His aid was nearer than he knew. There were no hills to which he could lift his eyes, but help may hide in the valley as well as come down from the mountain, and he found his under the coal-scuttle bonnet of the woman that swept out and dusted the chapel. She was no interesting young widow. A life of labour and vanished children lay behind as well as before her. She was sixty years of age, seamed with the small-pox, and in every seam the dust and smoke of London had left a stain. She had a troubled eye, and a gaze that seemed to ask of the universe why it had given birth to her. But it was only her face that asked the question; her mind was too busy with the ever recurring enigma, which, answered this week, was still an enigma for the next--how she was to pay her rent--too busy to have any other question to ask. Or would she not rather have gone to sleep altogether, under the dreary fascination of the slug monster, had she not had a severe landlady, who _would_ be paid punctually, or turn her out? Anyhow, every time and all the time she sat in the chapel, she was brooding over ways and means, calculating pence and shillings--the day’s charing she had promised her, and the chances of more--mingling faint regrets over past indulgences --the extra half-pint of beer she drank on Saturday--the bit of cheese she bought on Monday. Of this face of care, revealing a spirit which Satan had bound, the schoolmaster caught sight,-- caught from its commonness, its grimness, its defeature, inspiration and uplifting, for there he beheld the oppressed, down-trodden, mire-fouled humanity which the man in whom he believed had loved because it was his father’s humanity divided into brothers, and had died straining to lift back to the bosom of that Father. Oh tale of horror and dreary monstrosity, if it be such indeed as the bulk of its priests on the one hand, and its enemies on the other represent it! Oh story of splendrous fate, of infinite resurrection and uplifting, of sun and breeze, of organ-blasts and exultation, for the heart of every man and woman, whatsoever the bitterness of its care or the weight of its care, if it be such as the Book itself has held it from age to age!