MR. THEODORE CAIAPHAS was rector of the Church of the Advent. It
was said of that church that when the congregation were all at
the sanctuary and seated in their places the building contained a
representation of capital equivalent to a billion dollars of wealth.
It is hardly necessary to describe the Church of the Advent, for nearly
everybody knows of it; even those who do not live in the metropolis
have seen pictures of it. It occupied, with the rectory, half a square
of ground in one of the most valuable parts of the city. It was
estimated that if the land on which it stood were covered all over with
ten-dollar bills, an approximate value of the real estate would just
about be represented. The church itself was an architectural triumph,
within and without. It was built of white marble, carved elaborately
and exquisitely; the four large windows cost it cannot be told how many
thousands of dollars, and the interior decorations were all that art
could make them. The church was connected with the rectory by a glazed
cloister of exquisite proportions, and the rectory itself, retired well
back from the street behind parti-colored beds of flowering plants,
was in perfect keeping with the church. The great plate-glass windows
looked out across the little lawn upon the busy street where the
thunder of life was forever passing and repassing.
One time the Church of the Advent was in the upper part of the town;
then the flood of business had risen to it, and finally overwhelmed it
and its surroundings. At the time of this story the church looked down
upon a tumult of passing life and the bells clashed out their chimes
almost unheard in the roar that rose up from the stony streets below.
At first the ceaseless, roaring thunder had been very disturbing to
Dr. Caiaphas, but he became used to it so that he never noticed it,
except to miss it in the stifled, leaden silence of the country during
his vacation. The rectory was a very pleasant home, and almost any
bright day one could see children playing on the lawn in front of the
house (for Dr. Caiaphas had quite a large family), and occasionally the
rector himself might have been seen pacing up and down the gravelled
driveway--especially on a Saturday afternoon, when he was in the
throes of composing his addresses for the morrow.
Dr. Caiaphas was a very notable man. He was a liberal and advanced
reformer, not only in religious matters, but in political and social
matters as well. Not only had he written a number of pamphlets
attacking those lingering superstitions that had so long operated as
a clog to check the church in its advance abreast of the progress of
civilization, but he had, besides, written hundreds of open letters
and papers and several magazine articles upon the social problems of
the age--the labor question, the question of social vice, the pauper
question, and other similar topics. His passion for attacking and
reforming abuses led him even into politics. It was largely through his
instrumentality that the committee had been appointed to investigate
into the affairs of the police department, and great things had been
looked for as the outcome.
When it is taken into consideration that besides all these wide outside
works, his was one of the largest parishes in the metropolis, it may
be seen that Dr. Caiaphas was an extremely busy man and an extremely
useful man.
The income of Dr. Caiaphas as rector of the Church of the Advent was
forty thousand dollars per annum; added to this was a beautiful home,
rent free.
There was a time when the excess of wealth had been a very sharp thorn
in the side of the doctor's conscience, but at the time of this story
he had been rector of the Church of the Advent for nearly twenty years,
and he had become reconciled to the burden of good-fortune that the
Divine Wisdom had seen fit to lay upon him to bear. He lived soft and
warm; he was fond of works of art and of beautiful things, and he
was a great collector of rare and handsome books--of which he had a
magnificent library. He raised his family with all the surroundings of
luxury due to his and their position in the world; both of his sons
had attended college and were then abroad--the younger finishing his
education at a foreign university; the elder being an attaché to the
embassy at the court of another foreign power.
It was a matter of conscience with Dr. Caiaphas thus to spend his money
lavishly upon his children and himself, and he poured out his wealth
without stint. He used to say, "I will not hoard what has been given
me to-day for the sake of a possible to-morrow. I will trust to my
Heavenly Father to supply my needs as they arise."
When Dr. Caiaphas had first been asked to assume the rectorship of the
Church of the Advent, he had accepted, not without reluctance. At that
time he had very high and very exalted ideas as to his mission in life,
and it seemed to him that, should he accept this magnificent call,
he would, in a certain sense, be in danger of sacrificing his high
birthright in the kingdom of heaven for a mess--however rich--of very
worldly pottage. So at first he had been inclined to refuse; then, in
thinking the matter over, it occurred to him that maybe Providence had
laid this chance in his path that he might take it up and so exercise
his usefulness in the wider field of metropolitan life.
