When the pews were dense with worshippers, scarcely a vacant seat remaining, and my closest watchfulness had failed to note the presence of a single other person of my class, there broke faintly on the waiting company the clear, uplifting sweetness of a rare contralto voice. Vague and lightly stirring at the first, as when some deeply buried feeling, recalled to life, gives utterance to new being in “the language of a cry,” it rose to ever fuller power, unfaltering and pure in every tone, until it smote with the touch of truth each silent chord of life and waked them all to perfect harmony, wherein they sing the mystic unity of things, where the senses mix and whence they radiate, and where,
... in the midmost heart of grief Our passions clasp a secret joy.
I was not present, however, merely as a worshipper, but also as a member of my chosen order. I tried to see with their eyes, and then to think their thoughts and feel their emotions. When I held myself honestly to this task, with the aid of what I had learned directly from the men and caught of their ways of thinking, it was another revulsion of feeling which set in.
I thought of my nine dollars a week, and of the meagre pittance which resulted from utmost care in saving, even when my own support was the only claim upon me, and how far beyond my reach was all possibility of a seat in the pews which were held for barter. The image of Mrs. Schulz rose up to me, worn, and wan, and almost ill, yet always cheerful, and I remembered the patient, unflinching courage with which she faced the obligations of her life, and the heart-breaking economies by which she must meet many of its duties. On that very day, the two older children had gone at different hours to church, because there was but one pair of shoes and stockings between them, and Mrs. Schulz herself went out to mass, through the tingling cold of the early morning, in clothing which would have been light for summer.
While here, on every hand, was dress whose cost, as indicating not warmth and comfort but mere conformity to changing fashion, represented, in scores of cases, more of annual individual expenditure than the whole net income of many a workman’s family. And even more poignant to a mind made sensitive by this train of thought was the impression which weighed upon it of a company well-fed to a degree of comfort beyond the sense of sympathy with hunger that rarely learns the meaning of enough. The mere suggestion of a breakfast of rich food in wide variety, and served often at great cost in almost wasteful plenty, to be followed soon after the hour of worship by another meal yet more varied, and abundant, and rich, seemed the very pitch of heartless mockery, in the full presence almost of hundreds of men and women to whom bare day’s bread is an agony of anxious seeking, and of multitudes of little children to whom, not nourishing food alone but even food enough to stay the pangs of hunger, is a luxury.