That evening the striplings, together with Netherby Gomme, wandered, with a crowd that pressed, into the large and simple place of worship of a well-known chapel to hear a great Protestant preacher. This man, unaided by the gorgeous ritual of the morning that appealed to every artistic sense, made the simple Protestant claim to individual responsibility, to acts of life as against the ritual of churches. He ignored all Christolatry, as a grown man sets aside the toys of childhood, and his voice thundered that the life of the individual would be judged solely by the part it played towards the ennobling of the community. And he showed that just as Christianity had been born from the Jews and the Greeks, so had Protestantism in turn been born out of Rome; and so must the future ideals of the great peoples, purified still more and more by rejecting the false and the superstitious, be born again out of this same Protestantism.
It was the large, daring, and frank mind of this man that roused the lad from the lethargic irresponsibility of his boyhood to his duty towards life. Just as the Romanist communion by its ideal of the salvation of the individual through and by the community has weakened the force of the individual, so the innate difference of the Protestant ideal, the salvation of the community by and through the individual, strengthened the lad’s nerve and made his will resolute. He flung off his reliance on others and faced his life and his destiny.
He roused from the drowsy contemplation and the fantastic dreads of otherworldliness—ridiculous heavens and more ridiculous hells—and turned to life. For awhile he was not troubled.
The genial optimism of youth came back to him.
It was soon after this stage of awakening intellectual unrest that the lad found himself embarked on the larger tide of the literary and intellectual unrest of the Continent.
Mixing more and more amongst the Bohemians, he found himself amongst frank and fearless thinking; he was roused by the inquisitive genius of France—heard the first words of the daring speculations of German thought. He realized that religious teaching had passed from the Church to the newspaper—to literature—and to the arts; that religion, from being a fierce war of priests, was become a searching into the everyday life of the community, was become a fierce desire to better that life. The angels were flown, theology gone to dust, and man was seeking after the godhead that is in him—he who had kissed the feet of idols, cringing for salvation in whimsical heavens, now stood up and looked at the meaning of manhood.
Thou Shalt Not was giving place to Thou Shalt.