While here, on every hand, was dress whose cost, as indicating not warmth and comfort but mere conformity to changing fashion, represented, in scores of cases, more of annual individual expenditure than the whole net income of many a workman’s family. And even more poignant to a mind made sensitive by this train of thought was the impression which weighed upon it of a company well-fed to a degree of comfort beyond the sense of sympathy with hunger that rarely learns the meaning of enough. The mere suggestion of a breakfast of rich food in wide variety, and served often at great cost in almost wasteful plenty, to be followed soon after the hour of worship by another meal yet more varied, and abundant, and rich, seemed the very pitch of heartless mockery, in the full presence almost of hundreds of men and women to whom bare day’s bread is an agony of anxious seeking, and of multitudes of little children to whom, not nourishing food alone but even food enough to stay the pangs of hunger, is a luxury. These familiar feelings, roused, as always, by the common contrasts of life, which one follows in close study through the bewildering complexities of casual relations, were dominant, from the new point of view, as the outcome of patent facts. Superficial and undiscriminating, and yet most real and living, is the thought of the actual workman, as his mind responds to the obvious leading of the things he sees. I was glad at this point that Albert was not with me. A few minutes later I deeply regretted his absence. The minister had begun his sermon. I scarcely heard the opening sentences, so oppressed was my mind with the workman’s sense of the ruthless Philistinism of this phase of modern Christianity. It was the preacher’s tone which first attracted me. There was quiet in it and a great reserve, and he spoke as a pastor who holds earnest conversation with his flock. I was all attention in a moment, and I saw that I listened to a man who knew his fellow-men, and whose words made strong appeal to their intelligence. It was as though he spoke from a heart well-nigh broken with personal grief, but chastened to new love and truth, and tenderness, by the sorrow which it had borne.