The Angel

Jewels five words long
That on the outstretched forefinger of all time,
Sparkle for ever.

Next Sunday, it may be, you will hear them again, as you heard them last Sunday. Yet you live for evil pleasure still.

"When you think at all, you delude yourselves into imagining you are worshipping God, when you are taking a fitful interest in a ceremony which means no more to you than a ceremony. You come here for an hour in the morning of one day of the week, your minds full of worldly pleasures and the memories of your pleasant sins. You listen to the words of the Bible in your comfortable seats, and think how quaint, far off, and unreal they are. With a languid mental smile you hear of the devil and the evil spirits who walk up and down the City seeking whom they may devour. You would not smile if you were to take a short journey from this church into the devil's country, the East End of London – if now, with one accord, you were to drive in your carriages to those places where the air is heavy with ceaseless curses, where hideous disease and uncleanliness that you cannot even imagine, stalk hand in hand with famine, despair, and unmentionable horrors of vice.

"You would believe then, perhaps, that the devil still goes about the streets of London doing his work.

"I tell you this without any possibility of mistake, that you are the servants of Satan, and that in your lives you have enrolled yourselves under the black banners of hell.

"And more especially than all, you are hypocrites. Outwardly all is fair and of good report until, as happens now and then, your lives are laid bare to the world in some hideous scandal. You go to church, your names are seen upon the lists of those societies which endeavor to ameliorate the life of the downtrodden and the oppressed. But what personal service do most of you give to the cause of the God in whom you confess to believe? You live for pleasure, and you are hypocrites.

"Hypocrisy occurs in all the relations of your life; in the daily intercourse between man and man, when friendship is feigned; in the political sphere, when tyrants and self-seekers pretend a deep care for Fatherland, and thereby lead men according to their design. In art and science you are hypocrites, pretending a pure unselfish love to the higher ideal, when self-gratification is all you look for; incense is offered to the idols of the time, and pleasure is alone the end and aim, the Alpha and Omega of existence.

"You are as 'trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars.'

"And all around you London grows worse and worse, while it is from its corruption and from its misery that your sordid pleasures are distilled.

"There are men here to-night who have won fortune, rank, and celebrity from the wholesale poisoning of the poor. The food which the slaves of the modern Babylon eat, the drink they drink, is full of foulness, that you may fare sumptuously every day, that your wives may be covered with jewels. There are men here to-night who keep hundreds and thousands of their fellow-Christians in hideous and dreadful dens without hope, and for ever. In order that you may live in palaces, surrounded by all the beauties and splendors that the choicest art, the most skilled handicraft can give, hundreds of human beings who lurk in the holes for which they pay you must spend their lives, where no ordinary man or woman can remain for more than a moment or two, so terrible are these nauseous places.

"Whole miles of ground in the modern London are thickly packed with fellow-Christians who are hourly giving up their lives in one long torture that you may eat, drink and be merry. At midday you may go into the East End of London and pass a factory. Men come out of it dripping with perspiration, and that perspiration is green. The hair of these men sprouts green from the roots giving them the appearance of some strange vegetable. These men are changed and dyed like this that your wives may spend the life-earnings of any one of them in the costly shops of the perruquiers in Bond Street.

"In order that you may draw twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty per cent. from your investments, instead of an honest return from the wealth with which God has entrusted you, there are men who eat like animals. In the little eating-houses around the works, there are human beings who leave their knives and forks unused and drop their heads and bury their noses and mouths into what is set before them. All the bones, nerves, and muscles below their wrists are useless. These are the slaves of lead, who are transmuting lead with the sacrifice of their own lives, that it may change to gold to purchase your banquets. You are the people who directly or indirectly live in a luxury such as the world has never seen before, out of the wages of disease and death. Copper colic, hatter's shakers, diver's paralysis, shoemaker's chest, miller's itch, hammerman's palsy, potter's rot, shoddy fever, are the prices which others pay for your yachts and pictures, your horses and motor-cars, your music, your libraries, your clubs, your travel, and your health.

