"Surely to goodness, Enid," said Garthorne almost angrily, as they walked away together, "you are not doing this because Maxwell said it was wrong to use carriages on a Sunday! Good heavens, if we were to translate sermons into everyday life it would be rather a funny world to live in."
"Then what is the use of going to hear them, if they are not to be taken seriously?" she said, looking up quickly at him. "Why should they be preached, or why should we go to church at all?"
"Because it is the proper thing to do, I suppose, and because Society, whose slaves we are, makes it one of the social functions of the week,"
replied Garthorne, who had as much real religion in his composition as a South African Bushman. "We men go because you women do, and you women go to show others how nicely you can dress, and to see what they have got on."
"My dear Reginald, that is about as true as it is original, and that is not saying very much for it. If we don"t go to church for any other reasons than those it is merely mockery and wickedness to go at all. I was very glad to see that a great many people did send their carriages away. Next Sunday I hope they will have the decency to walk."
"Especially if the British climate, as it probably will, ends up the season with a pouring wet Sunday!" laughed Garthorne. "No, dear, those G.o.dly precepts are all very well when you read them in Sunday School books or hear them from the pulpit, and I am sure Vane put them most admirably to-day, although I confess I was slightly surprised to hear a really clever fellow like him preaching such hopelessly impossible nonsense. Of course I don"t mean any offence to him--far from it, but really, you know, if theories like those could be put into practice they would simply turn the world upside down."
"I think you might have found a better word than nonsense," she replied a trifle sharply; "but the world of to-day certainly would have to be turned upside down or inside out to make it anything like Christian.
That, at least, Vane--I mean Mr. Maxwell--taught us this morning."
"Christian according to the Reverend Vane Maxwell," he said, with the suspicion of a sneer. "Fortunately the Churches have agreed that such a violent operation is not necessary. By the way, though, won"t Maxwell get himself into a howling row with the ecclesiastical powers that be!
Just imagine the bench of Bishops standing anything like that!"
"Yes," she said quietly, "the preaching of the Sermon on the Mount in a fashionable London church! It does sound very terrible, doesn"t it? And yet, after all, I suppose they can"t take his orders away from him even for that. I wonder what would happen? It is sure to be in the papers to-morrow, and of course everybody will be talking about it."
"Yes," said Garthorne; "but if Master Vane thinks he is going to play Savanarola to this generation he will find that he has taken on a pretty large order. Are you quite sure you won"t take a turn in the Park, even on foot?"
"No, I"d rather not, but don"t let me keep you if you would like a stroll. I can get home all right."
"Well, if you don"t mind, Enid, I think I will. There are one or two fellows I want to see particularly about something, so bye-bye for the present."
He raised his hat and turned back, and she went on towards the house in Queen"s Gate with many strange thoughts in her heart.
Enid and her husband were by no means the only members of the congregation of St. Chrysostom who discussed Vane"s sermon on their way home. In fact, whether people walked or rode home, it was the universal topic. Some discussed it with timorous sympathy; others, perhaps with more worldly wisdom, talked of it quietly and cynically as the outburst of a half-fledged clerical enthusiast who would very soon find out that his superiors, on whom he depended for preferment, regarded the doctrines of Christianity as one thing and the practises of the Church as something entirely different.
"He"s a clever fellow, a very clever fellow and very earnest," said Lord Canore, who was a patron of several fat livings, to her ladyship and his two daughters as they drove home, "but he"ll soon get those rough corners knocked off him. If they are wise they will give him a good living, and then make him a canon as soon as possible. There"s nothing like preferment to sober a man down in the Church."
"Yes," sighed Lady Caroline Rosse, the elder daughter, who was getting somewhat _pa.s.see_, and was deeply interested in Church work; "what a beautiful voice he has, and such a wonderful face! Really, he looked almost inspired at times. He would make quite an ideal bishop, and, you know, some quite young men are being made bishops now-a-days."
"Yes," chuckled his lordship, as he lay back against the cushions, "that is the sort of thing I mean. You don"t catch bishops preaching the Sermon on the Mount and sub-editing it as they go on."
"My dear Canore," said her ladyship frigidly, "I think we had better change the subject; that last remark of yours was almost blasphemous."
