“The decision does not lay in your hands, Doctor Boyd,” drawled a nasal voice with an unconcealed sneer in it. It was clean-shaven old Joseph G. Clark, who was not disturbed, in so much as the parting of one hair, by all the adverse criticism of him which had filled column upon column of the daily press for the past few days. “The rector has never, in the history of Market Square Church, been given the control of its finances. He has invariably been hired to preach the gospel.”
Sargent, Cunningham, Manning, and even Van Ploon, looked at Clark in surprise. He was not given to open reproof. Chisholm manifested no astonishment. He sat quietly in his chair, his fingers idly drumming on the edge of the table, but his mutton-chop beard was pink from the reddening of the skin beneath.
“The present rector of Market Square Church means to have a voice in its deliberations so long as he is the rector!” announced that young man emphatically, and Jim Sargent looked up at him with a jerk of his head. The Reverend Smith Boyd was pale this afternoon, but there was a something shining through his pallor which made the face alive; and the something was not temper. Rufus Manning, clasping his silvery beard with a firm grip, smiled encouragingly at the tall young orator. “I have said that I have, so far as I am concerned, relinquished the building of the cathedral,” the rector went on. “For this there are two reasons. The first is that its building will bring us further away from the very purpose for which the church was founded; the worship of God with an humble and a contrite heart! I am ready to confess that I found, on rigid self-analysis, my leading motive in urging the building of the new cathedral to have been vanity. I am also ready to confess, on behalf of my congregation and vestry, that their leading motive was vanity!”
“You have no authority to speak for me,” interrupted Chisholm, his mutton chops now red.
“Splendour is no longer the exclusive property of religion,” resumed the rector, paying no attention to the interruption. “It has lost the greater part of its effectiveness because splendour has become a mere adjunct to the daily luxury of our civilisation. The new cathedral would be only a surrounding in keeping with the gilded boudoirs from which my lady parishioners step to come to worship; and the ceremony of worship has become the Sunday substitute, in point of social recognition, for the week day tea. If I thought, however, that the building of that cathedral would promote the spread of the gospel in a degree commensurate with the outlay, I would still be opposed to the erection of the building; for the money does not belong to us!”
“Go right on and develop our conscience,” approved Manning, smiling up at the old walnut-beamed ceiling with its carved cherub brackets.
“The money belongs to Vedder Court,” declared the rector; “to the distorted moral cripples which Market Square Church, through the accident of commerce, has taken under her wing. Gentlemen, in the recent revelations concerning the vast industrial interests of the world, I have seen the whole blackness of modern corporate methods; and Market Square Church is a corporation! Corporations were originally formed for the purpose of expediting commerce, and it is the mere logic of opportunity that their progress to rapacity, coercion, and merciless strangulation of all competition, has been so swift. They have at no time been swayed by any moral consideration. This fact is so notorious that it has given rise to the true phrase ‘corporations have no souls.’ I wish to ask you, in how far the Market Square Church has been swayed, in its commercial dealings, by moral considerations?”
He paused, and glanced from man to man of his vestry. Sargent and Manning, the former of whom knew his plans and the latter of whom had been waiting for them to mature, smiled at him in perfect accord. Nicholas Van Ploon sat quite placidly, with his hands folded over his creaseless vest. Willis Cunningham, stroking his sparse brown Vandyke, looked uncomfortable, as if he had suddenly been introduced into a rude brawl; but his eye roved occasionally to Nicholas Van Ploon, who was two generations ahead of him in the acquisition of wealth, by the brilliant process of allowing property to increase in valuation. Chisholm glared.
“You’ll not find any money which is not tainted,” snapped Joseph G. Clark, who regarded money in a strictly impersonal light. “The very dollar you have in your pocket may have come direct from a brothel.”
“Or from Vedder Court,” retorted the rector. “We have brothels there, though we do not ‘officially’ know it. We have saloons there; we have gambling rooms there; and, from all these iniquities, Market Square Church reaps a profit! For the glory of God? I dare you, Joseph G. Clark, or W. T. Chisholm, to answer me that question in the affirmative! In Vedder Court there are tenements walled and partitioned with contagion, poison, with miasmatic air, reeking with disease; and from the poor who flock into this fetid shelter, because we offer them cheap rents, Market Square Church takes a profit as great as any distillery combine! For the glory of God? Out of very shame we can not answer that question! We have bought and sold with the greed of any conscienceless individual, and our commodity has been filth and degradation, human lives and stunted souls! No decent man would conduct the business we do, for the reason that it would soil his soul as a gentleman; and it is a shameful thing that a gentleman should have finer ethics than a Christian church! In the beginning, I was a coward about this matter! It was because I wished to be rid of our responsibility in Vedder Court that I first urged the conversion of that property into a cathedral. We can not rid ourselves of the responsibility of Vedder Court! If it were possible for a church to be sent to hell, Market Square Church would be eternally damned if it took this added guilt upon it!”