When Van Meter heard of the scheme to appeal directly to the people to build the temple in defiance of the Board of Trustees, who were the legal managers of the church’s property, he was thunderstruck.
When the Sunday arrived he came half an hour earlier than usual to watch every incident of the day with his little black eyes open their widest.
It was a crisp November morning. Recent rains had washed the streets clean, the wind was blowing fresh, the sky was cloudless and the sun lit in cool gleaming splendour every avenue and park of the great city.
The people had returned from their country places and the hotels were thronged with merchants and visitors from the four quarters of the earth.
An enormous crowd squeezed into every inch of space the police would allow to be filled in the church, and hundreds were turned away, unable to gain admission.
Gordon had spent the entire day and night before in an agony of preparation, and he had not left his study until two o’clock Sunday morning. He took his seat in the pulpit trembling with anxiety. The organ burst into the strains of the Doxology and the crowd rose. He stood with folded hands looking over the sea of faces, and his heart began to ache with an agony of suspense and fear of failure.
The singing ceased, and every head bent as he lifted his big hand, with its blue veins standing out like a net of steel wires, and pronounced a brief invocation.
When he read the hymn, the people felt in his voice the shock of a storm of pent-up emotion. He read it slowly, beautifully, and with exquisite tenderness.
While they sang he sat with his elbow on the little table on which stood a vase of roses, his face resting thoughtfully on his left hand, studying the people, his soul on fire with the sense of their infinite needs.
Crouching low in his seat under the left gallery, he saw a man who had confessed a great wrong and was searching for peace.
At a post on the right, in a seat where he had been accustomed to see a working-girl for the past two years, a stranger sat. The girl was found dead in her room the week before. She had lost her place because she wore shabby clothes, and she wore shabby clothes because she had been sending her earnings to her home in Connecticut, supporting an aged father, mother and a worthless brother.
The rich, the poor, the old, the young, the outcast, the publican and sinner, the strange woman and the sweet face of innocent girlhood were there looking up at him for guidance and help.
But outnumbering all were massed rows of clean-faced young men whom his enthusiasm had drawn resistlessly. His heart went out to them in yearning sympathy, fighting their battles in the morning of life with the powers and princes of the spirit world for the mastery of the soul.
He felt the sledge-hammer blow of their united heart-beat strike his brain with the pain of a bludgeon.
The agony of fear was now upon him. He saw Van Meter sitting in the central tier of seats watching him sharply out of his little half-closed eyes, the incarnate sign of the mortal enmity of organised wealth, and he must appeal for money.
His great crowd had infinite needs, but much money they did not have. He thought with hope of the twenty millions of people who read his sermons on Monday morning, and of a dozen big-hearted men of wealth he knew in the city, and he was cheered.
He had prepared a most powerful sermon on the text, “The common people heard Him gladly.” He felt they could not resist his appeal. And yet in spite of himself his gaze would wander back to Van Meter, drawn by his black eyes as by the charm of an adder.
The Deacon was wondering, as he watched him, what could possibly be the outcome of this daring insanity. He had been fooled so often by the power of this athletic dreamer, he feared to predict the end, though he felt certain what it would be.
The services were unusually impressive. Special music had been prepared by the choir and rendered magnificently. Gordon read the hymns and Scripture with a feeling so intense the people were thrilled. His prayer had been simple and heartfelt, and had melted scores of people to tears.
He rose and faced the crowd with the keenest sense of solemnity. The hour was propitious; he could feel the hearts of the people beat responsive to his slightest tone, word or gesture.
As he swept rapidly through his introduction and into his theme he knew he was holding these thousands of breathless listeners in the hollow of his hand. He could feel their heartstrings quiver as he touched them with tenderness or struck them with some mighty thought.
His soul was singing with triumph, when suddenly a ripple of laughter ran along the front tier of the gallery, and a hundred heads were turned upward to see what the disturbance meant.
Had a bolt of lightning struck his spinal column he could not have been more shocked.
He repeated mechanically the last sentence in a dazed sort of way, and a louder ripple of laughter ran the entire length of both galleries and echoed through the main floor.
He stopped, fumbled at his notes, and turned red. The people before him were smiling and craning their necks to see more plainly something on the wide platform of the pulpit.
He suddenly got the insane idea that a fiend had thrust his head in the door behind him and was mocking and grinning.
He turned and looked, and there sat an impudent little black cat with big yellow eyes.
She had been sitting on her haunches blinking at him when he raised his voice or gestured, and the crowd has never yet gathered on this earth in the temple of Baal or Jehovah that can resist a cat accompaniment to the functions of a priest.
When Gordon looked the little cat full in the face, she liked him at once, and in the softest, friendliest treble said:
“Meow!”
And the crowd burst into incontrollable laughter.
At first the full import of the situation did not reach his mind, he was so stunned with surprise. He stood looking at the cat in helpless stupor, and blushing red. And then the sickening certainty crushed him that the day was lost; that it was beyond the power of human genius, or the reach of the spirit of God, to remove that cat and regain control of his audience.
