“Why,” said a sour voice suddenly at his elbow, “why do you consider yourself a child of God?”
Bayard recalled himself with a start to the fact that the personal examination of the day had begun, and that the opening shot had come from the least important and most crabbed man in the Council. And now for three quivering hours the young man stood the fire of the most ingenious ecclesiastical inquisition which had been witnessed in that part of the State for many a year.
At first it rather amused him than otherwise, and he bore it with great good nature.
He was patient beyond his years with the small clergyman from the small interior parish, whose hobby was that theological students were not properly taught their Bibles, and who had invented a precious catechism of his own, calculated to prove to the audience how little they or the candidate knew of Boanerges, Gog and Magog, and the four beasts which are the chief zoological ornaments of the Apocalypse. Having treated these burning questions satisfactorily, Bayard fenced awhile with the learned clergyman who was alive only in the dead languages, and who put the candidate through his Greek and Hebrew paces as if he had been a college boy.
Bayard had felt no serious concern as to the outcome of the examination, a mere form, a husk, a shell, with which it was not worth a man’s while to quarrel. The people of the church—he had already begun to call them his people—were enthusiastically and lovingly pledged to him. He smiled into their familiar faces over the heads of his inquisitors, and manfully and cheerfully stood his ground. All, in fact, went well enough, until the theology of the young man came under investigation. Then a cloud no bigger than a man’s tongue, if one may say so, appeared to darken the interior of Windover First Church. The oldest and deafest men in the Council pricked up their ears. The youngest and best-natured grew uneasy. The candidate’s people looked at him anxiously. His uncle flushed; Professor Carruth coughed sternly. The moderator ruled and overruled, and tried with troubled kindness to quench the warming flame of ecclesiastical censure in which many a bright, devout young life goes out.
Suddenly Bayard awoke to the fact that the smoke was curling in the fagots at his feet; that the stake was at his back, the chains upon his hands; that he was in danger of being precondemned for heresy in the hearts of those gray old men, his elder brothers in the church, and disgraced before the eyes of the people who had loved and chosen him.
The house was now so full and so still that a sigh could be heard; and when a group from the street pushed noisily in, and stood by the entrance, impatient expressions leaped from pew to pew. Bayard looked up at the disturbance. There by the green baize doors stood the Italian, Job Slip, and the young fellow (with the eyebrows) who did not drink, two or three other spectators of the fight, and the girl in the reefer. An uninvited delegation from Angel Alley, these children of the devil had crept among those godly men and women, and stared about.
“A circumstance,” complained Mr. Hermon Worcester afterwards to Professor Carruth, “which might not happen on such an occasion in our New England churches once in twenty years.”
Bayard had been singularly gentle and patient with his tormentors up to this moment. But now he gathered himself, and fought for his life like a man. Brand after brand, the inventions of theology were flung hissing upon him.
Did he believe that heathen, unacquainted with Christ, were saved?