“This is a wonderful sermon,” mused Gail; then she turned to the rector. She softened toward him, as she saw that he, too, had partaken of the awe and majesty of this scene. He stood straight and tall, his splendidly poised head thrown back, and his gaze resting far off where the hills cut against the sky in tree-clad scallops.
“It is an inspiration,” he told her, with a tone in his vibrant voice which she had not heard before; and for that brief instant these two, between whom there had seemed some instinctive antagonism, were nearer in sympathy than either had thought it possible to be. Then the Reverend Smith Boyd happened to remember something. “The morality or immorality of riches depends upon its use,” he sonorously stated, as he stepped out into the road again, dragging his sled behind him, following the noisy, loitering crowd with the number two bob-sled. “Market Square Church, which is the one I suppose you meant in your comparison with the rich man, intends to devote all the means with which a kind Providence has blessed it, to the glory of God.”
“And the gratification of the billionaire vestry,” she added, still annoyed with the Reverend Smith Boyd, though she did not know why.
He turned to her almost savagely.
“Have you no sense of reverence?” he demanded.
“For the church, or the creed, or the ministry? Not a particle!” she heartily assured him. “The church, as an instrument for good, has practically ceased to exist. Even charity, the greatest of the three principles upon which the church was originally founded, has been taken away from it, because the secular organisations dispense charity better and more sanely, and while the object is still alive.”
Again the Reverend Smith Boyd drew her out of the road, almost ungently, and unnecessarily in advance of need, to permit a thick man to glide leisurely by, on his stomach on a hand sled. He grinned up at them from under a stubby moustache, and waved a hand at them with a vigour which nearly ran him into a ditch; but a sharp scrape of his toe in the snow, made with a stab the expertness of which had come back to him through forty years, brought him into the path again, and he slid majestically onward, with happy forgetfulness of the dignity belonging to the president of the Towando Valley Railroad and a vestryman of Market Square Church.
“That used to be lots of fun,” remembered Gail, looking after her Uncle Jim in envy.
“Market Square Church has dispensed millions in charity,” the rector felt it his duty to inform her, as they started up the hill again.
“If it’s like our church at home it costs ninety cents to deliver a dime,” she retorted, bristling anew with bygone aggravations. “So long as you can deliver baskets of provisions in person, it is all right, but the minute you let the money out of your sight it filters through too many paid hands. I found this out just before I resigned from our charity committee.”