"And what of the other and more intimate side of your lives? Do you live with the most ordinary standard of family and personal purity before you? Do you spend a large portion of your lives in gambling, in the endeavor to gain money without working for it from people less skilful or fortunate than yourself? Do you reverence goodness and holiness when you find them or are told of them, or do you mock and sneer? Do you destroy your bodily health by over-indulgence in food, in wine, and in unnatural drugs, which destroy the mind and the moral sense? Do you ever and systematically seek the good and welfare of others, or do you live utterly and solely for yourself, even as the beasts that perish?"

The preacher stopped in one long pause; then his voice sank a full tone —

"Yes, all these things you do, and more, and God is not with you."

Nearly every head in the church was bent low as the flaming, scorching words of denunciation swept over them.

Wealthy, celebrated, high in the world's good favor as they were, none of these people had ever heard the terrible, naked truth about their lives before. Nor was it alone the denunciatory passion of the words and the bitter realization of the shameful truth which moved and influenced them so deeply. The personality of the Teacher, some quality in his voice which they had never yet heard in the voice of living man, the all-inspiring likeness to the most sacred figure the world has ever known, the intense vibrating quality of more than human power and conviction – all these united to light the fires of remorse in every heart, and to touch the soul with the cold fingers of fear.

Accustomed as most of them were to this or that piquant thrill or sensation – for were not their lives passed in the endless quest of stimulating excitement? – there was yet something in this occasion utterly alien to it, and different from anything they had ever known before.

Of what this quality consisted, of what it was composed, many of them there would have given conflicting and contradictory answers. All would have agreed in its presence.

Only a few, a very few, knew and recognized the truth, either with gladness and holy awe or with shrinking and guilty dread, the Power which enveloped them with the sense of the presence of the Holy Ghost.

There was a change in the accusing voice —

"But it is not yet too late. God's mercy is infinite, and through the merits of His Son you may save yourselves while there is time. Kneel now and pray silently as you have never prayed before, for I tell you that God is here among you. An opportunity will be given to each one of you to make reparation for the evil you have done, for the messengers of the Lord have come to London, and wondrous things will come to pass! And now pray, pray, pray! In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen."

With no further word the Teacher turned and quietly descended the pulpit steps.

Every head was bowed; hardly a single person heard or saw him move away into the vestry, and a great silence fell upon the church.

As if in a dream, the tall figure in its white linen ephod passed through the outer vestry into the large and comfortable room used by the priests. No one was there, and Joseph sank upon his knees in prayer. He had been sending up his passionate supplications for the souls of those without but a few seconds, when he felt a touch – a timid, hesitating touch – upon his shoulder.

He looked up, and saw a little elderly man, wearing the long velvet-trimmed gown which signalized a verger in St. Elwyn's, standing by his side. The old man's face was moving and working with strong emotion, and a strange blaze of eagerness shone in his eyes.

"Master," he said, "I heard it all, every word you said to them; and it is true – every word is bitter true. Master, there is one who has need of you, and in God's name I pray you to go with me."

"In God's name I will come with you, brother," Joseph answered gravely.

"Ay," the old man answered, "I felt my prayer would be answered, Master." He took Joseph's surplice from him, divested himself of his own gown, and opened the vestry door. "You found this way when you came, Master," he said. "The public do not know of it, for it goes through the big livery-stables. The district is so crowded. No one will see us when we leave the church, though there are still thousands of people waiting for you to pass in front. But my poor home is not far away."

As they walked, the old man told his story to Joseph. His son, a young fellow of eighteen or nineteen, had been employed as basement porter in the Countess of Morston's Regent Street shop for the selling of artistic, hand-wrought metal work.

Like many another fashionable woman in London, Lady Morston was making a large sum of money out of her commercial venture. But the repousse work which she sold was made by half-starved and sweated work-people in the East End of town, and all the employees in the shop itself were miserably underpaid. From early morning, sometimes till late at night, the old fellow's son had been at work carrying about the heavy crates of metal. His wages had been cut down to the lowest possible limit, and when he had asked for a rise he had been told that a hundred other young fellows would be glad to step into his shoes at any moment.

