Part 101 (1/2)

'All right,' replied Frankie. 'I won't stop running all the way.'

Barrington hesitated and looked at his watch. 'I think I have time to go back with you as far as your front door,' he said, 'then I shall be quite sure you haven't lost it.'

They accordingly retraced their steps and in a few minutes reached the entrance to the house. Barrington opened the door and stood for a moment in the hall watching Frankie ascend the stairs.

'Will your train cross over the bridge?' inquired the boy, pausing and looking over the banisters.

'Yes. Why?'

'Because we can see the bridge from our front-room window, and if you were to wave your handkerchief as your train goes over the bridge, we could wave back.'

'All right. I'll do so. Goodbye.'

'Goodbye.'

Barrington waited till he heard Frankie open and close the door of Owen's flat, and then he hurried away. When he gained the main road he heard the sound of singing and saw a crowd at the corner of one of the side-streets. As he drew near he perceived that it was a religious meeting.

There was a lighted lamp on a standard in the centre of the crowd and on the gla.s.s of this lamp was painted: 'Be not deceived: G.o.d is not mocked.'

Mr Rushton was preaching in the centre of the ring. He said that they had come hout there that evening to tell the Glad Tidings of Great Joy to hall those dear people that he saw standing around. The members of the s.h.i.+ning Light Chapel--to which he himself belonged--was the organizers of that meeting but it was not a sectarian meeting, for he was 'appy to say that several members of other denominations was there co-operating with them in the good work. As he continued his address, Rushton repeatedly referred to the individuals who composed the crowd as his 'Brothers and Sisters' and, strange to say, n.o.body laughed.

Barrington looked round upon the 'Brothers': Mr Sweater, resplendent in a new silk hat of the latest fas.h.i.+on, and a fur-trimmed overcoat. The Rev. Mr Bosher, Vicar of the Church of the Whited Sepulchre, Mr Grinder--one of the churchwardens at the same place of alleged wors.h.i.+p--both dressed in broadcloth and fine linen and glossy silk hats, while their general appearance testified to the fact that they had fared sumptuously for many days. Mr Didlum, Mrs Starvem, Mr Dauber, Mr Botchit, Mr Smeeriton, and Mr Leavit.

And in the midst was the Rev. John Starr, doing the work for which he was paid.

As he stood there in the forefront of this company, there was nothing in his refined and comely exterior to indicate that his real function was to pander to and flatter them; to invest with an air of respectability and rect.i.tude the abominably selfish lives of the gang of swindlers, slave-drivers and petty tyrants who formed the majority of the congregation of the s.h.i.+ning Light Chapel.

He was doing the work for which he was paid. By the mere fact of his presence there, condoning and justifying the crimes of these typical representatives of that despicable cla.s.s whose greed and inhumanity have made the earth into a h.e.l.l.

There was also a number of 'respectable', well-dressed people who looked as if they could do with a good meal, and a couple of shabbily dressed, poverty-stricken-looking individuals who seemed rather out of place in the glittering throng.

The remainder of the Brothers consisted of half-starved, pale-faced working men and women, most of them dressed in other people's cast-off clothing, and with broken, patched-up, leaky boots on their feet.

Rushton having concluded his address, Didlum stepped forward to give out the words of the hymn the former had quoted at the conclusion of his remarks:

'Oh, come and jine this 'oly band, And hon to glory go.'

Strange and incredible as it may appear to the reader, although none of them ever did any of the things Jesus said, the people who were conducting this meeting had the effrontery to claim to be followers of Christ--Christians!

Jesus said: 'Lay not up for yourselves treasure upon earth', 'Love not the world nor the things of the world', 'Woe unto you that are rich--it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.' Yet all these self-styled 'Followers' of Christ made the acc.u.mulation of money the princ.i.p.al business of their lives.

Jesus said: 'Be ye not called masters; for they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves will not touch them with one of their fingers. For one is your master, even Christ, and ye are all brethren.' But nearly all these alleged followers of the humble Workman of Nazareth claimed to be other people's masters or mistresses. And as for being all brethren, whilst most of these were arrayed in broadcloth and fine linen and fared sumptuously every day, they knew that all around them thousands of those they hypocritically called their 'brethren', men, women and little children, were slowly peris.h.i.+ng of hunger and cold; and we have already seen how much brotherhood existed between Sweater and Rushton and the miserable, half-starved wretches in their employment.

Whenever they were asked why they did not practise the things Jesus preached, they replied that it is impossible to do so! They did not seem to realize that when they said this they were saying, in effect, that Jesus taught an impracticable religion; and they appeared to forget that Jesus said, 'Wherefore call ye me Lord, Lord, when ye do not the things I say?...' 'Whosoever heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them not, shall be likened to a foolish man who built his house upon the sand.'

But although none of these self-styled 'Followers' of Christ, ever did the things that Jesus said, they talked a great deal about them, and sang hymns, and for a pretence made long prayers, and came out here to exhort those who were still in darkness to forsake their evil ways. And they procured this lantern and wrote a text upon it: 'Be not deceived, G.o.d is not mocked.'

They stigmatized as 'infidels' all those who differed from them, forgetting that the only real infidels are those who are systematically false and unfaithful to the Master they pretend to love and serve.

Grinder, having a slight cold, had not spoken this evening, but several other infidels, including Sweater, Didlum, Bosher, and Starr, had addressed the meeting, making a special appeal to the working people, of whom the majority of the crowd was composed, to give up all the vain pleasures of the world in which they at present indulged, and, as Rushton had eloquently put it at the close of his remarks: