“I saw him a few days ago, with his head bare, just as I have him here, preaching to a little group on a street corner,” said Cartice. “I stopped a moment to listen, and his face has been often in my mind since. So when I saw him from the window, this morning, talking to the boys, I hurried to make a sketch of him.”
Then looking up, with an eager light in her mottled eyes, she said, “Chrissalyn, let us go and hear him. You say he speaks to the poor. We are of them. Who needs help more? Let us go.”
The Butterfly gave but a grudging consent. She was the natural enemy of all serious instruction. As they went she babbled on about Gabriel Norris:
“As he was bent on preaching, his father wanted him to go to a theological college and be shaped up into a first-class regulation preacher, wear the correct thing in clothes, have a fashionable church, gilt-edged Bible, velvet pulpit cushions, fat salary and everything that goes to make preaching respectable; but Gabriel wouldn’t have it that way. He said there was more than enough of that kind of thing; that what he wanted to say to people had nothing in common with theological factories, and as for pulpit cushions and the like they were abominations in the sight of the Lord; that Jesus had none of them, nor would he have.”
The scene at the market-house was one to take hold upon the heart. The people who sat there on rude benches were all from the bitter land of indigence. Its hard conditions were written in their faces, their poor garments, stooping shoulders, weary and awkward attitudes. Many women were there, for women are ever found where a word of promise and hope is to be spoken, and that fact is eloquent of what they suffer, of the bitterness of their disappointments, of the weight of their sorrows, of the hunger of their hearts and the yearning of their spirits.
Before the preacher had spoken ten minutes Cartice was under the spell of his oratory, which was simple, strong and sympathetic. It wasn’t preaching. It was the life-giving, hope-inspiring talk of a loving friend, and it went to the hearts of his hearers and there awoke nobler aspirations. He said nothing of seeing evil in them. Instead, he told them how good they were—much better and higher than they themselves had dreamed; that possibilities of wonderful and beautiful growth were in every one of them; that they had an eternity in which to grow, and on themselves depended their well-being now and forever.
It was good to see the light of self-respect come into their dull eyes under the potent spell of the young preacher’s earnest words. Some of them had shrunk internally to almost nothing, under the blight of the self-depreciation which close intimacy with grinding poverty begets. Now their souls began to gather confidence and stand erect, conscious of their own value.
“My dear ones,” he said, “don’t make the blunder of thinking that the aim of life is to be happy. Do not spend your time hunting happiness, seeking it where it never was and never will be—in the external things of life, in possessions that pass even while you use them, in pleasures that leave a bitter taste in the mouth and a regret in the heart. I doubt not that our Divine Father intended us to be happy, but not in the way we imagine. His way is so very clear and simple, and yet we are so blind we see it not, and wander in such hard paths, and lose ourselves often. It is to love each other. Ever so brief a trial of this way proves it the true one. But to love each other does not mean to love only your own families, your friends and those who treat you well. It means to love everybody, even your enemy. When you love your enemy, a miracle happens. He ceases to be your enemy. Love always and to the end.
“When we love as we should we do not question whether we are happy or not. Then another miracle happens. We are happy, for we taste the highest order of happiness, that of forgiving and loving our enemies, of giving out good will and kindness to all, of making others happy. The less we think of our own happiness the happier we shall be.
“Did any man or woman whose life has helped the world go about complaining because he or she was not happy? Serve others, thinking not of yourselves and, without knowing the hour of the great transformation, you will find you are already a dweller within the kingdom of heaven.