"What is a Sunday?" he asked, answering himself--"A quiet hollow scooped out of the windy hill of the week." "Must a man then go for six days shelterless ere he comes to the repose of the seventh? Are there to be no great rocks to shadow him between?--no hiding-places from the wind to let him take breath and heart for the next struggle? And if there ought to be, where are they to be found if not in our churches?--scattered like little hollows of sacred silence scooped out of the roar and bustle of our cities, dumb to the questions--What shall we eat? what shall we drink? and wherewithal shall we be clothed?--but, alas! equally dumb to the question--Where shall I find rest, for I am weary and heavy-laden? These churches stand absolute caverns of silence amid the thunder of the busy city--with a silence which does not remind men of the eternal silence of truth, but of the carelessness of heart wherewith men regard that silence. Their work is nowhere till Sunday comes, and nowhere after that till the next Sunday or the next saint's day. How is this? Why should they not lift up the voice of silence against the tumult of care? against the dissonance of Comus and his crew? How is it that they do not--standing with their glittering, silent cocks and their golden, unopening keys high uplifted in sunny air? Why is it that their cocks do not crow, and their keys do not open? Because their cocks are busy about how the wind blows, and their keys do not fit their own doors. They may be caverns of peace, but they are caverns without entrance--sealed fountains--a mockery of the thirst and confusion of men." "But men do not want entrance. What is the use of opening the doors of our churches so long as men do not care to go in? Times are changed now." "But does not the very word Revelation imply a something coming from heaven--not certainly before men were ready for it, for God cannot be precipitate--but before they had begun to pray for it?" Mr. Fuller remembered how his own father used always to compel his children to eat one mouthful of any dish he heard them say at table that they did not like--whereupon they generally chose to go on with it. "But they won't come in." "How can you tell till you try, till you fulfill the part of the _minister_ (good old beautiful Christian word), and be 'the life o' the building?'" "Presumption! Are not the prayers everything?" "At least not till you get people to pray them." "You make too much of the priest." "Leave him for God, and the true priest has all the seal of his priesthood that he wants." At least so thought Mr. Fuller. "What is the priest?" he asked, going on with the same catechism. "Just a man to be among men what the Sunday is among the work-days of the week--a man to remind you that there is a life within this life, or beyond and about it, if you like that mode better--for extremes meet in the truest figures--that care is not of God, that faith and confidence