"It is in the spirit of this justice that I believe Christ shall come to
judge the world; not to condemn and punish so much as to reconcile and to
right. We live in an age of seeming preparation for indefinite war. The
lines are drawn harder and faster between the rich and the poor, and on
either side the forces are embattled. The working-men are combined in vast
organisations to withstand the strength of the capitalists, and these are
taking the lesson and uniting in trusts. The smaller industries are gone,
and the smaller commerce is being devoured by the larger. Where many little
shops existed one huge factory assembles manufacture; one large store, in
which many different branches of trade are united, swallows up the small
dealers. Yet in the labour organisations, which have their bad side, their
weak side, through which the forces of hell enter, I see evidence of the
fact that the poor have at last had pity on the poor, and will no more
betray and underbid and desert one another, but will stand and fall
together as brothers; and the monopolies, though they are founded upon
ruin, though they know no pity and no relenting, have a final significance
which we must not lose sight of. They prophesy the end of competition;
_they eliminate_ one element of strife, of rivalry, of warfare. But
woe to them through whose evil this good comes, to any man who prospers on
to ease and fortune, forgetful or ignorant of the ruin on which his success
is built. For that death the resurrection and the life seem not to be.
Whatever his creed or his religious profession, his state is more pitiable
than that of the sceptic, whose words perhaps deny Christ, but whose works
affirm Him. There has been much anxiety in the Church for the future of
the world abandoned to the godlessness of science, but I cannot share it.
If God is, nothing exists but from Him. He directs the very reason that
questions Him, and Christ rises anew in the doubt of him that the sins of
Christendom inspire. So far from dreading such misgiving as comes from
contemplating the disparity between the Church's profession and her
performance, I welcome it as another resurrection and a new life."
The minister paused and seemed about to resume, when a scuffling and
knocking noise drew all eyes toward the pew of the Gerrish family. Mr.
Gerrish had risen and flung open the door so sharply that it struck against
the frame-work of the pew, and he stood pulling his children, whom Mrs.
Gerrish urged from behind, one after another, into the aisle beside him.
One of them had been asleep, and he now gave way to the alarm which seizes
a small boy suddenly awakened. His mother tried to still him, stooping over
him and twitching him by the hand, with repeated "Sh! 'sh's!" as mothers
do, till her husband got her before him, and marched his family down the
aisle and out of the door. The noise of their feet over the floor of the
vestibule died away upon the stone steps outside. The minister allowed the
pause he had made to prolong itself painfully. He wavered, after clearing
his throat, as if to go on with his sermon, and then he said sadly, "Let us
pray!"