“What you propose is quite possible. It will be a canonical marriage, but it will take some little time to arrange. I must send across to Lambeth Palace. Toward evening I can go down to where he lies and take the license with me. Meantime speak to a clergyman and have everything in readiness.”
He walked with Glory down the long corridor to the door, and there he kissed her on the forehead and said:
“I've long known that a woman can be brave, but meeting you this morning has taught me something else, my child. Time and again I thought John's love of you was near to madness. He was ready to give up everything for it—everything! And he was right! Love like yours is the pearl of pearls, and he who wins it is a prince of princes!”
Later the same day, when the Prime Minister was sitting alone in his room, a member of his cabinet brought him an evening paper containing an article which was making a deep impression in London. It was understood to be written by a journalist of Jewish extraction:
“'HIS BLOOD BE ON US AND ON OUR CHILDREN.'
“This prediction has been for eighteen hundred years the expression of an historical truth. That the whole Jewish nation, and not Pilate or the rabble of Jerusalem, killed Jesus is a fact which every Jew has been made to feel down to the present day. But let the Christian nation that is without sin toward the Founder of Christianity first cast a stone at the Jews. If it is true, as Jesus himself said, that he who offers a cup of cold water to the least of his little ones offers it to him, then it is also true that he who inflicts torture and death on his followers crucifies him afresh. The unhappy man who has been miserably murdered in the slums of Westminster was a follower of Jesus if ever there lived one, and whosoever the actual persons may be who are guilty of his death, the true culprit is the Christian nation which has inflicted mockeries and insults on everybody who has dared to stand alone under the ensign of Christ.
“Let us not be led away by sneers. This man, whatever his errors, his weaknesses, his self-delusions, and his many human failings, was a Christian. He was the prophet of woman in relation to humanity as hardly any one since Jesus has ever been. And he is hounded out of life. Thus, after nineteen centuries, Christianity presents the same characteristics of frightful tyranny which disfigured the old Jewish law. 'We have a law, and by our law he ought to die.' Such is the sentence still pronounced on reformers in a country where civil and religious laws are confounded. God grant the other half of that doom may not also come true—'His blood be on us and on our children!'”