'Put like that,' I said, 'it is rather weird.'
'Aye,' he went on, 'and every half-year managers and deacons assemble in the houses of God to traffic in these square feet of pews. There is a story how One long ago knotted a whip of cords and drove the traffickers out of His Father's house, His eyes blazing with anger. Would He not wield the same whip on these deacons and managers, and drive them out to-day? How astonished they would be, with all the law and all the vested interest on their side ... and yet that whip!'
The little man fell silent, and his strange eye looked as if he were seeing it all. And he smiled curiously.
'Did you ever trespass on an ecclesiastical allotment?' he asked jerkily. 'No! Well, it is a thing not to be done. I once trespassed on a garden allotment out in Kelvinside, just to admire some wonderful sweet-peas, and the man who owned it found me and welcomed me like a brother, and sent me away with a radiant bunch of flowers; but an ecclesiastical allotment is another story. An old heritor once said to me that the only thing that really roused the devil in a Scotsman's heart was trespassing on his ecclesiastical allotment.'
'That only shows,' I retorted, 'how dear to a Scotsman's heart his part in the Church is.'
'That is only quibbling,' jerked out the bald man.
III
'Last Sunday evening,' went on the bald man, speaking very rapidly and walking up and down the room in his excitement, 'I went to a church situated in a mean street, surrounded by closes that each holds the population of a sparse parish. A tattered bill on the door proclaimed the traffic in seats. There seemed to be no demand. There were only eighteen present. A cheap church, with varnished pews, that could hold a thousand—and only eighteen there—old people and two or three children—none who could lay hold on life with both hands. To that handful a discouraged and hopeless preacher proclaimed the evangel of the love of God ... but his voice died in the disconsolate and empty spaces.... But when I came out, there in an open space were massed thousands of men, and the air throbbed with vitality as they listened to an orator denouncing capital and proclaiming the coming of the new day when every man could have his heart's desire—money and more money.... Eighteen at the church where the salt had lost its savour, and thousands where the chaff of worldliness was the only bread served to perishing souls.'
'But you must remember that there were some churches quite full in the city that evening,' I interjected.
'Quite so,' resumed the bald man, 'but who were they that filled them? Only the one class that has still kept its hold on the seriousness and the duty of life—the middle class—the one layer of health in the nation.'