This is not to be the theological history of a soul, so I shall not attempt to decide upon the exact proportion of literal acceptance of Christian dogma underlying the young pastor's sermons. I doubt if he could have told you himself, and I am sure he would have considered the point as unimportant as I do. His was a message of humanity delivered in terms of Christianity. The message was good, the meaning honest. He would, no doubt, have preferred another pulpit with other formulas, but that pulpit was not forthcoming; so, like all the strong and the wise, he chose the formulas offered to him, using as few as possible, and humanising all he used; and never for a single second of time, whatever the apparent contradictions on the surface, was Theophilus Londonderry that poorest of all God's creatures,--a hypocrite. However you may judge him, you must never make that mistake about him. CHAPTER III OF ELI MOGGRIDGE AND THE NEW SPIRIT New Zion, despite its name, was, as I have hinted, no longer new. The fiery zeal which had once made it a living schism had long since died out of it. Carried years before, a little blazing ember of faith, from a flourishing hearth of Nonconformity some streets away, it had puffed and gleamed a little space in the eloquence of the offended zealots who carried it hotfoot that Sunday morning, but its central fire had been poor, and for a long time no evangelistic bellows had awakened in it even a spark. Its original elders had long since lost heart and passed away. A dwindling remnant of their children, from old association, just kept its doors from actually closing, and made a mournful interruption in its musty silence on Sundays. Life was too low to support a Wednesday prayer-meeting, and Sunday by Sunday that life ebbed lower. New life from the outside must come, and speedily, or it must die. But new life was already on the way. On the town side the sad streets round New Zion led one into a more prosperous High Street, and indeed Zion Street itself, as it turned the corner, flamed into quite a jovial and ruddy shop--a provision merchant's, and kept by Eli Moggridge. The name did its owner considerable wrong, for its suggestion of puritanical sanctimoniousness was a flat contradiction of the jovial and ruddy personality, the huge red-whiskered laugher, for whom it stood, and of whom the shop, with its healthy smell of cheese and its air of exuberant prosperity, was a much more truthful expression. Well, the business was growing with such gusto that Mr. Moggridge felt he might afford a home away from his shop, and thus he came to take the biggish empty house which presently put on new paint and once more seemed quite proud of being "Zion View."