On the following Sunday evening London had another theological
sensation. The National Secular Society had advertised far and wide that
the preacher of the famous sermon at St. Chrysostom had consented to
deliver an address at the Hall of Science, and that the chair was to be
taken by the President of the Society, who was one of the most eloquent
and uncompromising exponents of free-thought and rationalism in the
world.
Not only in the Anglican churches but also among Catholics and
Nonconformists a perfect tempest of indignation had burst forth during
the past few days. A hurriedly summoned but crowded meeting was held at
Exeter Hall on the same night that Vane had welcomed Carol and her lover
into the family circle. It was mainly expressive of evangelical opinion,
and was addressed with indignant eloquence by several of the principal
Low Church and Nonconformist divines in London. Their principal theme
was ritualism and atheism, with special reference to the connection that
appeared to exist between them in the person of the Rev. Vane Maxwell.
To begin with, he had joined a confraternity of Anglican priests whose
practises were notoriously and admittedly illegal, and he had taken
advantage of his position in the pulpit to preach a sermon which had
sent a thrill of indignation through the hearts of all the most generous
supporters of Church and mission work throughout the United Kingdom and
abroad.
He had taken upon himself to put a brutally literal construction on the
words of Christ which it would be absolutely impossible to carry out in
practice unless the whole of Christendom were pauperised--and what,
then, would become of the work of the churches, and, particularly, of
those vast missionary movements which had spread the light of
Christianity in so many dark places of the earth? How would they
continue to exist without the vast sums which Christians of wealth so
generously contributed? What was to happen, even to the churches of all
denominations in England itself, if they accepted the preposterous
doctrine that a man could not enjoy the fruit of his own labour, or
inherit that of his ancestors, and at the same time remain a Christian?
It was totally out of the question, far beyond the bounds of all
practical common sense, and therefore it could not be Christian, since,
if such a doctrine were true, Christianity would be impossible.
And now, not content with preaching from a Christian pulpit a heresy
which, if accepted by Christians, would make Christianity a practical
impossibility, this headstrong, unthinking visionary, reckless of all
the best traditions of his Church and his cloth, was going to address an
assembly of infidels and atheists, and, as a minister of the Gospel,
make friends with those who blasphemed the name of God every time they
used it, and did their utmost to destroy the edifice of Christianity
and to uproot the foundations of the Christian faith.
It was monstrous, it was horrible, and the general sense of the
speeches, and of the resolutions which were unanimously and
enthusiastically carried at the end of the meeting, was that the man who
could preach heresy in a Christian pulpit, then, the next Sunday,
associate himself deliberately with infidels and atheists, was not
worthy to remain within the fold of the Christian Ministry.
Of course, the speeches were duly reported in the papers the next
morning with, in some cases, a considerable amount of editorial
embroidery, and nowhere were they read with greater interest than at the
breakfast-table of Sir Arthur's house in Warwick Gardens, especially as,
side by side with them, came the announcement that another meeting of
protest was to be held at St. James's Hall on the Saturday evening,
under the auspices of a committee of members of the English Church
Union. The chair was to be taken by Canon Thornton-Moore, and several of
the leading lights of High Anglicanism were to speak.
"What a very wicked person you must be, Vane," said Carol, who had
swiftly skimmed through some of the speeches and the comments on them.
"The Low Church people seem to have excommunicated you altogether, and
now the High Church are going to do it. Why don't you go to this meeting
to-night and give them a bit of your mind? I believe they are all
frightened of you and your new doctrines, and that is why they are
making such a fuss about it."
"My doctrines are not new, Carol," replied Vane, with a smile which
seemed to her very gentle and sweet. "They are just as old as
Christianity itself, and they are not mine, but the Master's. No, I
don't think I shall go to the meeting. I am afraid there will be quite
trouble enough without me, and, besides, personal controversy seldom
does any good at all. I only hope, indeed, that these good people will
keep away from the Hall of Science on Sunday night. It is the greatest
of pities that it was made public. I simply wanted to have a quiet talk
with the usual audience."
"I am afraid you won't have many more quiet talks with any audiences
now, Vane," laughed Sir Arthur. "This sudden jump that you have made
into fame has made it impossible. You will have to pay the usual penalty
of greatness."
"It appears," said Carol, "in this case, to be mostly abuse and
misunderstanding."
"I don't think there is much misunderstanding, Carol," said Dora. "It
seems to me to be quite the other way about. These people understand Mr.
