Within the Abbey the people looked doubtfully at one another. Some smiled--some sighed,--one or two had tears in their eyes. A faint whisper ran from lip to lip. “Christmas Day!” they murmured--“It is Christmas Day!” And again they sighed and smiled. But it was evident that the old Festival for them held no meaning--no tender or pious memory. Once perhaps it might have had--but now--! Why now the very Spirit and Soul of Christmas had departed!--the doors of the Christian Church itself were closed against it,--the Divine Friend of Mankind had passed by unheeded, and had gone away from those who were passively permitting His honour to be assailed,--what then was Christmas Day but the mere empty name of a discarded Blessing! The dark shadows steadily thickened,--and Josiah, still grovelling on the ground, with the awful clang of the moaning Bells in his ears, felt that he was being stifled and pressed down into a tomb of everlasting icy cold,--when he was suddenly plucked up from his knees by the grip of a too familiar claw, and lo!--the Goblin stood confronting him with a sad and sober grin. “Dull place, Westminster Abbey!” it remarked--“Oh hoo-roo! All damp and dismals! I wouldn’t be an England’s great man for anything! It’s the last reward an England’s great man ever gets,--the ‘honour’--oh, hoo-roo!--of being allowed to moulder among the most mouldered remains that ever mouldered! Hoo-roo! I’m glad the body I used to wear when I was a Churchwarden is all turned into daisies in a country churchyard. Pretty things, daisies! Fancy _your_ old wrinkles turning into them!” McNason was silent. He stood quietly resigned to the Goblin’s clutch, waiting for its next move. And while he waited, he saw the crowd in front of him sway, part asunder, and begin to disperse,--while the Atheist-Preacher, descending from the pulpit, held brief conversation with a man who took from his hand a roll of paper. McNason could hear him speaking, despite the space between them. “Here’s my sermon in full,”--he said--“I hope you will give it the widest publicity. The ‘copy’ contains a good many effective bits which I was obliged to leave out with a mixed congregation. You never know how people may take the upsetting of their cherished creeds! In such work the Press can do more than the Pulpit. Nothing like a good Press discussion for shaking the old foundations! And I think my remarks are likely to cause a fluttering in the dove-cotes!” The reporter--for such he was--smiled. “You are not afraid of your Archbishop?” he said. The Atheist-Preacher laughed. “My Archbishop! He has no time to give his attention to any such matter as this. He’s too busy with the claims of the Poor Clergy!” They both laughed then, shook hands and separated. McNason, in the Goblin’s grasp, watched them go their several ways, and then suddenly recovering his speech, said:-- “That man ought to be put out of the Church!”