A VESTRY MEETING
There was a strained atmosphere in the vestry meeting from the first.
Every member present felt the tension from the moment old Joseph G.
Clark walked in with Chisholm. They did not even nod to the Reverend
Smith Boyd, but took their seats solidly in their customary places at
the table, Clark, shielding his eyes, as was his wont, against the light
which streamed on him from the red robe of the Good Shepherd. The
repression was apparent, too, in the Reverend Smith Boyd, who rose to
address his vestrymen as soon as the late-comers arrived.
“Gentlemen,” said he, “I wish to speak to you as the treasury committee,
rather than as vestrymen, for it is in the former capacity which you
always attend. I am advised that we have been paid for Vedder Court.”
Chisholm, to whom he directed a gaze of inquiry, nodded his head.
“It’s in the Majestic,” he stated. “I have plans for its investment,
which I wish to lay before the committee.”
“I shall lay my own before them at the same time,” went on the rector.
“I wish, however, to preface these plans by the statement that I have,
so far as I am concerned, relinquished all thought of building the new
cathedral.”
Nicholas Van Ploon, who had been much troubled of late, brightened, and
nodded his round head emphatically.
“That’s what I say,” he declared.
“The decision does not lay in your hands, Doctor Boyd,” drawled a nasal
voice with an unconcealed sneer in it. It was clean-shaven old Joseph G.
Clark, who was not disturbed, in so much as the parting of one hair, by
all the adverse criticism of him which had filled column upon column of
the daily press for the past few days. “The rector has never, in the
history of Market Square Church, been given the control of its finances.
He has invariably been hired to preach the gospel.”
Sargent, Cunningham, Manning, and even Van Ploon, looked at Clark in
surprise. He was not given to open reproof. Chisholm manifested no
astonishment. He sat quietly in his chair, his fingers idly drumming on
the edge of the table, but his mutton-chop beard was pink from the
reddening of the skin beneath.
“The present rector of Market Square Church means to have a voice in its
deliberations so long as he is the rector!” announced that young man
emphatically, and Jim Sargent looked up at him with a jerk of his head.
The Reverend Smith Boyd was pale this afternoon, but there was a
something shining through his pallor which made the face alive; and the
something was not temper. Rufus Manning, clasping his silvery beard with
a firm grip, smiled encouragingly at the tall young orator. “I have said
that I have, so far as I am concerned, relinquished the building of the
cathedral,” the rector went on. “For this there are two reasons. The
first is that its building will bring us further away from the very
purpose for which the church was founded; the worship of God with an
humble and a contrite heart! I am ready to confess that I found, on
rigid self-analysis, my leading motive in urging the building of the new
cathedral to have been vanity. I am also ready to confess, on behalf of
my congregation and vestry, that their leading motive was vanity!”
“You have no authority to speak for me,” interrupted Chisholm, his
mutton chops now red.
“Splendour is no longer the exclusive property of religion,” resumed the
rector, paying no attention to the interruption. “It has lost the
greater part of its effectiveness because splendour has become a mere
adjunct to the daily luxury of our civilisation. The new cathedral would
be only a surrounding in keeping with the gilded boudoirs from which my
lady parishioners step to come to worship; and the ceremony of worship
has become the Sunday substitute, in point of social recognition, for
the week day tea. If I thought, however, that the building of that
cathedral would promote the spread of the gospel in a degree
commensurate with the outlay, I would still be opposed to the erection
of the building; for the money does not belong to us!”
“Go right on and develop our conscience,” approved Manning, smiling up
at the old walnut-beamed ceiling with its carved cherub brackets.
“The money belongs to Vedder Court,” declared the rector; “to the
distorted moral cripples which Market Square Church, through the
accident of commerce, has taken under her wing. Gentlemen, in the recent
revelations concerning the vast industrial interests of the world, I
have seen the whole blackness of modern corporate methods; and Market
Square Church is a corporation! Corporations were originally formed for
the purpose of expediting commerce, and it is the mere logic of
opportunity that their progress to rapacity, coercion, and merciless
strangulation of all competition, has been so swift. They have at no
time been swayed by any moral consideration. This fact is so notorious
that it has given rise to the true phrase ‘corporations have no souls.’
