‘Our Father’s House,’ by Wilfrid Lawson: the little, ragged girl peeping wistfully round the church pillar at the fashionably dressed congregation, who too often monopolise ‘Our Father’s House,’ had always around it some quiet and earnest students. It aroused in them, perhaps, the sleeping sense, now so often forgotten that it is almost ignored, that the church is the people’s possession, and, maybe, it awakened the hope, deep down (if sometimes visionary) in every breast, of the coming of the ‘good time’ when all class and unworthy distinctions will be lost in the Father’s presence. Israels’ works, of which in the last Exhibition there were five, were duly appreciated, not perhaps by the mass, but by the more thoughtful of the spectators. ‘The Canal Boat, a picture full of sadness; the man and woman look weary and worked. Nature is in tune with their hard life; still there is progress,’ said the catalogue. I overheard one man say, ‘Ah! poor chap, he’s got into a wrong current, but he’ll get out all right. Pull away.’ The picture, sketchy as it was, had taught in Israels’ style the lesson he loves to give--the pain and dreariness of life interlaced with the bright thread of hope-- Which is out of sight: That thread of all-sustaining beauty, Which runs through all and doth all unite. Mr. Walter Crane’s picture of ‘Ormuzd and Ahriman,’ which he kindly lent, awoke much interest. The people read, or had read to them, the description which told that the Persians believed in two gods--the god of good, Ormuzd; the god of evil, Ahriman--and how the picture expressed the fight between the two; a fight going on in every nation and every heart, all nature being represented as standing still during the conflict; while the river of time wound gently on past the ruins of the Memnons, the Acropolis, the Grove, the Altar, and the Abbey--the symbols of the world’s great religions. ‘I expect that’s true, but we don’t seem to see much of the _fight_ about here,’ was one cogent remark. Most frequently, though, a picture will draw forth no expression--for with the unlettered all expression is difficult, and we know how, in the presence of death, of a grand sunset, or of anything deeply moving, silence seems most fitting.