“And so,”—­

“And so, I must earn my name,” said Christopher Kirkbright, simply.

“Lift them up, and take them across,” said Hilary Vireo, as if thinking it over to himself.  The old story had quickened him.  A grand perception came to him for his friend, who had begged him to think for and advise him.  “Lift them up and take them across!” he repeated, looking into Mr. Kirkbright’s face, and speaking the words to him with warm energy.  “They are waiting—­so many of them!  They are sinking down—­so many!  They want to be lifted through.  They want—­and they want terribly—­a place of safety on the other side.  Go down into the river of temptation, and hardship, and sin, and help them up out of it, Christopher.  Take them up out of their cruel conditions; make a place for some of them to begin over again in; for some of them to rest in, once in a while, and take courage.  Why shouldn’t there be cities of refuge, now, Kirkbright?  Men are mapping out towns for their own gain, all over the land, wherever a water power or a railroad gives the chance for one to grow; why not build a Hope for the hopeless?  Nowhere on earth could that be done as it could in our own land!”

“A City of Refuge’” Kirkbright repeated the words gravely, earnestly; like those of some message of an angel of the Lord, that sounded with self-attested authority in his ears.

After a pause, in which his thought followed out the word of suggestion into a swift dream of possible fulfillment, he said to his companion,—­

“I believe there was nothing in that old Jewish economy, Vireo, that was not given as a ‘pattern of things’ that should be.  That whole Old Testament is a type and prophecy of the kingdom coming.  Only it was but the first Adam.  It was given right into the very conditions that illustrated its need.  It would have meant nothing, given into a society of angels.  Yet because men were not angels, but very mortal and sinful men, we of to-day must fling contempt upon the Myth of the Salvation of God!  It will stand, for all that,—­that history of God’s intimacy with men.  It was lived, not told as a vision, that it might stand!  It was lived, to show how near, in spite of sin, God came, and stayed.  The second coming shall be without sin unto salvation.”

“I’m not sure, Kirkbright, but you ought to be a minister.”

“Not to stand in a pulpit.  God helping me, I mean to be a minister.  Wouldn’t a preacher be satisfied to have studied a week upon a sermon, if he knew that on Sunday, preaching it, he had sent it, live, into one living soul?  Fifty-two souls a year, to reach and save,—­would not that be enough?  Well, then, every day a man might be giving the Lord’s word out somewhere, in some fashion, I think.  He needn’t wait for the Sundays.  Everybody has a congregation in the course of the week.  I don’t doubt the week-day service is often you preachers’ best.”

“I know it is,” Hilary Vireo replied.