The pastor was grasping the arms of his chair, his body bent toward the
lad, his head thrown back, his face livid with sacred rage. He was a
good man, tried and true: God-fearing, God-serving. No fault lay in him
unless it may be imputed for unrighteousness that he was a stanch,
trenchant sectary in his place and generation. As he sat there in the
basement study of his church, his pulpit of authority and his baptismal
pool of regeneration directly over his head, all round him in the city
the solid hundreds of his followers, he forgot himself as a man and a
minister and remembered only that as a servant of the Most High he was
being interrogated and dishonored. His soul shook and thundered within
him to repel these attacks upon his Lord and Master. As those
unexpected random questions had poured in upon him thick and fast, all
emerging, as it seemed to him, like disembodied evil spirits from the
black pit of Satan and the damned, it was joy to him to deal to each
that same straight, God-directed spear-thrust of a reply--killing them
as they rose. His soul exulted in that blessed carnage.
But the questions ceased. They had hurried out as though there were a
myriad pressing behind--a few issuing bees of an aroused swarm. But
they ceased. The pastor leaned back in his chair and drew a quivering
breath through his white lips.
"Ask some more!"
On his side, the lad had lost divine passion as the pastor had gained
it. His interest waned while the pastor's waxed. His last questions
were put so falteringly, almost so inaudibly, that the pastor might
well believe his questioner beaten, brought back to modesty and
silence. To a deeper-seeing eye, however, the truth would have been
plain that the lad was not seeing his pastor at all, but seeing THROUGH
him into his own future: into his life, his great chosen life-work. His
young feet had come in their travels nigh to the limits of his Promised
Land: he was looking over into it.
"Ask some more! The last of them! Out with them ALL! Make an end of
this now and here!"
The lad reached for his hat, which he had laid on the floor, and stood
up. He was as pale as the dead.
"I shall never be able to preach Apostolic Christianity," he said, and
turned to the door.
But reaching it, he wheeled and came back.
"I am in trouble!" he cried, sitting down again. "I don't know what to
believe. I don't know what I do believe. My God!" he cried again,
burying his face in his hands. "I believe I am beginning to doubt the
Bible. Great God, what am I coming to! what is my life coming to! ME
doubt the Bible!". . .
The interview of that day was one of the signs of two storms which were
approaching: one appointed to reach the University, one to reach the
lad.
The storm now gathering in many quarters and destined in a few years to
burst upon the University was like its other storms that had gone
before: only, this last one left it a ruin which will stay a ruin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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