The pulpit rises into the dim damp air, covered with
brown holland, reminding one of desertion and charwomen, if not
of a chamber of death and spiritual undertakers, who have shrouded
and coffined the truth. Gaping, empty, unsightly, the place is
the very skull of the monster himself--the fittest place of all
wherein to encounter the great slug, and deal him one of those
death blows which every sunrise, every repentance, every childbirth,
every true love deals him. Every hour he receives the blow that
kills, but he takes long to die, for every hour he is right carefully
fed and cherished by a whole army of purveyors, including every
trade and profession, but officered chiefly by divines and men of
science.
When the dominie entered, all was still, and every light had
a nimbus of illuminated vapour. There were hardly more than three
present beyond the number Mr Marshal had given him to expect; and
their faces, some grim, some grimy, most of them troubled, and
none blissful, seemed the nervous ganglions of the monster whose
faintly gelatinous bulk filled the place. He seated himself in
a pew near the pulpit, communed with his own heart and was still.
Presently the ministering deacon, a humbler one in the worldly sense
than Mr Marshal, for he kept a small ironmongery shop in the next
street to the chapel, entered, twirling the wet from his umbrella
as he came along one of the passages intersecting the pews.
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