He cleared his throat and his eyes wandered, raptly, as of old, into the dim vastness of the rafters. "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword," he said impressively. "Text taken from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, tenth chapter, thirty-fourth verse."
He paused at that point, as he had paused Sundays without end, and the congregation, as if at a signal, seemed to settle back and make itself resignedly comfortable against the duty it faced. There was a subdued but general coughing, and the whispering rustle of silks: then a calm hush.
But the preacher had not uttered a dozen words before the expectant quiet changed sensibly. It was not his words which caused the change, but his tone. And it was not that his tone was dramatic, but that it was not. The very fact that he spoke with a complete freedom from anything histrionic presented a contrast which amazed.
But as the significance of the lesson he was drawing from the text became clear to them, astonishment gave place to an almost ominous, certainly an unsympathetic, attention.
Never in his career had he had more heedful listeners. As if magically, the news seemed to have percolated to the most obtuse intelligences that grave matters were transpiring. Once or twice there was a sibilant inrush of breath from some auditor too dumfounded for control. But for the rest there was utter silence. There was not a rustle nor a cough. The congregation of St. Viateur's had changed its character. It was playing a different rôle. It was as if an epicure had bitten caviar and tasted quinine. It waited.
Meanwhile, the Reverend Arnold Imrie was recording his new-found belief that the peace of Christ was not a complacent acceptance of earthly misery, but a dynamic struggle against the few who dispossessed—or would dispossess—the many; that the Man of Sorrows was a rebel, seeking, not to bring men to heaven, but heaven to men; that he brought a sword, sharp-pointed for the blood of injustice, for which, injustice, terrified, crucified him; and he was asking, very simply but very clearly, whether the charge of heretics that time had brought about a change between preaching Christ and preaching dogma, was true.
He went calmly on, opening, though they never suspected it, the innermost chambers of his heart to them, taking them into his confidence as he had never before taken even himself. For the first time, he did not preach: it was rather a mutual inventory before the God they worshipped, a dispassionate analysis of the institutions they revered, to see if, since they had become idols, they had deteriorated or no.
Only once did his emotionless manner desert him. Then without euphemism, he lashed them for their luxuries, for the repletion of their bellies, for the ideals of the spirit that they had allowed to die of starvation. For a few minutes he waxed eloquent and bitter and cruel. With a crash of his fist on the pulpit rail he repeated the words, "let him take up his cross and follow me," and hammered home to them, with brutal logic and remorseless clarity, what they meant.
It was a new Jesus which he painted for them, in bold sharp strokes. The Lamb of God, the doe-eyed martyr to vicarious atonement, vanished, and in his place stood a virile battler for human rights.
The strongest sentiment in the minds of the listeners was one of bewilderment. They watched, with something approaching admiration, the portrait as it grew more vivid before their eyes, and a few even admitted in it a specious fidelity. But none could comprehend at all clearly the reason for their rector's complete and sudden estrangement from the conceptions which he had worshipped hitherto with an orthodoxy beyond suspicion.