"In order that you may draw twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty per cent. from your investments, instead of an honest return from the wealth with which God has entrusted you, there are men who eat like animals. In the little eating-houses around the works, there are human beings who leave their knives and forks unused and drop their heads and bury their noses and mouths into what is set before them. All the bones, nerves, and muscles below their wrists are useless. These are the slaves of lead, who are transmuting lead with the sacrifice of their own lives, that it may change to gold to purchase your banquets. You are the people who directly or indirectly live in a luxury such as the world has never seen before, out of the wages of disease and death. Copper colic, hatter's shakers, diver's paralysis, shoemaker's chest, miller's itch, hammerman's palsy, potter's rot, shoddy fever, are the prices which others pay for your yachts and pictures, your horses and motor-cars, your music, your libraries, your clubs, your travel, and your health.
"And what of the other and more intimate side of your lives? Do you live with the most ordinary standard of family and personal purity before you? Do you spend a large portion of your lives in gambling, in the endeavor to gain money without working for it from people less skilful or fortunate than yourself? Do you reverence goodness and holiness when you find them or are told of them, or do you mock and sneer? Do you destroy your bodily health by over-indulgence in food, in wine, and in unnatural drugs, which destroy the mind and the moral sense? Do you ever and systematically seek the good and welfare of others, or do you live utterly and solely for yourself, even as the beasts that perish?"
The preacher stopped in one long pause; then his voice sank a full tone—
"Yes, all these things you do, and more, and God is not with you."
Nearly every head in the church was bent low as the flaming, scorching words of denunciation swept over them.
Wealthy, celebrated, high in the world's good favor as they were, none of these people had ever heard the terrible, naked truth about their lives before. Nor was it alone the denunciatory passion of the words and the bitter realization of the shameful truth which moved and influenced them so deeply. The personality of the Teacher, some quality in his voice which they had never yet heard in the voice of living man, the all-inspiring likeness to the most sacred figure the world has ever known, the intense vibrating quality of more than human power and conviction—all these united to light the fires of remorse in every heart, and to touch the soul with the cold fingers of fear.
Accustomed as most of them were to this or that piquant thrill or sensation—for were not their lives passed in the endless quest of stimulating excitement?—there was yet something in this occasion utterly alien to it, and different from anything they had ever known before.
Of what this quality consisted, of what it was composed, many of them there would have given conflicting and contradictory answers. All would have agreed in its presence.
Only a few, a very few, knew and recognized the truth, either with gladness and holy awe or with shrinking and guilty dread, the Power which enveloped them with the sense of the presence of the Holy Ghost.
There was a change in the accusing voice—