It was Friday afternoon that the riot took place. It was now Sunday morning, and the first day of April. The sun was shining gloriously. Birds were chirping in the bare trees. The first springing green was giving life to the rectory lawn. But the rector of Christ Church, looking out from his window toward the street, neither saw nor heard these signs of the wakening season. The sound of the tolling church bell struck upon his ears. He knew that the hour for morning service was approaching, but the knowledge gave him little concern. His children were playing in the hall. He paid no heed to them. It was not that he was ill in body, but that he was sick in soul. His wound had been severe, but it had not placed his life in jeopardy. A glancing blow from a flying brick that had crashed through the glass panel of the door behind him had first laid his scalp open to the bone. He was still weak from the shock of the blow and from loss of blood. But prompt and skilful surgical attention, and a robust constitution, were bringing him rapidly back into his customary form. It was not the result of the violent and brutal assault upon his body from which he was suffering to-day; it was rather the awakening knowledge of what that assault implied. The toilers for whose sake he had dared the displeasure of the powerful, the oppressed for whom he had pleaded and fought, the poverty-stricken whose sufferings he had relieved with his own hands and out of his own pittance, had repudiated and repulsed him, and finally had stoned him. Could ingratitude reach greater depths? Had a bitterer cup than this ever been held to the lips of any minister of that Christ who alone had felt the extreme bitterness of ingratitude?
And yet he scarcely knew the half of what these toilers thought of him to-day. He had no conception of the strong resentment—resentment without cause that burned in their hearts against him. He had preached fairly enough indeed; but what had he actually done for them? He had declaimed against the power of capital, but capital had not loosened its grip on them by so much as the breadth of a hair. He had been charitable to them, oh, yes! and had visited their sick with pious consolation, and had lured them into unwitting friendship for him and his church, and had opened his parish hall to them on a March day, and what had been the purpose of it all? Only that he might betray them, at the last, into the hands of those tyrannical masters who had hired him, and whom they had repudiated once and for all. For had he not, when the hour came to strike the final blow for victory, thrown himself across their path, besought them to surrender to their oppressors, and when they would not, called them to their faces fools and cowards and murderers? One brick against his pious skull? He should have had a thousand. Curses on him and his sinister religion with its meaningless sop to socialism, and its cloven hoof hidden under its clerical robes!
Ah! but the denunciation of the poor was as nothing to the condemnation of the rich. By the teaching of his social heresies he had led the ignorant and the thoughtless into an attitude toward society that was bound to result in violence and bloodshed, as it had resulted. He had disgraced the religion he was supposed to preach. He had degraded his Church, and debased his high calling. He had opened their sacred buildings to a profane and howling crowd. The walls of their parish hall had echoed with incendiary speeches, with appeals to the worst passions of the heart, with jeers and curses and the crack and crash of churchly furniture. And out from the doors of this profanated house had issued a riotous and bloodthirsty mob, bent on destroying the property if not the lives of some of the most law-abiding and God-fearing citizens of the city or the state. What degradation! What unheard of sacrilege!
And in the midst and at the height of this disgraceful riot which he had done so much to precipitate, what a spectacle this discredited priest had made of himself! Alternately appealing to and denouncing the reckless mob that surrounded him, he had aroused only their scorn and resentment, until one of them, more daring than his companions, had felled the offending minister with a common brick. Disgusting enough, indeed! But that was not the worst of it; oh, by no means! For, as he lay sprawling and unconscious on the steps, surrounded by rioters and ruffians, had not a woman of the lower class, a socialist, an anarchist, an atheist, a consorter with desperate characters, a woman whose vulgar husband had been scarce six months dead, had not she rushed to his side, and embraced him, and kissed him, and wept over him, and shrieked to the crowd that he was the only man she had ever loved?
But when they reached this dramatic climax of the clergyman’s degradation, the scandalized gossips spoke in whispers lest some one, overhearing them, should charge them with spreading unclean tales.
Had the rector of Christ Church known the things that loose tongues were saying of him, had he known what had happened after he fell unconscious on the office steps—for no one had yet had the hardihood to tell him, and the newspapers, with becoming decency, had failed to publish the incident—would he have gone into his pulpit that April morning to preach to his people the gospel of a sinless Christ? It is not to be doubted. For he would have felt in his heart that he was guiltless and without stain, and, as yet, he had not known fear. Indeed, he had not yet acknowledged his defeat. He was hurt, grieved, humiliated, but not conquered. His spirit was not that of the Hebrew psalmist pouring out his soul in the de profundis. It was rather that of Henly’s hero thundering his pagan defiance at fate. The lines came into his mind now as he stood gazing from his window into the sunlight on the lawn, and brought to him a strange and unchristian consolation.
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.