"No call?" queried Dean Hamilton, laughing nervously, as was his way of modifying the intensity of the situation. "Your capacity to do is your call."
"Being honest with yourself, do you not believe that you can save this church?" argued Brother Harding.
John felt that he could, but his soul still strained within him, and his eyes roved over the audience, the corners of the room and the very beams in the ceiling, as if seeking a way of escape.
Suddenly a man stood up in the back of the church.
"Will he take a side?" this man demanded excitedly, with hoarse impatience. "What side is he on?"
The very crassness of this partisan creature, so seething with personal feeling that he understood nothing of the young man's agony of soul, lashed the tender sensibilities of Hampstead like a scourge, so that all his nature rose in protest. From a figure of cowering doubt, he suddenly stood forth bold and challenging.
"No!" he thundered. "I will not take a side! The curse of God is upon sides, and every man and every woman who takes a side in His church! I will take the Lord's side. I challenge every one of you who is willing to leave his or her petty personal feeling in this controversy, for to-night and forever, to come out here and stand beside me. I place my life career upon the issue. I will let your coming be my call. If you call me, I will answer. If you do not, God has set me free from any responsibility to you."
The questioning partisan sank down abashed before such prophetic fervor. John stood waiting. No eye looked at any other eye but his. The silence was electric and pregnant, but brief, broken almost immediately by a low, rumbling sound and the rattle of wheels against chairs. The Angel of the Chair, propelling her vehicle herself, was coming to take her place beside John.
She had barely reached the front when the tall form of Elder Burbeck was seen to advance stiffly and offer his hand to Hampstead.
The venerable Elder Lukenbill, goat-whiskered and doddering, leader of the Aleshire faction, hesitated only long enough to gloat a little at this spectacle of his rival, Burbeck, eating humble pie, and then, prodded from behind, arose and careened on weak knees down the aisle.