Much of the sermon itself, indeed, was beyond him. It was on the meaning of St. Paul’s great conception, ‘Death unto sin and a new birth unto righteousness.’ What did the Apostle mean by a death to sin and self? What were the precise ideas attached to the words ‘risen with Christ?’ Are this, death and this resurrection necessarily dependent upon certain alleged historical events? Or are they not primarily, and were they not, even in the mind of St. Paul, two aspects of a spiritual process perpetually re-enacted in the soul of man, and constituting the veritable revelation of God? Which is the stable and lasting Witness of the Father: the spiritual history of the individual and the world, or the envelope of miracle to which hitherto mankind has attributed so much Importance? Mr. Grey’s treatment of these questions was clothed, throughout a large portion of the lecture in metaphysical language, which no boy fresh from school, however intellectually quick, could be expected to follow with any precision. It was not, therefore, the argument, or the logical structure of the sermon, which so profoundly affected young Elsmere. It was the speaker himself, and the occasional passages in which, addressing himself to the practical needs of his hearers, he put before them the claims and conditions of the higher life with a pregnant simplicity and rugged beauty of phrase. Conceit selfishness, vice--how, as he spoke of them, they seemed to wither from his presence! How the ‘pitiful, earthy self’ with its passions and its cravings sank into nothingness beside the ‘great ideas’ and the ‘great causes’ for which, as Christians and as men, he claimed their devotion. To the boy sitting among the crowd at the back of the room, his face supported in his hands and his gleaming eyes fixed on the speaker, it seemed as if all the poetry and history through which a restless curiosity and ideality had carried him so far, took a new meaning from this experience. It was by men like this that the moral progress of the world had been shaped and inspired, he felt brought near to the great primal forces breathing through the divine workshop; and in place of natural disposition and reverent compliance, there sprang up in him suddenly an actual burning certainty of belief. ‘Axioms are not axioms,’ said poor Keats, ‘till they have been proved upon our pulses;’ and the old familiar figure of the Divine combat, of the struggle in which man and God are one, was proved once more upon a human pulse on that May night, in the hush of that quiet lecture-room. As the little moving crowd of men dispersed over the main quadrangle to their respective staircases, Langham and Robert stood together a moment in the windy darkness, lit by the occasional glimmering of a cloudy moon. ‘Thank you, thank you, sir!’ said the lad, eager and yet afraid to speak, lest he should break the spell of memory. ‘I should be sorry indeed to have missed that!’