Maxwell only too well for their own comfort. They see quite plainly that
if he is right, as, of course, he is, wealth and real Christianity
cannot go together; therefore, equally, of course, fat livings and
bishoprics and archbishoprics at ten and fifteen thousand a year will
also be impossible. It may be very wicked to say so, but I think a lot
of these good people are worrying themselves much more about salaries
and endowments and that sort of thing than real Christianity."
"Of course they are," said Carol. "I wonder how many of them will do
what Vane has done, give up everything he had----"
"My dear Carol," interrupted Vane, gently, "that is not quite the point.
You must remember that these men have their opinions just as I have
mine, and they may not think it their duty to do that. I do not believe
that it is right for a man to be a priest of the Church and possess more
than the actual necessaries of life. They believe that it is right."
"And a very convenient belief, too!" said Carol, with a look of
admiration. "Well, I am not as charitable as you are, and I don't
believe that they do believe it. Now, there's Cecil and the carriage.
Dear me! how very punctual he is."
"There's not much to wonder at in that," said Sir Arthur. "Well, now, I
suppose you young ladies are going to have a morning in Paradise--the
one that is bounded by Oxford Street on the north and Piccadilly on the
south. Vane, we will go and have a cigar with Mr. Rayburn while they are
getting ready."
The meeting at St. James's Hall was much less crowded, and, as some
thought, much more decorous than the one at Exeter Hall. Canon
Thornton-Moore, a man of stately presence, high social standing and very
considerable wealth--he had married the daughter of one of the most
successful operators in the Kaffir Circus--made an ideal chairman. He
was a High Churchman and the son of a Bishop. He was the incarnation of
the most aristocratic section of the Anglican Church. He was supported
by the presence of a Duke and two High Church peers on the platform, and
half a dozen vicars and curates, all eloquent preachers and fashionable
exponents of ritualistic doctrine, were announced to speak in advocacy
of the protest which the meeting had been called to make.
The proceedings were very quiet and dignified--and very churchy. It was
the Church from beginning to end; it never seemed to strike either the
speakers or the audience that there was anything that might fairly be
called Christianity outside the Church. In fact, the words Christ and
Christianity were not used at all from the platform.
The only approach to unseemliness occurred when, in response to a formal
intimation that "discussion within reasonable limits" would be
permitted, one of the Kilburn Sisters, a woman who had given up a
fortune and relinquished a title, got up and asked the chairman
point-blank what _his_ interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount was,
and further, if any of the noble and reverend gentlemen on the platform
could give a better exposition of it as a rule of Christian life than
Vane Maxwell had done?
She had hardly uttered her question before murmurs of angry protest
began to run from lip to lip through the hall; but when she went on to
ask why the preacher of the now famous sermon should be denounced by his
fellow priests for giving an address to free-thinkers in a free-thought
hall, when Christ himself, for his own good purposes, associated himself
with publicans and sinners and thought none too low or too utterly lost
to take by the hand, her voice was at once drowned by a chorus of "Oh!
Oh's!" amidst which the chairman rose and said in his most dignified
manner:
"I hope that I have the sense and feeling of the meeting with me when I
say that the questions asked by our most respected sister seem to have
been asked under a total misconception of the circumstances. It is
obvious that they raise issues which could not possibly be discussed in
such a place, and on such an occasion as this. I would remind our dear
friend that this edifice is not a church, and this platform not a
pulpit; and that, therefore, I do not feel myself justified, even if
time and other circumstances permitted, to enter upon a doctrinal
subject which involves so many far-reaching considerations as this one
does."
The Canon sat down amidst a many-voiced murmur of approval, and the Duke
said audibly to him:
"A very proper way, my dear Canon, of dealing with a most improper
question. The dear lady seems to think that we are not capable of
reading our Bibles for ourselves."
After that the chairman put to the meeting the resolution of protest to
the effect that if the Reverend Vane Maxwell persisted in carrying out
his intention to proceed from a pulpit of the church to the platform of
an infidel lecture hall, he would make it the painful duty of his
canonical superiors to take his conduct into most serious consideration,
and, further, should he persist in this deplorable resolution, he would
arouse the gravest suspicions in the minds of all loyal churchmen as to
his fitness for dispensing the sacred functions of his office.
The Kilburn Sister and a few others walked out amidst a chilling
silence, and under a silent fire of glances which ought to have made
them feel very uncomfortable. Perhaps it did.
The resolution was put and passed without a dissentient voice, and when
the proceedings were over and Lady Canore, who had been one of the most
energetic organisers of the meeting, got back into her carriage, she
said to her husband:
"I think the dear Canon's reply was most dignified and proper. That
woman ought to be ashamed of herself--and a Kilburn Sister, too! Donald,
I shall certainly go and hear what this Mr. Maxwell has to say to
these--ah--these people at, where is it? the Hall of what? Oh, yes!
