"And what," he asked, "does the minister do when he has received this decoration from the Angel of the Chair?"
It was Mrs. Burbeck's turn to feel a flush of pleasure at this appellation from a stranger.
"Why," she smiled, her large eyes lighting persuasively, "he goes into the pulpit and announces a hymn."
"Which I am not going to do," declared John, "because I should not know what to do next."
"In that hour it shall be given you," quoted the lady.
Now it was very strange, but when Mrs. Burbeck quoted this, it did not seem like an appeal to faith at all, but the simple statement of a fact. It chimed in, too, with that odd suggestion of the presence of the Presence, which had come to John a while ago.
Feeling thereby unaccountably stronger, and endued with a sort of moral authority as if he had just taken Holy Orders because of the carnation which bloomed so chastely white upon his breast, John squared his shoulders and mounted into the pulpit. There was something that God wanted to say to these people, and he accepted the situation as an obvious call to him to say it, but when he essayed to speak, awe came upon him, as it had a while before.
"Brethren," he confessed humbly, in a voice barely audible to all, "I am not a preacher. I haven't got any text, and I don't know what to say, except just perhaps to tell you how I happened to be here this morning."
Then he told them simply and unaffectedly but with unconscious eloquence how he happened to see the church nailed up and how it sounded like the echo of the blows upon the cross; how, this morning, with a sad ache in his own heart, the thought of the faith of little children disturbed by that brutal plank upon the door had brought him all the way over here from his home in San Francisco and led him to do what he had done. He even told them of his meditative comparison between the houses of people that looked so happy and the house of God that looked so unhappy.
But while John was relating this modestly, yet with some of the fervor of unction and some comfortable degree of self-forgetfulness, he was interrupted by a sound like a sob, and looking down beyond Elder Burbeck to where Sister Nelson sat, he was surprised to see a handkerchief before her eyes and her shoulders trembling. Over on the other side, too, handkerchiefs were out, so that John suddenly realized that he or somebody had touched something.