"Never heard such rubbish preached from a respectable pulpit in my life," said Mr. Horace Faustmann, a member of the Stock Exchange, director of several limited companies and a most liberal contributor to the offertories, and all Church effort in the parish of St. Chrysostom, to his wife as they rolled smoothly in their cee-spring, rubber-tyred victoria towards Hyde Park Corner.
"Why, if you can"t make plenty of money and still be a Christian, where are subscriptions coming from, and what price the Church endowments? It seems absolutely absurd to me. I wonder what on earth Baldwin was thinking about to let him preach a sermon like that in the smartest church in the West End. If he goes on in that style he will just ruin the show. Anyhow, he gets no more of my money if he is going to insult rich people in the pulpit. Any more of that sort of thing, my dear, and we"ll go somewhere else, won"t we?"
"I should think so," said the beautiful Mrs. Faustmann. She was the daughter of a poor aristocrat, and had made a very good social and financial bargain. She was one of the smartest women and most successful entertainers in London. There was another man eating his heart out on her account in the Burmese jungle, and sometimes, in her tenderest moment, she gave him a thought and a little sigh--about as much thought and sigh as her engagements permitted.
"Yes, Father Baldwin will really ruin the Church if he allows that sort of thing. Of course all the good people will give it up. In fact, you saw the Steinways, the Northwicks, the Athertons and several more leave the church before he was half way through his harangue, for really you could hardly call it a sermon. All the same, the church will be thronged to-night and next Sunday, because people will go there just for the sensation of the thing, and to see if anything else is going to happen; but poor Father Baldwin will simply be inundated with letters from the best of his people, and I don"t think he"ll find them very pleasant reading. I am going to write, and, although I respect the dear man very much, I shall tell him exactly what I think."
"Quite right," said her husband, as they turned into the Park. "You give it to him straight. If you don"t, I shall drop him a line myself and tell him that if he wants any more of my money, and he has had a good bit, he will have to keep his half-broken clerical colts a bit better in hand; I"m not going to support a church to be insulted in it."
Many other similar conversations were going on just then in the Park, in fact, Vane and his sermon were already being discussed by half fashionable London, so fast does the news of so startling an event travel from lip to lip when a crowd of somewhat _blase_ people, who have nothing in particular to talk about, get together. Most of the comments were quite similar to those just quoted, for Society felt generally by dinner time that night that it had been deliberately insulted, outraged, in fact, through its representatives in the congregation of St.
Chrysostom.
Nevertheless the church was packed to its utmost capacity at evening service. It was known that Father Baldwin was to preach, but it was hoped that Vane would take some part in the service, and of course everyone wanted to see him; still, the audience went away disappointed.
Vane was far away, helping Ernshaw at his mission in Bethnal Green, and was telling his congregation truths just as uncompromising and perhaps as unpalatable as those he had told to his wealthy and aristocratic hearers in the morning.
Father Baldwin preached, but his sermon was rather a homily on the duties of the rich towards the poor, especially at a time when the rich were about to migrate like gay-plumaged birds of pa.s.sage to other lands and climes in search of pleasure, leaving behind the millions of their fellow mortals and fellow Christians, whose ceaseless life-struggle left no leisure for the delights which they had come to look upon as the commonplaces of their existence.
He only made one brief allusion to Vane"s sermon. He knew perfectly well that these thronging hundreds of people had not come to hear him.
He felt, not without sorrow, that quite half of them had come to hear, or at least see, the man whose name was already the talk of fashionable London.
"Some of you," he said, "who are present now heard this morning from this pulpit words which must have sunk deep into the heart of every man and woman who feels an earnest desire to follow in the footsteps of the Master as closely as imperfect human nature will permit you. It is not for me to tell you to what extent those words must be taken literally.
They were spoken earnestly and from the inmost depths of the preacher"s own soul--may they sink into the inmost depths of yours! They put the most vital interest of human life plainly, nay, uncompromisingly before you; how far you can or will follow them in your daily lives is a matter which rests between yourselves and your Redeemer."
The next morning nearly all the papers contained more or less lengthy reports of a sermon of which half London was already talking. Ernest Reed, a smart young reporter with strong freethought tendencies, who made a Sunday speciality of reporting sermons of all sorts, especially the extreme ones, and who wrote caustically impartial comments on them in the rationalist papers, had instantly grasped the true significance of such a sermon being preached to such a congregation, and, moreover, he had himself been deeply affected by the solemn earnestness with which the momentous words had been spoken.
