.  Saint Agatha's first pastor, one should know, was a very
+young man of enthusiastic and unconventional temperament.  He did not
+live long enough to outgrow this--for a clergyman--unfortunate trend of
+nature, having died, full of dreams and visions, in the teeth of a
+lowering conflict with his wardens; but he lived long enough to carry
+the day and the name for a portion of his people who desired to call
+their church in honor of a sweet, though rich, old lady who had put her
+private fortune into their beautiful house of worship, and her warm
+heart into their future success.  It had befallen this dear old lady to
+bear the name of Agatha, which, for her sake,--and, of course, in due
+ecclesiastical remembrance of the strictly canonical saint of similar
+cognomen,--was accordingly bestowed upon the church.
+
+
+In the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and another numeral, which I
+am requested not to indicate, but I may not deny that it is a recent
+one, the popular rector of Saint Agatha's took a winter vacation.  He
+was an imposing and imperious man, full of years and honors, in the
+full sway of his professional fame, when he fell a victim, like any
+common person, to the grippe.
+
+In the attempt to recover from this vulgar malady, he was forced to
+observe that his select physician had drugged him, via an exclusive
+bronchitis, into a minister's sore throat, such as any ordinary country
+parson might develop for lack of an overcoat, or a fire in his bedroom.
+Without undue delay or reluctance, the rector of Saint Agatha's took
+ship for the south of France; and in the comfortable way in which such
+things are done in such quarters, the church was set trundling upon the
+wheels of a two-months' "supply."  This was managed so gracefully by
+the experienced vestry of Saint Agatha's that hardly a visible jar
+occurred in the parish machinery.  Many of the people did not know that
+their rector had gone until a canon from London sonorously filled the
+pulpit one Sunday morning.  A distinguished Middle State clergyman
+followed the next week; the West sent her brightest and best the
+succeeding Sunday; and so it went.
+
+Eminent variety easily occupied that sacred desk.  The wardens of St.
+Agatha's have but to say, Come, and he cometh who weigheth the honor of
+ministering in this aristocratic pulpit.  In brief, the most
+distinguished men in the denomination cordially supplied.  On the
+whole, perhaps the parish enjoyed their rector's vacation as much as he
+did.
+
+Now, upon the vestry there chanced at that time to be one man who was
+"different."  One does find such people even among the officers of
+fashionable churches.  This man (he was, by the way, a grand-nephew of
+the old lady who built the church when Saint Agatha's was an unendowed
+experiment) had occasional views not wholly in harmony with the policy
+of his brother officers; and, being himself a heavy rate-payer, was
+allowed, sometimes, by the courtesy of the majority,--when his notion
+was not really in bad form, you know,--to have his way.  He did not get
+it so often but that he was glad to make the most of it when he did;
+and when his turn came to control the supply for that Sunday with which
+this narrative has to do, he asked the privilege of being intrusted
+with the details of the business.  This request, as from a useful man
+of certain eccentricities, was indulgently granted; and thus there
+occurred the events which I am privileged to relate.
+
+
+It was just before Lent, and the winter had been a cold one.  One
+Friday evening in early March there came up, or came down, a drifting
+snow-storm.  It was bad enough in town, but in the suburbs it was
+worse, and in the country it was little less than dangerous to
+passengers through the wide, wind-swept streets, the choking lanes, and
+bitter moors.
+
+An old clergyman, the pastor of a scattered parish, sat in his study on
+that Friday night, and thanked God that the weekly evening service was
+over, and his day's work done.  He would have regretted being called
+out again that night, for he had got quite wet in walking to church and
+back, and the cold from which he had been suffering for a week past
+might not be benefited thereby.  This fact in itself was a matter of no
+concern, under ordinary conditions, to the old clergyman, who, being a
+lonely man in a forlorn country boarding-house, with nobody to take
+care of him, was accustomed to live under the shadow of a "common
+cold," and who paid no more attention to his own physical discomforts
+in the face of daily duty than he paid to the latest fashion in sable
+trimmings in the front pews at Saint Agatha's.  There was no fur
+trimming on his overcoat, which was seven years old and pitiably thin.
+But he had been invited to supply at Saint Agatha's next Sunday, and to
+that unexampled honor and opportunity he gave the pathetic
+attention--half personal pleasure, half religious fervor--of an
+overlooked and devout man.  In the course of a forty-years' ministry he
+had not been asked to preach in a city pulpit.  The event was
+tremendous to him.  He had been agitated by the invitation, which ran
+in some such way as this:
+
+[Illustration: "_He had been invited to supply at St. Agatha's_."]
+
+... "In closing, permit me to say, sir, that it would be agreeable to
+us to welcome among us the grandson of our first pastor, that young
+rector who died in the bud of his youth and Christian originality.  The
+fact of your ancestry will give to your presence a peculiar interest
+for our people at large.  But I beg to be allowed to add on behalf of
+the committee, that certain qualities in yourself and in your own work
+have led us to believe that you may exert positive influences upon us
+of which we stand in need.  In your remote and rural parish your life
+has not passed unobserved.  Your labors as a pastor, and your methods
+of preaching, have been an object of study to some of us.  We have come
+to rate you, sir, as one of the men of God.  There are not many.  In
+meeting with our people, the writer personally hopes that you may be
+able to teach us something of the secret of your own happy and
+successful experience as a minister of Christ our Lord." ...
+
+
+The old clergyman sat with his feet upon the base of his little
+cylinder coal-stove.  His thin ankles shrank in the damp stockings
+which he had not been able to change since he came in out of the storm,
+because, owing to some personal preference of the laundress, he could
+not find any dry ones.  His worn slippers flapped upon his cold feet
+when he moved.  But he had on his flowered dressing-gown of ancient
+pattern and rustic cut; his high arm-chair was cushioned in chintz and
+excelsior behind his aching head; the green paper shade was on his
+study-lamp; his best-beloved books (for the old saint was a student)
+lay within reach upon the table; piled upon them were his manuscript
+sermons; and he sighed with the content of a man who feels himself to
+be, although unworthy, in the loving arms of luxury.  A rap at the door
+undeceived him.  His landlady put in her withered face.
+
+"Sir," she said, "the widder Peek's a-dying.  It's just like her to
+take a night like this--but she's sent for you.  I must say I don't
+call you fit to go."
+
+"A man is always fit to do his duty," said the old clergyman, rising.
+"I will go at once.  Did she send--any--conveyance?"
+
+"Catch her!" retorted the landlady.  "Why, she hain't had the town
+water let in yet--and she wuth her fifteen thousand dollars; nor she
+won't have no hired girl to do for her, not that none of 'em will stay
+along of her a week, and Dobson's boy 's at the door, a drippin' and
+cussin' to get you, for he 's nigh snowed under.  She 's a wuthless old
+heathen miser, the widder Peek."
+
+"Then there is every reason why I should not neglect her," replied the
+clergyman, in his authoritative, clerical voice.  "Pray call the lad in
+from the weather, and tell him I will accompany him at once."
+
+He did look about his study sadly while he was making ready to leave
+it.  The fire in the base-burner was quite warm, now, and his wet,
+much-darned stockings were beginning to dry.  The room looked sheltered
+and pleasant; his books ran to the ceiling, though his floor was
+covered with straw matting, with odd pieces of woolen carpet for rugs;
+his carpet-covered lounge was wheeled out of the draft; his lamp with
+the green shade made a little circle of light and coziness; his Bible
+and prayer-book lay open within it, beside the pile of sermons.  He had
+meant to devote the evening to the agreeable duty of selecting his
+discourse for Saint Agatha's.  His mind and his heart were brimming
+over with the excitement of that great event.  He would have liked to
+concentrate and consecrate his thoughts upon it that evening.  As he
+went, coughing, into the cold entry, it occurred to him that the spot
+in his lung was more painful than he had supposed; but he pulled his
+old cap over his ears, and his thin overcoat up to meet it, and tramped
+out cheerfully into the storm.
+
+"Well, well, my lad!" he said in his warm-hearted way to Dobson's boy;
+"I 'm sorry for you that you have to be out a night like this."
+
+The boy spoke of this afterwards, and remembered it long--for a boy.
+But at the time he did but stare.  He stopped grumbling, however, and
+plunged on into the drifts, ahead of the old rector, kicking a path for
+him to right and left in the wet, packed snow; for the widow Peek lived
+at least a mile away, and the storm was now become a virulent thing.
+
+What passed between the unloved, neglected, dying parishoner and her
+pastor was not known to any but themselves, nor is there witness now to
+testify thereof.  Neither does it in any way concern the record of this
+narrative, except as the least may concern the largest circumstance in
+human story.  For, in view of what came to pass, it is impossible not
+to put the old, judicial question: Did it pay?  Was it worth while?
+When the miser's soul went out, at midnight, on the wings and the rage
+of that blind, black storm, did it pass gently, a subdued, forgiven
+spirit, humble to learn how to live again, for Christ's sake and his
+who gave himself--as his Master had before him--to comfort and to save?
+Did it pay?  _Do_ such things pay?  God knows.  But as long as men do
+not know, there will always be found a few among them who will elect to
+disregard the doubt, to wear the divinity of uncalculating sacrifice,
+and to pay its price.
+
+For the soul of the widow Peek the price was large, looked at in our
+mathematical way; for, when the old clergyman, having shrived her soul
+and closed her eyes, started to come home at one o'clock of the
+morning, the storm had become a malignant force.  Already wet through
+and through his thin coats and worn flannels, weak from the exposure,
+the watching, and the scene of death, every breath a sword athwart his
+inflamed lungs, with fire in his brain, and ice at his heart, he
+staggered against the blizzard.
+
+Dobson's boy had long since sought the shelter of his own home, and the
+old man was quite unattended.  True, the neighbor who watched with the
+dead woman suggested that he remain till morning; but the widow Peek's
+house was cold (she was always especially "near" about fuel), and he
+thought it more prudent to get back to his own stove and his bed.
+
+Whether he lost his way; whether he crossed and recrossed it, wandering
+from it in the dark and drift; whether he fell and lay in the snow for
+a time, and rose again, and staggered on, and fell again, and so pushed
+on again, cannot be known.  It is only known that at half-past two on
+Saturday morning his landlady put her wrinkled face out of the window,
+for the twentieth time, in search of him (for she had a thought for him
+in her own hard-featured way), and saw him fallen, and feebly trying to
+crawl on his hands and knees up the drifted steps.
+
+She got him in to his warm study, past the chair where the flowered
+dressing-gown and old slippers awaited him, and as far as the
+carpet-covered lounge, Beyond this he could not be taken.
+
+By morning the whole parish rang the door-bell; the hands and hearts
+and horses, the purses, the nurses, the doctors, the watchers, the
+tears, and the prayers of the village, were his--for he was dearly
+beloved and cherished in that parish.  But he lay on his old lounge in
+his study among his books, and asked of them nothing at all.  The
+kerosene lamp, behind its green shade, went out; and the Bible, with
+the pile of sermons on the table, looked large in the snow-light of a
+day when the storm ceases without sun.  He did not talk; but his
+thoughts were yet alive.  He remembered Saint Agatha's, and the sermon
+which he was to preach to-morrow.  He knew that not one of his people
+(ignorant of such matters) would understand how to get word to the city
+vestry.  He tried to give directions, but his voice refused his
+bidding.  He knew that he would be supposed to have failed to meet his
+appointment, perhaps to have been thwarted--a rural clergyman, old and
+timorous, baffled in an important professional engagement--by a little
+snow.  He was to have taken the evening train.  He was to be the guest
+of the vestryman who wrote that pleasant letter.  He was to preach in
+Saint Agatha's to-morrow.  He was to--
+
+Nay,--he was not,--nay.  He was to do none of these things.  A sick
+man, mortally a sick man, past power of speech, he lay upon his carpet
+lounge, shivering under the pile of thin blankets and cotton comforters
+that had been wrapped around him, and gently faced his fate.  He could
+not preach at Saint Agatha's.  And he could not explain to the vestry.
+Perhaps his heart-sickness about this matter subsided a little--one
+likes to think so--as his disease grew upon him; but there are men who
+will understand me when I say that this was the greatest disappointment
+of his humble, holy life.
+
+As Saturday night drew on, and the stars came out, he was heard to make
+such efforts to speak articulately, that one of his weeping people (an
+affectionate woman of a brighter wit than the rest) made out, as she
+bent lovingly over him, to understand so much as this:
+
+"Lord," he said, "into thy hands I commit my s-p--"
+
+"He commits his spirit to the Lord!" sobbed the landlady.
+
+But the listening parishioner raised her finger to her lips.
+
+"Lord," he said again, and this time the dullest ear in the parish
+could have heard the words--"Lord," he prayed, "into thy hands I
+commit--my supply."
+
+
+Sunday morning broke upon the city as cold and clear as the sword of a
+rebuking angel.  People on the way to the West End churches exchanged
+notes on the thermometer, and talked of the destitution of the poor.
+It was so cold that the ailing and the aged for the most part stayed at
+home.  But the young, the _ennuyé_, the imitative, and the soul-sick,
+got themselves into their furs and carriages when the chimes rang, and
+the audiences were, on the whole, as comfortable and as devout as usual.
+
+The vestryman sat nervously in his pew.  He had not fully recovered
+from the fact that his supply had disappointed him.  Having sent his
+coachman in vain to all the Saturday evening trains to meet his country
+parson, the vestryman had passed but an uneasy night.
+
+"I had supposed the old man had principles about Sunday travel," he
+said to his wife, "but it seems he is coming in the morning, after all.
+He might at least have sent me word."
+
+"Telegraphing in the country is--difficult, sometimes, I have heard,"
+replied the lady, vaguely.  She was a handsome, childless woman, with
+the haughty under lip of her class.  Her husband spoke cheerily, but he
+was not at ease, and she did not know how to make him so.
+
+The Sunday morning train came in from the country station forty miles
+back, but the old clergyman was not among its passengers.  Now
+thoroughly alarmed, the vestryman had started for his hat and coat,
+when his parlor-maid brought him a message.  It had been left at the
+door, she said, by a messenger who brooked neither delay nor question,
+but ordered her to tell the master of the house that the supply for
+Saint Agatha's was in the city, and would meet the engagement at the
+proper time and place.  The old clergyman, the messenger added, had
+been suddenly stricken with a dangerous illness, and could not be
+expected; but his substitute would fill the pulpit for the day.  The
+vestryman was requested to feel no concern in the matter.  The preacher
+preferred retirement until the hour of the service, and would fulfil
+his duties at the church at the appointed hour.
+
+But when the vestryman, feeling flurried despite himself, tapped at the
+door of the luxurious vestry-room, gracefully refurnished that winter
+for the rector with the sore throat who was in the south of France, he
+found it locked; and to his unobtrusive knock no answer came.  At this
+uncomfortable moment the sexton tiptoed up to say that the supply had
+requested not to be disturbed until the service should begin.  The
+sexton supposed that the clergyman needed extra preparation; thought
+that perhaps the gentleman was from the country, and--ah--unused to the
+audience.
+
+"What is his name?  What does he look like?" asked the chairman, with
+knotted brows.
+
+"I have not seen him sir," replied the sexton, with a puzzled
+expression.
+
+"How did you receive the message?"
+
+"By a messenger who would not be delayed or questioned."
