When the service was over Sinclair walked slowly along the narrow street with Miss MacAllister and her father. For a time they were silent, as if each were letting the impression of it sink into the mind. Miss MacAllister was the first to speak.
"I have never thought myself religious," she said. "I am afraid that I have been like so many others, a member of a church because it is customary and respectable. But if the spirit and atmosphere which were in that little Chinese church this morning prevailed in our big churches at home, I think I could be religious."
"I am afraid that you are underestimating your own interest in religion," replied her father. "And perhaps you are mixing, just a little, reverent feelings and actually living as a Christian. They are very different things. But it is true that the spirit of worship I have found in many of those native churches has made the services of a considerable proportion of our home churches appear mere barren, lifeless formalism in comparison. The West may have again to learn from the East the devotion and self-forgetfulness of Christianity."
They had reached a point in the narrow, crooked street which commanded a view of the harbour and of the sea beyond. An exclamation from Sinclair directed their attention seaward.
A small merchant steamer was seen coming towards the harbour. As she drew near a puff of smoke streamed out from the _Vipère_, and after an interval the heavy boom of a cannon floated along the water. The little merchantman promptly reversed. A boat from the Frenchman ran alongside. After half an hour's delay the boat pulled away again, and the _Fokien_ steamed slowly in, picking up a pilot as she came. Her captain had satisfied the search party that she had no contraband of war on board.
In the afternoon Sinclair and Miss MacAllister met at a service conducted in English in the little mission college for the benefit of the foreign community. The missionaries, the consul and his wife and daughter, the officers and a detachment of men from the _Locust_, and the MacAllisters attended. Very few of the other foreign residents took advantage of it. Most of them had shed their church-going habits and their interest in religion of any kind as soon as they came to the Far East.