Science, and you must manage to get a seat. I believe you pay for them
just as you do in a theatre. It is, of course, very shocking, but I
think it will be most interesting."
A good many other members of the audience said practically the same
thing in other ways, and so it came about that the Hall in Old Street
was packed as it had not been since the most famous days of Charles
Bradlaugh, and packed, too, with a most strangely assorted audience of
democrats and aristocrats, socialists and landowners, freethinkers of
the deistic, the atheistic, and the agnostic persuasions, and Christians
of even more varying shades of opinion, from the most rigidly
Calvinistic evangelical, to the most artistically emotional of the High
Anglican cult.
The President rose amidst the usual applause, but it hushed the moment
he began to speak, in clear incisive tones which sent every syllable
distinctly from end to end of the hall:
"Friends, I intend to say very little, because we are going to hear
to-night what we very seldom hear in a secular lecture-hall. We are
going to hear an address which you are waiting for as eagerly as I am,
an address delivered by a man who, as a Priest of the Church of England,
last Sunday sent a thrill of astonishment, of amazement, I might almost
say of horror, through Christian England."
A burst of applause, coming chiefly from the back of the hall,
interrupted the speaker, but he put his hand up, and went on:
"No, please! I must ask you not to applaud. For one thing, there is not
time for it. Just let me get my say said, and then, when Mr. Maxwell
gives us the message he has brought us from what we are, perhaps, too
ready to believe the enemy's camp, applaud him as much as you like. What
I want to do now is to say as far as possible without offence, and
without hurting the feelings of the many members of Christian churches
who have come amongst us to-night, that it is to be our privilege to
listen here in what has been recently called the head-quarters of
infidelity--an insulting epithet which I, with you and all true
rationalists indignantly repudiate--a man, a Christian clergyman, a
priest of the Church of England who has, as you already know, raised a
hurricane of criticism throughout this Christian country by daring to
tell Christians just what Jesus of Nazareth meant--if plain words mean
anything--when he preached the Sermon on the Mount. He has dared to say
from a Christian pulpit what we have been saying from these platforms of
ours ever since we had them--that Christendom is not Christian, and that
it cannot be so until it is prepared to be honest with itself and its
God.
"Mr. Maxwell has come amongst us to-night with other thoughts, other
faiths, other beliefs than ours, but from what I see of the audience he
will not speak to freethinkers only. I believe that there are more
professing Christians in this hall to-night than there ever have been
before. Let us remember that. It may be that Mr. Maxwell will teach us
some lessons as unpalatable as those which he taught from the pulpit of
St. Chrysostom; but do not let us forget this that we shall be listening
to a man who is a missionary in the best sense of the word, a man who
has justified his faith by the sacrifice of his worldly prospects, and
who has taken upon himself a task infinitely more difficult, infinitely
more thankless than that of the missionary who, as we believe, carries
at an immense expense of money which could be better spent in the
charity that begins at home, a message of salvation, as he no doubt
honestly believes it to be, to savages who cannot understand it, or to
the people who were civilized when we were savages, and who don't want
it and won't have it.
"Mr. Maxwell has taken upon himself, if I may say so without offence, a
far nobler mission than this, a greater task, if possible, than that of
the noble men and women of all creeds, and no creed, who minister to the
wants of our own savages, by which I mean those who have been kept in a
state of savagery infinitely worse than that of the negro slave of
seventy years ago, by the necessities of the civilization which is no
more Christian than it is humane.
"Mr. Maxwell, by preaching that one famous sermon of his, has
constituted himself a missionary to the rich, to those who profess and
call themselves Christians, and yet are content to live utterly and
hopelessly unchristian lives. Friends, the man beside me has begun to
make himself the Savonarola of the twentieth century. Whether his creed
is ours or not, we must all agree that that sermon of his is the
beginning of a great and noble work. He told his wealthy and fashionable
hearers last Sunday that they could not be Christians unless they were
honest with God and their fellow men. As regards the first part, some of
us have different beliefs to his, but as regards the second, we are with
him heart and soul. If he can teach us to be honest with ourselves and
each other, he will have done more to conquer sin and vice, more to make
earth that human paradise that the poets and dreamers and prophets of
all ages have longed for and foretold, than all the churches and all the
creeds have done for the last two thousand years. It is a godly because
it is a goodly work, and--if there is a God--that God will bless him and
help him in it."