In the evening Hubert met Mr. Bond at the station. They were scarcely seated in the light trap and facing toward home when the young minister said:
"Well, Mr. Gray, have you found God demonstrable?"
"Yes!" Hubert almost shouted, and the two grasped each other's hands in the strong grip of a fraternity never formed by man.
"I thought it would be so," said the other, "and I saw it in your face as we met. Thank God for it."
Mr. Bond led Hubert on with keen interest to tell of the process of his search after God, and of the illumination brighter than the light of day, that came to him when the Spirit shone with such clear luster on the Word. To Hubert it seemed the happiest hour of his life, as he conversed with a man who seemed to understand the processes of his own heart, and to be thoroughly at home in the new world into which he himself had entered.
The drive was all too brief, but later in the evening, when good-night had been spoken to the rest of the household, the two men sat in the unlighted veranda and talked until midnight of Christ and the matters of His realm.
The _tout ensemble_ of the company gathered to hear Mr. Bond's first lecture was somewhat curious. It was not a large congregation, but it was representative, being drawn from the interested or curious of nearly every kind of church or religious coterie in the city. Keen Bible students were there, notebooks in hand, prepared to capture any new suggestion which might help them. The critical were there, representing various shades of belief and prejudice, from the quiet repressionist, who, disdaining emotion, views with dispassionate coldness the great tenets of the faith, to the irrepressible enthusiast whose spiritual understanding is often lost beneath a foam of feeling; from the instructed brother who reads his title clear with logical accuracy in the Scriptures and glories in his standing with belieing indifference to his state, to the anxious soul whose hope of heaven veers with every changing wind of fitful emotion. Each critic was bent on discovering if the stranger would hew faithfully to the line of his own demarcation.
There were Mr. Selton's friends, people of his own station, who responded to his personal invitation to come, prepared to listen courteously, to express polite thanks at the end for the pleasure conferred, and, for the most part, to find various lions in the way of attending again, profound as were their regrets!