Could he serve this day?  Could he?  The need was desperate.  Was there anything in this Christianity, freed from bigotry, to work out the awful problem which the ages had left for America to solve?  People called this old Knowles an infidel, said his brain was as unnatural and distorted as his body.  God, looking down into his heart that night, saw the fierce earnestness of the man to know the truth, and judged him with other eyes than ours.

When the girl had finished reading, she went out and stood in the cool air.  The Doctor passed her without notice.  The story stood alive in his throbbing brain, demanding a hearing; it stood there always, needing but a touch to waken it.  All things were real to this man, this uncouth mass of flesh that his companions sneered at; most real of all the unhelped pain of life, the great seething mire of dumb wretchedness in our streets and alleys, the cry for aid from the starved souls of the world.  You and I have other work to do than to listen,—­pleasanter.  But this man, coming out of the mire, his veins thick with the blood of a despised race, had carried up their pain and hunger with him:  it was the most real thing on earth to him,—­more real than his own share in the unseen heaven or hell.  By the reality, the peril of the world’s instant need, he tried the offered help from Calvary.  It was the work of years, not of this night.  Perhaps, if they who preach Christ crucified had first doubted and tried him as this man did, their place in the coming heaven might be higher,—­and ours, who hear them.

He went, in his lumbering way, down the hill into the city.  He was glad to go back; the trustful, waiting quiet oppressed, taunted him.  It sent him back more mad against Destiny, his heart more bitter in its great pity.  Let him go back into the great city, with its stifling gambling-hells, its negro-pens, its foul cellars.  It is his place and work.  If he stumble blindly against unconquerable ills, and die, others have so stumbled and so died.  Do you think their work is lost?

* * * * *

TIME’S HOUSEHOLD.

  Time is a lowly peasant, with whom bred
  Are sons of kings, of an immortal race. 
  Their garb to their condition they debase,
  Eat of his fare, make on his straw their bed,
  Conversing, use his homely dialect,
  (Giving the words some meaning of their own,)
  Till, half forgetting purple, sceptre, throne,
  Themselves his children mere they nigh suspect. 
  And when, divinely moved, one goes away,
  His royal right and glory to resume,
  Loss of his rags appears his life’s decay,
  He weeps, and his companions mourn his doom. 
  Yet doth a voice in every bosom say,
  “So perish buds while bursting into bloom.”

WHAT WE ARE COMING TO.