The Redemption of David CorsonGoss, Charles Frederic
General
The Redemption of David Corson
Goss, Charles Frederic
Society of Friends -- Fiction
A few moments' walking brought him to a weird spectacle. A torch had
been erected above a low platform on which stood a man of most unique
and striking personality. He looked like a giant in the wavering light
of the torch. He was dressed in the simple garb of a Quaker; his head
was bare; great locks of reddish hair curled round his temples and fell
down upon his shoulders. His massive countenance bespoke an
extraordinary mind, and beamed with rest and peace.
As he sang the old familiar hymn, he looked around upon his audience
with an expression such as glowed, no doubt, from the countenance of the
Christ when He spoke to the multitudes on the shores of Lake Genessaret.
Close to the small platform was a circle of street Arabs, awed into
silence and respect by the charm of this remarkable personality. Next to
them came a ring of women--some of them old and gray, with haggard and
wrinkled countenances upon which Time, with his antique pen, had traced
many illegible hieroglyphs; some of them young and bedizened with tinsel
jewelry and flashy clothing; not a few of them middle-aged, wan,
dispirited and bearing upon their hips bundles wrapped in faded shawls,
from which came occasionally that most distressing of sounds, the wail
of an ill-fed and unloved infant, crying in the night.
Outside of this zone of female misery and degradation, there was a belt
of masculine stupidity and crime; men with corpulent bodies, bull necks,
double chins, pile-driving heads; men of shrunken frames, cadaverous
cheeks, deep-set and beady eyes--vermin-covered, disease-devoured,
hope-deserted. They clung around him, these concentric circles of
humanity, like rings around a luminous planet, held by they knew not
what resistless attraction.
The simple melody, borne upon the pinions of that resonant and
cello-like voice, attained an almost supernatural influence over their
perverted natures. When it ceased, an audible sigh arose, an involuntary
tribute of adoration and of awe.
As soon as he had finished his hymn, this consecrated apostle to the
lost sheep of the great city opened a well-worn volume.
The passage which he read, or rather chanted, was the fifty-third
chapter of Isaiah, the awe-inspiring sentences sending through the
circles of humanity which were tightening about him visible vibrations.
When he finished his reading, he began an address full of homely wit and
pathos, in which, with all the rich and striking imagery culled from a
varied life in the wildernesses of the great forests and the great
cities of our continent, he appealed to that consciousness of "the true,
the beautiful and the good" which he believed to lie dormant, but
capable of resurrection, in the soul of every man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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