I wish to ask you, in how far the Market Square Church has been swayed,
in its commercial dealings, by moral considerations?”
He paused, and glanced from man to man of his vestry. Sargent and
Manning, the former of whom knew his plans and the latter of whom had
been waiting for them to mature, smiled at him in perfect accord.
Nicholas Van Ploon sat quite placidly, with his hands folded over his
creaseless vest. Willis Cunningham, stroking his sparse brown Vandyke,
looked uncomfortable, as if he had suddenly been introduced into a rude
brawl; but his eye roved occasionally to Nicholas Van Ploon, who was two
generations ahead of him in the acquisition of wealth, by the brilliant
process of allowing property to increase in valuation. Chisholm glared.
“You’ll not find any money which is not tainted,” snapped Joseph G.
Clark, who regarded money in a strictly impersonal light. “The very
dollar you have in your pocket may have come direct from a brothel.”
“Or from Vedder Court,” retorted the rector. “We have brothels there,
though we do not ‘officially’ know it. We have saloons there; we have
gambling rooms there; and, from all these iniquities, Market Square
Church reaps a profit! For the glory of God? I dare you, Joseph G.
Clark, or W. T. Chisholm, to answer me that question in the affirmative!
In Vedder Court there are tenements walled and partitioned with
contagion, poison, with miasmatic air, reeking with disease; and from
the poor who flock into this fetid shelter, because we offer them cheap
rents, Market Square Church takes a profit as great as any distillery
combine! For the glory of God? Out of very shame we can not answer that
question! We have bought and sold with the greed of any conscienceless
individual, and our commodity has been filth and degradation, human
lives and stunted souls! No decent man would conduct the business we do,
for the reason that it would soil his soul as a gentleman; and it is a
shameful thing that a gentleman should have finer ethics than a
Christian church! In the beginning, I was a coward about this matter! It
was because I wished to be rid of our responsibility in Vedder Court
that I first urged the conversion of that property into a cathedral. We
can not rid ourselves of the responsibility of Vedder Court! If it were
possible for a church to be sent to hell, Market Square Church would be
eternally damned if it took this added guilt upon it!”
“This talk is absurd,” declared Chisholm. “The city has taken Vedder
Court away from us.”
“Only the property,” quickly corrected Rufus Manning, turning to
Chisholm with sharpness in his deep blue eyes. “If you will remember, I
told you this same thing before Doctor Boyd came to us. I have waited
ever since his arrival for him to develop to this point, and I wish to
announce myself as solidly supporting his views.”
“Your own will not bear inspection!” charged Clark, turning to Manning
with a scowl.
“I’ll range up at the judgment seat with you!” flamed Manning. “We’re
both old enough to think about that!”
Joseph G. Clark jumped to his feet, and, leaning across the table, shook
a thin forefinger at Manning.
“I have been attacked enough on the point of my moral standing!” he
declared, his high pitched nasal voice quavering with an anger he had
held below the explosive point during the most of his life. “I can stand
the attacks of a sensational press, but when spiteful criticism follows
me into my own vestry, almost in the sacred shadow of the altar itself,
I am compelled to protest! I wish to state to this vestry, once and for
all, that my moral status is above reproach, and that my conduct has
been such as to receive the commendation of my Maker! Because it has
pleased Divine Providence to place in my hands the distribution of the
grain of the fields, I am constantly subject to the attacks of envy and
malice! It has gone so far that I, last night, received from the
Reverend Smith Boyd, a request to resign from this vestry!” He paused in
triumph on that, as if he had made against the Reverend Smith Boyd a
charge of such ghastly infamy that the young rector must shrivel before
his eyes. “I have led a blameless life! I have never smoked nor drank! I
have paid every penny I ever owed and fulfilled every promise I ever
made. I have obeyed the gospel, and partaken of the sacraments, and the
Divine Being has rewarded me abundantly! He has chosen me, because of my
faithful stewardship, to gather the foods of earth from its sources, and
feed it to the mouths of the hungry; and I shall not depart from my
stewardship in this church, because I am here, as I am everywhere, by
the will of God!”