+
+Struck by the repetition of this phrase, the chairman asked again:
+
+"But what did the messenger look like?"  The sexton shook his head.
+
+"I cannot tell you, sir.  He was a mere messenger.  I paid no attention
+to him."
+
+"Very well," said the church officer, turning away discontentedly.  "It
+must be all right.  I have implicit confidence in the man whose chosen
+substitute this is."
+
+With this he ceased to try to intrude himself upon the stranger, but
+went down to his pew, and sat beside his wife in uneasy silence.
+
+The chimes sang and sank, and sang again:
+
+  Holy, holy, holy--
+
+
+The air was so clear that the sound rang twice the usual distance
+through the snowlit, sunlit air; and the sick and the old at home
+listened to the bells with a sudden stirring at their feeble hearts,
+and wished again that they could have gone to church.  One bed-ridden
+woman, whose telephone connected her with Saint Agatha's, held the
+receiver to her sensitive ear, and smiled with the quick gratitude for
+trifling pleasures of the long sick, as she recognized the notes of the
+chime.  With a leap and a thrill as if they cast their metal souls out
+in the act, the voices of the bells rose and swelled, and ceased and
+slept, and where they paused the anthem took the word up:
+
+  Holy, holy--
+
+and carried it softly, just above the breath, with the tone which is
+neither a sigh, nor a cry, nor a whisper, but that harmony of all which
+makes of music prayer.
+
+He must have entered on the wave of this strain; opinions differed
+afterwards as to this: some said one thing, some another; but it was
+found that most of the audience had not observed the entrance of the
+preacher at all.  The choir ceased, and he was; and no more could be
+said.  The church was well filled, though not over-crowded, and the
+decorous rustle of a fashionable audience in the interval preceding
+worship stirred through the house.
+
+In the natural inattention of the moment, it was not remarkable that
+most of the people failed to notice the strange preacher until he was
+among them.
+
+But to the church officer, whose mind was preoccupied with the supply,
+there was something almost startling in the manner of his approach.
+
+The vestryman's uneasy eyes were not conscious of having slipped their
+guard upon the chancel for a moment; he had but turned his head
+politely, though a bit impatiently, to reply to some trivial remark of
+his wife's, when, behold, the preacher stood before him.
+
+Afterwards it was rumored that two or three persons in the audience had
+not been taken by surprise in this way, but had fully observed the
+manner of the stranger's entrance; yet these persons, when they were
+sought, were difficult to find.  There was one shabby woman who sat in
+the gallery among the "poor" seats; she was clad in rusty mourning, and
+had a pale and patient face, quite familiar to the audience, for she
+was a faithful church-goer, and had attended Saint Agatha's for many
+years.  It came to be said, through the sexton's gossip or otherwise,
+that this poor woman had seen the preacher's approach quite clearly,
+and had been much moved thereat; but when some effort was made to find
+her, and to question her on this point, unexpected obstacles
+arose,--she was an obscure person, serving in some menial capacity for
+floating employers; she was accustomed to slip in and out of the church
+hurriedly, both late and early,--and nothing of importance was added
+from this quarter to the general interest which attended the
+eccentricities of the supply.
+
+The stranger was a man a trifle above the ordinary height, of majestic
+mien and carriage, and with the lofty head that indicates both
+fearlessness and purity of nature.  As he glided to his place behind
+the lectern, a hush struck the frivolous audience, as if it had been
+smitten by an angel's wing: such power is there in noble novelty, and
+in the authority of a high heart.
+
+When had the similar of this preacher led the service in that venerable
+and fashionable house of worship?  In what past years had his
+counterpart served them?
+
+Whom did he resemble of the long line of eminent clerical teachers with
+whose qualities this elect people was familiar?  What had been his
+history, his ecclesiastical position, his social connections?
+
+It was characteristic of the audience that this last question was first
+in the minds of a large proportion of the worshipers.  Whence came he?
+His name?  His titles?  What was his professional reputation--his
+theology?  What were his views on choirboys, confessionals, and
+candles--on mission chapels and the pauperizing of the poor?
+
+These inquiries swept through the inner consciousness of the audience
+in the first moment of his appearance.  But in the second, neither
+these nor any other paltry queries fretted the smallest soul before him.
+
+The stranger must have had an impressive countenance; yet afterwards it
+was found that no two descriptions of it agreed.  Some said this thing,
+some said that.  To this person he appeared a gentle, kindly man with a
+persuasive manner; to that, he looked majestic and commanding.  There
+were some who spoke of an authoritative severity in the eye which he
+turned upon them; but these were not many.  There were those who
+murmured that they had melted beneath the tenderness of his glance, as
+snow before the sun; and such were more.  As to the features of his
+face, men differed, as spectators are apt to do about the lineaments of
+extraordinary countenances.  What was the color of his eyes, the
+contour of his lips, the shape of his brow?  Who could say?
+Conflicting testimony arrived at no verdict.  In two respects alone
+opinions agreed about the face of this man: it commanded, and it shone;
+it had authority and light.  The shrewdest heresy-hunter in the
+congregation would not have dared question this clergyman's theology,
+or the tendencies of his ritualistic views.  The veriest pharisee in
+the audience quailed before the blinding brilliance of the preacher's
+face.  It was a moral fire.  It ate into the heart.  Sin and shame
+shriveled before it.
+
+One might say that all this was apparent in the preacher before he had
+spoken a word.  When he had opened his lips these impressions were
+intensified.  He began in the usual way to read the usual prayers, and
+to conduct the service as was expected of him.  Nothing eccentric was
+observable in his treatment of the preliminaries of the occasion.  The
+fashionable choir, accustomed to dictate the direction of the music,
+met with no interference from the clergyman.  He announced the hymns
+and anthems that had been selected quite in the ordinary manner; and
+the critics of the great dailies took the usual notes of the musical
+programme.  In fact, up to the time of the sermon, nothing out of the
+common course occurred.
+
+But having said this, one must qualify.  Was it nothing out of the
+common course that the congregation in Saint Agatha's should sit as the
+people sat that day, bond-slaves before the enunciation of the familiar
+phrases in the morning's confession?
+
+"What a voice!" whispered the wife of the vestryman.  But her husband
+answered her not a word.  Pale, agitated, with strained eyes uplifted,
+and nervous hands knotted together, he leaned towards the stranger.  At
+the first articulate sentence from the pulpit, he knew that the success
+of his supply was secured.
+
+What a voice indeed!  It melted through the great house like burning
+gold.  The heart ran after it as fire runs through metal.  Once or
+twice in a generation one may hear the liturgy read like that--perhaps.
+In a lifetime no longer to be counted short, the vestryman had heard
+nothing that resembled it.
+
+"Thank God!" he murmured.  He put his hat before his face.  He had not
+realized before what a strain he had endured.  Cold drops stood upon
+his brow.  He shook with relief.  From that moment he felt no more
+concern about the service than if he had engaged one of the sons of God
+to "supply."
+
+"Are you faint?" asked his wife in a tone of annoyance.  She offered
+him her smelling-salts.
+
+
+Had there existed stenographic records of that sermon, this narrative,
+necessarily so defective, would have no occasion for its being.  One of
+the most interesting things about the whole matter is that no such
+records can to-day be found.  Reporters certainly were in the gallery.
+The journals had sent their picked men as usual, and no more.  Where,
+then, were their columns of verbal record?  Why has so important a
+discourse gone afloat upon vague, conflicting rumor?  No person knows;
+the reporters least of all.  One, it is said, lost his position for the
+default of that report; others received the severest rebukes of their
+experience from their managing editors for the same cause.  None had
+any satisfactory reason to give for his failure.
+
+"I forgot," said he who lost his position for his boyish excuse.  "All
+I can say, sir, is I forgot.  The man swept me away.  I forgot that
+such a paper as 'The Daily Gossip' existed.  Other matters," he added
+with expensive candor, "seemed more important at the time."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"When the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?"
+
+The stranger announced this not unusual text with the simple manner of
+a man who promised nothing eccentric in the sermon to come.  Yet
+something in the familiar words arrested attention.  The phrase, as it
+was spoken, seemed less a hackneyed biblical quotation than a pointed
+personal question to which each heart in the audience-room was
+compelled to respond.
+
+The preacher began quietly.  He reminded his hearers in a few words of
+the true nature of the Christian religion, whose interests he was there
+to represent.  One felt that he spoke with tact, and with the kind of
+dignity belonging to the enthusiast of a great moral movement.  It
+occurred to one, perhaps for the first time, that it was quite manly in
+a Christian preacher to plead his cause with as much ardor as the
+reformer, the philanthropist, the politician, or the devotee of a
+mystical and fashionable cult.  One became really interested in the
+character and aims of the Christian faith; it did not fall below the
+dignity of a Browning society, or a study in theosophy or hypnotism.
+The attention of the audience--from the start definitely
+respectful--became reverent, and thus absorbed.
+
+It was not until he had his hearers thoroughly in his power that the
+preacher's manner underwent the remarkable change of which Saint
+Agatha's talks in whispers to this day.  He spoke entirely without
+manuscript or note, and he had not left the lectern.  Suddenly folding
+his hands upon the great Bible, he paused, and, as if the audience had
+been one man, he looked it in the eye.
+
+Then, like the voice of the living God, his words began to smite them.
+What was the chancel of Saint Agatha's?  The great white throne?  And
+who was he who dared to cry from it, like the command of the Eternal?
+Sin!  Sinners!  Shame!  Guilt!  Disgrace!  Punishment!  What words were
+these for the delicate ears of Saint Agatha's?  What had these silken
+ladies and gilded men to do with such ugly phrases?  Smiles stiffened
+upon refined, protesting faces.  The haughty under lip of the
+vestryman's wife, and a hundred others like it, dropped.  A moral
+dismay seized the exclusive people whom the preacher called to account
+like any vulgar audience.  But the shabby woman in the "poor" seats
+humbly wept, and the young reporter who lost his position cast his eyes
+upon the ground, for the tears that sprang to them.  From the delicate
+fingers of the vestryman's wife the smelling-salts fell upon the
+cushioned seat; she held her feathered fan against her face.  Her
+husband did not even notice this.  He sat with head bowed upon the rail
+before him, as a good man does when reconsecrating himself at the
+communion hour.
+
+The choir rustled uneasily in their seats.  The soprano covered her
+eyes with her well-gloved hand, and thought of the follies and regrets
+(she called them by these names) that beset the musical temperament.
+But the tenor turned his face away, and thought about his wife.  Down
+the avenue, in the room of the "shut-in" woman, where the telephone
+carried the preacher's voice, a pathetic cry was heard:
+
+"Forgive!  Forgive!  Oh, if suffering had but made me better!"
+
+But now the preacher's manner of address had changed again.  Always
+remembering that it is now impossible to quote his language with any
+accuracy, we may venture to say that it ran in some such way as this:
+
+The Son of God, being of the Father, performed his Father's business.
+What do ye who bear his name?  What holy errands are ye about?  What
+miracles of consecration have ye wrought?  What marvels of the soul's
+life have ye achieved upon the earth since he left it to your trust?
+
+He came to the sinful and the unhappy; the despised and rejected were
+his friends; to the poor he preached the Gospel; the sick, and
+overlooked, and cast-out, the unloved and forgotten, the unfashionable
+and unpopular, he selected.  These to his church on earth he left in
+charge.  These he cherished.  For such he had lived.  For them he had
+suffered.  For them he died.  People of Saint Agatha's, where are they?
+What have ye done to his beloved?  Thou ancient church, honored and
+privileged and blessed among men, where are those little ones whom thy
+Master chose?  Up and down these godly aisles a man might look, he
+said, and see them not.  Prosperity and complacency he saw before him;
+poverty and humility he did not see.  In the day when habit cannot
+reply for duty, what account will ye give of your betrayed trust?  Will
+ye say: "Lord, we had a mission chapel.  The curate is responsible for
+the lower classes.  And, Lord, we take up the usual collections; Saint
+Agatha's has always been called a generous church"?
+
+In the startled hush that met these preposterous words the preacher
+drew himself to his full height, and raised his hand.  He had worn the
+white gown throughout the day's services, and the garment folded itself
+about his figure majestically.  In the name of Christ, then, he
+commanded them: Where were those whom their Lord did love?  Go, seek
+them.  Go, find the saddest, sickest souls in all the town.  Hasten,
+for the time is short.  Search, for the message is of God.  Church of
+Christ, produce his people to me, for I speak no more words before
+their substitutes!
+
+Thus and there, abruptly, the preacher cast his audience from him, and
+disappeared from the chancel.  The service broke in consternation.  The
+celebrated choir was not called upon to close the morning's worship.
+The soprano and the tenor exchanged glances of neglected dismay.  The
+prayer-book remained unopened on the sacred desk.  The desk itself was
+empty.  The audience was, in fact, authoritatively dismissed--dismissed
+without a benediction, like some obscure or erring thing that did not
+deserve it.
+
+The people stared in one another's faces for an astounded moment, and
+then, without words, with hanging heads, they moved to the open air and
+melted out of the church.
+
+The sexton rushed up to the vestryman, pale with fear.
+
+"Sir," he whispered, "he is not in the vestry-room.  He has taken
+himself away--God knows whither.  What are we to do?"
+
+"Trust him," replied the church officer, with a face of peace, "and God
+who sent him.  Who he may be, I know no more than you; but that he is a
+man of God I know.  He is about his Father's business.  Do not meddle
+with it."
+
+"Lord forbid!" cried the sexton.  "I'd sooner meddle with something I
+can understand."
+
+Upon the afternoon of that long-remembered Sunday there was seen in
+Saint Agatha's the strangest sight that those ancient walls had
+witnessed since the corner-stone was laid with a silver trowel in the
+name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost "whom we, this
+people, worship."
+
+Before the chimes rang for the vesper service, the house was filled.
+Before the bronze lips of the bells were mute, the pews were packed.
+Before the stranger reappeared, the nave and the transept overflowed.
+The startled sexton was a leaf before the wind of the surging crowd.
+He could not even enforce the fire-laws, and the very aisles were
+jammed.  Who carried the story?  How do such wraiths of rumors fly?
+
+Every member of that church not absent from town or known to be ill in
+his bed sought his pew that afternoon.  Many indeed left their
+sick-rooms to be present at that long-remembered service.  But no man
+or woman of these came alone.  Each brought a chosen companion; many,
+two or three; some came accompanied by half a dozen worshipers: and
+upon these invited guests Saint Agatha's looked with an astonishment
+that seemed to be half shame; for up those velvet aisles there moved an
+array of human faces at which the very angels and virtues in the
+painted windows seemed to turn their heads and stare.
+
+Such wretchedness, such pallor, hunger, cold, envy, sickness, sin, and
+shame were as unknown to those dedicated and decorated walls as the
+inmates of hell.  Rags and disease, uncleanliness and woe and want,
+trod the house of God as if they had the right there.  Every pew in the
+church was thrown open.  Tattered blanket shawls jostled velvet cloaks,
+and worn little tan-colored reefers, half concealing the shivering
+cotton blouses of last summer, rubbed against sealskin furs that swept
+from throat to foot.  Wretched men, called in by the throb of
+repentance that follows a debauch, lifted their haggard eyes to the
+chancel from the pews of the wardens, and women of the town sat gently
+beside the "first ladies" of the parish and of the city.  There were a
+few ragged children in the audience, wan and shrewd, sitting drearily
+beside mothers to whom they did not cling.  The pew of our friend, the
+vestryman, was filled to overflowing.  The wife with the under lip sat
+beside him, and did not protest.  She had herself gone with him to the
+hospital to select their guests.  For their pew was filled with the
+crippled and other sick who could neither walk nor afford to ride, and
+whom their own carriage had brought to Saint Agatha's.  One of these, a
+woman, came on crutches, and the lady helped her, not knowing in the
+least how to do it; and a man who had not used his feet for six years
+was lifted in by the pew-owner and his coachman and butler, and carried
+the length of the broad aisle.