"A Daniel come to judgment! A parson who believes in his own creed at last!" was his mental comment, as he closed his note-book. "That chap"s worth following. I wonder where he is going to preach to-night. I"ll find out."
Of course he did find out and followed Vane to Bethnal Green, with the result that he made what is professionally termed "a scoop," since he was the only reporter who was able to give both sermons verbatim. The _Daily Chronicle_ was the only morning paper smart enough to print them word for word in parallel columns under the t.i.tle:
WEIGHTY WORDS TO RICH AND POOR.
The Rev. Vane Maxwell Asks Mayfair and Bethnal Green If they are Christian?
The consequence was, that all London and a very considerable part of England too, stared wonderingly over its breakfast table and asked itself whether there was really anything in these plain, almost homely, and yet terribly pregnant words. Certainly there was no getting away from the pitiless logic of them. If Vane Maxwell was right, England was _not_ a Christian country, save in name, and its citizens were Christians only because they had been baptized into one or other of the churches and so called themselves Christians by a sort of courtesy t.i.tle. For the moment at least, Christianity a.s.sumed a shape as tangible and a meaning almost as serious as party politics. In other words Vane"s sermon, even when read in cold print, put the question: Are you really a Christian? so plainly, so uncompromisingly, and so unavoidably to every man or woman calling himself or herself a Christian, that hundreds of thousands of people all over the country, to say nothing of a million or two in London, felt a sudden, and, as it seemed to them, somewhat unaccountable obligation to give an equally plain answer to it. What was the answer to be?
"Yes or no?"
It certainly was a very serious matter to millions who had never thought of asking the question for themselves, and whose pastors and spiritual masters had mostly contented themselves with lecturing and teaching in soul-soothing, instead of soul-searching, words.
They, good folk, had really never troubled themselves very much about the matter. They had their business affairs to attend to, their wives and families to keep out of the workhouse or to maintain in comfort or luxury, as the case might be, and a good many of them had certain social duties to perform; and so they had got into the way of letting the churches and chapels, the bishops, priests, deacons and so forth, look after these things.
They were paid to do so. That was rather an ugly thought. At least, it seemed to be so, after reading the words of Jesus Christ, and His servant Vane Maxwell; but still it _was_ a fact; and some of them were very highly paid. They were living in charming houses and had very comfortable investments in companies which made money anyhow, so long as they made it. Others were wretchedly paid, it was true, mostly half-starved and inevitably in debt; but still, neither of these facts affected the main question, which, of course, was the personal one: Are you--rich man or poor man--you who read these words, a Christian? Are you, as the preacher had asked in those five terrible words, honest before G.o.d and man?
Then to the scores and hundreds of thousands of people who read this, came, in a whispering terror, the further question:
"Do you think you can cheat G.o.d, even if you are cheating yourself and other people like you--the G.o.d Whom you have been taught to believe in as knowing all things, the G.o.d to whom all secrets are known?"
It was a distinctly ugly question to answer, and more Bibles were searched throughout the United Kingdom than had been for many a long year past; but no searcher found any answer that satisfied his own soul, if he had one, save the one that was given from the Mount of Olives:
"Ye cannot serve G.o.d and Mammon."
As the young preacher had said, there was no compromise. There was certainly the alternative of being honest one way or the other; but that sort of honesty had a very appalling prospect to the respectable British citizen, especially those, who, in any way, resembled the young man who came to Christ and asked Him what he should do to be saved. It was, in short, a case of becoming comparative paupers, and only having the bare necessaries of life, or keeping what they had, and saying honestly to themselves, the world, and G.o.d:
"I can"t be a Christian at that price, and so, instead of remaining a Christian humbug, I will be an honest atheist."
A very terrible dilemma, certainly, and yet, if the Gospels were true, and if the Son of G.o.d had really preached the Sermon on the Mount, it was one from which there was no escape but this. It was a plain matter of belief or disbelief, honesty or dishonesty, and, if they believed in G.o.d, dishonesty was impossible, save under the penalty of eternal d.a.m.nation.
CHAPTER XVIII.