He stared with a new wonder at the motor-cars, hurrying past, at a wireless telegraph station in the distance, thrusting its antennæ into the illimitable skies. How could he have ever been so blind! In all the world—and on it and over it—man was ever seeking truth and finding it. Always, like the wireless, he was pushing his antennæ into uncharted space, never resting content with the achievements of yesterday. It was only in the St. Viateur's that men still sat mumbling forgotten ritual, praying to shattered idols, rotting in the darkness. Outside, in the sunshine, the world forged ahead, living always in struggle, dying only in content.
His had been death in life, thought Imrie with something between a thrill and a shudder. But there were years left to him yet. He threw back his shoulders and set his jaws as he turned homeward.
For the first time he felt that he had a key to the great mystery of life. Paradox vanished, conflict dissolved. It seemed amazingly simple. His call to the ministry was a phenomenon, an aberration of adolescence. He still looked upon it with tenderness, but no longer with seriousness. Beside this new call now sounding bell-like in his heart, that other was but a beating of pans to drive the ghosts away, an empty relic of childhood. To expound creeds was a petty matter of business. He had been no nobler than the barrister who seeks to make right the wrong of his client for a consideration of sundry pieces of silver. He had been a mere tradesman in the things of the soul. It had seemed enough. Now, crystal-clear, stretched the true road toward which he was summoned. He had dallied long and comfortably in the well-tilled fields of the Past: he was called now to the hard, never-ending conquest of the Future. He would learn the Truth, and it would set him free ... and then, mayhap, he would set others free.
He was restless that evening, after dinner. The self-imposed solitude of the hotel had begun to be irksome. Forgetting momentarily that it was Sunday, he decided to visit a theatre. But as he ran through the blatant announcements of plays, an inconspicuous little advertisement caught his eye.
Half an hour later, in consequence of what he felt was a veritably inspired accident, he was in a theatre, listening to a sermon by a man who repeatedly assured his audience that he was not a clergyman.
Imrie noticed with surprise that the congregation was largely of men, and the thought struck him with unpleasant force that they were present quite entirely of their own volition. He wondered ironically how many people would attend St. Viateur's if there were no social ends to be achieved.
The man who sat next to him answered some of the questions which rose in his mind. He was about his own age, keen-featured, nervously alert, very fashionably dressed, a type more often found on the golf links than in church on Sunday mornings. Often, thought Imrie with a kind of shame, he had himself preached against the "agnosticism," the "irreligion," the "spiritual indifference," of such men. But this man's obviously profound attention to a mere sermon was a little bewildering.
From him Imrie learned that the speaker was a Jew, formerly a rabbi, who had established a "church" in a distant city, which, though without wealth or machinery of any sort, even to a home of its own, never had a vacant seat, and had become a powerful factor in civic affairs.
The stranger's familiarity with the speaker's history, and his manifest enthusiasm, were as surprising as they were significant, and as Imrie cast his eyes around the hall, he saw many like him. It struck him unpleasantly that men of this sort had not been numerous in his own congregation.
After the service, moved by an impulse which he did not stop to analyse, he made his way to the platform, introduced himself to the speaker, and asked permission to call upon him at his hotel. It was an act very foreign, he realised, to what he had always thought his natural reserve. But the spirit which impelled him was as strong as it was novel. Perhaps, he reflected, it was only necessity. He needed aid. Something told him that Dr. Weis could give it.