The life and death of Berselius had been an object lesson for him, teaching vividly the fact that evil is indestructible; that wash yourself with holy water or wash yourself with soap, you will never wash away the evil being that you have constructed by long years of evil-doing and evil-thinking.
His pilgrimage in search of mercy and redress for a miserable people had emphasized the fact.
The great crime of the Congo stood gigantic, like a shadowy engine for the murdering of souls.
“Destroy that,” said the devil triumphantly. “You cannot, for it is past destruction; it has passed into the world of the ideal. No man’s hand may touch it; it is beyond the reach like the real self of your friend Berselius. Sweep the Congo State away to-morrow; this will remain. A thing soul-destroying till the end of time. It began small in the brain of one ruinous man, God whom I hate! look at it now.
“It has slain ten million men and it will slay ten million more, that is nothing; it has ruined body and soul, the stokers who fed it and the engineers who worked it, that is nothing; it has tangled in its wheels and debased the consciences of five nations, that is nothing. It is eternal—that is everything.
“Since I was flung out of heaven, I have made many things, but this is my masterpiece. If I and all my works were swept away, leaving only this thing, it would be enough. In the fiftieth century it will still have its clutch on man, yea, and to the very end of time.”
Cause and effect, my friend, in those two words you have the genius of this machine which will exist forever in the world of consequence, a world beyond divine or human appeal.
In England, Adams had found himself confronted with the dull lethargy of the people, and the indifference of the Established Church. The two great divisions of Christ’s Church were at the moment at death grapples over the question of Education. Only amongst the Noncomformists could be found any real response to the question which was, and is, the test question which will disclose, according to its answer, whether Christianity is a living voice from on high, or an echo from the Pagan past; and a debased echo at that. Debased, for if Adams could have stood in the Agora of Athens and told his tale of horror and truth, could Demosthenes have taken up the story; could Leopold the Barbarian have been a king in those days, and have done in those days, under the mandate of a deluded Greece, what he has done under the mandate of a deluded England; what a living spirit would have run through Athens like a torch, how the phalanxes would have formed, and the beaked ships at Piræus torn themselves from their moorings, to bring to Athens in chains the ruffian who had murdered and tortured in her name!
To complete the situation and give it a touch of hopelessness, he found that others had striven well, yet almost vainly in the field. Men working for truth and justice as other men work for gold, had attacked the public with solid battalions of facts, tabulated infamies; there had been meetings, discussions, words, palabres, as they say in the south; but the murderer had calmly gone on with his work, and England had put out no hand to stay him.
But it was not till he reached America, that Adams found himself fighting the machine itself.