As in his earlier revival preaching, so now, Gregory’s utterance was attended with peculiar power. There was this difference, however, between his relation to his audience now and in that other time: then a familiar appeal was reënforced, even though involuntarily and unconsciously, by the full weight of his personal and psychic influence; now he relied wholly, it appeared, upon the dynamic of his message. His manner was more impassioned than in that earlier time, but less exciting.
Keith and Anna Burgess, from their places in the audience with Mrs. Ingraham, whose guests they were, watched and listened with almost breathless intensity of interest. They had not heard it on this wise before.
“Do you remember,” continued Gregory, with searching emphasis, “that on a certain day the Master said, ‘Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven’? Do you remember how the twelve men who followed him were said to have been ‘exceedingly amazed’? From the fourth century, when the Church and the world formed their unhallowed union, down to the present day, men have continued to be ‘exceedingly amazed’ at a saying so inconvenient and so revolutionary, and have set themselves to blunt its sharp edge or to explain it away altogether.
“To-night I am here to say to you plainly, This is a faithful saying, worthy of all acceptation, and woe unto him who seeks to take it away from the words of Christ. Put with it, if you will, other like words from the lips of Christ and his Apostles, rather than seek to abate the force of these. But why are the rich condemned? Surely they are the most law-abiding, most influential class in every community! Because the riches of the rich man are founded upon a lie! This is the lie: that a man has the right to build up his own prosperity and enjoyment upon the suffering and privation of his fellow-men.
“Ask yourselves, men who listen to me now, do I tell the truth?
“You made your money in trade; very well—is trade just? Could you, under present conditions, have made money, had you dealt justly and loved mercy? had you lived the truth, shown the truth? Could your trade have prospered if you had followed the simplest rule of Christ, ‘Do unto others as ye would have them do unto you?’
“Is not the very basis of your trade and of your gains that you force other men into failure, dejection, and poverty, and rise upon the wreck of them? Well has it been said, ‘A rich man’s happiness is built up of a thousand poor men’s sorrows.’
“Many men make their money in manufacture, perhaps not largely so in this city; but the conditions are familiar to us all. Very well, is manufacture true to God, true to men?
“The profits, we will say of a given manufacture, were not great enough last year; the owners had a large income, but not as large as they wanted; some of the rich stockholders grumbled. What did they do? They reduced the beggarly wages of the toilers in their iron prisons, sent them home to their wives and children with less than sufficed to give them daily bread and shelter, and they knew it. They sent pure girls to the life of shame, and honest men to the black refuge of despair. Thus they declared their dividend, and their rich neighbours praised their business genius and pocketed their share of the gains complacently; and the rich grew richer, and the poor, poorer. This done, they come before God with pious words; they pass boxes in the churches to gather the widows’ and the orphans’ mites whose burdens they do not lift, no, not with one finger; they build a hospital now and then; they found a university, and their names are exalted; they sit in their homes with all their treasures of art, of intellect, and of refinement about them, and thank the Lord that they are not as other men are, or even as that poor fellow they hear reeling, profane and drunken, down the street, because no home is his, no hope, no God.
“Hear the words which God hath sworn by his holy prophets: