And meanwhile, let us have faith too for those who cannot yet feel this attractive power as we, perhaps, have known it. In the Fourth Gospel the Master tells his disciples that he has other sheep who are not of this fold; we may picture his thought as going out to far-off lands where men were striving to do their duty or to find the truth without any knowledge of him, without any intellectual knowledge of God perhaps; some legionary guarding the peace of the empire at the gates of the North, some Roman government official upholding the dignity and justice of the law amongst jealous robber tribes and unscrupulous traders, some Greek philosopher seeking to know a yet higher law, and simple men and women practising it unknown to themselves; or, further away in the far-off East, the Buddhist missionary teaching the worth of gentleness and mercy, or the disciple of Confucius learning to reverence the great moral truths he knew, and to apply them [p.134] in all life's relations. Some day all these should hear his voice; already they were his sheep. And so to-day, wherever the lonely thinker spends his hours in seeking, and the servant of science unselfishly gives up all thought of personal advancement and delight in the pursuit of truth, wherever in the politics of towns or peoples men seek to work out a higher form of public life, or in business as in leisure to be faithful not merely to their own interests, but to a wider ideal, we must see the seekers and servants of good, who are God's servants too. Sooner or later for these too will be fulfilled the words: "Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed." CHAPTER IX.: THE HOUSE OF PEACE. THE sense of ancient peace, the quiet beauty of the ruined abbeys which Turner and many a lesser artist loved to paint, must often have come home to many who visit them, who have no knowledge of architecture and little thought for history. But, even with these passers by, something of their interest in the old ruin is perhaps due to the thought of the life which was lived there in the days gone by. Less worthy traditions have marred the glory of the earlier days, and dimmed the recollection of the long struggle with nature, the hardships of a simple, self-denying life, the toil of the scholar and the conflicts of the saint, but as we look at the broken pillars and the silent aisles and arches where once the music of men's chanting rose and fell, we feel that it is not only the thought of the vanished greatness that moves us, but the sense that this was a place where prayer was wont to be made. We try to picture to our selves sometimes the life of mediaeval England, and how these ruins were once places living and vibrating with thought and spiritual effort, centres [p.136] from which pulsed out many a good influence to uplift the lives of men.