Nevertheless John Grayson joined the stream of church-goers: fathers, and mothers, and little children, old men and old women coming in together, while the rosy-cheeked Sunday scholars took their appointed places. He looked round with strangely mingled feelings on the old country church, which was without elaborate ornament, although seemly and reverent in all its appointments, as befitted a house of God. But what most arrested him was the "fair white cloth" on the Holy Table, showing that the Feast of the Lord was spread that day. He had never yet partaken of it in the Church of his fathers; but he no more doubted his right to come than the child doubts his right to sit down at his father's table, because it is spread in a strange room. It was a joy to look forward to that; it was a joy meanwhile to join once more, though with trembling lips, in the dear, familiar prayers-those prayers "that sound like church bells in the ears of the English child." And now his cousin stood in the pulpit. In his aspect and bearing there was a deep solemnity, which, young though he was, made him look in truth "as one that pleaded with men." He read his text, "_A name which is above every name_," and began with an exposition of the context, lucid, thoughtful, and evincing careful study. Jack's thoughts wandered from the words to the speaker, and from the speaker to the surroundings, once so familiar, now so unwonted and strange to him. Presently however a word arrested him. "My brethren," said the preacher, leaning over the pulpit in his earnestness, "have you ever thought what a wonderful thing is the love of Christ?" "Surely," Jack said to himself, "if we have ever thought of Him at all, we have thought of that." "I do not mean now," the preacher went on, "the love of Christ for us. I use 'love of Christ' as I use 'love of country,' 'love of friends,' to mean--not theirs for us, but ours for them. And I say, that the love of Humanity for Christ is a mystery only less than the grand, supreme mystery of all--the love of Christ for man. And the greater mystery is proved and illustrated by the less. As we may look, in its reflection, on some object too bright to gaze upon directly,--as we may measure a mountain by its shadow, so may we gain some faint conception of _how_ 'He first loved us,' by the wondering contemplation of how men in all ages have loved Him. "Consider. The Man called Christ Jesus lived, for three and thirty years, or less, in a little corner of the world, which He never left. Of those years thirty were spent in silence and obscurity; only for two or three did He flash into sudden fame, soon cut short by a violent death. He did not write, He did not organize, He did not rule; He only taught, and lived, and loved. Yet what has His name been in the world ever since? What is it in the world to-day?