Mr. Andrew Levison, the lessee and part proprietor of the Frivolity Theatre, sat in his private office, which led out of the foyer, one damp and foggy afternoon, a fortnight after Joseph's now famous sermon at St. Elwyn's.
Since that momentous occasion, much water had run under the bridge.
Joseph and his companions had become the question of the hour. What, in the first instance, had been mere excitement and surmise, was now an accepted and revolutionary fact. Except by hearsay, London in reality was divided into two camps—those who were for, and those who were against the Teacher.
And the hostile party was infinitely greater than the friendly one.
In the first instance, the attitudes of the religious bodies were extremely varied.
Mr. Persse himself, whose church had become suddenly emptied of its congregation, and whose personal prestige had suffered an irremediable injury, headed a most virulent and persistent antagonism.
But the really fine brains and spiritual natures in the Anglican Church—including those noble men who live the lives of paupers among paupers, and work like galley-slaves—were much more friendly. They noticed that the Teacher made no personal assumptions. He did not say that those whose sins he remitted were cleansed. He baptized none; he called himself an ambassador, but not a priest of God.
That, in His inscrutable providence, the Father had richly endowed this man with the Holy Spirit, that he did indeed walk under the direct guidance of God, seemed to these good men impossible to doubt. They were, despite the certain restrictions of thought to which their training and temperament inclined them, ready to believe that because the advent of one directly inspired by the Holy Ghost in the sense with which the Apostle Paul was inspired was outside their personal experience, it was not to be rejected upon that account.
As far as in them lay, in the measure of their opportunities and possibilities, they held out the welcoming hand.
But, as was inevitable, it was the Free Sects who were in the front of the Teacher's army—as far as definitely Christian people went.