“The masses” have not asked for churches and services; they really do not care for anything of the kind—whether they ought is another matter. If the clergy choose to supply them, that is well and worthy. But they should understand their relation to the impenitent worldling, which is precisely that of a physician without a mandate from the patient, who may not be convinced that there is very much the matter with him. The physician may have a diploma and a certificate authorizing him to practise, but if the patient do not deem himself bound to be practised upon has the physician a right to make him miserable until he will submit? Clearly, he has not. If he can not persuade him to come to the dispensary and take medicine there is an end to the matter, and he may justly conclude that he is misfitted to his vocation. I am sure that the ministers and the singularly small contingent of earnest and, on the whole, pretty good persons who cluster about them do not perceive how alien they are in their convictions, tastes, sympathies and general mental habitudes to the majority of their fellow men and women. Their voices are like “the gushing wave” which, to the ears of the lotus-eaters, Far, far away did seem to mourn and rave, coming to us as from beyond a great gulf, mere ghosts of sound, almost devoid of meaning. We know that they would have us do something, but what it is we do not clearly apprehend. We feel that they are concerned for us, but why, we are imperfectly able to conceive. In an unintelligible tongue they tell us of unthinkable things. Here and there in the discourse we catch a word, a phrase, a sentence—something which, from ancestors whose mother-speech it was, we have inherited the capacity to understand; but the homily as a whole signifies nothing. Solemn and sonorous enough it all is, and not unmusical, but it lacks its natural accompaniment of shawm and sackbut and the wind-swept harp in the willows by the waters of Babylon. It is, in fact, something of a survival—the memory of a dream. VI