A man with a strong square head, rugged face, and grizzled hair and beard.
A workman, one could see at a glance, and poor as the people of the congregation, but yet there was a subtle difference.
His face was more sophisticated in suffering than theirs—his poverty more poignant—for he knew which they did not, what poor people miss. He had looked wistfully up the highways he might not tread, they looked only upon the hard road they had travelled.
He peered yearningly into paradises of learning whose gates are closed to the man whose hours are spent in toil; they did not lift their eyes beyond the little circle of their immediate needs. He craved to “reach the law within the law”; they sought their own personal salvation.
And as Sidney rose the eyes of this man dwelt upon him as one might look upon a master who had betrayed him, whom yet he follows afar off.
Sidney rose in his place.
A shaft of golden light wavered about the old-fashioned square panes of the window, and, finding the centre of one, pierced through it, and streamed in lucent radiance straight above Sidney’s head.
Some in the congregation thought it was like the flaming sword that drove Adam from Paradise, and the old workman, watching the preacher with an infinitude of yearning in his eyes, gave a deep-chested sigh and thought it pity that nature’s golden illumination was just a little higher than Sidney, just a hand-breadth beyond him.
With hands outstretched above them Sidney uttered the usual words of his invocation, and then gave out the hymn. There are unwritten canons which govern the selection of sacred songs, and in Dole the clergyman had been wont to begin the service with words suggestive of humbleness, or pleading, or an acknowledgment of the Deity they were addressing, or at least a filial expression of confidence in a Father’s love. But Sidney had chosen another hymn than any of these—one of those yearning sweet songs which here and there redeem the hymn-books—usually chosen at the end of the service; he took it as the key-note seemingly of his sermon:
“Oh love that will not let me go.”