Van Meter gazed on him hypnotised by the violence of his onrush. When Gordon would suddenly lift his enormous blue-veined hand high over his head in an impassioned gesture the Deacon cowered unconsciously beneath his towering figure.
Pausing a moment, while the crowd held its’ breath, watching every movement and every twitch of a muscle of his face, he pointed his long finger at the Deacon and continued:
“And, as if to mock intelligence, Tradition raises the feeble cry of reminiscent senility, ‘Back to the old paths!’
“Protestantism is the rebellion of reason against the shackles of authority. Our conscience fettered by tradition stultifies its own life. We must go forward or die.
“Theology is a science, religion a life. The one is a fact, the other an analysis after the fact. The stage-coach yielded to the limited, the sailing craft to the ocean greyhound, but we are told that the only age that ever knew the truth, or had the right to express it, was the age which burned witches, executed dumb animals as criminals, whipped church bells for heresy, held chemistry a black art and electricity a manifestation of the devil or the Shekina of God.
“The men to whom I speak have seen New York grow from a town of three hundred thousand on the lower end of Manhattan Island to be the imperial metropolis of the New World with four millions within her golden gates.
“Within a generation, the Brooklyn Bridge, a dream in the brain of a man, has spun its spider web of steel across the river, our buildings grown from four stories to towering castles of steel with their flag-staffs in the clouds.
“Our nation has been baptised in blood and a new Constitution established.
“The German Empire has been created, and a new map of the world made.
“Steam and electricity have been applied to travel and speech, and the earth transformed into a whispering gallery. The cylinder press has proclaimed universal education, and the dynamo crowned the brow of humanity with a coronet of light.