"Oh, what is the matter?" she pleaded.
"You!" he laughed. "You, too!" To control himself he unfolded and looked at the leaflet that he had picked up in the church doorway, and had been heedlessly folding and unfolding ever since. His mirth stopped. "Listen to this," he ordered. "By Jove, it's not Nicholson alone; it's the whole bunch, and speaking officially, too! Listen to this. It's a printed statement issued by the General Executive Committee of the whole church—not St. Athanasius alone, but the entire denomination—and it's worse than Nicholson's sermon." His eyes ran from line to line. "'We call upon the prayers of the faithful,'" he read as well as the motion of the car permitted.... "'He has not buried his talent nor hidden his candle under a bushel.... So far as a man's life can, his life exemplified Law and Order, realized the truth uttered by Richard Hooker: "Of Law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is in the bosom of God, the harmony of the world."'"
Betty had been listening attentively.
"Well?" she asked.
"'Well?'" repeated Luke. "'Well?' Don't you see? The whole Church is standing up for him. And not our Church alone: all churches. He'd bought them—bought them!"
"Luke! How can you?"
"Yes, he has. One way or another. He or his kind: for I'm beginning to see at last he wasn't alone—never was and never will be. And seeing that, I'm not blaming him so much—any of the hims. I don't say, any more, he was worse than the rest of us; he was only stronger. Maybe he was only the average man in extraordinary circumstances. He didn't make them—I'm beginning to believe that, too,—they made him. But the Church! The churches! They've sinned against the light. They're liars. They're—why, they must be founded on a lie: their light must be darkness!"
The girl had edged away from him, her brown eyes big with horror at his blasphemy. The motor was drawing up before the door of the Forbes house; it was drawing up in a quiet Brooklyn street. And there, in that Sunday stillness, and among those surroundings of commonplace respectability, suddenly the Marvel came to him.
It came to him, this denial of Religion, as a profound religious experience. It was Miracle, burning, blinding, transfiguring. Elemental, tremendous. It was a stroke that affected his entire being; suffused him; changed him, spiritually, in every atom. It hurled him from all his old bases and set him in a new relation to the universe. It was not reformation; it was revolution. Luke was another personality: this was the "new birth." He saw the glory of individuality, the divinity of his humanity. In the flash of revelation, he learned to walk and knew that for all his life he had been permitting himself to be carried. Without guessing it, he had been, he now knew, all these years, afraid, and now, with this new inspiration, he faced all things and feared none. Believing, he had been dead, but denying, was alive again; faithful, he had been lost, faithless, he was found, and not by any other help than his own: he had found himself. It was the thing that, in the twinkling of an eye, can make an honest man of a liar, an abstainer of a dipsomaniac, good out of evil. It was the same thing that happens to a penitent at the moment of "conversion," of "receiving grace," of "experiencing religion"; the same force operating with the same power and the same manner, but in an opposite direction.
As St. Paul rose from the earth after his vision near Damascus, so Luke staggered from the Forbes motor-car. His hands groped at the air.