One day the inevitable collapse had come. He had found himself unable to continue the arduous labor, and had left the position. Almost immediately after his departure he had been attacked with a long and painful nervous complaint. Unable, owing to the fact of his resignation, to claim any compensation from the countess as a legal right, he had humbly petitioned for a little pecuniary help to tide him over his illness. This had been coldly refused, and the young man was now bedridden and a permanent encumbrance to the old man, who himself was unable to do anything but the lightest work.

Mr. Persse, on being applied to for assistance, had consulted the Countess of Morston, who was one of his parishioners, in order, as he said, to find out if it were "a genuine case." With an absolute disregard for truth, and in order to shield herself, the woman had told the clergyman that her late assistant was a dishonest scoundrel who merited no consideration whatever.

"And so, Master," the old man concluded – "and so I lost all hope, and tried to make up my mind to see my lad die slowly. And then I see about you in the paper, and something comes into my mind like. And then the vicar he tells me about this here service to-night, and that you were coming yourself, Master. So I prayed and I prayed that I should have a chance to speak to you. Master, I want you to raise Bill up and make him well."

The old man clutched Joseph by the arm, his cracked and pathetic voice full of poignant pleading.

"You will, won't you, Master?" he said once more.

"Take me to the young man," Joseph answered.

CHAPTER XV

JOSEPH AND THE JOURNALIST

Eric Black was thirty-three years of age, and one of the chief and most trusted writers upon the staff of the Daily Wire.

Very few of the younger school of journalists in London had the crisp touch and vivid sense of color in words possessed by this writer. His rise to considerable success had been rapid, and his signed articles on current events were always read with extreme interest by the enormous public who bought the most popular journal of the day.

Eric Black's intellect was of first class order, but it was one-sided. He saw all the practical and material affairs of life keenly, truly and well. But of that side of human existence which men can neither touch nor see he was profoundly ignorant, and as ignorance generally is, inclined to be frankly contemptuous.

In religious matters accordingly this brilliant young man might have been called an absolute "outsider." He never denied religion in any way, and very rarely thought about it at all. No one had ever heard him say that he did not believe in God, he simply ignored the whole question.

His personal life was singularly kindly, decent, and upright. He was, in short, though he had not the slightest suspicion of it himself, a man waiting and ready for the apprehension of the truth – one of those to whom the Almighty reveals Himself late.

On a great daily paper, when some important event or series of events suddenly rises on the horizon of the news-world, a trusted member of the staff, together with such assistants as may be necessary, is placed in entire charge of the whole matter. Eric Black, accordingly, was deputed to "handle" the affair of Joseph and his epoch-making arrival in London.

Mr. Persse, the vicar of St. Elwyn's, had sent two tickets of admission for Joseph's address to the Daily Wire, and Eric Black, accompanied by a shorthand writer who was to take down the actual words of the sermon, sat in a front seat below the pulpit during the whole time of Joseph's terrible denunciation of modern society.

While the reporter close by bent over his note-book and fixed the Teacher's burning words upon the page, Black, his brain alert and eager, was busy in recording impressions of the whole strange and unexpected scene. He was certainly profoundly impressed with the dignity and importance of the occasion. He realized the emotions that were passing through the minds of the rich and celebrated people who filled the church. His eyes drank in the physical appearance of the Teacher, his ears told him that Joseph's voice was unique in all his experience of modern life.

Enormously interested and stirred as he was, Black was not, however, emotionally moved. The journalist must always and for ever be watchful and serene, never carried away – an acute recorder, but no more.

Towards the end of the sermon, when the young man saw that Joseph would only say a few more words, a sudden flash of inspiration came to him. No journalist in London had yet succeeded in obtaining an interview or a definite statement with the extraordinary being who had appeared like a thunderbolt in its midst. It was the ambition of Eric Black to talk with the Teacher, and thus to supply the enterprising journal which employed him, and for which he worked with a whole-hearted and enthusiastic loyalty, with an important and exclusive article.