He turned sick with anger and humiliation, and his big bear-like hands clasped his sheet of notes and slowly crushed them.
He continued to look at the cat and she cocked her head to one side, opened her yellow eyes wider and, slowly, in grieved accents said:
“M-e-o-w!”
Which unmistakably meant, “I’m very sorry you don’t like me as well as I do you.”
Again the crowd laughed.
Gordon stepped backward and bent slowly over the cat. She did not look very bright, but she was too shrewd for that movement.
The crowd watched breathlessly. He grasped at her.
She sprang quickly to one side, bowed her back, bushed her tail, and scampered across the platform crying:
“Pist! pist!” and ran up the column that supported the end of the gallery.
The preacher’s empty hand struck the bare floor, and the crowd was convulsed.
A young man sitting in the gallery near the column caught the cat as she climbed over the rail, ran to a window and was about to throw her down to the pavement twenty feet below.
Gordon lifted his hand and cried:
“Don’t do that, young man—don’t hurt her; bring her here.”
It had, suddenly occurred to the preacher as he watched Van Meter bending low in his pew overcome with laughter, that he had stooped to this contemptible trick to defeat him and make the solemnest hour of life ridiculous. He knew the Deacon had come to the church earlier than usual. He was sure he had done it.
A curious smile began to play about his lips, and a cold glitter came into his steel-gray eyes.
He took the cat in his arms and stroked her gently. She purred and rubbed her face against his and moved her feet up and down, sheathing and unsheathing her claws in his robe with evident delight.
The crowd grew still. Instinctively they knew that something big was happening in the soul of the man they were watching.
“This little cat, my friends,” he said, “is an innocent actor in a tragedy this morning, but she is the agent of one who is not innocent.”
He fixed his gaze on Van Meter, who stirred with uneasy amazement.
“They say that cats sometimes incarnate the souls of dead men. This one is the soul of a living man, my good friend, Deacon Arnold Van Meter, who had her brought here this morning.”
The Deacon turned red, drew his head down as though he would pull it within his shoulders, and shrank from the gaze of the crowd.
Gordon handed the cat back to the young man, whispered something to him, and he disappeared.
Then, walking up to the pulpit, he snatched off its crimson cloth and threw it behind him. He ran his big muscular hands into the throat of his robe, ripped it open, tore it from his arms, crushed it into a shapeless mass and threw it on the floor.
He snatched up the golden lectern pulpit, hurled it back into the comer, and moved the little table with its vase of roses into its place. He did this quickly, without a word or an exclamation to break the awful stillness with which the crowd watched him.
They knew that a tremendous drama was being enacted before them. So intense was the excitement the people on the back tiers of the galleries sprang impulsively to their feet and stood on the pews.
Van Meter’s eyes danced with wild amazement as he straightened himself up, sure Gordon had gone mad. But when he advanced to the edge of the platform, looking a foot taller in his long black Prince Albert coat, folded his giant arms across his breast, the nostrils of his great aquiline nose dilated, his lips quivering, and looked straight into Van Meter’s face, the Deacon saw there was dangerous method in his madness.
His eyes blazing with pent-up passion, he began in deliberate tones an extempore address.
In a moment the air was charged with the thrill of his powerful personality wrought to the highest tension of emotional power.
“My friends,” he began, “there are moments in our experience when we live a lifetime—moments when the hair of our heads turns gray, a soul dies within a laving body, or a dead one rises, shakes off its grave clothes, and lifts its head in the sunlight.
“From this hour I am a free man. I will live what I am, and speak what I feel to be the truth. The truth shall be its own justification. I will wear no robes, mumble no ceremonies, call no man Rabbi, and permit no man to call me Rabbi. I proclaim the universal priesthood of believers.
“While I am your pastor the Kitchen Mission in which we have gathered the poor on the East Side will be closed at the hour of service, and all God’s children shall enter this house because it is their Father’s!”
Van Meter shrank back in his pew as a ripple of applause ran round the galleries.
“If men ask a sign to-day whether the Church of the living God exists in New York, what is our answer?
“Look about you. New York is the centre of the commerce, society, art, literature and politics of the Western World. Her port, in which fly the flags of every nation, is the gateway of two worlds. The feet of four millions daily press her pavements. Her walls frame the furnace in which are being tried by fire the faiths, hopes and dreams of the centuries past and to come. In mere volume of population she is the equal of three great Atlantic states: Virginia, North and South Carolina. One man alone of her millions of citizens possesses wealth greater than the valuation of all the property of the State of North Carolina, the cradle of American democracy, containing fifty thousand square miles and supporting a population of a million six hundred thousand.
“In the roar of this modern Babylon beats the fevered heart of modern civilisation. He who wins that heart holds the key to the century. Imperial Rome, mistress of the world, was a pygmy compared to this.
“And what are we doing?
“Ou............