+
+The church, as we say, was packed long before the preacher appeared.
+He came punctually to his appointment, like any ordinary man.  It was
+mid-afternoon, and the sun was declining when he glided across the
+chancel.  Already shadows were lying heavily in the corners of the
+church and under the galleries on the darker side.  A few lights were
+glimmering about the chancel, but these served only to illuminate the
+stranger's form and face; they did not lighten the mass of hushed and
+appealing humanity before him.
+
+The choir, with bowed heads, just above the breath, began to chant:
+
+  Who shall lay anything to the charge
+  Of God's Elect?
+  It is God that justifieth,
+  It is Christ that died.
+
+While they sang the preacher stood quite still and looked at the
+people, that strange and motley mass, the rich and the poor, the sick
+and the well, the disgraced and the reputable, the pampered and the
+starving, the shameful and the clean of life, the happy and the
+wretched together.  When the singing ceased, he spoke as if he talked
+right on; he read no prayers; he turned to no ritual; he did not even
+use the great Bible of Saint Agatha's--but only spoke in a quiet way,
+like a man who continues a thought begun:
+
+"For the Lord," he said, "is the maker of you all."
+
+There was no sermon in Saint Agatha's that afternoon.  Ecclesiastically
+speaking, there was no service.  But the preacher spoke to the people;
+and their hearts hung upon his words.  But what those words were no man
+may tell us at this day.
+
+It has been whispered, indeed, that what he said took different
+meanings to the members of that strange audience.  Each heart received
+its own message.  Wide as the earth were the gulfs between those
+hearers.  But the preacher's message bridged them all.  From his
+quivering lip and melting voice each soul drank the water of life.
+Afterwards each kept its own secret, and told not of that thirst, or of
+its assuaging.
+
+"He speaks to me," sighed the patrician, with bowed head.  "How happens
+this, for I thought no man did know that inner history?  I have never
+told"--
+
+"To me!  To me!" sobbed the pauper and the castaway--"the preacher
+speaks to me.  My misery, my shame--the whole world knows, but no man
+ever understood before."
+
+The afternoon waned.  The shadows deepened under the galleries.  The
+great house clung like one child to the voice of the preacher.  It was
+as still as the courts of Heaven when a soul is pardoned.  The stranger
+spoke in a low but penetrating voice.  Not a word was lost by the
+remotest.  He spoke of the love of God the Father, and of the life of
+Christ the Son.  He spoke of sin and of forgiveness, of sorrow, of
+shame, and of peace.  He spoke of sacrifice, of patience, of purity,
+and of hope, and of the eternal life.
+
+Not once did he allude to the petty differences among the people who
+sat bowed and breathless before him.  Such paltry things as riches or
+poverty, or position, or obscurity, he did not recognize.  He spoke to
+men and women, the children of God.  He spoke to sinners and to
+sufferers, and to patient saints; he said nothing about "classes;" he
+talked of human beings; he rebuked them for their sins; he comforted
+them for their miseries; he smote their hearts; he shook their souls;
+he passed over their lives as conflagration passes, burning to ashes,
+purifying to new growth.
+
+As he spoke, the manner of his countenance changed before them, like
+that of any great and holy man who is charged with the burden of souls,
+and who persuadeth them.  A fine, inner light glowed through his
+features, as a sacred lamp glows through alabaster or some exquisite
+shell.  His plaintive lip trembled.  His deep eyes burned and
+retreated, as if they veiled themselves.  An expression dazzling to
+behold settled upon his face.  His white garment gathered light, and
+shone.  Suddenly pausing, he stretched forth his hands.  What delicate
+arrangement of the chancel lamps illuminated them?  It was noticed by
+many, and spoken of afterwards below the breath.  For, as he raised
+them in benediction upon the people, there scintillated from the palms
+a light.  Some said that it was reflected from the radiance of the
+man's face.  Some said that it had another cause.  Only this is sure:
+when he did uplift his hands to bless them, all the people fell upon
+their knees before him.
+
+It was now almost dark in the church, and no man could see his
+neighbor's face.  The choir, on their knees, began to sing, "Holy,
+holy, holy"--  When their voices fell, the preacher's rose:
+
+"And now may the grace of God the Father, and the love of Jesus Christ
+his Son, your Lord, and the peace of the Holy Spirit, be upon you; for
+there is Life Eternal; and God is the Light thereof; whose children ye
+are forever.  Amen, and Amen."
+
+His voice ceased.  The hush that followed it was broken only by sobs.
+
+The electric lights sprang out all over the church.  In the sudden
+brilliance the kneeling people lifted their wet faces to the
+stranger's, thinking to catch a last sight of him for life-long
+treasure.
+
+But the chancel was empty.  As silently, as strangely, as he had come,
+the preacher had gone.  It was the fashion of the man.  Such was his
+will.  He was never seen at Saint Agatha's again; nor, though his name
+and fame were widely sought, were they ever learned by any.
+
+The great, strange crowd of worshipers melted mutely away.  No man
+spoke to his neighbor; each was busy with the secret of his own soul.
+The sick returned to their sufferings; the bereaved to their
+loneliness; the poor to their struggles; the rich to their pleasures;
+the erring to their temptations; and God went with them.
+
+Down the avenue, in the room of the life-long invalid, the receiver
+fell from a woman's shaking hand.  All these--all they, the saddest,
+the sorest, of them all--had been preferred before her.
+
+"Oh, to have seen his face!" she cried.  She held her thin hands before
+her eyes.  Then, flashing by that inner light which burns in the brain
+of the sensitive sick, the face of the stranger swam before her for an
+instant--and was not; for she had recognized it.
+
+[Illustration: "_The face of the stranger swam before her_"]
+
+
+In the Monday morning's paper, the vestryman of Saint Agatha's observed
+a line or two of obituary notice tucked away in one of the spaces
+reserved for the obscure.  It set forth the fact that the old clergyman
+who had failed to meet his appointment died on Sunday morning, of
+pneumonia, after a brief illness, aged seventy-two.
+
+
+
+
+  Books by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.
+      (MRS. WARD.)
+
+  THE GATES AJAR.  78th Thousand.  16mo, $1.50.
+  BEYOND THE GATES, 30th Thousand.  16mo, $1.25.
+  THE GATES BETWEEN.  16mo, $1.25.
+
+  The above three volumes, in box, $4.00.
+
+
+  MEN, WOMEN, AND GHOSTS.  Stories.  16mo, $1.50.
+  HEDGED IN.  16mo, $1.50.
+  THE SILENT PARTNER.  16mo, $1.50.
+  THE STORY OF AVIS.  16mo, $1.50; paper, 50 cents.
+  SEALED ORDERS, and Other Stories.  16mo, $1.50.
+  FRIENDS: A Duet.  16mo, $1.25; paper, 50 cents.
+  DOCTOR ZAY.  16mo, $1.25; paper, 50 cents.
+  AN OLD MAID'S PARADISE, and BURGLARS IN PARADISE.  16mo, $1.23.
+  THE MASTER OF THE MAGICIANS.  Collaborated with
+    HERBERT D. WARD.  16mo, $1.25; paper, 50 cents.
+  COME FORTH!  Collaborated with HERBERT D. WARD.
+    16mo, $1.25; paper, 50 cents.
+  FOURTEEN TO ONE.  Short Stories.  16mo, $1.25.
+  DONALD MARCY.  16mo, $1.25.
+  A SINGULAR LIFE.  A Novel.  16mo, $1.25.
+
+  The above 16 volumes, uniform, $21.50.
+
+
+  THE SUPPLY AT ST. AGATHA'S.  Illustrated.  Square  12mo, $1.00.
+  THE MADONNA OF THE TUBS.  Illustrated.  12mo, $1.50.
+  THE SAME.  Square 12mo, boards, 75 cents.
+  JACK THE FISHERMAN.  Illustrated.  Square 12mo, boards, 50 cents.
+  THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY.  Essays.  16mo, $1.25.
+  THE TROTTY BOOK.  Illustrated.  Square 16mo, $1.25.
+  TROTTY'S WEDDING TOUR AND STORY BOOK.  With
+    Illustrations.  Square 16mo, $1.25.
+  WHAT TO WEAR?  16mo, $1.00.
+  POETIC STUDIES.  Square 16mo, $1.50.
+  SONGS OF THE SILENT WORLD.  With Portrait.  16mo, $1.25.
+  CHAPTERS FROM A LIFE.  Illustrated.  12mo, $1.50
+
+
+  HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,
+
+  BOSTON AND NEW YORK.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Supply at Saint Agatha's, by 
+Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
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+<HTML>
+<HEAD>
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+<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
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+<TITLE>
+The Project Gutenberg E-text of The Supply at Saint Agatha's,
+by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
+</TITLE>
+
+<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
+BODY { color: Black;
+       background: White;
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+
+P.noindent {text-indent: 0% }
+
+P.poem {text-indent: 0%;
+        margin-left: 10%; }
+
+P.letter {text-indent: 0%;
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Supply at Saint Agatha's, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Supply at Saint Agatha's
+
+Author: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
+
+Illustrator: E. Boyd Smith
+             Marcia Oakes Woodbury
+
+Release Date: November 8, 2010 [EBook #34256]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SUPPLY AT SAINT AGATHA'S ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-front"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-front.jpg" ALT="&quot;<I>The kneeling people lifted their wet faces ... But the chancel was empty</I>&quot;" BORDER="2" WIDTH="448" HEIGHT="725">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 448px">
+&quot;<I>The kneeling people lifted their wet faces ... But the chancel was empty</I>&quot;
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+THE
+</H2>
+
+<H1 ALIGN="center">
+SUPPLY AT SAINT AGATHA'S
+</H1>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+BY
+</H4>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+<I>WITH ILLUSTRATIONS</I>
+<BR>
+BY
+<BR>
+E. BOYD SMITH AND MARCIA OAKES WOODBURY
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+<BR>
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
+<BR>
+The Riverside Press, Cambridge
+<BR>
+1896
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+Copyright, 1896,
+<BR>
+BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WARD AND
+<BR>
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN &amp; CO.
+<BR><BR>
+<I>All rights reserved.</I>
+<BR><BR><BR>
+<I>The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.</I>
+<BR>
+Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton &amp; Co.
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01"></A>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+THE SUPPLY AT SAINT AGATHA'S.
+</H2>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P>
+At the crossing of the old avenue with the stream of present traffic,
+in a city which, for obvious reasons, will not be identified by the
+writer of these pages, there stood&mdash;and still stands&mdash;the Church of
+Saint Agatha's.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The church is not without a history, chiefly such as fashion and sect
+combine to record.  It is an eminent church, with a stately date upon
+its foundation stone, and a pew-list unsurpassed for certain qualities
+among the worshipers of the Eastern States.  Saint Agatha's has long
+been distinguished for three things, its money, its music, and its
+soundness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When the tax-list of the town is printed in the daily papers once a
+year, the wardens and the leading parishioners of Saint Agatha's stand
+far upwards in the score, and their names are traced by slow, grimy
+fingers of mechanics and strikers and socialists laboriously reading on
+Saturday nights.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The choir of Saint Agatha's, as all the world knows, is superior.  Her
+soprano alone (a famous prima donna) would fill the house.  Women
+throng the aisles to hear the tenor, and musical critics, hat in hand,
+and pad on hat, drop in to report the anthem and the offertory for the
+Monday morning press.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In ecclesiastical position, it is needless to add, Saint Agatha's has
+always been above reproach.  When did Saint Agatha's question a canon?
+When did she contend with a custom?  When did she criticise a creed?
+Why should she contest a tradition?  She accepts, she conforms, she
+prospers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In one particular Saint Agatha's has been thrust into an attitude of
+originality foreign to her taste.  Her leading men feel called upon
+occasionally to explain how the eternal feminine came&mdash;a little
+contrary to the fashion of our land&mdash;to be recognized in the name of
+the church.  Saint Agatha's first pastor, one should know, was a very
+young man of enthusiastic and unconventional temperament.  He did not
+live long enough to outgrow this&mdash;for a clergyman&mdash;unfortunate trend of
+nature, having died, full of dreams and visions, in the teeth of a
+lowering conflict with his wardens; but he lived long enough to carry
+the day and the name for a portion of his people who desired to call
+their church in honor of a sweet, though rich, old lady who had put her
+private fortune into their beautiful house of worship, and her warm
+heart into their future success.  It had befallen this dear old lady to
+bear the name of Agatha, which, for her sake,&mdash;and, of course, in due
+ecclesiastical remembrance of the strictly canonical saint of similar
+cognomen,&mdash;was accordingly bestowed upon the church.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+In the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and another numeral, which I
+am requested not to indicate, but I may not deny that it is a recent
+one, the popular rector of Saint Agatha's took a winter vacation.  He
+was an imposing and imperious man, full of years and honors, in the
+full sway of his professional fame, when he fell a victim, like any
+common person, to the grippe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the attempt to recover from this vulgar malady, he was forced to
+observe that his select physician had drugged him, via an exclusive
+bronchitis, into a minister's sore throat, such as any ordinary country
+parson might develop for lack of an overcoat, or a fire in his bedroom.
+Without undue delay or reluctance, the rector of Saint Agatha's took
+ship for the south of France; and in the comfortable way in which such
+things are done in such quarters, the church was set trundling upon the
+wheels of a two-months' "supply."  This was managed so gracefully by
+the experienced vestry of Saint Agatha's that hardly a visible jar
+occurred in the parish machinery.  Many of the people did not know that
+their rector had gone until a canon from London sonorously filled the
+pulpit one Sunday morning.  A distinguished Middle State clergyman
+followed the next week; the West sent her brightest and best the
+succeeding Sunday; and so it went.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Eminent variety easily occupied that sacred desk.  The wardens of St.
