"Then you have misjudged me. The only criticism I've ever made of you has been as a part of our social and economic order. This is a question, it seems to me, we might differ about and still be friends. Now, I wish you to tell me honestly, face to face, why you object to me as the pastor of your church?" "You wish me to be perfectly frank?" he asked, with his black eyes twinkling. "Perfectly so. You couldn't say anything that would anger me. I am too much in earnest." "Well, to begin with, you don't preach the simple gospel." "No; but I do preach the gospel of Christ." "Your reference to the strike amongst the women shirt-makers in New York drove one of the richest men out of our church." "Yes; I saw him jump up and go out during the service. The women were making shirts for his house at thirty-five cents a dozen, finding their own thread and using their own machines. I said if I found one of those shirts in my house I'd put it in the fire with a pair of tongs, and I would. I'd be afraid to touch a seam lest I felt the throb of a woman's bruised fingers in it." The Deacon softly stroked his whiskers. "It was an unfortunate remark. He contributed $500 a year to the church. He has gone where the simple gospel of Christ is preached." "Yes, so simple that he can sleep through it and know that it will never touch his life," Gordon said with a sneer. "What's the use to talk about mustard plaster? I say apply it to the place that hurts." "You preach Evolution. I don't like the idea that man is descended from a monkey." "The weight of scholarship sustains the theory." "Well, my idea is, if it's true, the less said about it the better. And then you lack dignity out of the pulpit." "Even so, Deacon, the most dignified man I ever saw was a dead man--a dead New Yorker. What we need in the church is life." "But you have departed from the faith of our fathers." "Perhaps," Gordon said, with a twinkle in his eye, "if you mean our famous fathers who 'landed first on their knees and then on the aborigines.'" Van Meter ignored the remark. "You said one day that in America we had but two classes, the masses and the asses. That sentence cost the church a thousand dollars in pew-rents. I think such assertions blasphemous." "Well, it's true." "I don't think so; and if it were, it don't pay to say such things." "Am I only to preach the truths that pay?" "We hired you to preach the simple gospel of Christ." "Pardon me, Deacon; I am not your hired man. I chose this church as the instrument through which I could best give my message to the world. I answer to God, not to you. The salary you pay me is not the wage of a hireling. My support comes from the free offerings laid on God's altar." "We call them pew-rents. You are trying to abolish this system, as old as our life, and allow a mob of strangers to push and crowd our old members out of their pews." "I believe the system of renting pews un-Christian and immoral-a mark of social caste."