Mr. Flaxman was fond of breakfast parties à la Rogers, and on the first occasion when Robert could be induced to attend one of these functions, he saw opposite to him what he supposed to be a lad of twenty, a young slip of a fellow, whose sallies of fun and invincible good humour attracted him greatly.
Sparkling brown eyes, full lips rich in humour and pugnacity, 'lockës crull as they were layde in presse,' the same look of 'wonderly' activity too, in spite of his short stature and dainty make, as Chaucer lends his squire—the type was so fresh and pleasing that Robert was more and more held by it, especially when he discovered to his bewilderment that the supposed stripling must be from his talk a man quite as old as himself, an official besides, filling what was clearly some important place in the world. He took his full share in the politics and literature started at the table, and presently, when conversation fell on the proposed municipality for London, said things to which the whole party listened. Robert's curiosity was aroused, and after breakfast he questioned his host and was promptly introduced to 'Mr. Murray Edwardes.'
Whereupon it turned out that this baby-faced sage was filling a post, in the work of which perhaps few people in London could have taken so much interest as Robert Elsmere.
Fifty years before, a wealthy merchant who had been one of the chief pillars of London Unitarianism had made his will and died. His great warehouses lay in one of the Eastern riverside districts of the city, and in his will he endeavoured to do something according to his lights for the place in which he had amassed his money. He left a fairly large bequest wherewith to build and endow a Unitarian chapel and found certain Unitarian charities, in the heart of what was even then one of the densest and most poverty-stricken of London parishes. For a long time, however, chapel and charities seemed likely to rank as one of the idle freaks of religious wealth and nothing more. Unitarianism of the old sort is perhaps the most illogical creed that exists, and certainly it has never been the creed of the poor. In old days it required the presence of a certain arid stratum of the middle classes to live and thrive at all. This stratum was not to be found in R——, which rejoiced instead in the most squalid types of poverty and crime, types wherewith the mild shrivelled Unitarian minister had about as much power of grappling as a Poet Laureate with a Trafalgar Square Socialist.
Soon after the erection of the chapel, there arose that shaking of the dry bones of religious England which we call the Tractarian movement. For many years the new force left R—— quite undisturbed. The parish church droned away, the Unitarian minister preached decorously to empty benches, knowing nothing of the agitations outside. At last, however, towards the end of the old minister's life, a powerful church of the new type, staffed by friends and pupils of Pusey, rose in the centre of R——, and the little Unitarian chapel was for a time more snuffed out than ever, a fate which this time it shared dismally with the parish church. As generally happened, however, in those days, the proceedings at this new and splendid St. Wilfrid's were not long in stirring up the Protestantism of the British rough,—the said Protestantism being always one of the finest excuses for brickbats of which the modern cockney is master. The parish lapsed into a state of private war—hectic clergy heading exasperated processions or intoning defiant Litanies on the one side,—mobs, rotten eggs, dead cats, and blatant Protestant orators on the other.
The war went on practically for years, and while it was still raging the minister of the Unitarian chapel died, and the authorities concerned chose in his place a young fellow, the son of a Bristol minister, a Cambridge man besides, as chance would have it, of brilliant attainments, and unusually commended from many quarters, even including some Church ones of the Liberal kind. This curly-haired youth, as he was then in reality, and as to his own quaint vexation he went on seeming to be up to quite middle age, had the wit to perceive at the moment of his entry on the troubled scene that behind all the mere brutal opposition to the new church, and in contrast with the sheer indifference of three-fourths of the district, there was a small party consisting of an aristocracy of the artisans, whose protest against the Puseyite doings was of a much quieter sterner sort, and amongst whom the uproar had mainly roused a certain crude power of thinking. He threw himself upon this element, which he rather divined than discovered, and it responded. He preached a simple creed, drove it home by pure and generous living; he lectured, taught, brought down workers from the West End, and before he had been five years in harness had not only made himself a power in R——, but was beginning to be heard of and watched with no small interest by many outsiders.
This was the man on whom Robert had now stumbled. Before they had talked twenty minutes each was fascinated by the other. They said good-bye to their host, and wandered out together into St. James's Park, where the trees were white with frost and an orange sun was struggling through the fog. Here Murray Edwardes poured out the whole story of his ministry to attentive ears. Robert listened eagerly. Unitarianism was not a familiar subject of thought to him. He had never dreamt of joining the Unitarians, and was indeed long ago convinced that in the beliefs of a Channing no one once fairly started on the critical road could rationally stop. That common thinness and aridity, too, of the Unitarian temper had weighed with him. But here, in the person of Murray Edwardes, it was as though he saw something old and threadbare revivified. The young man's creed, as he presented it, had grace, persuasiveness, even unction; and there was something in his tone of mind which was like a fresh wind blowing over the fevered places of the other's heart.
They talked long and earnestly, Edwardes describing his own work, and the changes creeping over the modern Unitarian body, Elsmere saying little, asking much.
At last the young man looked at Elsmere with eyes of bright decision.