John felt that he wrote this and that he signed it in the presence of the Presence. The address and not the sermon was his valedictory.
CHAPTER XXXIX
THE CUP TOO FULL
While the Monday morning papers played up the "Address to the People", in the evening John noticed that his name had slipped off the front page. This was at once a relief and a bitterness. It told him that he was done for; that, as a matter of news, he was only a corpse waiting for the funeral pyre. That pyre was a matter to which Elder Burbeck was attending, assisted by a committee of fellow zealots—male and female—who were industriously conducting a house-to-house canvass of the entire membership of All People's during the hours between Sunday at one and Monday night at eight. Despite the lofty mood of self-sacrifice into which the man had worked himself, the knowledge of all this busy bell-ringing and its sinister purpose operated irritatingly on the skin of Hampstead. It made his flesh creep with annoyance that grew toward anger.
But in the midst of these creepings, a significant thing happened. The Reverend William Dudley Rohan, pastor of the largest, the richest, and by material standards the most influential protestant congregation in the city, came in person to call on Hampstead, to shake him by the hand and say: "Your address had an apostolic ring to it. I believe in you sincerely."
In John's mail that afternoon there came from Father Ansley, an influential priest of the Roman Catholic communion, a letter to similar effect.
Moreover, as the activity of Elder Burbeck developed, John began to hear more and more from members of his own congregation who either refused to believe the charges against him, or, if not so ready to acquit, none the less refused to desert him now.
All of these things seemed definitely to testify that a wave of reaction was upon its way. They almost gave the man hope. Yet by the end of an hour of calculation, John saw that after all it was a small wave. All People's church had more than eleven hundred members. He had not heard from one fifth of them. Those who had communicated or come to press his hand were very frequently the weak, obscure, and least influential. They were the "riff-raff", as Burbeck would have called them, of the congregation. The pastor did not disesteem their support on this account. Instead he valued it a little more; yet gave himself no illusions as to its value in a battle-line.
At the same time his friends urged him to organize against the assaults of Elder Burbeck; to send out bell-ringing committees upon his own account. Yet he would not do this. He would not make himself an issue. But the minister's negatives were not so stout as they had been. It was one thing to write in a frenzy at midnight how bravely he would endure his fate. It was another to wait the creeping hours in passive fortitude until the blow should fall.
By noon he confessed to himself that he was feeling rather broken. For a week he had eaten little, and that little nervously, absently, and without enjoyment. His sleep had been restless and unrefreshing. Strong, vigorous as he was, reckless as were the draughts that could be made upon his work-hardened constitution, a fear that it would fail him now began to agitate the man. He must be strong—physically. He must bear himself unyielding as Atlas. His shoulders, instead of sinking, must stiffen as the still heavier load rolled upon them. But his mind also must be strong.