As he read the clever trimming article and marked the bitterness of its tone, the priest's face grew red with anger and contempt.
This facile acceptance of the Great Horror, this insolent conversion of it to party ends, this flimsy pretence of reconciling statements, which, if true, made Christianity a thing of nought, to a novel and trumped-up system of adherence to it, filled him with bitter antagonism.
But, useful as the article was as showing the turn many men's minds were taking, there was no time to trouble about it now.
To-morrow the great meeting of those who still believed Christ died and rose again from the dead was to be held.
The terrible "Report" had been issued. During the forty hours of its existence everything was already beginning to crumble away. To-morrow the Church Militant must speak to the world.
It was said, moreover, that the great wave of infidelity and mockery which was sweeping hourly over the country would culminate in a great riot to-morrow....
Everything seemed dark, black, hopeless....
He picked up the Report once more to study it, as he had done fifty times that day.
But before he opened it he knelt in prayer.
As he prayed, so sweet and certain an assurance came to him, he seemed so very near to the Lord, that doubt and gloom fled before that Presence.
What were logic, proofs of stone-work, the reports of archæologists, to This?
Here in this lonely chamber Christ was, and spoke with His servant, bidding him be of good comfort.
With bright eyes, full of the glow of one who walks with God, the priest opened the pamphlet once more.
Although, during the first days of the Darkness, hundreds of thousands of Christian men and women were chilled almost to spiritual death, and although the lamp of Faith was flickering very low, it was not in London that the far-reaching effects of the discovery at Jerusalem were most immediately apparent.
In that great City there is an outward indifference, bred of a million different interests, which has something akin to the supreme indifference of Nature. The many voices never blend into one, so that the ear may hear them in a single mighty shout.
But in the grimmer North public opinion is heard more readily, and is more quickly visible. In the great centres of executive toil the vital truths of religion seem to enter more insistently into the lives of men and women whose environment presents them with fewer distractions than elsewhere. Often, indeed, this interest is a political interest rather than a deeply Christian one, a matter of controversy rather than feeling. Certain it is that all questions affecting religious beliefs loom large and have a real importance in the cities of the North.