"And there he stopped again, until I moved. Then he said: 'Parson, if you saw a fellow starving on a bit of land over there that wouldn't feed a prairie-chick, and you knew of a free homestead across the creek, where he could raise five and twenty bushels to the acre and live like a man, would you leave him to rot on his bare patch? Not you. That's why I'm going Home—to Battersea.'
"If Hare had been a married man I might have advised him otherwise. But he was married only to the farm he had wrought so well, and it did not seem to me part of my business to come between a man and his duty—as he saw it. That man came Home, and took the cheapest lodging he could get in Battersea. He had sold his farm well. Now he took to street preaching, and what he preached was, not religion, but the prairie. 'Lord sake, young folk!' he used to say to the lads and girls when they turned toward the public-houses. 'Hold on! Wait a minute! I want to tell you something!' And he would tell them what four years' clean work had given him in Canada.
"He got into touch with various emigration agencies. The money he had lasted him, living as he did, for five years. In that time he was the means of sending nine hundred and twenty men and five hundred and forty women and girls to a free and independent life in Canada. Just before his money was exhausted, England's affliction, England's chastisement, came upon her like God's anger in a thunderbolt. Hare had meant to return to Canada to make another start, and earn money enough to return to his work here. Instead of that, my friends, instead of what he called Paradise in Manitoba, God took him straight into Heaven. He left his body beside the North London entrenchments, where, so one of his comrades told me, he fought like ten men for England, knowing well that, if captured, he would be shot out of hand as a civilian bearing arms. One may say of Edward Hare, I think, that he saw his duty very clearly—and did it.
"But what of us? What of you, and I, my friends? How do we stand regarding Duty?"
I never heard such questions in my life. He had been speaking smoothly, evenly, calmly, and without gesticulation. With the questions, his body was bent as though for a leap; his hands flung forward. These questions left him like bullets. It was as though that great hall had been in blackest darkness, and with a sudden movement the speaker had switched on ten thousand electric lights. I saw men rise to a half-erect posture. I heard women catch their breath. The air of the place seemed all aquiver.
"My friends, will you please pray with me?"
He leaned forward, an appeal in every line of his figure, addressed confidentially to each soul present. Then his right hand rose:
"Please God, help me to give my Message! Please God, open London's heart to hear my Message! Please God, give me strength to tell it—now! For Christ's sake. Amen!"
One heard a low, emphatic, and far-carrying "Amen!" from the lips of London's Bishop; and I think that, too, meant something to the great congregation of Londoners assembled there.