Clergy -- Fiction; Love stories; Mistaken identity -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
This minister! This corrupt, ungodly shepherd! He could be neither
hanged nor put in jail, yet he committed a crime for which hell itself
scarce held adequate penalty and punishment! The street preacher's eyes
dilated, the hand that held the panel trembled, spots of unhealthy white
sprang into his burning cheeks. The flaring candles--the table with its
carven legend, _This Do In Remembrance of Me_--the little gold cross,
set there, it seemed to him, in a satanic derision! It was the evil the
Apostle Paul wrestled against, of "wicked spirits in high places." It
was sacrilege! It was blasphemy! It was the Arch-Fiend laughing, making
a mock of God's own altar with the guilty pleasures of the pit--a very
sacrament of the damned!
Scarce knowing what he did, he closed the panel softly and ran across
the chapel lawn. On the pavement outside he met a man approaching. It
was the bishop, on his way to his contemplated chat with Harry
Sanderson. The excited evangelist did not know the man, but his eye
caught the ministerial dress, the plain, sturdy piety of the face. In
his zeal he saw an instrument to his hand. He grasped the bishop's arm.
"Quick! Quick!" he gasped. "There's devil's work doing in there! Come
and see!" He fairly pulled him inside the gate.
The puzzled bishop saw the intense excitement of the other's demeanor.
He saw the faint glow in the corner of the rose-window. Were there
thieves after the altar-plate?
He shook off the eager hand that was drawing him toward the window. "Not
there--come this way!" he said, and hurried toward the porch. He tried
the chapel door--it was fast. He had a key to this in his pocket. He
inserted it with caution, opened the door noiselessly and went in, the
street preacher at his heels.
What the bishop saw was photographed instantaneously on his mind in
fiery, indelible colors. It ate into his soul like hot iron into
quivering flesh, searing itself upon his memory. It was destined to
haunt his sleep for many months afterward, a phantom of regret and
shame. He was, in his way, a man of the world, travelled, sophisticated,
acquainted with sin in unexpected forms and places. But this sight, in
all its coarse suggestion of license, in its harrowing implication of
hidden vice and hypocrisy, was damning and appalling. The evangelist of
the pave had been horrified, shocked to word and action; the bishop was
frozen, inarticulate, impaled. For any evil in Hugh Stires he was
prepared--since the forgery. But Hugh's companion now was the man whom
he himself had ordained and anointed, by the laying on of hands, with
the chrism of his holy ministry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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