“To say that they whose trend is toward things unclean are abhorred of God is to re-echo the edicts of nature and history. They say whenever a sin is committed a devil is created to avenge it. What legions avenge this sin which, most of all, brutalizes man and turns all social relations into anarchy! Ask your men of science. They will tell you that all the evils flesh is heir to seem to get their seeds herein. Immortal revenge haunts it! You know, how in the Christian’s holy book, it is affirmed that many sicken and die because partaking of the cup of the holy communion unworthily. Presumptuous hypocrisy thus meets the wrath which paralyzed Uzzah and Jeroboam. But the cup of the passion was love’s highest gift, and the offense is not against the cup but against love in its sublimest display. Therefore forever death is the penalty that overhangs those who outrage this finest gem of angels and mortals. Treason to love is suicidal as well as murderous! They say that there is a demon whose touch causes hideous, coiling, stinging serpents to grow from the bodies of those he touches. I’ll tell you his name—Lasciviousness, and he works fatefully wherever man abides. But the pure home is an invincible bulwark against him, and hymen’s torch his blinding horror.”
There were some of the knight’s auditors, both men and women, who felt it their duty, because of custom, to affect disapproval of the free speaking they heard. Of these dissenters the women uttered no word, but their eyes glared, and the color went and came in their cheeks. The disapproving men exhibited faces as hard as marble, while their lips mumbled incoherently.
The knight was not slow to perceive the rising storm, but he was undaunted. He waxed more earnest and more eloquent; his words and theme inflamed him.
One favorable to his faithfulness remarked to a comrade:
“The Hospitaler seems to grow taller, as if filled and enlarged by an inspiration.”
His face shone as that of Moses when bearing the law, and some cowered as if they heard coming toward them, from afar, the rumblings of Sinai. Some white souls present wept, moved more by the truth in its beauty and power than they could have been by any play on their emotions. It was an hour of true oratory’s triumph; logic set on fire; a consecrated herald grappling awful sin with the power of omnipotence.
Presently, after the thunder and lightning, came “the still, small voice.” The man of God spoke with loving persuasiveness; he healed with words, the woundings truth had made. Then he carried his audience with him. Many bowed their heads to weep, as trees beaten by winds that carried rain!
“We can all entreat fallen men as to most sins, why not as to the chief sins? We speak to the fathers, brothers and sons faithfully, pleadingly; why not to the women who are elect to companion creation’s lords? Alas, the women have the greater need of helpful admonition, when they fall, for revilings and black despair fill up the cup of their remorse! You have heard of the Feast of Lanterns among the Chinese? Those pagans, once a year, go out with many-colored lights to symbolize Mercy seeking lost daughters. Shall God’s choicest people fall behind the pagan? Never, if true to the noble, tender, pure spirit that emanates from God’s own ideal of womanhood. No, no! let us vow with unwonted zeal, amid the lights, lessons and joys of this hour, to be knights of new order; knights of the white cross; sworn to denounce all impure practices on our own part, and on the other hand to strive to allure the fallen to that that is clean and white as the souls of the angels which do excel! Let us go to those whom sin has made drunk, in their despairing. Let us tell them that doubt castles are stormed! Let us proclaim the seed of the woman the serpent’s destroyer! Go, women to women, in woman’s name, remembering that pity in the soul makes him or her that hath it successful suppliant for all mercies at the throne on which forever the Interceding Son of the Virgin reigns! Go, fathers, making your fatherhood godlike in its just tenderness! Go, brothers, sons of women, as pure, strong brothers indeed! There is many a scarlet woman to-day with scalded eyes and ashen heart who is so because she believed men brothers and fathers and found some wolves and vultures. Go to those who have all days as nights, all joys as apples of Sodom. They were not always so, and need not so continue. Do not belittle their sin, yet seek to allure them by a noble presentment of purity and by all encouragement to attempt to win back their lost crowns. Tell them of the woman that stood serenely amid bitterest scorns, and say as did her Son to one like them: ‘Go, and sin no more.’ Then teach those who have no such blot upon them to be kind and helpful. We can never judge any soul’s guilt until we at last know the measure of the temptation! God alone knows that.
“I could speak on this theme for hours; but this is enough! The story of Mary has somehow ever had peculiar efficacy with the blighted of her sex. They easily are led, when all men fail them, to dare to trust the One who had a mother so tender. Many a motherless outcast has found Christ in trying to find mother-love in Mary. After the phantasmagoria of illusive pleasure it is healing, through faith in God’s exemplified love, to dream of how it seems to have a real mother’s arms enfolding one. I hold that it is profitable to the impure man, sometimes looking within the Pantheon of memory, to find therein conceptions he treasured in his purer days; but with more determined assertion I find that it lifts up the soiled woman to come in contact with the girdle of power and crown jewels of that maiden and mother of Nazareth and Bethlehem. It was she that stood against imperial Rome, in the person of Herod; a chaste young Jewess against corsleted animality; a country maiden, heaven-endowed, against an old fox; the loyal mother-eagle against the python! But she that was simply good evaded, outran, soared above, and finally confounded the evil at its lowest dip, its highest power!”
Then the orator-knight, waving his hand to Cornelius to signify to him that the missioner was to conclude the ceremonial, abruptly closed his address and retired to one of the little alcove-chapels.