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306 he did so, his other self sneered at the weakness which must comfort itself with a poet's rhyme and cling to an apothegm for readjustment. He tried to shut out the world's alarm from his mental eyes and ears.

He went back to the scenes of his first triumph. They had been sweet indeed.

Yes! worth all the price he had paid and might be called upon to pay.

All over England his life's thought, his constant programme had been gloriously vindicated. They had hailed him as the prophet of Truth at first — a prophet who had cried in the wilderness for years, and who had at last come into his own.

The voices of great men and vast multitudes had come to him as incense. He was to be the leader of the new religion of common sense. Why had they doubted him before, led away by the old superstitions?

Men who had hated and feared him in the old days, had spoken against him and his doctrines as if both were abhorred and unclean, were his friends and servants now. Christians had humbled themselves to the representative of the new power. Bishops had consulted him as to the saving of the Church, and its reconstruction upon "newer, broader, more illuminated lines." They had come to him with fear — anxious, eager to confess the errors of the past, swift to flatter and suggest that, with his help, the fabric and political power of the Church might yet stand.

He was shown, with furtive eyes and hesitating lips, from which the shame had not yet been cleansed, how desirable and necessary it was that in the reconstruction of Christianity the Church should still have a prominent and influential part.

He had been a colossus among them all. But — and