He sometimes wondered with misgivings whether his conscience had not
tallied almost too patly with his inclination in the matter. Indeed, he
would have been more than human had he not appreciated what a thing it
was to be rector of the Church of the Advent. It is probable that if he
had been asked to leave his church in the country, and its salary of
five thousand dollars a year, and to take up an obscure church in the
metropolis, say, at a salary of twenty-five hundred a year, he would
not have done so, even though, in accepting it, he might have widened
his field of usefulness ever so much. But, to change at once from the
old Church of the Messiah to the foremost church of his denomination
in the country--he would have been, indeed, more than human if he had
not appreciated the significance of such an advance in his life.
In his former work Dr. Caiaphas had seen much of poverty in a
provincial town, and it was with him as it was with other people in
the smaller cities and communities--he did not know what it meant to
be poor in a great city such as the metropolis. To be poor in a small
city is altogether a different thing from the dreadful poverty of the
great congested communities where rents are expensive and living dear.
A man may be poor in a provincial town and yet have a comfortable home.
Oftentimes his home becomes squalid and barren--it becomes bare and
naked and stripped of comforts as he sinks lower and lower into the
quag of poverty; but he still has room in which to move about and to
live, and he still has the out-of-doors close at hand in which he may
walk about and breathe the pure air. But in a great city, even those
who are not really of the pauper class--even those who have work to do,
and make what is called a comfortable living--live crowded together and
congested in black and dismal tenement houses that fairly reek with
the stench of humanity packed within their walls. This is a poverty
from which there is no escape, and to which there is no out-of-doors
except the noisy and dirty street with its ash-barrels, its garbage,
and its refuse. This is a poverty whose recreation is to sit out upon
the doorstep that leads into the dirty street or upon the fire-escape,
or, in hot weather, maybe upon the roofs among the chimney-stacks and a
net-work of electric wires. This is a poverty that breeds harlots and
criminals as corruption breeds maggots.
For all this misery Dr. Caiaphas was in nowise to blame, but,
nevertheless, when he first entered into the parish, coming, as he did,
fresh from a wholesome provincial community, he felt that the condition
was a crime to which he himself was somehow indirectly a party. He did
not see wherein the fault lay, nor yet just how he was responsible
for it, but it was clear to him that it was cruelly unjust that he,
who had never produced anything, who had never created anything, who
spent his life in preaching to rich people who had no need for divine
consolation, and who listened to his sermons for the sake of their
splendid oratorical periods--interested rather in the novelty of
his ideas than in their humanitarian import--it seemed to him to be
cruelly unjust that he, doing such barren work as this, should enjoy
forty thousand dollars a year and live so luxuriously while these
poor men and women, who did actually create the real uses of the
world, who were actually now adding to the wealth and the prosperity
of mankind--should be packed together in greasy and stinking tenement
houses like vermin in so many boxes.
Early in his life, as rector of the church, he had made one futile
attempt to rectify this wrong to which he felt that he was himself
helplessly party. "I cannot, gentlemen," he said, concluding a speech
to the vestry--"I cannot feel free to accept a fee of forty thousand
dollars a year, besides my house, rent free, and to live in luxury
under such circumstances. It is an injustice which I did not create,
but in accepting such munificent rewards I make myself accessory to
it. These men are equally human beings with myself, and betwixt them
and myself, in the eyes of God, there is not one iota of fundamental
difference. Not only have they the same desires as myself, but they,
in the light of truth, are God's children just as I am one of God's
children, and each and every one of them is the inheritor of a heavenly
immortality equal to mine--a heavenly glory that shall, perhaps, exceed
mine to come. Feeling this as strongly as I do, I cannot consent to be
the instrument of such injustice and such inequality. I cannot consent
to accept for the few trivial years of this life such great luxury and
ease of living, simply for the pleasure it affords my bodily senses,
while these other human beings have not even sufficient food to eat or
sufficient clothes to wear. Therefore it is that I cannot accept any
such fee as it is your pleasure to offer me."
The chairman of the vestry was Mr. James Dorman-Webster, probably one
of the richest men in the world. He smiled kindly as the minister
concluded his address, and then he laughed. "I cannot see the force of
your reasoning, doctor," he said. "If you could strip yourself down
to the barest necessities of life, and live upon a dollar and a half
a day, I do not see in what way you would benefit these people whose
poverty is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the result of their
own improvidence. The truth is that you work as hard as the head of
the nation, and I am sure you are as intelligent as he, and earn your
money quite as well as he does. Why should you not have a salary equal
to his, instead of less than his? The fact is, _labor given and wages
received have no relation whatever with each other, but are merely
arbitrary quantities_." He thrust his hand into the breast-pocket of
his coat as he spoke and drew out a pocket-book. Then he filled out a
check and handed it to the doctor. It was for ten thousand dollars.
"There, doctor," he said, "take that and distribute it among your poor
as you choose. When you find that you need more, appeal to your vestry,
and if they ever refuse to give it to you, then it will be time to talk
of giving up your own salary."
It was pathetic--almost tragic--the inability of this well-meaning
priest, of Levitical cast and Roman associations, to escape from under
the weight of forty thousand dollars of yearly wealth that God had
seen fit to lay upon his shoulders. There was no answer to be made to
the practical logic of Mr. Dorman-Webster, and there was nothing to be
gained by any sacrifice the rich priest could make. There was the check
just donated, and there was the promise of as much more as he should
ask for in reason. Dr. Caiaphas might just as well have walked down to
the river and have thrown his salary into the water as to refuse to
take it now. His poor would gain nothing by the refusal, and he would
lose everything--even his influence over the needy of his parish--for
poor people, though they resent riches, have no respect for poverty in
the upper classes.
Such was Dr. Caiaphas. His was a mind of that logical, well-balanced
sort to which anything like religious fanaticism or excess is, of all
things, most repugnant. There was nothing so displeasing to him as
religious hysteria. He was wont to say, "Does any man think that God
Almighty is deaf that He needs to have prayers shouted into His ears?"
All the religious ferment attending the preaching of John the Baptist
was not only distasteful to him--it was positively repulsive. It
distressed him beyond measure to think that it was possible for one
man like this John to so stir the nether depths of humanity that all
the purity and lucidity of true faith should become turbid. It was
incredible to the wise and even-minded priest that any man--be he
never so poor, or ignorant, or credulous--could, in that age of light,
listen to the blasphemous assertions of an insane fanatic, that God
was really about to send a Son into the midst of such a turbulent
and disorderly tumult. How was it possible for any human creature to
conceive that the Messiah would appear in the midst of such a rabble as
that gathered in the wilderness to a mad baptism? Of what use were the
teachings of his twenty years of rational religion if, in a moment, his
poor parishioners could so rush away from him and the pure and lucid
truths of faith, trampling those truths beneath their feet like a herd
of swine, in their rush to hear something that stirred their emotions
and was new and startling? He had thought that the poor people in his
parish were fond of him, and loved to listen to the words of wisdom
he was commissioned to speak. Now he felt that they cared nothing for
him, and that all the words he had spoken to them had fallen upon their
minds as water falls upon the sand, leaving it as parched and barren as
before.
Then one day he sent out addresses to all the prominent clergymen of
the different denominations of the city, inviting them to a conference
at the rectory of the Church of the Advent to consider what was to be
done to counteract the growing disorder.
Some few of those to whom these addresses were sent did not respond,
but nearly all who received invitations to the meeting were present.
Dr. Caiaphas was a very notable, even a famous man, and the invitation
was a compliment to every divine who received it.
Nearly all who were present were strangers to the place, and it was an
interesting study of human nature to see the different ways in which
the different men bore themselves. Those who were not strangers perhaps
assumed an air of intimate acquaintance with their surroundings. One
young man, for instance, a fashionable clergyman of the day, who had
not been in the house a half-dozen times, stood with his back to the
fire smoking a cigar with an air of perfect and authoritative ease.
"What did you do with the little Rembrandt that used to hang yonder,
doctor?" he called across the room.
The doctor laughed. He understood the workings of the young clergyman's
mind. "Oh, that hangs in the upper hall now," he said.
Others who were strangers to the place gazed about them, at the cases
of beautifully bound books, at the walls covered with paintings and
water-colors, some with a sort of half-furtive curiosity, others
assuming a studied and obvious air of indifference to the richness and
exquisite taste of everything, others evidently honestly impressed with
the superabundance of beautiful things, one or two ill at ease--some
few even overawed at the magnificence of their surroundings.
The meeting resulted in a rather rambling sort of talk; there were
other things spoken of besides John the Baptist--mostly general
topics of the same sort--discursive discussions of various heresies.
The relation of the classes was talked about, and even politics. But
still Dr. Caiaphas held the discussion pretty steadily to the topic
in hand. Some who were present regarded the matter as serious enough;
others were inclined to permit themselves a sort of clerical jocularity
concerning it; he himself tried to throw into the talk the weight he
felt it deserved. Maybe a series of addresses from the pulpit would
be the better way of reaching the attention of the people, he said.
Such a series of addresses might be delivered simultaneously in all
the churches. "Oh, if it's a matter of preaching a sermon," said
Mr. Munjoy, a minister of another denomination--"if it's a matter
of preaching a sermon, why I'm right there. To tell you the honest
truth"--here he whispered broadly--"I'm sometimes so close pushed for a
theme to preach about that I'm only too glad to have one suggested to
me."
Some of those present laughed. Dr. Caiaphas smiled faintly. "I don't
think that we are exactly in search of a theme to preach about," he
said. "I take it we are rather called together here to consider some
mutual effort in defence of God's truth."
Mr. Munjoy laughed and helped himself to another cigar.
"What impresses me," said Mr. Bold, a young clergyman with strong
revolutionary tendencies, "is that we shall never be able to treat this
subject as we should treat it unless we see with our own eyes what
is being done at these baptisms, and hear with our own ears what the
man has to say. I don't believe in sitting in a room and imagining
how a thing might be, and then combating the notion. For instance, I
was reading your sermon reported in the _Aurora_ this morning," he
said, addressing himself directly to Mr. Lovejoy, a mild-mannered,
fashionable clergyman, "about the lost woman, you know. It impressed
me you were talking about something you imagined rather than about
something you had really seen. Now, did you ever happen to study
intimately the life of a real harlot?" Mr. Lovejoy looked ineffably
shocked, and a sudden silence fell upon all, while Mr. Bold, in spite
of his self-assurance, felt uncomfortably that he had expressed himself
unfortunately, and that he had not been understood. "What I mean," he
said, "is that unless you really know something about what you attack
from the pulpit, I fail to see how your attack is going to amount to
anything. Now, I wonder how many of us have heard this man preach."
"I'm sure I've not," said Mr. Munjoy. And there was not one of all of
them who had thought it worth while to go to John the Baptist to hear
what he really had to say.
"Then," said Mr. Bold, "how are you going to attack what he has to say
if you don't know what he does say?"
"There's a good deal of truth in what our friend says," said Dr.
Caiaphas, after a moment or two of thoughtful silence.
"And how would you propose to approach the matter so as to deal with
it knowledgeably?" asked Dr. Kimberly, a minister of still another
denomination.
"I don't know," said Dr. Caiaphas. "I'm sure the conference is open to
suggestions."
"How would it do to send down a committee of five to interview him, and
to ask him what he has to say for himself?" said Mr. Munjoy, jocularly.
And then there was a murmur of laughter.
"Really, though," said Mr. Bold, after the laugh had subsided, "I don't
know that that is a half bad suggestion."
"Bad!" said Mr. Munjoy. "I should hope not. I hope you don't think that
a minister of my denomination would suggest anything that was bad." And
then there was another laugh.
The idea of the committee had been proposed in jest, but before the
meeting closed it was considered seriously, and was finally adopted.
There was still a general feeling of half-repressed jocularity about it
all, but, nevertheless, the committee was duly appointed. Mr. Munjoy,
as the proposer of the committee, was nominated for chairman, but he
declined in a very witty and amusing speech, proposing Dr. Caiaphas
in his stead. Dr. Caiaphas was not at all pleased with the sense of
levity that pervaded the meeting. It seemed to him that the subject
was very serious, and he replied to what Mr. Munjoy had said in a
very serious manner. He wished, he said, that some younger man had
been chosen. Without at all desiring to shift the burden from his own
shoulders, he must say that he really felt that his time was so much
taken up with the work of the investigation committee appointed to
examine into the police department that it would be almost impossible
for him to give to this matter that consideration which it seemed to
him to deserve. Nevertheless, if it was the will of those present that
he should act as chairman, he would so act to the best of his poor
powers.