And so, if anybody had laughed at Mr. Trimblerigg’s ingenuous answer on the question of his greatness, the laugh speedily died down, having left nothing to feed on. For if Mr. Trimblerigg was not the greatest man in the world, he was, at all events, the greatest success. In a single week he had made America believe in miracle; after which, from such a source, America was ready to believe almost anything.
His first message was delivered from the plinth of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, to an arrangement of loud-speakers which enabled him to be heard from Newark round by Staten Island to Brooklyn; thence, to a yet wider circle—embracing the greater part of the western hemisphere—broadcasting took up the tale, and if not quite making the world one, making Mr. Trimblerigg its sole topic of conversation.
Record crowds attended the performance; two ferry-boats capsized under the one-sided weight of the thousands who jammed the upper decks. The churches, smarter in the uptake than those of his own country, were satisfactorily filled; for there also loud-speakers adorned the vacant pulpits, and congregations of a hundred denominations hung upon his lips.
In that there was a danger, since verbal inspiration was now generally ascribed to him: and Mr. Trimblerigg being one of those orators who, when they let themselves go, are never quite sure what they may say,—or, afterwards, what they actually have said,—found it very hard to keep within safe bounds, or to withhold certain inspiring facts which he believed himself to possess.
He knew, for instance, the day on which the world, as regards its present dispensation, was to end. Susannah Walcot had given her word for it; but hitherto the Council of the Second Adventists had decided not to publish it,—to keep it till their position had become more absolutely assured, and the world psychologically ready to receive it.
But it was very difficult for Mr. Trimblerigg, when a whole continent was rushing into a state of conversion, and millions listening fervently to his daily orations, it was very difficult to keep back, in moments of inspired utterance, a declaration which would give the clou to the whole movement, letting organized society know in definite terms how brief, how startlingly brief, was its time-limit, before that great cataclysmic change which would take and turn it upside down.
And so one day, in a moment of effervescence, Mr. Trimblerigg let it out. And having done so, there was no going back on it.
With many millions already declared converts, and at least as many more hovering upon the brink, waiting for the deciding push, Second Adventism in that act of inspired indiscretion revealed its weakness and its strength. Western civilization (the East staying strangely unmoved, sceptical, slightly amused) received a shock comparable to a renewed outbreak of war. It was as though a half of the world had leapt to its feet in startled amaze, then staggered and plunged. For then on all the stock exchanges the wildest rush for reinvestments began that had ever been known, and mainly for shares in the vast co-operative concerns of New Jerusalem Ltd. which had been set going before his departure to America by Mr. Trimblerigg. A city designed to hold a million souls—self-governing, self-supporting, with its own trade-tokens for currency, and closely encircled by an agricultural combine exclusively supplying its needs from day to day—was now being rushed into being before the astonished eyes of a metropolis which had hitherto regarded itself as the biggest thing of its kind in the world.
But if, in less than a year, such a city could spring up mushroom-like from the soil, with a mere used-up playground set about with toy-palaces as its nucleus, what might it not do within a decade under a new dispensation? Its huge neighbour, unplanned, haphazard, fortuitous in the slow growth through which it had attained its present dimensions, and replete with vested interests opposed to so dislocating a change, paled at the mere thought of it. But the plan was already in operation, building was going on; and half the farmers and dairymen of the surrounding counties had signed contracts of future service entirely subversive to the supply-system of a city ten times its size. The trade-interests tried to get an act through Parliament, but the electoral power of Second Adventism was too strong. They tried to engineer a strike in the building trade, but Second Adventism was paying its workers too well. In every department there was prosperity and contentment; and when the Trade Unions and their leaders themselves became converts to Second Adventism, what more could the enemy do? They tried to get Mr. Trimblerigg’s co-operative currency prohibited as a base imitation of the coin of the realm; but Mr. Trimblerigg’s currency had been designed with holes through it—haloes with the heads missing—so that it could deceive nobody; and the Courts ruled that as a trade-token for convenience in commerce, it was allowable. Then they tried to swamp out its value by forging it; but as it had its full worth of silver in the world’s exchange, forgeries did not matter. Of course no bank would handle it; but that also did not matter. The New Jerusalem was going to have a bank of its own; and when the present state of things came to an end, it might well be the only bank that would count.
For Second Adventism did not teach that the world was going to end in fire, and earthquake, and physical overthrow; but that a new spirit would come hovering, responsive to the call of its worshippers; and entering into the place prepared for it, there set up a light; and all the world would see a working object-lesson of the new society that was soon to be; co-operation would take the place of competition; a reorganization of industry would make strikes superfluous; internationalism would arise, not from the adjustment of racial differences but from religious unity. And out of that would come Peace.