+Agatha's have but to say, Come, and he cometh who weigheth the honor of
+ministering in this aristocratic pulpit.  In brief, the most
+distinguished men in the denomination cordially supplied.  On the
+whole, perhaps the parish enjoyed their rector's vacation as much as he
+did.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, upon the vestry there chanced at that time to be one man who was
+"different."  One does find such people even among the officers of
+fashionable churches.  This man (he was, by the way, a grand-nephew of
+the old lady who built the church when Saint Agatha's was an unendowed
+experiment) had occasional views not wholly in harmony with the policy
+of his brother officers; and, being himself a heavy rate-payer, was
+allowed, sometimes, by the courtesy of the majority,&mdash;when his notion
+was not really in bad form, you know,&mdash;to have his way.  He did not get
+it so often but that he was glad to make the most of it when he did;
+and when his turn came to control the supply for that Sunday with which
+this narrative has to do, he asked the privilege of being intrusted
+with the details of the business.  This request, as from a useful man
+of certain eccentricities, was indulgently granted; and thus there
+occurred the events which I am privileged to relate.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+It was just before Lent, and the winter had been a cold one.  One
+Friday evening in early March there came up, or came down, a drifting
+snow-storm.  It was bad enough in town, but in the suburbs it was
+worse, and in the country it was little less than dangerous to
+passengers through the wide, wind-swept streets, the choking lanes, and
+bitter moors.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+An old clergyman, the pastor of a scattered parish, sat in his study on
+that Friday night, and thanked God that the weekly evening service was
+over, and his day's work done.  He would have regretted being called
+out again that night, for he had got quite wet in walking to church and
+back, and the cold from which he had been suffering for a week past
+might not be benefited thereby.  This fact in itself was a matter of no
+concern, under ordinary conditions, to the old clergyman, who, being a
+lonely man in a forlorn country boarding-house, with nobody to take
+care of him, was accustomed to live under the shadow of a "common
+cold," and who paid no more attention to his own physical discomforts
+in the face of daily duty than he paid to the latest fashion in sable
+trimmings in the front pews at Saint Agatha's.  There was no fur
+trimming on his overcoat, which was seven years old and pitiably thin.
+But he had been invited to supply at Saint Agatha's next Sunday, and to
+that unexampled honor and opportunity he gave the pathetic
+attention&mdash;half personal pleasure, half religious fervor&mdash;of an
+overlooked and devout man.  In the course of a forty-years' ministry he
+had not been asked to preach in a city pulpit.  The event was
+tremendous to him.  He had been agitated by the invitation, which ran
+in some such way as this:
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-006"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-006.jpg" ALT="&quot;He had been invited to supply at St. Agatha's.&quot;" BORDER="2" WIDTH="462" HEIGHT="687">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 462px">
+&quot;<I>He had been invited to supply at St. Agatha's</I>.&quot;
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+... "In closing, permit me to say, sir, that it would be agreeable to
+us to welcome among us the grandson of our first pastor, that young
+rector who died in the bud of his youth and Christian originality.  The
+fact of your ancestry will give to your presence a peculiar interest
+for our people at large.  But I beg to be allowed to add on behalf of
+the committee, that certain qualities in yourself and in your own work
+have led us to believe that you may exert positive influences upon us
+of which we stand in need.  In your remote and rural parish your life
+has not passed unobserved.  Your labors as a pastor, and your methods
+of preaching, have been an object of study to some of us.  We have come
+to rate you, sir, as one of the men of God.  There are not many.  In
+meeting with our people, the writer personally hopes that you may be
+able to teach us something of the secret of your own happy and
+successful experience as a minister of Christ our Lord." ...
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The old clergyman sat with his feet upon the base of his little
+cylinder coal-stove.  His thin ankles shrank in the damp stockings
+which he had not been able to change since he came in out of the storm,
+because, owing to some personal preference of the laundress, he could
+not find any dry ones.  His worn slippers flapped upon his cold feet
+when he moved.  But he had on his flowered dressing-gown of ancient
+pattern and rustic cut; his high arm-chair was cushioned in chintz and
+excelsior behind his aching head; the green paper shade was on his
+study-lamp; his best-beloved books (for the old saint was a student)
+lay within reach upon the table; piled upon them were his manuscript
+sermons; and he sighed with the content of a man who feels himself to
+be, although unworthy, in the loving arms of luxury.  A rap at the door
+undeceived him.  His landlady put in her withered face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sir," she said, "the widder Peek's a-dying.  It's just like her to
+take a night like this&mdash;but she's sent for you.  I must say I don't
+call you fit to go."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A man is always fit to do his duty," said the old clergyman, rising.
+"I will go at once.  Did she send&mdash;any&mdash;conveyance?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Catch her!" retorted the landlady.  "Why, she hain't had the town
+water let in yet&mdash;and she wuth her fifteen thousand dollars; nor she
+won't have no hired girl to do for her, not that none of 'em will stay
+along of her a week, and Dobson's boy 's at the door, a drippin' and
+cussin' to get you, for he 's nigh snowed under.  She 's a wuthless old
+heathen miser, the widder Peek."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then there is every reason why I should not neglect her," replied the
+clergyman, in his authoritative, clerical voice.  "Pray call the lad in
+from the weather, and tell him I will accompany him at once."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He did look about his study sadly while he was making ready to leave
+it.  The fire in the base-burner was quite warm, now, and his wet,
+much-darned stockings were beginning to dry.  The room looked sheltered
+and pleasant; his books ran to the ceiling, though his floor was
+covered with straw matting, with odd pieces of woolen carpet for rugs;
+his carpet-covered lounge was wheeled out of the draft; his lamp with
+the green shade made a little circle of light and coziness; his Bible
+and prayer-book lay open within it, beside the pile of sermons.  He had
+meant to devote the evening to the agreeable duty of selecting his
+discourse for Saint Agatha's.  His mind and his heart were brimming
+over with the excitement of that great event.  He would have liked to
+concentrate and consecrate his thoughts upon it that evening.  As he
+went, coughing, into the cold entry, it occurred to him that the spot
+in his lung was more painful than he had supposed; but he pulled his
+old cap over his ears, and his thin overcoat up to meet it, and tramped
+out cheerfully into the storm.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, well, my lad!" he said in his warm-hearted way to Dobson's boy;
+"I 'm sorry for you that you have to be out a night like this."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy spoke of this afterwards, and remembered it long&mdash;for a boy.
+But at the time he did but stare.  He stopped grumbling, however, and
+plunged on into the drifts, ahead of the old rector, kicking a path for
+him to right and left in the wet, packed snow; for the widow Peek lived
+at least a mile away, and the storm was now become a virulent thing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What passed between the unloved, neglected, dying parishoner and her
+pastor was not known to any but themselves, nor is there witness now to
+testify thereof.  Neither does it in any way concern the record of this
+narrative, except as the least may concern the largest circumstance in
+human story.  For, in view of what came to pass, it is impossible not
+to put the old, judicial question: Did it pay?  Was it worth while?
+When the miser's soul went out, at midnight, on the wings and the rage
+of that blind, black storm, did it pass gently, a subdued, forgiven
+spirit, humble to learn how to live again, for Christ's sake and his
+who gave himself&mdash;as his Master had before him&mdash;to comfort and to save?
+Did it pay?  <I>Do</I> such things pay?  God knows.  But as long as men do
+not know, there will always be found a few among them who will elect to
+disregard the doubt, to wear the divinity of uncalculating sacrifice,
+and to pay its price.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For the soul of the widow Peek the price was large, looked at in our
+mathematical way; for, when the old clergyman, having shrived her soul
+and closed her eyes, started to come home at one o'clock of the
+morning, the storm had become a malignant force.  Already wet through
+and through his thin coats and worn flannels, weak from the exposure,
+the watching, and the scene of death, every breath a sword athwart his
+inflamed lungs, with fire in his brain, and ice at his heart, he
+staggered against the blizzard.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dobson's boy had long since sought the shelter of his own home, and the
+old man was quite unattended.  True, the neighbor who watched with the
+dead woman suggested that he remain till morning; but the widow Peek's
+house was cold (she was always especially "near" about fuel), and he
+thought it more prudent to get back to his own stove and his bed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whether he lost his way; whether he crossed and recrossed it, wandering
+from it in the dark and drift; whether he fell and lay in the snow for
+a time, and rose again, and staggered on, and fell again, and so pushed
+on again, cannot be known.  It is only known that at half-past two on
+Saturday morning his landlady put her wrinkled face out of the window,
+for the twentieth time, in search of him (for she had a thought for him
+in her own hard-featured way), and saw him fallen, and feebly trying to
+crawl on his hands and knees up the drifted steps.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She got him in to his warm study, past the chair where the flowered
+dressing-gown and old slippers awaited him, and as far as the
+carpet-covered lounge, Beyond this he could not be taken.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+By morning the whole parish rang the door-bell; the hands and hearts
+and horses, the purses, the nurses, the doctors, the watchers, the
+tears, and the prayers of the village, were his&mdash;for he was dearly
+beloved and cherished in that parish.  But he lay on his old lounge in
+his study among his books, and asked of them nothing at all.  The
+kerosene lamp, behind its green shade, went out; and the Bible, with
+the pile of sermons on the table, looked large in the snow-light of a
+day when the storm ceases without sun.  He did not talk; but his
+thoughts were yet alive.  He remembered Saint Agatha's, and the sermon
+which he was to preach to-morrow.  He knew that not one of his people
+(ignorant of such matters) would understand how to get word to the city
+vestry.  He tried to give directions, but his voice refused his
+bidding.  He knew that he would be supposed to have failed to meet his
+appointment, perhaps to have been thwarted&mdash;a rural clergyman, old and
+timorous, baffled in an important professional engagement&mdash;by a little
+snow.  He was to have taken the evening train.  He was to be the guest
+of the vestryman who wrote that pleasant letter.  He was to preach in
+Saint Agatha's to-morrow.  He was to&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nay,&mdash;he was not,&mdash;nay.  He was to do none of these things.  A sick
+man, mortally a sick man, past power of speech, he lay upon his carpet
+lounge, shivering under the pile of thin blankets and cotton comforters
+that had been wrapped around him, and gently faced his fate.  He could
+not preach at Saint Agatha's.  And he could not explain to the vestry.
+Perhaps his heart-sickness about this matter subsided a little&mdash;one
+likes to think so&mdash;as his disease grew upon him; but there are men who
+will understand me when I say that this was the greatest disappointment
+of his humble, holy life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As Saturday night drew on, and the stars came out, he was heard to make
+such efforts to speak articulately, that one of his weeping people (an
+affectionate woman of a brighter wit than the rest) made out, as she
+bent lovingly over him, to understand so much as this:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Lord," he said, "into thy hands I commit my s-p&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He commits his spirit to the Lord!" sobbed the landlady.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the listening parishioner raised her finger to her lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Lord," he said again, and this time the dullest ear in the parish
+could have heard the words&mdash;"Lord," he prayed, "into thy hands I
+commit&mdash;my supply."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Sunday morning broke upon the city as cold and clear as the sword of a
+rebuking angel.  People on the way to the West End churches exchanged
+notes on the thermometer, and talked of the destitution of the poor.
+It was so cold that the ailing and the aged for the most part stayed at
+home.  But the young, the <I>ennuyé</I>, the imitative, and the soul-sick,
+got themselves into their furs and carriages when the chimes rang, and
+the audiences were, on the whole, as comfortable and as devout as usual.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The vestryman sat nervously in his pew.  He had not fully recovered
+from the fact that his supply had disappointed him.  Having sent his
+coachman in vain to all the Saturday evening trains to meet his country
+parson, the vestryman had passed but an uneasy night.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I had supposed the old man had principles about Sunday travel," he
+said to his wife, "but it seems he is coming in the morning, after all.
+He might at least have sent me word."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Telegraphing in the country is&mdash;difficult, sometimes, I have heard,"
+replied the lady, vaguely.  She was a handsome, childless woman, with
+the haughty under lip of her class.  Her husband spoke cheerily, but he
+was not at ease, and she did not know how to make him so.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Sunday morning train came in from the country station forty miles
+back, but the old clergyman was not among its passengers.  Now
+thoroughly alarmed, the vestryman had started for his hat and coat,
+when his parlor-maid brought him a message.  It had been left at the
+door, she said, by a messenger who brooked neither delay nor question,
+but ordered her to tell the master of the house that the supply for
+Saint Agatha's was in the city, and would meet the engagement at the
+proper time and place.  The old clergyman, the messenger added, had
+been suddenly stricken with a dangerous illness, and could not be
+expected; but his substitute would fill the pulpit for the day.  The
+vestryman was requested to feel no concern in the matter.  The preacher
+preferred retirement until the hour of the service, and would fulfil
+his duties at the church at the appointed hour.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But when the vestryman, feeling flurried despite himself, tapped at the
+door of the luxurious vestry-room, gracefully refurnished that winter
+for the rector with the sore throat who was in the south of France, he
+found it locked; and to his unobtrusive knock no answer came.  At this
+uncomfortable moment the sexton tiptoed up to say that the supply had
+requested not to be disturbed until the service should begin.  The
+sexton supposed that the clergyman needed extra preparation; thought
+that perhaps the gentleman was from the country, and&mdash;ah&mdash;unused to the
+audience.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What is his name?  What does he look like?" asked the chairman, with
+knotted brows.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have not seen him sir," replied the sexton, with a puzzled
+expression.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How did you receive the message?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"By a messenger who would not be delayed or questioned."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Struck by the repetition of this phrase, the chairman asked again:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But what did the messenger look like?"  The sexton shook his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I cannot tell you, sir.  He was a mere messenger.  I paid no attention
+to him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Very well," said the church officer, turning away discontentedly.  "It
+must be all right.  I have implicit confidence in the man whose chosen
+substitute this is."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With this he ceased to try to intrude himself upon the stranger, but
+went down to his pew, and sat beside his wife in uneasy silence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The chimes sang and sank, and sang again:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Holy, holy, holy&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The air was so clear that the sound rang twice the usual distance
+through the snowlit, sunlit air; and the sick and the old at home
+listened to the bells with a sudden stirring at their feeble hearts,
+and wished again that they could have gone to church.  One bed-ridden
+woman, whose telephone connected her with Saint Agatha's, held the
+receiver to her sensitive ear, and smiled with the quick gratitude for
+trifling pleasures of the long sick, as she recognized the notes of the
+chime.  With a leap and a thrill as if they cast their metal souls out
+in the act, the voices of the bells rose and swelled, and ceased and
+slept, and where they paused the anthem took the word up:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Holy, holy&mdash;<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+and carried it softly, just above the breath, with the tone which is
+neither a sigh, nor a cry, nor a whisper, but that harmony of all which
+makes of music prayer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He must have entered on the wave of this strain; opinions differed
+afterwards as to this: some said one thing, some another; but it was
+found that most of the audience had not observed the entrance of the
+preacher at all.  The choir ceased, and he was; and no more could be
+said.  The church was well filled, though not over-crowded, and the
+decorous rustle of a fashionable audience in the interval preceding
+worship stirred through the house.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the natural inattention of the moment, it was not remarkable that
+most of the people failed to notice the strange preacher until he was
+among them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But to the church officer, whose mind was preoccupied with the supply,
+there was something almost startling in the manner of his approach.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The vestryman's uneasy eyes were not conscious of having slipped their
+guard upon the chancel for a moment; he had but turned his head
+politely, though a bit impatiently, to reply to some trivial remark of
+his wife's, when, behold, the preacher stood before him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Afterwards it was rumored that two or three persons in the audience had
+not been taken by surprise in this way, but had fully observed the
+manner of the stranger's entrance; yet these persons, when they were
+sought, were difficult to find.  There was one shabby woman who sat in
+the gallery among the "poor" seats; she was clad in rusty mourning, and
+had a pale and patient face, quite familiar to the audience, for she
+was a faithful church-goer, and had attended Saint Agatha's for many
+years.  It came to be said, through the sexton's gossip or otherwise,
+that this poor woman had seen the preacher's approach quite clearly,
+and had been much moved thereat; but when some effort was made to find
+her, and to question her on this point, unexpected obstacles
+arose,&mdash;she was an obscure person, serving in some menial capacity for
+floating employers; she was accustomed to slip in and out of the church
+hurriedly, both late and early,&mdash;and nothing of importance was added
+from this quarter to the general interest which attended the
+eccentricities of the supply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The stranger was a man a trifle above the ordinary height, of majestic
+mien and carriage, and with the lofty head that indicates both
+fearlessness and purity of nature.  As he glided to his place behind
+the lectern, a hush struck the frivolous audience, as if it had been
+smitten by an angel's wing: such power is there in noble novelty, and
+in the authority of a high heart.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When had the similar of this preacher led the service in that venerable
+and fashionable house of worship?  In what past years had his
+counterpart served them?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whom did he resemble of the long line of eminent clerical teachers with
+whose qualities this elect people was familiar?  What had been his
+history, his ecclesiastical position, his social connections?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was characteristic of the audience that this last question was first
+in the minds of a large proportion of the worshipers.  Whence came he?
