“That God which is in you—in me,” he proclaimed, “has lain dormant because undeveloped man, having made for himself in the dark ages gods of wood and stone, demanding awful sacrifice, called forth for himself later a deity as material, though embodied in no physical form—a God of vengeance and everlasting punishments. This is the man-created deity, and in his name man has so clamoured that the God which is man’s soul has been silenced. Let this God rise, and He will so demand justice and noble mercy from all creatures to their fellows that temptation and suffering will cease. What! can we do no good deed without the promise of paradise as reward? Can we refrain from no evil unless we are driven to it by the threat of hell? Are we such base traffickers that we make merchandise of our souls and bargain for them across a counter? Let us awake! I say to you from the deepest depths of my aching soul—if there were no God to bargain with, then all the more awful need that each man constitute himself a god—of justice, pity, and mercy—until the world’s wounds are healed and each human thing can stand erect and claim the joy of life which is his own.”
On the morning of the day he said these words to the crowd which had flocked to hear him, he had talked long with Latimer. For some weeks he had not been strong. The passion of intensity which ruled him when he spoke to his audiences was too strong an emotion to leave no physical trace. After a lecture or sermon he was often pallid and shaken.
“I have things to say,” he exclaimed feverishly to Latimer. “There are things which must be said. The spoken word lives—for good or evil. It is a sound sent echoing through all the ages to come. Some men have awakened echoes which have thrilled throughout the world. To speak one’s thought—to use mere words—it seems such a small thing—and yet it is my conviction that nothing which is said is really ever forgotten.”
And his face was white, his eyes burning, when at night he leaned forward to fling forth to his hearers his final arraignment.
“I say to you, were there no God to bargain with, then all the more awful need that each man constitute himself a god of justice, pity, and mercy—until the world’s wounds are healed and each human thing can stand erect and claim the joy of life which is his own.”
The people went away after the lecture, murmuring among themselves. Some of them carried away awakening in their eyes. They all spoke of the man himself; of his compelling power, the fire of meaning in his face, and the musical, far-reaching voice, which carried to the remotest corner of the most crowded buildings.
“It is not only his words one is reached by,” it was said. “It is the man’s self. Truly, he cries out from the depths of his soul.”
This was true. It was the man himself. Nature had armed him well—with strength, with magnetic force, with a tragic sense of the anguish of things, and with that brain which labours far in advance of the thought of the hour. Men with such brains—brains which work fiercely and unceasingly even in their own despite—reach conclusions not yet arrived at by their world, and are called iconoclasts. Some are madly overpraised, some have been made martyrs, but their spoken word passes onward, and if not in their own day, in that to-morrow which is the to-day of other men, the truth of their harvest is garnered and bound into sheaves.
At the closing of his lectures, men and women crowded about him to speak to him, to grasp his hand. When they were hysterical in their laudations, his grace and readiness controlled them; when they were direct and earnest, he found words to say which they could draw aid from later.
“Am I developing—or degenerating—into a popular preacher?” he said once, with a half restless laugh, to his shadow.