The preacher must secularise
his sermon or talk to vacant pews. Historic Christianity has been
destroyed by Criticism. A thousand wild Isms nourish in the twilight
of this eclipse of Faith, while Materialism and the Pursuit of
Pleasure strangle out spiritual hopes."
"And you are the seer called to lead out of this chaos," the woman
whispered. "I know this from my own life. But for you I would be
listening to idiotic platitudes, cultivating sham, my very soul
'crucified between a whimper and a smile.' I owe it to you that I
am a woman--not a cross between an angel and an idiot."
The passion with which she said this, bending her beautiful face,
flushed with emotion, so close to his that he caught the perfume
of her mass of waving hair, went to the man's head like wine.
"Why not spring our building scheme on the people at once, without
authority from the Board of Trustees, and make it the rallying cry
of the new Humanity?" he cried eagerly.
"I believe it will succeed," she answered, her heart glowing with
the consciousness of the intimacy of that little word "our" he had
used.
She got pad and pencil, and Gordon dictated to her a plan for
engaging every force of the church and its congregation and various
societies in the project.
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