+His name?  His titles?  What was his professional reputation&mdash;his
+theology?  What were his views on choirboys, confessionals, and
+candles&mdash;on mission chapels and the pauperizing of the poor?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+These inquiries swept through the inner consciousness of the audience
+in the first moment of his appearance.  But in the second, neither
+these nor any other paltry queries fretted the smallest soul before him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The stranger must have had an impressive countenance; yet afterwards it
+was found that no two descriptions of it agreed.  Some said this thing,
+some said that.  To this person he appeared a gentle, kindly man with a
+persuasive manner; to that, he looked majestic and commanding.  There
+were some who spoke of an authoritative severity in the eye which he
+turned upon them; but these were not many.  There were those who
+murmured that they had melted beneath the tenderness of his glance, as
+snow before the sun; and such were more.  As to the features of his
+face, men differed, as spectators are apt to do about the lineaments of
+extraordinary countenances.  What was the color of his eyes, the
+contour of his lips, the shape of his brow?  Who could say?
+Conflicting testimony arrived at no verdict.  In two respects alone
+opinions agreed about the face of this man: it commanded, and it shone;
+it had authority and light.  The shrewdest heresy-hunter in the
+congregation would not have dared question this clergyman's theology,
+or the tendencies of his ritualistic views.  The veriest pharisee in
+the audience quailed before the blinding brilliance of the preacher's
+face.  It was a moral fire.  It ate into the heart.  Sin and shame
+shriveled before it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One might say that all this was apparent in the preacher before he had
+spoken a word.  When he had opened his lips these impressions were
+intensified.  He began in the usual way to read the usual prayers, and
+to conduct the service as was expected of him.  Nothing eccentric was
+observable in his treatment of the preliminaries of the occasion.  The
+fashionable choir, accustomed to dictate the direction of the music,
+met with no interference from the clergyman.  He announced the hymns
+and anthems that had been selected quite in the ordinary manner; and
+the critics of the great dailies took the usual notes of the musical
+programme.  In fact, up to the time of the sermon, nothing out of the
+common course occurred.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But having said this, one must qualify.  Was it nothing out of the
+common course that the congregation in Saint Agatha's should sit as the
+people sat that day, bond-slaves before the enunciation of the familiar
+phrases in the morning's confession?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What a voice!" whispered the wife of the vestryman.  But her husband
+answered her not a word.  Pale, agitated, with strained eyes uplifted,
+and nervous hands knotted together, he leaned towards the stranger.  At
+the first articulate sentence from the pulpit, he knew that the success
+of his supply was secured.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What a voice indeed!  It melted through the great house like burning
+gold.  The heart ran after it as fire runs through metal.  Once or
+twice in a generation one may hear the liturgy read like that&mdash;perhaps.
+In a lifetime no longer to be counted short, the vestryman had heard
+nothing that resembled it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thank God!" he murmured.  He put his hat before his face.  He had not
+realized before what a strain he had endured.  Cold drops stood upon
+his brow.  He shook with relief.  From that moment he felt no more
+concern about the service than if he had engaged one of the sons of God
+to "supply."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Are you faint?" asked his wife in a tone of annoyance.  She offered
+him her smelling-salts.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Had there existed stenographic records of that sermon, this narrative,
+necessarily so defective, would have no occasion for its being.  One of
+the most interesting things about the whole matter is that no such
+records can to-day be found.  Reporters certainly were in the gallery.
+The journals had sent their picked men as usual, and no more.  Where,
+then, were their columns of verbal record?  Why has so important a
+discourse gone afloat upon vague, conflicting rumor?  No person knows;
+the reporters least of all.  One, it is said, lost his position for the
+default of that report; others received the severest rebukes of their
+experience from their managing editors for the same cause.  None had
+any satisfactory reason to give for his failure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I forgot," said he who lost his position for his boyish excuse.  "All
+I can say, sir, is I forgot.  The man swept me away.  I forgot that
+such a paper as 'The Daily Gossip' existed.  Other matters," he added
+with expensive candor, "seemed more important at the time."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent" ALIGN="center">
+<SPAN STYLE="letter-spacing: 4em">*****</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"When the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The stranger announced this not unusual text with the simple manner of
+a man who promised nothing eccentric in the sermon to come.  Yet
+something in the familiar words arrested attention.  The phrase, as it
+was spoken, seemed less a hackneyed biblical quotation than a pointed
+personal question to which each heart in the audience-room was
+compelled to respond.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The preacher began quietly.  He reminded his hearers in a few words of
+the true nature of the Christian religion, whose interests he was there
+to represent.  One felt that he spoke with tact, and with the kind of
+dignity belonging to the enthusiast of a great moral movement.  It
+occurred to one, perhaps for the first time, that it was quite manly in
+a Christian preacher to plead his cause with as much ardor as the
+reformer, the philanthropist, the politician, or the devotee of a
+mystical and fashionable cult.  One became really interested in the
+character and aims of the Christian faith; it did not fall below the
+dignity of a Browning society, or a study in theosophy or hypnotism.
+The attention of the audience&mdash;from the start definitely
+respectful&mdash;became reverent, and thus absorbed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was not until he had his hearers thoroughly in his power that the
+preacher's manner underwent the remarkable change of which Saint
+Agatha's talks in whispers to this day.  He spoke entirely without
+manuscript or note, and he had not left the lectern.  Suddenly folding
+his hands upon the great Bible, he paused, and, as if the audience had
+been one man, he looked it in the eye.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then, like the voice of the living God, his words began to smite them.
+What was the chancel of Saint Agatha's?  The great white throne?  And
+who was he who dared to cry from it, like the command of the Eternal?
+Sin!  Sinners!  Shame!  Guilt!  Disgrace!  Punishment!  What words were
+these for the delicate ears of Saint Agatha's?  What had these silken
+ladies and gilded men to do with such ugly phrases?  Smiles stiffened
+upon refined, protesting faces.  The haughty under lip of the
+vestryman's wife, and a hundred others like it, dropped.  A moral
+dismay seized the exclusive people whom the preacher called to account
+like any vulgar audience.  But the shabby woman in the "poor" seats
+humbly wept, and the young reporter who lost his position cast his eyes
+upon the ground, for the tears that sprang to them.  From the delicate
+fingers of the vestryman's wife the smelling-salts fell upon the
+cushioned seat; she held her feathered fan against her face.  Her
+husband did not even notice this.  He sat with head bowed upon the rail
+before him, as a good man does when reconsecrating himself at the
+communion hour.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The choir rustled uneasily in their seats.  The soprano covered her
+eyes with her well-gloved hand, and thought of the follies and regrets
+(she called them by these names) that beset the musical temperament.
+But the tenor turned his face away, and thought about his wife.  Down
+the avenue, in the room of the "shut-in" woman, where the telephone
+carried the preacher's voice, a pathetic cry was heard:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Forgive!  Forgive!  Oh, if suffering had but made me better!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But now the preacher's manner of address had changed again.  Always
+remembering that it is now impossible to quote his language with any
+accuracy, we may venture to say that it ran in some such way as this:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Son of God, being of the Father, performed his Father's business.
+What do ye who bear his name?  What holy errands are ye about?  What
+miracles of consecration have ye wrought?  What marvels of the soul's
+life have ye achieved upon the earth since he left it to your trust?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He came to the sinful and the unhappy; the despised and rejected were
+his friends; to the poor he preached the Gospel; the sick, and
+overlooked, and cast-out, the unloved and forgotten, the unfashionable
+and unpopular, he selected.  These to his church on earth he left in
+charge.  These he cherished.  For such he had lived.  For them he had
+suffered.  For them he died.  People of Saint Agatha's, where are they?
+What have ye done to his beloved?  Thou ancient church, honored and
+privileged and blessed among men, where are those little ones whom thy
+Master chose?  Up and down these godly aisles a man might look, he
+said, and see them not.  Prosperity and complacency he saw before him;
+poverty and humility he did not see.  In the day when habit cannot
+reply for duty, what account will ye give of your betrayed trust?  Will
+ye say: "Lord, we had a mission chapel.  The curate is responsible for
+the lower classes.  And, Lord, we take up the usual collections; Saint
+Agatha's has always been called a generous church"?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the startled hush that met these preposterous words the preacher
+drew himself to his full height, and raised his hand.  He had worn the
+white gown throughout the day's services, and the garment folded itself
+about his figure majestically.  In the name of Christ, then, he
+commanded them: Where were those whom their Lord did love?  Go, seek
+them.  Go, find the saddest, sickest souls in all the town.  Hasten,
+for the time is short.  Search, for the message is of God.  Church of
+Christ, produce his people to me, for I speak no more words before
+their substitutes!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus and there, abruptly, the preacher cast his audience from him, and
+disappeared from the chancel.  The service broke in consternation.  The
+celebrated choir was not called upon to close the morning's worship.
+The soprano and the tenor exchanged glances of neglected dismay.  The
+prayer-book remained unopened on the sacred desk.  The desk itself was
+empty.  The audience was, in fact, authoritatively dismissed&mdash;dismissed
+without a benediction, like some obscure or erring thing that did not
+deserve it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The people stared in one another's faces for an astounded moment, and
+then, without words, with hanging heads, they moved to the open air and
+melted out of the church.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The sexton rushed up to the vestryman, pale with fear.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sir," he whispered, "he is not in the vestry-room.  He has taken
+himself away&mdash;God knows whither.  What are we to do?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Trust him," replied the church officer, with a face of peace, "and God
+who sent him.  Who he may be, I know no more than you; but that he is a
+man of God I know.  He is about his Father's business.  Do not meddle
+with it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Lord forbid!" cried the sexton.  "I'd sooner meddle with something I
+can understand."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Upon the afternoon of that long-remembered Sunday there was seen in
+Saint Agatha's the strangest sight that those ancient walls had
+witnessed since the corner-stone was laid with a silver trowel in the
+name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost "whom we, this
+people, worship."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before the chimes rang for the vesper service, the house was filled.
+Before the bronze lips of the bells were mute, the pews were packed.
+Before the stranger reappeared, the nave and the transept overflowed.
+The startled sexton was a leaf before the wind of the surging crowd.
+He could not even enforce the fire-laws, and the very aisles were
+jammed.  Who carried the story?  How do such wraiths of rumors fly?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Every member of that church not absent from town or known to be ill in
+his bed sought his pew that afternoon.  Many indeed left their
+sick-rooms to be present at that long-remembered service.  But no man
+or woman of these came alone.  Each brought a chosen companion; many,
+two or three; some came accompanied by half a dozen worshipers: and
+upon these invited guests Saint Agatha's looked with an astonishment
+that seemed to be half shame; for up those velvet aisles there moved an
+array of human faces at which the very angels and virtues in the
+painted windows seemed to turn their heads and stare.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Such wretchedness, such pallor, hunger, cold, envy, sickness, sin, and
+shame were as unknown to those dedicated and decorated walls as the
+inmates of hell.  Rags and disease, uncleanliness and woe and want,
+trod the house of God as if they had the right there.  Every pew in the
+church was thrown open.  Tattered blanket shawls jostled velvet cloaks,
+and worn little tan-colored reefers, half concealing the shivering
+cotton blouses of last summer, rubbed against sealskin furs that swept
+from throat to foot.  Wretched men, called in by the throb of
+repentance that follows a debauch, lifted their haggard eyes to the
+chancel from the pews of the wardens, and women of the town sat gently
+beside the "first ladies" of the parish and of the city.  There were a
+few ragged children in the audience, wan and shrewd, sitting drearily
+beside mothers to whom they did not cling.  The pew of our friend, the
+vestryman, was filled to overflowing.  The wife with the under lip sat
+beside him, and did not protest.  She had herself gone with him to the
+hospital to select their guests.  For their pew was filled with the
+crippled and other sick who could neither walk nor afford to ride, and
+whom their own carriage had brought to Saint Agatha's.  One of these, a
+woman, came on crutches, and the lady helped her, not knowing in the
+least how to do it; and a man who had not used his feet for six years
+was lifted in by the pew-owner and his coachman and butler, and carried
+the length of the broad aisle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The church, as we say, was packed long before the preacher appeared.
+He came punctually to his appointment, like any ordinary man.  It was
+mid-afternoon, and the sun was declining when he glided across the
+chancel.  Already shadows were lying heavily in the corners of the
+church and under the galleries on the darker side.  A few lights were
+glimmering about the chancel, but these served only to illuminate the
+stranger's form and face; they did not lighten the mass of hushed and
+appealing humanity before him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The choir, with bowed heads, just above the breath, began to chant:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Who shall lay anything to the charge<BR>
+Of God's Elect?<BR>
+It is God that justifieth,<BR>
+It is Christ that died.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+While they sang the preacher stood quite still and looked at the
+people, that strange and motley mass, the rich and the poor, the sick
+and the well, the disgraced and the reputable, the pampered and the
+starving, the shameful and the clean of life, the happy and the
+wretched together.  When the singing ceased, he spoke as if he talked
+right on; he read no prayers; he turned to no ritual; he did not even
+use the great Bible of Saint Agatha's&mdash;but only spoke in a quiet way,
+like a man who continues a thought begun:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"For the Lord," he said, "is the maker of you all."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was no sermon in Saint Agatha's that afternoon.  Ecclesiastically
+speaking, there was no service.  But the preacher spoke to the people;
+and their hearts hung upon his words.  But what those words were no man
+may tell us at this day.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It has been whispered, indeed, that what he said took different
+meanings to the members of that strange audience.  Each heart received
+its own message.  Wide as the earth were the gulfs between those
+hearers.  But the preacher's message bridged them all.  From his
+quivering lip and melting voice each soul drank the water of life.
