"Got a bit more than you came for, eh? Hope you've enjoyed your lordly selves. Don't forget to say your prayers to-night. You want a lot of converting before you'll be Christians. I've 'alf a mind to put up one for you to-night myself, blowed if I 'aven't."
Then the applause changed to laughter, hearty and good-humoured, and when the President had proposed the usual vote of thanks to the lecturer, and Vane had accepted his invitation to give a series of addresses at the halls of the Society throughout the country, the most memorable meeting on record at the Hall of Science came to an end.
CHAPTER XXIV.
The next Sunday, Vane, the Mayfair Missionary, as one of the evening papers had called him, preached at St. Chrysostom, and took for his text:
"Art thou a master of Israel and knowest not these things."
During the week, the storm of indignation against him had been growing both in strength and violence, and a movement was already on foot to arraign him before the Ecclesiastical Courts on charges of heresy and unbelief, and of bringing the priesthood into contempt by publicly associating himself as a priest with the avowed enemies of the Church.
The church was, of course, crowded, but the congregation was composed of very different elements from those which had made up his congregation a fortnight before. There were many of its richest members there, but they did not come in their carriages. Many others had come in trains or 'busses, or had walked from Mile End and Bethnal Green to hear the words of the new prophet; and scores of these had not seen the inside of a church for years, or ever dreamt of listening with anything like respect to a sermon from a Christian pulpit, yet none were more respectful and attentive than these infidels and heretics whose respectful attention and new-awakened reverence were the first fruits of Vane's mission harvest.
His sermon was a direct and uncompromising reply to the challenge to prove that he was worthy to wear the cloth of the priesthood, and when it was over, his hearers, the believers and unbelievers alike, had been driven to the conviction, unpleasant as it was to some of them, that if the preacher had drawn his conclusions right from the words of Christ and his Apostles, it was absolutely certain that neither churches or churchmen, whatever their form of doctrine might be, could at the same time be wealthy and powerful in the worldly sense, and remain anything more than nominal Christians.