CHAPTER I.
Barnabas Thorpe stood preaching by the river. He had preached in northern manufacturing towns, where the struggle for life is hard; he had preached by the sea shore, and in little outlying hamlets in the mining districts; but he had spoken nowhere as he spoke to-day in London.
This city, of great wealth and great poverty; of idlers and slaves; these churches, where the rich man sat on cushioned seats, and the poor man on benches hard as charity; these women, with hoarse voices and hungry eyes, who followed him in the streets; these children, for whom the Kingdom of Heaven might indeed be open, but for whom earth had more kicks than blessings—all these stung him to a passionate eloquence that almost touched despair.
Did Luxury never look backwards over her shoulder at the black misery treading close at her heel? he wondered. Would the men of Sodom and Gomorrah rise up in judgment on this place?
Perhaps (though he did not know it, being little given to analysis), a sharp personal want pointed his realisation of the contrast between the Dives and the Lazarus of London; for his wife at this moment was with her father.
He stood on a barrel by the water's edge—the Thames was neither sweet nor clean at Stepney—and preached of Heaven in the midst of, what seemed to him, an uncommonly good imitation of hell.
It was a close evening; but there was a fine drizzling rain falling, that damped everything except the preacher's ardour, which always burnt more fiercely for opposition, either physical or moral.
Even without his barrel he would have been a head taller than most of his hearers. His vigorous manhood was in strong contrast to the stunted specimens of riverside humanity gathered round him—under-sized, unhealthy youths, who looked as if they had done nothing but "loaf" from the day they were born; girls with straight fringes, and paper feathers stuck in their hats, and just a sprinkling of navvies, a burlier and more hopeful, though brutal, element.