While speaking, the man had risen to his full height, and he now appeared, to all there assembled, impressively tall.
When he had spoken, reaching his right hand backward he grasped the foot of the great golden crucifix. It snapped off like glass, and he threw it on the marble floor at the feet of the priest. The fragment broke into many bits. It was apparently not wood, but plaster.
"Sacrilege!" cried the priest, in a stifled voice, as if the sound were wrung from his throat. His eyes seemed to be starting out of his great purple face.
The man quietly replied:
"No, but my right; for you are the sacrilegist and the blasphemer who makes of the Son of man a hideous caricature."
Then the priest stepped forward, and gripped Markus by the wrist. The latter made no resistance, but cried in a loud voice that reverberated through the church:
"Do your work, Caiaphas!"
After that he suffered himself to be led away to the sacristy.
While the congregation still sat, spellbound and motionless, Johannes hastily writhed his way out between the benches and the throngs of people.
Father Canisius returned, now quite calm and far less red. And while the sacristan with broom and dust-pan swept up the fragments and put them into a basket, the priest turned toward the audience and said: