'Waking up!' he exclaimed; 'we are going to sleep. A Christian should never need to waken up to facts like that. He would have them as a burden ever on his heart until they were for ever banished. He would be constantly hearing the voice of Him who said of little ones like these that it was better for those who did them wrong that a millstone were hanged round their necks and that they were cast into the midst of the sea.... If only we were Christians, endued with Christ's spirit of love, we would make an end of that at once.... We are only semi-pagans.' II 'It isn't merely what you see outside,' went on the little man, polishing his shining poll, 'but look inside the churches themselves--any one of the hundreds in this city--and what do you find? You find the house of God given over to an unholy merchandise. Every church is parcelled out into so many square feet, and these are bought and sold as ecclesiastical allotments. Did you ever think of that gruesome traffic, and the weirdness of it? That good news of Love brooding over all, caring even for the grass and the sparrow, has now become the monopoly of the renter, while the poor are shut out. And it was at first proclaimed to the poor without money and without price, committed to the winds of Galilee.' 'Put like that,' I said, 'it is rather weird.' 'Aye,' he went on, 'and every half-year managers and deacons assemble in the houses of God to traffic in these square feet of pews. There is a story how One long ago knotted a whip of cords and drove the traffickers out of His Father's house, His eyes blazing with anger. Would He not wield the same whip on these deacons and managers, and drive them out to-day? How astonished they would be, with all the law and all the vested interest on their side ... and yet that whip!' The little man fell silent, and his strange eye looked as if he were seeing it all. And he smiled curiously. 'Did you ever trespass on an ecclesiastical allotment?' he asked jerkily. 'No! Well, it is a thing not to be done. I once trespassed on a garden allotment out in Kelvinside, just to admire some wonderful sweet-peas, and the man who owned it found me and welcomed me like a brother, and sent me away with a radiant bunch of flowers; but an ecclesiastical allotment is another story. An old heritor once said to me that the only thing that really roused the devil in a Scotsman's heart was trespassing on his ecclesiastical allotment.' 'That only shows,' I retorted, 'how dear to a Scotsman's heart his part in the Church is.' 'That is only quibbling,' jerked out the bald man. III