Sensitive and responsive, he always knew in what spirit his people received his text. He read their faces as an open book, and took his keynote from them. It was this intangible method of getting at the hearts of his people that made it possible for him to comfort and satisfy them, while preaching the most orthodox doctrine and restricted creed.
Mrs. Thorpe's battle began with the text. She kept her eyes withdrawn from the pastor's face and she endeavored to keep her mind from dwelling wholly on what he was saying. She thought of the long line of snow-capped homes that led up to the church; and about her heart there clutched a hardness cold and unyielding as the frost king's embrace of the earth. Each building and frost-hung shrub and white-branched tree reared itself into a mountain of ice and snow. And Mrs. Thorpe felt that just such a range of ice-bound mountains, relentless, forbidding, impassable, lay between her and the love of God.
The pastor, with nice discernment, was able to give his voice just the proper pitch and volume to cause it to fill the room; every word was carefully articulated, clear and distinct:
"From the beginning, man, the crowning work of God's hand, manifested a disposition to disobey, and this disobedience plunged the world into a chaos of sin and disorder. From the earliest record we see man demonstrating his evil nature, his tendency to sin and all unrighteousness.... The priests of old endeavored to cleanse and purify from sin. Moses was chosen the deliverer of the Lord's ancient people; David in his day was called to rule over them; Solomon was given wisdom with which to direct them; Jeremiah threatened them with destruction; and Habakkuk exhorted them to a renewal of righteousness and prayed the Lord to be merciful to them. But the downward tendency was inherent within them and the record of man is one long record of sin and unfaithfulness....
"From time to time, owing to the wickedness of the people, it became necessary to visit punishment and destruction upon them. And many sacrifices were offered to God for the sins of the people. Lambs were slain and offered upon consecrated altars; goats and bullocks were sacrificed and altars ran red with the blood that was shed to wash away the still more crimson stain of men's sins. But there came a time when a long-suffering God could not thus be appeased; there came a time my friends, my brothers, there came a time when the blood of goats and bullocks was not sufficient to wash away the sins of man; was not sufficient to appease the wrath of Almighty God. When this time came, the only begotten Son was given into the hands of men to be crucified....
"A child, a little, helpless child, was cradled in a manger and ministered to by His Virgin mother. No man has trod nor can ever tread the pathway of pain and suffering that lay before this child, given to die for the sins of men. No man can drink the cup that He drank, or suffer the anguish that He suffered. He must die upon a cross, scorned and reviled by the world He came to save.... In the blood of His own beloved Son God wiped out the sins of the world, and so great is the corruption in which the children of men are steeped, that had one drop in the bitter cup, one sigh of anguish in the Garden, one nail that pierced the defenseless hand of the Christ been spared, the God of righteousness and justice would not have been appeased. This, then, this sacrifice sealed in blood, is the price of your salvation and mine, and there is no other way under heaven whereby men may be saved. Our pardon has been bought with the innocent blood of a crucified Savior."
Mrs. Thorpe felt her breath coming in short, quick gasps. Her cheeks were a scarlet flame and a white line was drawn about her mouth. How could men live and praise and exult under this carnage of blood! Where should she fly--how escape? Was there no way out of this--this--THIS! Was it inevitable, irrevocable, that she must reap the benefit of this awful carnage, this slaughter of a world's Redeemer? Who had at her birth, yea, before she was born, laid upon her sins for which another was called to suffer--who had dared to do this? If a blood sacrifice was required for her conscious sins, then her blood it should be--not another's--not innocent blood for culpable sin!
But the acme of her suffering lay in the thought that the God of the world had decreed this thing, in His own heart He had conceived it, from the beginning He had foreseen it--premeditated it. What wonder that chaos reigns in His world? What wonder that the children of His creation have from the beginning gone astray? What wonder that envy and hatred, strife, bitterness and despair live and flourish? Can man rise above his conception of his Creator? Can he consistently worship a God who had planned and caused to be done a thing from which the compassionate human heart must shrink and human hand must stay? Is not the whole story of the Creation, the Fall, the Sacrifice, the Redemption, as we have heard it in all its harrowing details, absurd, deplorable, culpable? Can we in sincerity acknowledge ourselves guilty of a sin for which we are not responsible, and grateful to a Creator who, possessing absolute power, fashioned men free in will and action, and then forced upon them the blood of His own innocent Son to save them from the consequences of their freedom?
Yet, bewildered and entangled as Mrs. Thorpe felt herself to be, in this labyrinth of doubt and rebellion, she was aware that other thoughts than these were tapping at the door of her consciousness; tapping and pleading for admission. Deep in her heart soil a grain of truth was throwing out its penetrating rootlets and struggling toward the light. But so completely would these thoughts, if admitted and accepted, uproot every preconceived idea, so entirely would they cast out and destroy that which all her life she had been taught to believe, that their pleading for admittance but increased the confusion of her thoughts and rendered her mental state more chaotic.
When the service was over Mrs. Thorpe became aware that many eyes, curious and sympathetic, were upon her; yet few of her friends spoke to her, for there was an unwritten law that no one should go out of the way to speak to another and that little demonstration should be made inside the church. All was orderly and dignified and befitting the house of the Lord. Strangers came and went; newcomers felt the chill of propriety that pervaded the atmosphere, and the old members felt it, too, and gloried in it.