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CHAPTER XII.

Mr. Fuller in his Church.

R. FULLER'S main bent of practical

thought was how to make his position in the church as far as possible from a sinecure. If the church was a reality at all, if it represented a vital body, every portion of it ought to be instinct with life. Yet here was one of its cells, to speak physiologically, all but inactive—a huge building of no use all the week, and on Sundays filled with organ sounds, a few responses from a sprinkling of most indifferent worshippers, and his own voice reading prayers, and trying"with sick assay" sometimes-to move those few to be better men and women than they were. Now so far it was a centre of life, and as such well worthy of any amount of outlay of mere money. But even money itself is a holy

thing; and from the money point alone, low as that is, it might well be argued that this church was making no adequate return for the amount expended upon it. Not that one thought of honest comfort to a human soul is to be measured against millions of expense: but that what the money did, might well be measured against what the money might do. To the commercial mind such a church suggests immense futility, a judgment correct in so far as it falls short of its possibilities. To tell the truth, and a good truth it is to tell, Mr. Fuller was ashamed of St. Amos's, and was thinking day and night how to retrieve the character of his church.

And he reasoned thus with himself, in the way mostly of question and answer:

"What is Sunday?" he asked, answering himself "A quiet hollow scooped out of the windy hill of the week." "Must a man then

go for six days shelterless

ere he comes to the

repose of the seventh? Are there to be no great rocks to shadow him between ?—no hidingplaces from the wind to let him take breath and

heart for the next struggle? And if there ought to be, where are they to be found if not in our churches?-scattered like little hollows of sacred silence scooped out of the roar and bustle of our cities, dumb to the questions-What shall we eat? what shall we drink? and wherewithal shall we be clothed?-but, alas! equally dumb to the question-Where shall I find rest, for I am weary and heavy-laden? These churches stand absolute caverns of silence amidst the thunder of the busy city-with a silence which does not remind men of the eternal silence of truth, but of the carelessness of heart wherewith men regard that silence. Their work is nowhere till Sunday comes, and nowhere after that till the next Sunday or the next saint's day. How is this? Why should they not lift up the voice of silence against the tumult of care? against the dissonance of Comus and his crew? How is it that they do not-standing with their glittering silent cocks and their golden unopening keys high uplifted in sunny air? Why is it that their cocks do not crow, and their keys do not open? Because their cocks are busy about how the wind blows, and

their keys do not fit their own doors. They may be caverns of peace, but they are caverns without entrance-sealed fountains-a mockery of the thirst and confusion of men." "But men do not want entrance; what is the use of opening the doors of our churches so long as men do not care to go in? Times are changed now." "But does not the very word Revelation imply a something coming from heaven-not certainly before men were ready for it, for God cannot be precipitate-but before they had begun to pray for it?" Mr. Fuller remembered how his own father used always to compel his children to eat one mouthful of any dish he heard them say at table that they did not like-whereupon they generally chose to go on with it. "But they wont come in." "How can you tell till you try, till you fulfil the part of the minister (good old beautiful Christian word), and be the life o' the building?" "

"Presumption ! Are not the

prayers everything ?” people to pray them."

the priest."

"At least not till you get

"You make too much of

"Leave him for God, and the true

priest has all the seal of his priesthood that he wants." At least so thought Mr. Fuller. "What is the priest ?" he asked, going on with the same catechism. "Just a man to be among men what the Sunday is among the work days of the week—a man to remind you that there is a life within this life, or beyond and about it, if you like that mode better-for extremes meet in the truest figures-that care is not of God, that faith and confidence are truer, simpler, more of common sense than balances at bankers or preference shares. He is a protest against the money-heaping tendencies of men, against the desire of rank or estimation or any kind of social distinction. With him all men are equal, as in the Church all have equal rights, and rank ceases on the threshold of the same, overpowered by the presence of the Son of Mary, who was married to a carpenter-overpowered by the presence of the God of the whole earth, who wrote the music for the great organ of the spheres, after he had created them to play the same." Such was the calling of the clergyman, as Mr. Fuller saw it. Rather a lofty

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