The altar bell rang snappishly through this cold fog like the dinner bell of a boarding house, and in that yellow mist, which deepened with every minute, the white flames of the candles lost nearly all their starlike brightness.
There seemed to be depression and resentment in the deep voices of the choir rumbling and rolling behind the screen; there seemed to be haste, a desire to get it over, in the nasal voice of the priest praying almost squeakily at the altar.
People were continually entering the cathedral, many of them having the appearance of foreigners, many of them young men who looked like waiters: one was struck by their reverence, and also by their look of intellectual apathy.
Father Knox appeared in the pulpit, which is stationed far down the nave, having come from his work of teaching at Ware to preach to the faithful at Westminster.

He looked very young, and rather apprehensive, a slight boyish figure, swaying uneasily, the large luminous eyes, of an extraordinary intensity, almost glazed with light, the full lips, so obviously meant for laughter, parted with a nervous uncertainty, a wave of thick brown hair falling across the narrow forehead with a look of tiredness, the long slender hands never still for a moment.
I will endeavour to summarise his remarkable sermon, which was delivered through the fog in a soft and throaty voice, the body of the preacher swaying monotonously backward and forward, the congregation sitting back in its little chairs and coughing inconveniently from beginning to end.
It was the strangest sermon I have listened to for many years, and all the stranger for its unimpassioned delivery.

He spoke of the Fall of Man as a certainty[8].

He spoke continually of an offended God.

Between this offended God and His creature Man sin had dug an impassable chasm.
But Christ had thrown a bridge, from heaven's side of that chasm, over the dreadful gulf.