The pulpit was high above the heads of the people, much higher than is usual, a box of stone set in the great arch of the chancel.
As Gortre stood for a moment, after the prayer, he kissed the stole and placed it, as a yoke, upon his shoulders. He looked down the great building and saw the hundreds of watchful, expectant faces, with an uplifting sense of power. He felt as if he were a mouthpiece of strange, unseen forces. The air seemed full of wings.
For a moment the preacher paused and sent a keen glance over the congregation below. He saw Sir Michael Manichoe, dark, aquiline, Semitic, sitting in his front pew. A few seats behind him, with a sudden throb of surprise but nothing else, the calm and evil beauty of Constantine Schuabe's face looked up at him.
The strangeness of the appearance and the shock of it had at that moment no menace or intimidation for him. Standing there to deliver God's message, in God's house, his enemy seemed to have no power to throw his brain into its old fear and tumult.
Another face, unknown to him, arrested his attention.
The sexes were not separated for worship in St. Mary's. In the same seat where Schuabe sat was a woman, dark, handsome, expensively dressed.
She also was Jewish in appearance, though it was obvious that there was no connection between her and the millionaire. Her face, as the young clergyman's eyes rested on it for a second, seemed to be curiously familiar, as if he saw it every day of his life, but it nevertheless struck no personal note.
Gortre began to speak, taking for his text part of a verse from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans—"Declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead."
"In this world of to-day," he began calmly, and with a certain deliberation and precision in his utterance, "what men in general are hungering after is a positive assurance of actual spiritual agency in the world. They crave for something to hold by which is outside themselves, and which cannot have grown out of the inner persuasions of men. They cannot understand people who tell them that, whether the events of the Gospels actually passed upon earth or not, they may fashion their own dispositions all the same, on the supposition that these events occurred. If I can to-night show that any appearance of the Risen Lord is attested in the same way as are certain facts commonly accepted as history, I shall have accomplished as much as I can hope."
Then, very carefully, Gortre went through the scientific and historical evidences for the truth of the Resurrection. Gradually, as he marshalled his proofs and brought forth one after the other, he began, by a sort of unconscious hypnotism of the eye, to make the seat where Schuabe and the strange woman sat his objective.