Perhaps W. T. Chisholm was not shocked by this blasphemy, but the dismay
of it sat on every other face, even on that of Nicholas Van Ploon, who
was compelled to dig deep to find his ethics.
“You infernal old thief!” wondered Manning, recovering from his
amazement. “Was it Divine Providence which directed you to devise the
scheme whereby the railroads paid you two dollars rebate on every car of
wheat you shipped, and a dollar bonus on every car of wheat your
competitors shipped? I could give you a string of sins as long as the
catechism, and you dare not deny one of them, because I can prove them
on you! And yet you have the effrontery to say that a Divine Providence
would establish you in your monopoly, by such scoundrelly means as you
have risen to become the greatest dispenser of self advertising
charities in the world! You propose to ride into Heaven on your
universities and your libraries, and on the fact that you never smoked
nor drank nor swore nor gambled; but when you come face to face with
this horrible new god you have created, a deity who would permit you to
attain wealth by the vile methods you have used, you will find him with
a pitch-fork in his hands! I am glad that Doctor Boyd, though knowing
your vindictive record, has had bravery enough to demand your
resignation from this vestry! I hope he receives it!”
Joseph G. Clark had remained standing, and his head shook, as with a
palsy, while he listened to the charge of Manning. He was a very old
man, and it had been quite necessary for him to restrain his passions
throughout his life.
“You will go first!” he shouted at Manning. “I am impregnable; but you
have no business on this vestry! You can be removed at any time an
examination is ordered, for I have heard you, we have all heard you,
deny the immaculate conception, and thereby the Divinity of Christ, in
whom alone there is salvation!”
A hush like death fell on the vestry. The Reverend Smith Boyd was the
first to break the ghastly silence.
“Gentlemen,” said he, “I do not think that we are in a mood to-day for
further discussion. I suggest that we adjourn.”
His voice seemed to distract the attention of Clark from Manning, at
whom he had been glowering. He turned on the Reverend Smith Boyd the
remainder of the wrath which marked his first break into senility.
“As for you!” he snarled, “you will keep your fingers out of matters
which do not concern you! You were hired to preach the gospel, and you
will confine your attention to that occupation, preaching just what you
find sanctioned in this book; nothing more, nothing less!” and taking a
small volume which lay on the table, he tossed it in front of the
Reverend Smith Boyd.
It was the Book of Common Prayer, containing, in the last pages, the
Articles of Faith.
Clark seized his hat and coat, and strode out of the door, followed by
the red-faced Chisholm, who had also been asked to resign. Nicholas Van
Ploon rose, and shook hands with the Reverend Smith Boyd.
“Sargent has told me about your plan for the new tenements,” he stated.
“I am in favour of buying the property.”
“We’ll swing it for you, Boyd,” promised Jim Sargent. “I’ve been talking
with some of the other members, and they seem to favour the idea that
the new Vedder Court will be a great monument. There’ll be no such
magnificent charity in the world, and no such impressive sacrifice as
giving up that cathedral! I think Cunningham will be with us, when it
comes to a vote.”
“Certainly,” interposed Nicholas Van Ploon. “We don’t need to make any
profit from those tenements. The normal increase in ground value will be
enough.”
“Yes,” said Cunningham slowly. “I am heartily in favour of the
proposition.”
“Coming along, Doctor,” invited Manning, going for his coat and hat.
“No, I think not,” decided the Reverend Smith Boyd quietly.
He was sitting at the end of the table facing the Good Shepherd, at the
edge of whose robe still sparkled crystalline light, and in his two
hands he thoughtfully held the Book of Common Prayer.