+Afterwards each kept its own secret, and told not of that thirst, or of
+its assuaging.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He speaks to me," sighed the patrician, with bowed head.  "How happens
+this, for I thought no man did know that inner history?  I have never
+told"&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"To me!  To me!" sobbed the pauper and the castaway&mdash;"the preacher
+speaks to me.  My misery, my shame&mdash;the whole world knows, but no man
+ever understood before."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The afternoon waned.  The shadows deepened under the galleries.  The
+great house clung like one child to the voice of the preacher.  It was
+as still as the courts of Heaven when a soul is pardoned.  The stranger
+spoke in a low but penetrating voice.  Not a word was lost by the
+remotest.  He spoke of the love of God the Father, and of the life of
+Christ the Son.  He spoke of sin and of forgiveness, of sorrow, of
+shame, and of peace.  He spoke of sacrifice, of patience, of purity,
+and of hope, and of the eternal life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Not once did he allude to the petty differences among the people who
+sat bowed and breathless before him.  Such paltry things as riches or
+poverty, or position, or obscurity, he did not recognize.  He spoke to
+men and women, the children of God.  He spoke to sinners and to
+sufferers, and to patient saints; he said nothing about "classes;" he
+talked of human beings; he rebuked them for their sins; he comforted
+them for their miseries; he smote their hearts; he shook their souls;
+he passed over their lives as conflagration passes, burning to ashes,
+purifying to new growth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As he spoke, the manner of his countenance changed before them, like
+that of any great and holy man who is charged with the burden of souls,
+and who persuadeth them.  A fine, inner light glowed through his
+features, as a sacred lamp glows through alabaster or some exquisite
+shell.  His plaintive lip trembled.  His deep eyes burned and
+retreated, as if they veiled themselves.  An expression dazzling to
+behold settled upon his face.  His white garment gathered light, and
+shone.  Suddenly pausing, he stretched forth his hands.  What delicate
+arrangement of the chancel lamps illuminated them?  It was noticed by
+many, and spoken of afterwards below the breath.  For, as he raised
+them in benediction upon the people, there scintillated from the palms
+a light.  Some said that it was reflected from the radiance of the
+man's face.  Some said that it had another cause.  Only this is sure:
+when he did uplift his hands to bless them, all the people fell upon
+their knees before him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was now almost dark in the church, and no man could see his
+neighbor's face.  The choir, on their knees, began to sing, "Holy,
+holy, holy"&mdash;  When their voices fell, the preacher's rose:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And now may the grace of God the Father, and the love of Jesus Christ
+his Son, your Lord, and the peace of the Holy Spirit, be upon you; for
+there is Life Eternal; and God is the Light thereof; whose children ye
+are forever.  Amen, and Amen."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His voice ceased.  The hush that followed it was broken only by sobs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The electric lights sprang out all over the church.  In the sudden
+brilliance the kneeling people lifted their wet faces to the
+stranger's, thinking to catch a last sight of him for life-long
+treasure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the chancel was empty.  As silently, as strangely, as he had come,
+the preacher had gone.  It was the fashion of the man.  Such was his
+will.  He was never seen at Saint Agatha's again; nor, though his name
+and fame were widely sought, were they ever learned by any.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The great, strange crowd of worshipers melted mutely away.  No man
+spoke to his neighbor; each was busy with the secret of his own soul.
+The sick returned to their sufferings; the bereaved to their
+loneliness; the poor to their struggles; the rich to their pleasures;
+the erring to their temptations; and God went with them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Down the avenue, in the room of the life-long invalid, the receiver
+fell from a woman's shaking hand.  All these&mdash;all they, the saddest,
+the sorest, of them all&mdash;had been preferred before her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, to have seen his face!" she cried.  She held her thin hands before
+her eyes.  Then, flashing by that inner light which burns in the brain
+of the sensitive sick, the face of the stranger swam before her for an
+instant&mdash;and was not; for she had recognized it.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-036"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-036.jpg" ALT="&quot;<I>The face of the stranger swam before her</I>&quot;" BORDER="2" WIDTH="455" HEIGHT="716">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 455px">
+&quot;<I>The face of the stranger swam before her</I>&quot;
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+In the Monday morning's paper, the vestryman of Saint Agatha's observed
+a line or two of obituary notice tucked away in one of the spaces
+reserved for the obscure.  It set forth the fact that the old clergyman
+who had failed to meet his appointment died on Sunday morning, of
+pneumonia, after a brief illness, aged seventy-two.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<HR>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap02"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+  Books by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.
+<BR>
+(MRS. WARD.)
+</H3>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+THE GATES AJAR.  78th Thousand.  16mo, $1.50.<BR>
+BEYOND THE GATES, 30th Thousand.  16mo, $1.25.<BR>
+THE GATES BETWEEN.  16mo, $1.25.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent" ALIGN="center">
+The above three volumes, in box, $4.00.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+MEN, WOMEN, AND GHOSTS.  Stories.  16mo, $1.50.<BR>
+HEDGED IN.  16mo, $1.50.<BR>
+THE SILENT PARTNER.  16mo, $1.50.<BR>
+THE STORY OF AVIS.  16mo, $1.50; paper, 50 cents.<BR>
+SEALED ORDERS, and Other Stories.  16mo, $1.50.<BR>
+FRIENDS: A Duet.  16mo, $1.25; paper, 50 cents.<BR>
+DOCTOR ZAY.  16mo, $1.25; paper, 50 cents.<BR>
+AN OLD MAID'S PARADISE, and BURGLARS IN PARADISE.  16mo, $1.23.<BR>
+THE MASTER OF THE MAGICIANS.  Collaborated with HERBERT D. WARD.  16mo, $1.25; paper, 50 cents.<BR>
+COME FORTH!  Collaborated with HERBERT D. WARD.  16mo, $1.25; paper, 50 cents.<BR>
+FOURTEEN TO ONE.  Short Stories.  16mo, $1.25.<BR>
+DONALD MARCY.  16mo, $1.25.<BR>
+A SINGULAR LIFE.  A Novel.  16mo, $1.25.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent" ALIGN="center">
+The above 16 volumes, uniform, $21.50.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+THE SUPPLY AT ST. AGATHA'S.  Illustrated.  Square  12mo, $1.00.<BR>
+THE MADONNA OF THE TUBS.  Illustrated.  12mo, $1.50.<BR>
+THE SAME.  Square 12mo, boards, 75 cents.<BR>
+JACK THE FISHERMAN.  Illustrated.  Square 12mo, boards, 50 cents.<BR>
+THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY.  Essays.  16mo, $1.25.<BR>
+THE TROTTY BOOK.  Illustrated.  Square 16mo, $1.25.<BR>
+TROTTY'S WEDDING TOUR AND STORY BOOK.  With Illustrations.  Square 16mo, $1.25.<BR>
+WHAT TO WEAR?  16mo, $1.00.<BR>
+POETIC STUDIES.  Square 16mo, $1.50.<BR>
+SONGS OF THE SILENT WORLD.  With Portrait.  16mo, $1.25.<BR>
+CHAPTERS FROM A LIFE.  Illustrated.  12mo, $1.50<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent" ALIGN="center">
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,<BR>
+<BR>
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Supply at Saint Agatha's, by 
+Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
+
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+Project Gutenberg's The Supply at Saint Agatha's, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Supply at Saint Agatha's
+
+Author: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
+
+Illustrator: E. Boyd Smith
+             Marcia Oakes Woodbury
+
+Release Date: November 8, 2010 [EBook #34256]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SUPPLY AT SAINT AGATHA'S ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: "_The kneeling people lifted their wet faces ... But the
+chancel was empty_"]
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+SUPPLY AT SAINT AGATHA'S
+
+
+BY
+
+ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS
+
+
+
+
+_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_
+
+BY
+
+E. BOYD SMITH AND MARCIA OAKES WOODBURY
+
+
+
+
+
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
+
+The Riverside Press, Cambridge
+
+1896
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1896,
+
+BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WARD AND
+
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
+
+
+_All rights reserved._
+
+
+
+_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
+
+Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
+
+
+
+
+THE SUPPLY AT SAINT AGATHA'S.
+
+
+
+
+At the crossing of the old avenue with the stream of present traffic,
+in a city which, for obvious reasons, will not be identified by the
+writer of these pages, there stood--and still stands--the Church of
+Saint Agatha's.
+
+The church is not without a history, chiefly such as fashion and sect
+combine to record.  It is an eminent church, with a stately date upon
+its foundation stone, and a pew-list unsurpassed for certain qualities
+among the worshipers of the Eastern States.  Saint Agatha's has long
+been distinguished for three things, its money, its music, and its
+soundness.
+
+When the tax-list of the town is printed in the daily papers once a
+year, the wardens and the leading parishioners of Saint Agatha's stand
+far upwards in the score, and their names are traced by slow, grimy
+fingers of mechanics and strikers and socialists laboriously reading on
+Saturday nights.
+
+The choir of Saint Agatha's, as all the world knows, is superior.  Her
+soprano alone (a famous prima donna) would fill the house.  Women
+throng the aisles to hear the tenor, and musical critics, hat in hand,
+and pad on hat, drop in to report the anthem and the offertory for the
+Monday morning press.
+
+In ecclesiastical position, it is needless to add, Saint Agatha's has
+always been above reproach.  When did Saint Agatha's question a canon?
+When did she contend with a custom?  When did she criticise a creed?
+Why should she contest a tradition?  She accepts, she conforms, she
+prospers.
+
+In one particular Saint Agatha's has been thrust into an attitude of
+originality foreign to her taste.  Her leading men feel called upon
+occasionally to explain how the eternal feminine came--a little
+contrary to the fashion of our land--to be recognized in the name of
+the church.  Saint Agatha's first pastor, one should know, was a very
+young man of enthusiastic and unconventional temperament.  He did not
+live long enough to outgrow this--for a clergyman--unfortunate trend of
+nature, having died, full of dreams and visions, in the teeth of a
+lowering conflict with his wardens; but he lived long enough to carry
+the day and the name for a portion of his people who desired to call
+their church in honor of a sweet, though rich, old lady who had put her
+private fortune into their beautiful house of worship, and her warm
+heart into their future success.  It had befallen this dear old lady to
+bear the name of Agatha, which, for her sake,--and, of course, in due
+ecclesiastical remembrance of the strictly canonical saint of similar
+cognomen,--was accordingly bestowed upon the church.
+
+
+In the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and another numeral, which I
+am requested not to indicate, but I may not deny that it is a recent
+one, the popular rector of Saint Agatha's took a winter vacation.  He
+was an imposing and imperious man, full of years and honors, in the
+full sway of his professional fame, when he fell a victim, like any
+common person, to the grippe.
+
+In the attempt to recover from this vulgar malady, he was forced to
+observe that his select physician had drugged him, via an exclusive
+bronchitis, into a minister's sore throat, such as any ordinary country
+parson might develop for lack of an overcoat, or a fire in his bedroom.
+Without undue delay or reluctance, the rector of Saint Agatha's took
+ship for the south of France; and in the comfortable way in which such
+things are done in such quarters, the church was set trundling upon the
+wheels of a two-months' "supply."  This was managed so gracefully by
+the experienced vestry of Saint Agatha's that hardly a visible jar
+occurred in the parish machinery.  Many of the people did not know that
+their rector had gone until a canon from London sonorously filled the
+pulpit one Sunday morning.  A distinguished Middle State clergyman
+followed the next week; the West sent her brightest and best the
+succeeding Sunday; and so it went.
+
+Eminent variety easily occupied that sacred desk.  The wardens of St.
+Agatha's have but to say, Come, and he cometh who weigheth the honor of
+ministering in this aristocratic pulpit.  In brief, the most
+distinguished men in the denomination cordially supplied.  On the
+whole, perhaps the parish enjoyed their rector's vacation as much as he
+did.
+
+Now, upon the vestry there chanced at that time to be one man who was
+"different."  One does find such people even among the officers of
+fashionable churches.  This man (he was, by the way, a grand-nephew of
+the old lady who built the church when Saint Agatha's was an unendowed
+experiment) had occasional views not wholly in harmony with the policy
+of his brother officers; and, being himself a heavy rate-payer, was
+allowed, sometimes, by the courtesy of the majority,--when his notion
+was not really in bad form, you know,--to have his way.  He did not get
+it so often but that he was glad to make the most of it when he did;
+and when his turn came to control the supply for that Sunday with which
+this narrative has to do, he asked the privilege of being intrusted
+with the details of the business.  This request, as from a useful man
+of certain eccentricities, was indulgently granted; and thus there
+occurred the events which I am privileged to relate.
+
+
+It was just before Lent, and the winter had been a cold one.  One
+Friday evening in early March there came up, or came down, a drifting
+snow-storm.  It was bad enough in town, but in the suburbs it was
+worse, and in the country it was little less than dangerous to
+passengers through the wide, wind-swept streets, the choking lanes, and
+bitter moors.
+
+An old clergyman, the pastor of a scattered parish, sat in his study on
+that Friday night, and thanked God that the weekly evening service was
+over, and his day's work done.  He would have regretted being called
+out again that night, for he had got quite wet in walking to church and
+back, and the cold from which he had been suffering for a week past
+might not be benefited thereby.  This fact in itself was a matter of no
+concern, under ordinary conditions, to the old clergyman, who, being a
+lonely man in a forlorn country boarding-house, with nobody to take
+care of him, was accustomed to live under the shadow of a "common
+cold," and who paid no more attention to his own physical discomforts
+in the face of daily duty than he paid to the latest fashion in sable
+trimmings in the front pews at Saint Agatha's.  There was no fur
+trimming on his overcoat, which was seven years old and pitiably thin.
+But he had been invited to supply at Saint Agatha's next Sunday, and to
+that unexampled honor and opportunity he gave the pathetic
+attention--half personal pleasure, half religious fervor--of an
+overlooked and devout man.  In the course of a forty-years' ministry he
+had not been asked to preach in a city pulpit.  The event was
+tremendous to him.  He had been agitated by the invitation, which ran
+in some such way as this:
+
+[Illustration: "_He had been invited to supply at St. Agatha's_."]
+
+... "In closing, permit me to say, sir, that it would be agreeable to
+us to welcome among us the grandson of our first pastor, that young
+rector who died in the bud of his youth and Christian originality.  The
+fact of your ancestry will give to your presence a peculiar interest
+for our people at large.  But I beg to be allowed to add on behalf of
+the committee, that certain qualities in yourself and in your own work
+have led us to believe that you may exert positive influences upon us
+of which we stand in need.  In your remote and rural parish your life
+has not passed unobserved.  Your labors as a pastor, and your methods
+of preaching, have been an object of study to some of us.  We have come
+to rate you, sir, as one of the men of God.  There are not many.  In
+meeting with our people, the writer personally hopes that you may be
+able to teach us something of the secret of your own happy and
+successful experience as a minister of Christ our Lord." ...
+
+
+The old clergyman sat with his feet upon the base of his little
+cylinder coal-stove.  His thin ankles shrank in the damp stockings
+which he had not been able to change since he came in out of the storm,
+because, owing to some personal preference of the laundress, he could
+not find any dry ones.  His worn slippers flapped upon his cold feet
+when he moved.  But he had on his flowered dressing-gown of ancient
+pattern and rustic cut; his high arm-chair was cushioned in chintz and
+excelsior behind his aching head; the green paper shade was on his
+study-lamp; his best-beloved books (for the old saint was a student)
+lay within reach upon the table; piled upon them were his manuscript
+sermons; and he sighed with the content of a man who feels himself to
+be, although unworthy, in the loving arms of luxury.  A rap at the door
+undeceived him.  His landlady put in her withered face.
+
+"Sir," she said, "the widder Peek's a-dying.  It's just like her to
+take a night like this--but she's sent for you.  I must say I don't
+call you fit to go."
+
+"A man is always fit to do his duty," said the old clergyman, rising.
+"I will go at once.  Did she send--any--conveyance?"
+
+"Catch her!" retorted the landlady.  "Why, she hain't had the town
+water let in yet--and she wuth her fifteen thousand dollars; nor she
+won't have no hired girl to do for her, not that none of 'em will stay
+along of her a week, and Dobson's boy 's at the door, a drippin' and
+cussin' to get you, for he 's nigh snowed under.  She 's a wuthless old
+heathen miser, the widder Peek."
