“He ain’t. He’s dangerous. I see it in his eyes. He’ll kill you some day; I know he will.”
Mary Bradley laughed, and put her arm around the old woman’s waist, and kissed her wrinkled face.
“You dear old fool!” she said. “Neither Crœsus nor the king could induce him to hurt me by so much as a pin-prick. I can twist him round my little finger every hour in the day.”
“Do you love him, Mary?”
“Let me tell you, mother. For what he has told me to-night, for the hope he has given me, for the promise of pure joy he has set before me, I adore him.”
CHAPTER XVI
“THE DARKNESS DEEPENS”
There was no abatement in the vigor with which the rector of Christ Church attacked the sins of capitalism, the curse of wage-slavery, the glaring inequalities of the existing social order. In the pulpit, on the platform, to the man in the street, anywhere, everywhere, in season and out of season, he preached his new gospel of the brotherhood of man. But he did not call it a new gospel. He called it the old gospel, proclaimed by Jesus Christ as the one foundation on which all human character and conduct must be built. He was acclaimed by the toiler, and cursed by the capitalist. His fame spread beyond the borders of his city and his state. The newspapers reported his sermons and speeches as matters of interest to the general public. Soap-box orators quoted him with approval. Socialists regarded him as one of their own kind; not quite, but almost persuaded to an acceptance of all their tenets and beliefs. There were some things in the socialistic creed to which he could not yet subscribe. He had little sympathy with the purely materialistic conception of the cause and basis of either happiness or misery in this life. He believed, with his Lord, that “The life is more than meat, and the body more than raiment.”
He could not concede the right of men and women to free themselves from a marriage bond which has become burdensome save for the one cause set down in Holy Scripture.