After that the chairman put to the meeting the resolution of protest to the effect that if the Reverend Vane Maxwell persisted in carrying out his intention to proceed from a pulpit of the church to the platform of an infidel lecture hall, he would make it the painful duty of his canonical superiors to take his conduct into most serious consideration, and, further, should he persist in this deplorable resolution, he would arouse the gravest suspicions in the minds of all loyal churchmen as to his fitness for dispensing the sacred functions of his office.
The Kilburn Sister and a few others walked out amidst a chilling silence, and under a silent fire of glances which ought to have made them feel very uncomfortable. Perhaps it did.
The resolution was put and passed without a dissentient voice, and when the proceedings were over and Lady Canore, who had been one of the most energetic organisers of the meeting, got back into her carriage, she said to her husband:
"I think the dear Canon's reply was most dignified and proper. That woman ought to be ashamed of herself—and a Kilburn Sister, too! Donald, I shall certainly go and hear what this Mr. Maxwell has to say to these—ah—these people at, where is it? the Hall of what? Oh, yes! Science, and you must manage to get a seat. I believe you pay for them just as you do in a theatre. It is, of course, very shocking, but I think it will be most interesting."
A good many other members of the audience said practically the same thing in other ways, and so it came about that the Hall in Old Street was packed as it had not been since the most famous days of Charles Bradlaugh, and packed, too, with a most strangely assorted audience of democrats and aristocrats, socialists and landowners, freethinkers of the deistic, the atheistic, and the agnostic persuasions, and Christians of even more varying shades of opinion, from the most rigidly Calvinistic evangelical, to the most artistically emotional of the High Anglican cult.
The President rose amidst the usual applause, but it hushed the moment he began to speak, in clear incisive tones which sent every syllable distinctly from end to end of the hall:
"Friends, I intend to say very little, because we are going to hear to-night what we very seldom hear in a secular lecture-hall. We are going to hear an address which you are waiting for as eagerly as I am, an address delivered by a man who, as a Priest of the Church of England, last Sunday sent a thrill of astonishment, of amazement, I might almost say of horror, through Christian England."
A burst of applause, coming chiefly from the back of the hall, interrupted the speaker, but he put his hand up, and went on:
"No, please! I must ask you not to applaud. For one thing, there is not time for it. Just let me get my say said, and then, when Mr. Maxwell gives us the message he has brought us from what we are, perhaps, too ready to believe the enemy's camp, applaud him as much as you like. What I want to do now is to say as far as possible without offence, and without hurting the feelings of the many members of Christian churches who have come amongst us to-night, that it is to be our privilege to listen here in what has been recently called the head-quarters of infidelity—an insulting epithet which I, with you and all true rationalists indignantly repudiate—a man, a Christian clergyman, a priest of the Church of England who has, as you already know, raised a hurricane of criticism throughout this Christian country by daring to tell Christians just what Jesus of Nazareth meant—if plain words mean anything—when he preached the Sermon on the Mount. He has dared to say from a Christian pulpit what we have been saying from these platforms of ours ever since we had them—that Christendom is not Christian, and that it cannot be so until it is prepared to be honest with itself and its God.
"Mr. Maxwell has come amongst us to-night with other thoughts, other faiths, other beliefs than ours, but from what I see of the audience he will not speak to freethinkers only. I believe that there are more professing Christians in this hall to-night than there ever have been before. Let us remember that. It may be that Mr. Maxwell will teach us some lessons as unpalatable as those which he taught from the pulpit of St. Chrysostom; but do not let us forget this that we shall be listening to a man who is a missionary in the best sense of the word, a man who has justified his faith by the sacrifice of his worldly prospects, and who has taken upon himself a task infinitely more difficult, infinitely more thankless than that of the missionary who, as we believe, carries at an immense expense of money which could be better spent in the charity that begins at home, a message of salvation, as he no doubt honestly believes it to be, to savages who cannot understand it, or to the people who were civilized when we were savages, and who don't want it and won't have it.