+
+"Then there is every reason why I should not neglect her," replied the
+clergyman, in his authoritative, clerical voice.  "Pray call the lad in
+from the weather, and tell him I will accompany him at once."
+
+He did look about his study sadly while he was making ready to leave
+it.  The fire in the base-burner was quite warm, now, and his wet,
+much-darned stockings were beginning to dry.  The room looked sheltered
+and pleasant; his books ran to the ceiling, though his floor was
+covered with straw matting, with odd pieces of woolen carpet for rugs;
+his carpet-covered lounge was wheeled out of the draft; his lamp with
+the green shade made a little circle of light and coziness; his Bible
+and prayer-book lay open within it, beside the pile of sermons.  He had
+meant to devote the evening to the agreeable duty of selecting his
+discourse for Saint Agatha's.  His mind and his heart were brimming
+over with the excitement of that great event.  He would have liked to
+concentrate and consecrate his thoughts upon it that evening.  As he
+went, coughing, into the cold entry, it occurred to him that the spot
+in his lung was more painful than he had supposed; but he pulled his
+old cap over his ears, and his thin overcoat up to meet it, and tramped
+out cheerfully into the storm.
+
+"Well, well, my lad!" he said in his warm-hearted way to Dobson's boy;
+"I 'm sorry for you that you have to be out a night like this."
+
+The boy spoke of this afterwards, and remembered it long--for a boy.
+But at the time he did but stare.  He stopped grumbling, however, and
+plunged on into the drifts, ahead of the old rector, kicking a path for
+him to right and left in the wet, packed snow; for the widow Peek lived
+at least a mile away, and the storm was now become a virulent thing.
+
+What passed between the unloved, neglected, dying parishoner and her
+pastor was not known to any but themselves, nor is there witness now to
+testify thereof.  Neither does it in any way concern the record of this
+narrative, except as the least may concern the largest circumstance in
+human story.  For, in view of what came to pass, it is impossible not
+to put the old, judicial question: Did it pay?  Was it worth while?
+When the miser's soul went out, at midnight, on the wings and the rage
+of that blind, black storm, did it pass gently, a subdued, forgiven
+spirit, humble to learn how to live again, for Christ's sake and his
+who gave himself--as his Master had before him--to comfort and to save?
+Did it pay?  _Do_ such things pay?  God knows.  But as long as men do
+not know, there will always be found a few among them who will elect to
+disregard the doubt, to wear the divinity of uncalculating sacrifice,
+and to pay its price.
+
+For the soul of the widow Peek the price was large, looked at in our
+mathematical way; for, when the old clergyman, having shrived her soul
+and closed her eyes, started to come home at one o'clock of the
+morning, the storm had become a malignant force.  Already wet through
+and through his thin coats and worn flannels, weak from the exposure,
+the watching, and the scene of death, every breath a sword athwart his
+inflamed lungs, with fire in his brain, and ice at his heart, he
+staggered against the blizzard.
+
+Dobson's boy had long since sought the shelter of his own home, and the
+old man was quite unattended.  True, the neighbor who watched with the
+dead woman suggested that he remain till morning; but the widow Peek's
+house was cold (she was always especially "near" about fuel), and he
+thought it more prudent to get back to his own stove and his bed.
+
+Whether he lost his way; whether he crossed and recrossed it, wandering
+from it in the dark and drift; whether he fell and lay in the snow for
+a time, and rose again, and staggered on, and fell again, and so pushed
+on again, cannot be known.  It is only known that at half-past two on
+Saturday morning his landlady put her wrinkled face out of the window,
+for the twentieth time, in search of him (for she had a thought for him
+in her own hard-featured way), and saw him fallen, and feebly trying to
+crawl on his hands and knees up the drifted steps.
+
+She got him in to his warm study, past the chair where the flowered
+dressing-gown and old slippers awaited him, and as far as the
+carpet-covered lounge, Beyond this he could not be taken.
+
+By morning the whole parish rang the door-bell; the hands and hearts
+and horses, the purses, the nurses, the doctors, the watchers, the
+tears, and the prayers of the village, were his--for he was dearly
+beloved and cherished in that parish.  But he lay on his old lounge in
+his study among his books, and asked of them nothing at all.  The
+kerosene lamp, behind its green shade, went out; and the Bible, with
+the pile of sermons on the table, looked large in the snow-light of a
+day when the storm ceases without sun.  He did not talk; but his
+thoughts were yet alive.  He remembered Saint Agatha's, and the sermon
+which he was to preach to-morrow.  He knew that not one of his people
+(ignorant of such matters) would understand how to get word to the city
+vestry.  He tried to give directions, but his voice refused his
+bidding.  He knew that he would be supposed to have failed to meet his
+appointment, perhaps to have been thwarted--a rural clergyman, old and
+timorous, baffled in an important professional engagement--by a little
+snow.  He was to have taken the evening train.  He was to be the guest
+of the vestryman who wrote that pleasant letter.  He was to preach in
+Saint Agatha's to-morrow.  He was to--
+
+Nay,--he was not,--nay.  He was to do none of these things.  A sick
+man, mortally a sick man, past power of speech, he lay upon his carpet
+lounge, shivering under the pile of thin blankets and cotton comforters
+that had been wrapped around him, and gently faced his fate.  He could
+not preach at Saint Agatha's.  And he could not explain to the vestry.
+Perhaps his heart-sickness about this matter subsided a little--one
+likes to think so--as his disease grew upon him; but there are men who
+will understand me when I say that this was the greatest disappointment
+of his humble, holy life.
+
+As Saturday night drew on, and the stars came out, he was heard to make
+such efforts to speak articulately, that one of his weeping people (an
+affectionate woman of a brighter wit than the rest) made out, as she
+bent lovingly over him, to understand so much as this:
+
+"Lord," he said, "into thy hands I commit my s-p--"
+
+"He commits his spirit to the Lord!" sobbed the landlady.
+
+But the listening parishioner raised her finger to her lips.
+
+"Lord," he said again, and this time the dullest ear in the parish
+could have heard the words--"Lord," he prayed, "into thy hands I
+commit--my supply."
+
+
+Sunday morning broke upon the city as cold and clear as the sword of a
+rebuking angel.  People on the way to the West End churches exchanged
+notes on the thermometer, and talked of the destitution of the poor.
+It was so cold that the ailing and the aged for the most part stayed at
+home.  But the young, the _ennuye_, the imitative, and the soul-sick,
+got themselves into their furs and carriages when the chimes rang, and
+the audiences were, on the whole, as comfortable and as devout as usual.
+
+The vestryman sat nervously in his pew.  He had not fully recovered
+from the fact that his supply had disappointed him.  Having sent his
+coachman in vain to all the Saturday evening trains to meet his country
+parson, the vestryman had passed but an uneasy night.
+
+"I had supposed the old man had principles about Sunday travel," he
+said to his wife, "but it seems he is coming in the morning, after all.
+He might at least have sent me word."
+
+"Telegraphing in the country is--difficult, sometimes, I have heard,"
+replied the lady, vaguely.  She was a handsome, childless woman, with
+the haughty under lip of her class.  Her husband spoke cheerily, but he
+was not at ease, and she did not know how to make him so.
+
+The Sunday morning train came in from the country station forty miles
+back, but the old clergyman was not among its passengers.  Now
+thoroughly alarmed, the vestryman had started for his hat and coat,
+when his parlor-maid brought him a message.  It had been left at the
+door, she said, by a messenger who brooked neither delay nor question,
+but ordered her to tell the master of the house that the supply for
+Saint Agatha's was in the city, and would meet the engagement at the
+proper time and place.  The old clergyman, the messenger added, had
+been suddenly stricken with a dangerous illness, and could not be
+expected; but his substitute would fill the pulpit for the day.  The
+vestryman was requested to feel no concern in the matter.  The preacher
+preferred retirement until the hour of the service, and would fulfil
+his duties at the church at the appointed hour.
+
+But when the vestryman, feeling flurried despite himself, tapped at the
+door of the luxurious vestry-room, gracefully refurnished that winter
+for the rector with the sore throat who was in the south of France, he
+found it locked; and to his unobtrusive knock no answer came.  At this
+uncomfortable moment the sexton tiptoed up to say that the supply had
+requested not to be disturbed until the service should begin.  The
+sexton supposed that the clergyman needed extra preparation; thought
+that perhaps the gentleman was from the country, and--ah--unused to the
+audience.
+
+"What is his name?  What does he look like?" asked the chairman, with
+knotted brows.
+
+"I have not seen him sir," replied the sexton, with a puzzled
+expression.
+
+"How did you receive the message?"
+
+"By a messenger who would not be delayed or questioned."
+
+Struck by the repetition of this phrase, the chairman asked again:
+
+"But what did the messenger look like?"  The sexton shook his head.
+
+"I cannot tell you, sir.  He was a mere messenger.  I paid no attention
+to him."
+
+"Very well," said the church officer, turning away discontentedly.  "It
+must be all right.  I have implicit confidence in the man whose chosen
+substitute this is."
+
+With this he ceased to try to intrude himself upon the stranger, but
+went down to his pew, and sat beside his wife in uneasy silence.
+
+The chimes sang and sank, and sang again:
+
+  Holy, holy, holy--
+
+
+The air was so clear that the sound rang twice the usual distance
+through the snowlit, sunlit air; and the sick and the old at home
+listened to the bells with a sudden stirring at their feeble hearts,
+and wished again that they could have gone to church.  One bed-ridden
+woman, whose telephone connected her with Saint Agatha's, held the
+receiver to her sensitive ear, and smiled with the quick gratitude for
+trifling pleasures of the long sick, as she recognized the notes of the
+chime.  With a leap and a thrill as if they cast their metal souls out
+in the act, the voices of the bells rose and swelled, and ceased and
+slept, and where they paused the anthem took the word up:
+
+  Holy, holy--
+
+and carried it softly, just above the breath, with the tone which is
+neither a sigh, nor a cry, nor a whisper, but that harmony of all which
+makes of music prayer.
+
+He must have entered on the wave of this strain; opinions differed
+afterwards as to this: some said one thing, some another; but it was
+found that most of the audience had not observed the entrance of the
+preacher at all.  The choir ceased, and he was; and no more could be
+said.  The church was well filled, though not over-crowded, and the
+decorous rustle of a fashionable audience in the interval preceding
+worship stirred through the house.
+
+In the natural inattention of the moment, it was not remarkable that
+most of the people failed to notice the strange preacher until he was
+among them.
+
+But to the church officer, whose mind was preoccupied with the supply,
+there was something almost startling in the manner of his approach.
+
+The vestryman's uneasy eyes were not conscious of having slipped their
+guard upon the chancel for a moment; he had but turned his head
+politely, though a bit impatiently, to reply to some trivial remark of
+his wife's, when, behold, the preacher stood before him.
+
+Afterwards it was rumored that two or three persons in the audience had
+not been taken by surprise in this way, but had fully observed the
+manner of the stranger's entrance; yet these persons, when they were
+sought, were difficult to find.  There was one shabby woman who sat in
+the gallery among the "poor" seats; she was clad in rusty mourning, and
+had a pale and patient face, quite familiar to the audience, for she
+was a faithful church-goer, and had attended Saint Agatha's for many
+years.  It came to be said, through the sexton's gossip or otherwise,
+that this poor woman had seen the preacher's approach quite clearly,
+and had been much moved thereat; but when some effort was made to find
+her, and to question her on this point, unexpected obstacles
+arose,--she was an obscure person, serving in some menial capacity for
+floating employers; she was accustomed to slip in and out of the church
+hurriedly, both late and early,--and nothing of importance was added
+from this quarter to the general interest which attended the
+eccentricities of the supply.
+
+The stranger was a man a trifle above the ordinary height, of majestic
+mien and carriage, and with the lofty head that indicates both
+fearlessness and purity of nature.  As he glided to his place behind
+the lectern, a hush struck the frivolous audience, as if it had been
+smitten by an angel's wing: such power is there in noble novelty, and
+in the authority of a high heart.
+
+When had the similar of this preacher led the service in that venerable
+and fashionable house of worship?  In what past years had his
+counterpart served them?
+
+Whom did he resemble of the long line of eminent clerical teachers with
+whose qualities this elect people was familiar?  What had been his
+history, his ecclesiastical position, his social connections?
+
+It was characteristic of the audience that this last question was first
+in the minds of a large proportion of the worshipers.  Whence came he?
+His name?  His titles?  What was his professional reputation--his
+theology?  What were his views on choirboys, confessionals, and
+candles--on mission chapels and the pauperizing of the poor?
+
+These inquiries swept through the inner consciousness of the audience
+in the first moment of his appearance.  But in the second, neither
+these nor any other paltry queries fretted the smallest soul before him.
+
+The stranger must have had an impressive countenance; yet afterwards it
+was found that no two descriptions of it agreed.  Some said this thing,
+some said that.  To this person he appeared a gentle, kindly man with a
+persuasive manner; to that, he looked majestic and commanding.  There
+were some who spoke of an authoritative severity in the eye which he
+turned upon them; but these were not many.  There were those who
+murmured that they had melted beneath the tenderness of his glance, as
+snow before the sun; and such were more.  As to the features of his
+face, men differed, as spectators are apt to do about the lineaments of
+extraordinary countenances.  What was the color of his eyes, the
+contour of his lips, the shape of his brow?  Who could say?
+Conflicting testimony arrived at no verdict.  In two respects alone
+opinions agreed about the face of this man: it commanded, and it shone;
+it had authority and light.  The shrewdest heresy-hunter in the
+congregation would not have dared question this clergyman's theology,
+or the tendencies of his ritualistic views.  The veriest pharisee in
+the audience quailed before the blinding brilliance of the preacher's
+face.  It was a moral fire.  It ate into the heart.  Sin and shame
+shriveled before it.
+
+One might say that all this was apparent in the preacher before he had
+spoken a word.  When he had opened his lips these impressions were
+intensified.  He began in the usual way to read the usual prayers, and
+to conduct the service as was expected of him.  Nothing eccentric was
+observable in his treatment of the preliminaries of the occasion.  The
+fashionable choir, accustomed to dictate the direction of the music,
+met with no interference from the clergyman.  He announced the hymns
+and anthems that had been selected quite in the ordinary manner; and
+the critics of the great dailies took the usual notes of the musical
+programme.  In fact, up to the time of the sermon, nothing out of the
+common course occurred.
+
+But having said this, one must qualify.  Was it nothing out of the
+common course that the congregation in Saint Agatha's should sit as the
+people sat that day, bond-slaves before the enunciation of the familiar
+phrases in the morning's confession?
+
+"What a voice!" whispered the wife of the vestryman.  But her husband
+answered her not a word.  Pale, agitated, with strained eyes uplifted,
+and nervous hands knotted together, he leaned towards the stranger.  At
+the first articulate sentence from the pulpit, he knew that the success
+of his supply was secured.
+
+What a voice indeed!  It melted through the great house like burning
+gold.  The heart ran after it as fire runs through metal.  Once or
+twice in a generation one may hear the liturgy read like that--perhaps.
+In a lifetime no longer to be counted short, the vestryman had heard
+nothing that resembled it.
