"Thanks, no," he courteously replied. "It's not——exactly——in my line, you know. It's an excellent institution——for the poor. When I'm with my own folk, I go, just to set them an example. But I'm not known here: so I think I'll excuse myself sitting out a sermon. Country-preachers are always so dull!"
Arthur was silent till we were out of hearing. Then he said to himself, almost inaudibly, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them."
"Yes," I assented: "no doubt that is the principle on which church-going rests."
"And when he does go," he continued (our thoughts ran so much together, that our conversation was often slightly elliptical), "I suppose he repeats the words 'I believe in the Communion of Saints'?"
But by this time we had reached the little church, into which a goodly stream of worshipers, consisting mainly of fishermen and their families, was flowing.
The service would have been pronounced by any modern aesthetic religionist——or religious æsthete, which is it?——to be crude and cold:
