OF ELI MOGGRIDGE AND THE NEW SPIRIT
New Zion, despite its name, was, as I have hinted, no longer new. The
fiery zeal which had once made it a living schism had long since died
out of it. Carried years before, a little blazing ember of faith, from a
flourishing hearth of Nonconformity some streets away, it had puffed and
gleamed a little space in the eloquence of the offended zealots who
carried it hotfoot that Sunday morning, but its central fire had been
poor, and for a long time no evangelistic bellows had awakened in it
even a spark.
Its original elders had long since lost heart and passed away. A
dwindling remnant of their children, from old association, just kept its
doors from actually closing, and made a mournful interruption in its
musty silence on Sundays. Life was too low to support a Wednesday
prayer-meeting, and Sunday by Sunday that life ebbed lower. New life
from the outside must come, and speedily, or it must die.
But new life was already on the way. On the town side the sad streets
round New Zion led one into a more prosperous High Street, and indeed
Zion Street itself, as it turned the corner, flamed into quite a jovial
and ruddy shop--a provision merchant's, and kept by Eli Moggridge. The
name did its owner considerable wrong, for its suggestion of puritanical
sanctimoniousness was a flat contradiction of the jovial and ruddy
personality, the huge red-whiskered laugher, for whom it stood, and of
whom the shop, with its healthy smell of cheese and its air of exuberant
prosperity, was a much more truthful expression. Well, the business was
growing with such gusto that Mr. Moggridge felt he might afford a home
away from his shop, and thus he came to take the biggish empty house
which presently put on new paint and once more seemed quite proud of
being "Zion View."
Till this time, Mr. Moggridge. had "attended" elsewhere, but he was not
so young as he had been and somewhat stouter, and the stealthy approach
of comfortable habits had suggested to him that his old chapel was
rather at an unnecessary distance. Then, too, the fact of his house
being called after New Zion seemed to impose a sort of obligation
towards the sad old chapel. Besides, Mr. Moggridge was not inhumanly
above the pleasures of self-importance, and though he did not express it
in just those words, or indeed in any words at all, the idea of his
being the Maecenas of New Zion was suddenly born within him.
Now, quick was even the word with Mr. Moggridge, as became a successful
man of business, and for him to conceive an idea was to carry it out, as
goods were always delivered from Mr. Moggridge's shop, with despatch.
Also in some dim far-off way Mr. Moggridge's mind had, all
unconsciously, been stirred by vibrations of what we call the New
Spirit. The new spirit of any age works its way even into its
businesses, and though Mr. Moggridge wouldn't have so described it, it
was the "New Spirit" that had made the success of his provision shop.
Speaking of the need of New Zion, Mr. Moggridge called it "new blood."
He meant the "New Spirit;" and it was in reply to his advertisement for
a new pastor, that the "New Spirit" in the person of Theophilus
Londonderry came one Sunday to preach at New Zion.