“Bishop ——.” Another voice immediately cried, “No! The Rev. ——.”
A momentary clamour of voices ensued. The voices were not shrill in their eagerness, but sullen, sombre, almost savage, in fact. A moment, and the Bishop slowly entered the pulpit. He bowed his head in prayer.
Like the slow, rushing sound of the letting loose of some distant water, the noise of thousands of bending forms filled the place, for everyone bowed the head.
A moment later, the heads were raised. The silence almost of a tomb filled the place, when the first momentary rustle of the uprearing had subsided.
The voice of the Bishop broke the silence, crying:—
“Men and women of London, fellows with me in the greatest shame the world has ever known—the shame of bearing the name Christian, and yet of being the rejected of Christ,—we meet to-day under awful, solemn circumstances.
“We are face to face with the most solemnly awful situation the human race has ever known, if we except the conditions under which, during those three hours of blackness at Calvary, the people of Jerusalem were found, while the Crucified Christ hung mid-air, on the Fatal Tree.
“It may be said that our position bears some likeness to that of the people who were destroyed at the Flood. Those antediluvians had one hundred and twenty years warning, we, as professing Christians, have had nearly two thousand years warning, yet, London, England and the whole world has by last night’s events, been proved practically heathen—or atheist, atheist will perhaps best fit our character.
“The moment came when God called Noah and his family into the ark. But what never occurred to me, until this morning, was the significant fact, that God did not shut the door of the ark, or send the flood, until seven days later, thus giving the unbelievers another opportunity to be saved.