It was a serious grief to Louis, when, following Fritz’s example, several of the other young men declared themselves, as Fritz had expressed it, “solid for religion,” not to be able to include himself among the number. It was an odd thing, he thought, that he, who had played at being a Christ-kind in his babyhood, whose guide and pattern in his youth had been the life of the Lord Christ,—that he should stand aside unable to believe, while others, till then indifferent, pressed forward to be called by His name. It was easy enough to go to church, and that Louis did quite regularly, sitting always when others rose or knelt, and following every word with patient, wistful anxiety. But there was very little comfort to be got out of churchgoing, so far as Louis could see; though the sound of Ernest Clare’s voice, and the sight of his calm, strong face, gave him sometimes the sensation of one struggling on in utter darkness, who, though he can trace no ray of light, knows that the full, cloudless sunshine is just beyond. But, meanwhile, the darkness is hard to bear; and the wistful pleading of the blue eyes that were fixed so earnestly upon his face went to the very heart of Ernest Clare. Mr. Clare was slowly becoming a power at St. Andrew’s, the unfashionable church to which he had offered his services, gratis, at his first coming to Micklegard. The rector, an elderly man with a large family, always ground down to the earth by fuel and grocery bills, had, at first, looked askance at his unsalaried assistant, as an eccentric whose dangerous social doctrines were likely to get not only himself, but the Church at large, into trouble. Indeed, long years of money anxieties, whereof the care had been faithfully cast upon Him who has promised to bear it, had almost convinced the rector that a situation wherein lay no temptation to be anxious for the morrow would be positively irreligious. He knew too well the blessings of poverty to pray, like pious Agar, to be delivered therefrom; and while his favorite beatitude was “Blessed are the poor,” the promise that the meek shall inherit the earth had for him no signification that was at all borne out by his own individual experience. By such a man as this Ernest Clare was quite content to be lightly esteemed and guarded against. Reading the prayers and lessons, however, in the rector’s opinion, could harm no one, and spared a weary voice; even in the baptism of infants, and the visitation of the sick, there is little scope for dynamite, and it was a great comfort to be able to call at will upon one so entirely destitute of vanity or self-assertion. So, by the time the winter came, and the rector got a cold instead of the voice he lost in catching it, he was ready to accept Mr. Clare’s offer to preach for him, backed by the promise, voluntarily made, with a smile of affectionate amusement, “not to say a word of which the rector could possibly disapprove.”