IT was nearly midnight when old Alice turned in at the vicarage gate.
Having handed her to the care of his man-of-all-work, the ancient
Hobson, who was sitting up for her, the vicar said good-night to Edith
and then went to his study. He had had a particularly trying day, and
a man of less strength of will would have been content for this to be
its end. But he could not bring himself to go to bed while that page
of an accusing emptiness lay upon his blotting pad. It was within five
minutes of Sunday and his sermon was hardly begun.
The clock on the chimneypiece struck the hour. The vicar turned up his
reading lamp and sat down at his desk. He was really very tired and
heart-sore, but for many a long year he had not failed in his pastoral
duty, and he was not going to fail now. There was one line already
traced in a bold, firm hand on the sheet before him. “Let us cast off
the works of darkness, let us put on the armor of light.”
The words came upon him with a shock of surprise. He could not remember
having written them. And at this moment, weary in body and spirit,
he was not able to meet their implication. Overborne by the weight of
an unintelligible world, he was unequal to their message. He drew his
pen through them and wrote: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. I will
repay.” It was lower, easier ground for a man tired and dispirited,
and, after all, it was the ideal text for war time. He had preached
from it many times already, but in that hour it seemed the only one for
his mood.
Yes, such a vengeance had come upon the world as had been long
predicted. Once more those prophetic words glowed on the page with a
living fire: “There shall be wars and rumors of war.” Terrible, ancient
phrases, vibrating with emotion, came with a subliminal uprush into his
mind. How miraculously had the Word been fulfilled. But one thing was
needed to complete the tale, and that the far-off divine event to which
the whole creation moves.
But, the vicar asked, as phrases and thoughts of his own began to take
shape, was this Second Coming to be regarded as a literal fact of the
physical world, was it only to be regarded by the eye of faith, or was
it merely the figment of a poet’s fancy? It behooved the world of men
to search its heart. Let all face the question that the time-spirit
was asking; let all face it fully, frankly, fearlessly.
The Christ was overdue. In the opinion of many, if civilization, if
humanity was to continue, there must be a divine intervention. These
organized and deepening hatreds were destroying the soul of the world.
Even average sensual men had come to realize this vital need. But--the
vicar began to gnaw the stump of his pen furiously--an age that had
ceased to believe in miracles was now crying out for a miracle to
happen.
“O ye of little faith,” wrote the vicar as the first subheading of his
great theme. Only a miracle could now save a world that had so long
derided them. The vicar wrote the word Nemesis, and then in brackets,
“Terrible word--retributive justice.”
Yes, the only hope remaining for a blood-soaked world was to accept the
miracle of the Incarnation. And to accept that miracle was to affirm
the second advent.
How will He come? The vicar left a space on the slowly filling page,
and then wrote his question in the form of a second subheading. How
will He appear to us, this Christ of pity, and purity, and peace? Would
the heavens open, as the Book of Revelation had foretold; would the
King of the World emerge from the clouds to the blowing of trumpets,
crowned in a chariot? Or would He come as a spirit on the face of the
waters? Who should say? But come He must, because of the promise He had
made.
“The duty of faith in this present hour,” wrote the vicar, as a third
subheading. It was a man’s duty to reject the carpings of science and
the machinations of modern denial. He must believe where he could not
prove. The vicar wrote in brackets, “It is very difficult to do that in
an age of skepticism.”
“The watchers.” The vicar drew a line under his fourth subheading. All
men must stand as upon a tower, their eyes fixed on the far horizon,
in the hope that they might see in the eastern sky the herald of a new
heaven and a new earth. And by that portent, which was the light of
sublime truth, must they learn to know the Master when He came among
them. But only the faithful could hope to do that.
“The danger of His coming to a world in which none should know Him,”
was the final clause of the vicar’s sermon. That would be the supreme
tragedy.
The sudden striking of the clock on the chimneypiece startled the
vicar. “Four o’clock!” he said. And he went to bed.