I looked at the title of it. It was called: “God in His World.”
“Does this prove that God is really in the world?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Will you read it?”
“Yes,” I said, “I am glad to get it. It is wonderful that so great a truth can be established in so small a pamphlet, and all for nothing.”
She looked at me curiously, I thought, and I put the tract by the side of the pamphlet I had bought from the freethinker, and drifted again in the eddy.
The largest crowd of all was close packed about a swarthy young chap whose bushy hair waved in response to the violence of his oratory. He, too, was perspiring with his ideas. He had a marvellous staccato method of question and answer. He would shoot a question like a rifle bullet at the heads of his audience, and then stiffen back like a wary boxer, both clenched hands poised in a tremulous gesticulation, and before any one could answer his bullet-like question, he was answering it himself. As I edged my way nearer to him I discovered that he, also, had a little pile of books at his feet which a keen-eyed assistant was busily selling. How well-established the technic of this art of the city eddies! How well-studied the psychology!
I thought this example the most perfect of them all, and watched with eagerness the play of the argument as it was mirrored in the intent faces all about me. And gradually I grew interested in what the man was saying, and thought of many good answers I could give to his questionings if he were not so cunning with answers of his own. Finally, in the midst of one of his loftiest flights, he demanded, hotly:
“Are you not, every one of you, a slave of the capitalist class?”
It was perfectly still for a second after he spoke, and before I knew what I was doing, I responded:
“Why, no, I'm not.”