As the hundred passed on they sent fear before them and left a trail of red justice behind them. The joy burned brighter in the heart of the man in black. “Have I not talked to these people of the justice of God?” said he to himself. “Now they are seeing it. Now they will know it to be swift and terrible. A knife with a keen blade, a judge with a clean heart, these things this people needs.”
They came upon two soldiers who were quarrelling over the division of a sable coat. Each had an end and the altercation was proceeding over the outstretched garment. They protested that they had bought the coat not two hours before and that they had paid for it. One begged piteously for his life, but the man in black shook his head.
So the expedition of the hundred became a thing of blood and more blood. The heart of the man of the religion of Jesus was filled with a grim ecstasy. It seemed to dance within him. “Am I not,” he chanted to himself, “a messenger of the Lord to a sinful people? With what measure they have measured, have I measured unto them. As they have pitied others, so have I pitied them. Blood must flow, for blood alone can cleanse. Blood alone can cleanse.”
A young soldier was caught as he climbed the stairs of a small house. He was brought into the street and told to kneel. “I have heard of your Jesus and his forgiveness,” he said; “now I know.” He knelt with a sort of dignity, the dignity that death brings to the brave, and his head fell.
His words struck through the blood fever to the heart of the man in black. For a second he closed his eyes and when he opened them again he saw with his old clearness. He knew that blood is blood and shame came over him.
He sent back his hundred, saying: “Go. I have done wrong.”
He came to his own house and to his own small room where a crucifix hung above the bed. He knelt and remained for a long time with his eyes fixed upon the figure. The words, “Father, forgive them,” came from his lips as from the lips of a stranger. For two days and for two nights he had not slept. He sank slowly to the floor and lay still before the quiet figure on the cross.
This article is not intended in any sense as a reply to the _Confessions of a Harvard Man_ published several months ago in THE FORUM by Mr. Harold E. Stearns. The importance of those articles, as Mr. Stearns had reason to point out, lay not so much in what they told about Harvard as in what they told about him. Precisely. Analyses of the temper of Young America have their place. The temper of Harvard itself, however, is something quite apart, and it is to that alone that this article is devoted. The importance of it lies only in the number of significant and true things it tells about Harvard.