+
+"Thank God!" he murmured.  He put his hat before his face.  He had not
+realized before what a strain he had endured.  Cold drops stood upon
+his brow.  He shook with relief.  From that moment he felt no more
+concern about the service than if he had engaged one of the sons of God
+to "supply."
+
+"Are you faint?" asked his wife in a tone of annoyance.  She offered
+him her smelling-salts.
+
+
+Had there existed stenographic records of that sermon, this narrative,
+necessarily so defective, would have no occasion for its being.  One of
+the most interesting things about the whole matter is that no such
+records can to-day be found.  Reporters certainly were in the gallery.
+The journals had sent their picked men as usual, and no more.  Where,
+then, were their columns of verbal record?  Why has so important a
+discourse gone afloat upon vague, conflicting rumor?  No person knows;
+the reporters least of all.  One, it is said, lost his position for the
+default of that report; others received the severest rebukes of their
+experience from their managing editors for the same cause.  None had
+any satisfactory reason to give for his failure.
+
+"I forgot," said he who lost his position for his boyish excuse.  "All
+I can say, sir, is I forgot.  The man swept me away.  I forgot that
+such a paper as 'The Daily Gossip' existed.  Other matters," he added
+with expensive candor, "seemed more important at the time."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"When the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?"
+
+The stranger announced this not unusual text with the simple manner of
+a man who promised nothing eccentric in the sermon to come.  Yet
+something in the familiar words arrested attention.  The phrase, as it
+was spoken, seemed less a hackneyed biblical quotation than a pointed
+personal question to which each heart in the audience-room was
+compelled to respond.
+
+The preacher began quietly.  He reminded his hearers in a few words of
+the true nature of the Christian religion, whose interests he was there
+to represent.  One felt that he spoke with tact, and with the kind of
+dignity belonging to the enthusiast of a great moral movement.  It
+occurred to one, perhaps for the first time, that it was quite manly in
+a Christian preacher to plead his cause with as much ardor as the
+reformer, the philanthropist, the politician, or the devotee of a
+mystical and fashionable cult.  One became really interested in the
+character and aims of the Christian faith; it did not fall below the
+dignity of a Browning society, or a study in theosophy or hypnotism.
+The attention of the audience--from the start definitely
+respectful--became reverent, and thus absorbed.
+
+It was not until he had his hearers thoroughly in his power that the
+preacher's manner underwent the remarkable change of which Saint
+Agatha's talks in whispers to this day.  He spoke entirely without
+manuscript or note, and he had not left the lectern.  Suddenly folding
+his hands upon the great Bible, he paused, and, as if the audience had
+been one man, he looked it in the eye.
+
+Then, like the voice of the living God, his words began to smite them.
+What was the chancel of Saint Agatha's?  The great white throne?  And
+who was he who dared to cry from it, like the command of the Eternal?
+Sin!  Sinners!  Shame!  Guilt!  Disgrace!  Punishment!  What words were
+these for the delicate ears of Saint Agatha's?  What had these silken
+ladies and gilded men to do with such ugly phrases?  Smiles stiffened
+upon refined, protesting faces.  The haughty under lip of the
+vestryman's wife, and a hundred others like it, dropped.  A moral
+dismay seized the exclusive people whom the preacher called to account
+like any vulgar audience.  But the shabby woman in the "poor" seats
+humbly wept, and the young reporter who lost his position cast his eyes
+upon the ground, for the tears that sprang to them.  From the delicate
+fingers of the vestryman's wife the smelling-salts fell upon the
+cushioned seat; she held her feathered fan against her face.  Her
+husband did not even notice this.  He sat with head bowed upon the rail
+before him, as a good man does when reconsecrating himself at the
+communion hour.
+
+The choir rustled uneasily in their seats.  The soprano covered her
+eyes with her well-gloved hand, and thought of the follies and regrets
+(she called them by these names) that beset the musical temperament.
+But the tenor turned his face away, and thought about his wife.  Down
+the avenue, in the room of the "shut-in" woman, where the telephone
+carried the preacher's voice, a pathetic cry was heard:
+
+"Forgive!  Forgive!  Oh, if suffering had but made me better!"
+
+But now the preacher's manner of address had changed again.  Always
+remembering that it is now impossible to quote his language with any
+accuracy, we may venture to say that it ran in some such way as this:
+
+The Son of God, being of the Father, performed his Father's business.
+What do ye who bear his name?  What holy errands are ye about?  What
+miracles of consecration have ye wrought?  What marvels of the soul's
+life have ye achieved upon the earth since he left it to your trust?
+
+He came to the sinful and the unhappy; the despised and rejected were
+his friends; to the poor he preached the Gospel; the sick, and
+overlooked, and cast-out, the unloved and forgotten, the unfashionable
+and unpopular, he selected.  These to his church on earth he left in
+charge.  These he cherished.  For such he had lived.  For them he had
+suffered.  For them he died.  People of Saint Agatha's, where are they?
+What have ye done to his beloved?  Thou ancient church, honored and
+privileged and blessed among men, where are those little ones whom thy
+Master chose?  Up and down these godly aisles a man might look, he
+said, and see them not.  Prosperity and complacency he saw before him;
+poverty and humility he did not see.  In the day when habit cannot
+reply for duty, what account will ye give of your betrayed trust?  Will
+ye say: "Lord, we had a mission chapel.  The curate is responsible for
+the lower classes.  And, Lord, we take up the usual collections; Saint
+Agatha's has always been called a generous church"?
+
+In the startled hush that met these preposterous words the preacher
+drew himself to his full height, and raised his hand.  He had worn the
+white gown throughout the day's services, and the garment folded itself
+about his figure majestically.  In the name of Christ, then, he
+commanded them: Where were those whom their Lord did love?  Go, seek
+them.  Go, find the saddest, sickest souls in all the town.  Hasten,
+for the time is short.  Search, for the message is of God.  Church of
+Christ, produce his people to me, for I speak no more words before
+their substitutes!
+
+Thus and there, abruptly, the preacher cast his audience from him, and
+disappeared from the chancel.  The service broke in consternation.  The
+celebrated choir was not called upon to close the morning's worship.
+The soprano and the tenor exchanged glances of neglected dismay.  The
+prayer-book remained unopened on the sacred desk.  The desk itself was
+empty.  The audience was, in fact, authoritatively dismissed--dismissed
+without a benediction, like some obscure or erring thing that did not
+deserve it.
+
+The people stared in one another's faces for an astounded moment, and
+then, without words, with hanging heads, they moved to the open air and
+melted out of the church.
+
+The sexton rushed up to the vestryman, pale with fear.
+
+"Sir," he whispered, "he is not in the vestry-room.  He has taken
+himself away--God knows whither.  What are we to do?"
+
+"Trust him," replied the church officer, with a face of peace, "and God
+who sent him.  Who he may be, I know no more than you; but that he is a
+man of God I know.  He is about his Father's business.  Do not meddle
+with it."
+
+"Lord forbid!" cried the sexton.  "I'd sooner meddle with something I
+can understand."
+
+Upon the afternoon of that long-remembered Sunday there was seen in
+Saint Agatha's the strangest sight that those ancient walls had
+witnessed since the corner-stone was laid with a silver trowel in the
+name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost "whom we, this
+people, worship."
+
+Before the chimes rang for the vesper service, the house was filled.
+Before the bronze lips of the bells were mute, the pews were packed.
+Before the stranger reappeared, the nave and the transept overflowed.
+The startled sexton was a leaf before the wind of the surging crowd.
+He could not even enforce the fire-laws, and the very aisles were
+jammed.  Who carried the story?  How do such wraiths of rumors fly?
+
+Every member of that church not absent from town or known to be ill in
+his bed sought his pew that afternoon.  Many indeed left their
+sick-rooms to be present at that long-remembered service.  But no man
+or woman of these came alone.  Each brought a chosen companion; many,
+two or three; some came accompanied by half a dozen worshipers: and
+upon these invited guests Saint Agatha's looked with an astonishment
+that seemed to be half shame; for up those velvet aisles there moved an
+array of human faces at which the very angels and virtues in the
+painted windows seemed to turn their heads and stare.
+
+Such wretchedness, such pallor, hunger, cold, envy, sickness, sin, and
+shame were as unknown to those dedicated and decorated walls as the
+inmates of hell.  Rags and disease, uncleanliness and woe and want,
+trod the house of God as if they had the right there.  Every pew in the
+church was thrown open.  Tattered blanket shawls jostled velvet cloaks,
+and worn little tan-colored reefers, half concealing the shivering
+cotton blouses of last summer, rubbed against sealskin furs that swept
+from throat to foot.  Wretched men, called in by the throb of
+repentance that follows a debauch, lifted their haggard eyes to the
+chancel from the pews of the wardens, and women of the town sat gently
+beside the "first ladies" of the parish and of the city.  There were a
+few ragged children in the audience, wan and shrewd, sitting drearily
+beside mothers to whom they did not cling.  The pew of our friend, the
+vestryman, was filled to overflowing.  The wife with the under lip sat
+beside him, and did not protest.  She had herself gone with him to the
+hospital to select their guests.  For their pew was filled with the
+crippled and other sick who could neither walk nor afford to ride, and
+whom their own carriage had brought to Saint Agatha's.  One of these, a
+woman, came on crutches, and the lady helped her, not knowing in the
+least how to do it; and a man who had not used his feet for six years
+was lifted in by the pew-owner and his coachman and butler, and carried
+the length of the broad aisle.
+
+The church, as we say, was packed long before the preacher appeared.
+He came punctually to his appointment, like any ordinary man.  It was
+mid-afternoon, and the sun was declining when he glided across the
+chancel.  Already shadows were lying heavily in the corners of the
+church and under the galleries on the darker side.  A few lights were
+glimmering about the chancel, but these served only to illuminate the
+stranger's form and face; they did not lighten the mass of hushed and
+appealing humanity before him.
+
+The choir, with bowed heads, just above the breath, began to chant:
+
+  Who shall lay anything to the charge
+  Of God's Elect?
+  It is God that justifieth,
+  It is Christ that died.
+
+While they sang the preacher stood quite still and looked at the
+people, that strange and motley mass, the rich and the poor, the sick
+and the well, the disgraced and the reputable, the pampered and the
+starving, the shameful and the clean of life, the happy and the
+wretched together.  When the singing ceased, he spoke as if he talked
+right on; he read no prayers; he turned to no ritual; he did not even
+use the great Bible of Saint Agatha's--but only spoke in a quiet way,
+like a man who continues a thought begun:
+
+"For the Lord," he said, "is the maker of you all."
+
+There was no sermon in Saint Agatha's that afternoon.  Ecclesiastically
+speaking, there was no service.  But the preacher spoke to the people;
+and their hearts hung upon his words.  But what those words were no man
+may tell us at this day.
+
+It has been whispered, indeed, that what he said took different
+meanings to the members of that strange audience.  Each heart received
+its own message.  Wide as the earth were the gulfs between those
+hearers.  But the preacher's message bridged them all.  From his
+quivering lip and melting voice each soul drank the water of life.
+Afterwards each kept its own secret, and told not of that thirst, or of
+its assuaging.
+
+"He speaks to me," sighed the patrician, with bowed head.  "How happens
+this, for I thought no man did know that inner history?  I have never
+told"--
+
+"To me!  To me!" sobbed the pauper and the castaway--"the preacher
+speaks to me.  My misery, my shame--the whole world knows, but no man
+ever understood before."
+
+The afternoon waned.  The shadows deepened under the galleries.  The
+great house clung like one child to the voice of the preacher.  It was
+as still as the courts of Heaven when a soul is pardoned.  The stranger
+spoke in a low but penetrating voice.  Not a word was lost by the
+remotest.  He spoke of the love of God the Father, and of the life of
+Christ the Son.  He spoke of sin and of forgiveness, of sorrow, of
+shame, and of peace.  He spoke of sacrifice, of patience, of purity,
+and of hope, and of the eternal life.
+
+Not once did he allude to the petty differences among the people who
+sat bowed and breathless before him.  Such paltry things as riches or
+poverty, or position, or obscurity, he did not recognize.  He spoke to
+men and women, the children of God.  He spoke to sinners and to
+sufferers, and to patient saints; he said nothing about "classes;" he
+talked of human beings; he rebuked them for their sins; he comforted
+them for their miseries; he smote their hearts; he shook their souls;
+he passed over their lives as conflagration passes, burning to ashes,
+purifying to new growth.
+
+As he spoke, the manner of his countenance changed before them, like
+that of any great and holy man who is charged with the burden of souls,
+and who persuadeth them.  A fine, inner light glowed through his
+features, as a sacred lamp glows through alabaster or some exquisite
+shell.  His plaintive lip trembled.  His deep eyes burned and
+retreated, as if they veiled themselves.  An expression dazzling to
+behold settled upon his face.  His white garment gathered light, and
+shone.  Suddenly pausing, he stretched forth his hands.  What delicate
+arrangement of the chancel lamps illuminated them?  It was noticed by
+many, and spoken of afterwards below the breath.  For, as he raised
+them in benediction upon the people, there scintillated from the palms
+a light.  Some said that it was reflected from the radiance of the
+man's face.  Some said that it had another cause.  Only this is sure:
+when he did uplift his hands to bless them, all the people fell upon
+their knees before him.
+
+It was now almost dark in the church, and no man could see his
+neighbor's face.  The choir, on their knees, began to sing, "Holy,
+holy, holy"--  When their voices fell, the preacher's rose:
+
+"And now may the grace of God the Father, and the love of Jesus Christ
+his Son, your Lord, and the peace of the Holy Spirit, be upon you; for
+there is Life Eternal; and God is the Light thereof; whose children ye
+are forever.  Amen, and Amen."
+
+His voice ceased.  The hush that followed it was broken only by sobs.
+
+The electric lights sprang out all over the church.  In the sudden
+brilliance the kneeling people lifted their wet faces to the
+stranger's, thinking to catch a last sight of him for life-long
+treasure.
+
+But the chancel was empty.  As silently, as strangely, as he had come,
+the preacher had gone.  It was the fashion of the man.  Such was his
+will.  He was never seen at Saint Agatha's again; nor, though his name
+and fame were widely sought, were they ever learned by any.
+
+The great, strange crowd of worshipers melted mutely away.  No man
+spoke to his neighbor; each was busy with the secret of his own soul.
+The sick returned to their sufferings; the bereaved to their
+loneliness; the poor to their struggles; the rich to their pleasures;
+the erring to their temptations; and God went with them.
+
+Down the avenue, in the room of the life-long invalid, the receiver
+fell from a woman's shaking hand.  All these--all they, the saddest,
+the sorest, of them all--had been preferred before her.
+
+"Oh, to have seen his face!" she cried.  She held her thin hands before
+her eyes.  Then, flashing by that inner light which burns in the brain
+of the sensitive sick, the face of the stranger swam before her for an
+instant--and was not; for she had recognized it.
+
+[Illustration: "_The face of the stranger swam before her_"]
+
+
+In the Monday morning's paper, the vestryman of Saint Agatha's observed
+a line or two of obituary notice tucked away in one of the spaces
+reserved for the obscure.  It set forth the fact that the old clergyman
+who had failed to meet his appointment died on Sunday morning, of
+pneumonia, after a brief illness, aged seventy-two.
+
+
+
+
+  Books by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.
+      (MRS. WARD.)
+
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+
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+
+
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