“You remember Sheepskin,” he went on, “the old vicar? The Reverend Horace Pendergast has got the job now. He’s a cousin of Eleanor’s--rattling good preacher. We’re hoping to make him a bishop. I went to see the old man once, when I was a youngster, to arrange about my uncle’s funeral, and he threw me in a sermon. I don’t know why--I wasn’t worrying much about religion in those days--but I can still see his round, pink, puzzled face and his little fat hands that trembled as he talked. It was near Christmas time--Christ’s birthday; and all that he could think about, he told me, were the Christmas bills and how to meet them. It wasn’t his fault. How can a respectable married man be a Christian? ‘How can I preach Christ?’--there were tears in his eyes. ‘Christ the outcast, the beggar, the servant of the poor, the bearer of the Cross.’ That’s what he had started out to preach. The people would only have laughed at him. He lives in a big house, they would have said, and keeps four servants and a gig. His sons go to college, and his wife and daughters wear rich garments. ‘Struggle enough I find it, Strong’nth’arm,’ he confessed to me. ‘But I ought not to be struggling to do it. I ought to be down among the people, preaching Christ, not only with my lips but with my life.’ It isn’t talkers for God, it is fighters for God that are wanted. Men who are not afraid of the world!” The daylight had faded. Betty had pushed the table into a corner. They sat beside the blazing logs. “Some years ago,” said Betty, “I travelled from San Francisco to Hong Kong in company with a Chinese gentleman. It was during the off-season, and half a dozen of us had the saloon to ourselves. There were two commercial travellers and a young missionary and his wife. By process of natural selection--at least so I like to believe--Mr. Cheng and myself chummed on. He was one of the most interesting men I have met, and I think he liked talking to me. I remember one brilliantly clear night we were alone together on the deck. I was leaning back in my chair looking up at the Southern Cross. Suddenly I heard him say that the great stumbling block in the way of man’s progress was God. Coming from anybody else the remark would have irritated me; but I knew he wasn’t trying to be clever; and as he went on to explain himself I found myself in agreement with him. Man’s idea of God is of some all-powerful Being who is going to do everything for him. Man has no need to exert himself; God, moving in mysterious ways, is labouring to make the world a paradise where man may dwell in peace and happiness. All man has to do is to trust in God and practise patience. Man if he took the task in hand for himself could turn this world into a paradise tomorrow without waiting for God. But it would mean man giving up his greeds and passions. It is easier to watch and pray. God has promised man the millenium, in the dim and distant future. Men by agreeing