The kneeling financier was indeed a gracious and lovely spectacle to the young clergyman, and in his next words, above the still-bended congregation, his tones grew warmly moist with an unction that thrilled his hearers as never before.  Movingly, indeed, upon the authority that God hath given to his ministers, did he declare and pronounce to his people, being penitent, the absolution and remission of their sins.  Wonderful, in truth, had it been if his hearers did not thrill, for the minister himself was thrilled as never before.  He, Allan Delcher Linford, was absolving and remitting the sins of a man whose millions were counted by the hundred, a god of money and of power—­who yet cringed before him out there like one who feared and worshipped.

Nor did he here make the mistake that many another would have made.  Instead of preaching to Cyrus Browett alone—­preaching at him—­he preached as usual to his congregation.  If his glance fell, now and then, upon the face of Browett, he saw it only through the haze of his own fervour—­a patch of granite-gray holding two pricking points of light.  Not once was Browett permitted to feel himself more than one of a crowd; not once was he permitted to rise above his mere atomship, nor feel that he received more attention than the humblest worshipper in arrears for pew-rent.  Yet, though the young rector regarded Browett as but one of many, he knew infallibly the instant that invisible wire was strung between them, and felt, thereafter, every tug of opposition or signal of agreement that flashed from Browett’s mind, knowing in the end, without a look, that he had won Browett’s approval and even excited his interest.

For the sermon had been strangely, wonderfully suited to Browett’s peculiar tastes.  Hardly could a sermon have been better planned to win him.  The choice of the text itself:  “And thou shalt take no gift:  for the gift blindeth the wise and perverteth the words of the righteous,” was perfect art.

The plea was for intellectual honesty, for academic freedom, for fearless independence, which were said to be the crowning glories in the diadem of man’s attributes.  Fearlessly, then, did the speaker depreciate both the dogmatism of religion and the dogmatism of science.  “Much of what we call religion,” he said, “is only the superstition of the past; much of what we call science is but the superstition of the present.”  He pleaded that religion might be an ever-living growth in the human heart, not a dead formulary of dogmatic origin.  True, organisation was necessary, but in the realm of spiritual essentials a creed drawn up in the fourth century should not be treated as if it were the final expression of the religious consciousness in secula seculorum.  One should, indeed, be prepared for the perpetual restatement of religious truth, fearlessly submitting the most cherished convictions to the light of each succeeding age.