“God knows.”
“Bound to go on with it?”
“Till I succeed or fail.”
“What do you propose? To turn temperance lecturer, and that sort of thing? I suppose you’ll be switching off your religious services into prohibition caucuses, and so forth.”
“I propose nothing of the kind. I am not a politician. I am a preacher of the Christian religion.”
“I always knew you were eccentric, of course, Bayard. Everybody knows that. But I never expected to see you leading such a singular life. I never took you for this sort of fanatic. It seems so—common for a man of your taste and culture, and there can be no doubt that it is unwise, from every point of view, even from your own, I should think. I don’t deny that your work impressed me, what I saw of it to-night. Your gifts tell—even here. It is a pity to have them misapplied. Now, what was your motive in that outbreak to-night? I take it, it was the first time you had tackled the subject.”
“To my shame—yes. It was the first time. I have had reasons to look into it, lately—that’s all. You see, my ignorance on the subject was colossal, to start in. We were not taught such things in the Seminary. Cesarea does as well as any of them—but no curriculum recognizes Job Slip. Oh, when I think about it—Predestination, foreordination, sanctification, election, and botheration,—and never a lesson on the Christian socialism of our day, not a lecture to tell us how to save a poor, lost woman, how to reform a drunkard, what to do with gamblers and paupers and thieves, and worse, how to apply what we believe to common life and common sense—how to lift miserable creatures, scrambling up, and falling back into the mud as fast as they can scramble—people of no religion, no morals, no decency, no hope, no joy—who never see the inside of a church”—
“They ought to,” replied Fenton severely. “That’s their fault, not ours. And all seminaries have a course on Pastoral Theology.”
“I visited sixteen of the dens of this town this last week,” replied Bayard. “I took a policeman, and went through the whole thing. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t go to church if I were they. I shall dream about what I saw—I don’t know that I shall ever stop dreaming about it. It is too horrible to tell. I wouldn’t even speak what I saw men and women live. The old sailors who have seen a good many ports, call it a hell of a town. My own idea is, that it isn’t a particle worse than other places of its class. I fancy it’s a fair, average seaport town. Six thousand seamen sail this harbor every year. I can’t get at the number of dens they support; such figures are runaway lunatics, you understand; they have a genius for hiding; and nobody wants to find them. But put it low—call it two hundred—in this little town. If it isn’t the business of a Christian church to shut them—whose is it? If it isn’t the business of religious people to look after these fellows—whose is it? I say, religious people are answerable for them, and for their vices! The best people are responsible for the worst, or there’s no meaning in the New Testament, and no sense in the Christian religion. Oh,” said Bayard, with a sound that was more like a moan than a sigh, “if Christ could come into Angel Alley—just this one street! If He could take this little piece of a worldful of human woe—modern human misery, you understand, all the new forms and phases that Palestine knew nothing about—if He could sweep it clean, and show us how to do it now! Think, Fenton, think, how He would go to work—what that would be!... sometimes I think it would be worth dying for.”