He felt anew what he had felt and seen, and he could not give any verve to the peroration of his sermon. He could not even change it. It had been effective when he had preached it previously. But now he parroted with unconscious irony the phrases he had once so admired. He came to the last word.
"And so, to repeat: How much more bitter, dearly beloved, are the anguishes of the soul than any mere bodily distress! What are the fleeting torments of this tenement of clay, mere bone and flesh, to the soul's despair? Nothing, nothing."
His congregation felt a lack of warmth in his tone. His hand fell limply on the Bible and the sermon was done. The only stir was one of relief at its conclusion.
He gave out the final hymn, and he sat through it while the people dragged it to the end. He gave forth the benediction "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost," and he made short work of the dawdlers who waited to exchange stupidities with him. He took refuge from his congregation in his study, locked the door, and gave himself up to meditation.
Somehow pain had suddenly come to mean more to him than it had yet meant. He had known it, groaned under it, lived it down, and let it go. He had felt sorry for other people and got rid of their woes as best as he could with the trite expressions in use, and had forgotten whether they were hushed by health or by death.
And so he had let the old-fashioned hell go by with other dogmas out of style. He had fashioned a new Hades to frighten people with, that they might not find sin too attractive and imperilous.
Now he was suddenly convinced that if there must be hell, it must be such as Dante set to rhyme and the old hard-shell preachers preached: a region where flames sear and demons pluck at the frantic nerves, playing upon them fiendish tunes.
Yet he could not reconcile that hell with the God that made the lilac-bush whose purple clusters shook perfume and little flowers against his window-sill, while the old locust in rivalry bent down and flaunted against the lilacs its pendants of ivory grace and heavenly fragrance.
Against that torment of beauty came glimpses of Drury and Irene in the lurid cavern under the wreck. Beyond those delicate blossoms he imagined the battle-fields of Europe and the ruined vessels where hurt souls writhed in multitudes.
He could not be satisfied with any theory of the world. He could not find that pain was punishment here, or see how it could follow the soul after the soul had left behind it the fleshly instrument of torture. The why of it escaped his reason utterly; for Drury had been good, and he had come upon an honorable errand when he fell into the pit.