“No, no!” Latimer cried, rising. “You—it could not——”
He drew his hand across his forehead and eyes.
“What are we saying?” he exclaimed, stammeringly. “What are we thinking of? For a moment it seemed as if she were alive again. Poor little Margery, with her eyes like blue flowers, she has been dead years and years and years.”
It was not long after this that the Reverend John Baird startled a Boston audience one night by his lecture, “Repentance.” In it he unfolded a new passionate creed which produced the effect of an electric shock. Newspapers reported it, editorials discussed it, articles were written upon it in monthly magazines. “Repentance is too late,” was the note his deepest fervour struck with virile, almost terrible, intensity. “Repent before your wrong is done.”
“Repentance comes too late,” he cried. “We say a man saves his soul by it—his soul! We are a base, cowardly lot. Our own souls are saved—yes! And we hug ourselves and are comforted. But what of the thing we have hurt—for no man ever lost his soul unless he lost it by the wound he gave another—by inflicting in some other an agony? What of the one who has suffered—who has wept blood? I repent and save myself; but repentance cannot undo. The torture has been endured—the tears of blood shed. It is not to God I must kneel and pray for pardon, but to that one whose helplessness I slew, and, though he grant it me, he still has been slain.”
The people who sat before him stirred in their seats; some leaned forward, breathing quickly. There were those who turned pale; here and there a man bent his head and a woman choked back a sob, or sat motionless with streaming eyes. “Repentance is too late—except for him who buys hope and peace with it. A lifetime of it cannot undo.” The old comfortable convention seemed to cease to be supporting. It seemed to cease to be true that one may wound and crush and kill, and then be admirable in escaping by smug repentance. It seemed to cease to be true that humanity need count only with an abstract, far-off Deity Who can easily afford to pardon—that one of his poor myriads has been done to death. It was all new—strange—direct—and each word fell like a blow from a hammer, because a strong, dramatic, reasoning creature spoke from the depths of his own life and soul. In him Humanity rose up an awful reality, which must itself be counted with—not because it could punish and revenge, but because the laws of nature cried aloud as a murdered man’s blood cries from the ground.
As Baird crossed the pavement to reach his cab, the first night he delivered this lecture, a man he knew but slightly stepped to his side and spoke to him.
“Mr. Baird,” he said, “will you drive me to the station?”
Baird turned and looked at him in some surprise. There were cabs enough within hailing distance. The man was well known as a journalist, rather celebrated for his good looks and masculine charm. He was of the square-shouldered, easy-moving, rich-coloured type; just now his handsome eye looked perturbed.