He strove hard to become their friend, and that of the men; to win their confidence, and with a considerable measure of success.  On more than one occasion he threw aside his clerical coat and put on boxing-gloves, and he gave a series of lectures, with lantern slides, collected during the six months he had once spent in Europe.  The Irish-Americans and the Germans were the readiest to respond, and these were for the most part young workingmen and youths by no means destitute.  When they were out of a place, he would often run across them in the reading-room or sitting among the lockers beside the gymnasium, and they would rise and talk to him cordially and even familiarly about their affairs.  They liked and trusted him—­on a tacit condition.  There was a boundary he might not cross.  And the existence of that boundary did not seem to trouble McCrae.

One night as he stood with his assistant in the hall after the men had gone, Hodder could contain himself no longer.

“Look here, McCrae,” he broke out, “these men never come to church—­or only a very few of them.”

“No more they do,” McCrae agreed.

“Why don’t they?”

“Ye’ve asked them, perhaps.”

“I’ve spoken to one or two of them,” admitted the rector.

“And what do they tell you?”

Hodder smiled.

“They don’t tell me anything.  They dodge.”

“Precisely,” said McCrae.

“We’re not making Christians of them,” said Hodder, beginning to walk up and down.  “Why is it?”

“It’s a big question.”

“It is a big question.  It’s the question of all questions, it seems to me.  The function of the Church, in my opinion, is to make Christians.”

“Try to teach them religion,” said McCrae—­he almost pronounced it releegion—­“and see what happens.  Ye’ll have no classes at all.  They only come, the best of them, because ye let them alone that way, and they get a little decency and society help.  It’s somewhat to keep them out of the dance-halls and saloons maybe.”

“It’s not enough,” the rector asserted.  “You’ve had a great deal of experience with them.  And I want to know why, in your view, more of them don’t come into the Church.”

“Would ye put Jimmy Flanagan and Otto Bauer and Tony Baldassaro in Mr. Parr’s pew?” McCrae inquired, with a slight flavour of irony that was not ill-natured.  “Or perhaps Mrs. Larrabbee would make room for them?”

“I’ve considered that, of course,” replied Hodder, thoughtfully, though he was a little surprised that McCrae should have mentioned it.  “You think their reasons are social, then,—­that they feel the gap.  I feel it myself most strongly.  And yet none of these men are Socialists.  If they were, they wouldn’t come here to the parish house.”

“They’re not Socialists,” agreed McCrae.

“But there is room in the back and sides of the church, and there is the early service and the Sunday night service, when the pews are free.  Why don’t they come to these?”