Once I had even stopped for a few minutes to listen to a sermon being preached outside the Central Station by the Reverend John P. Wester; and I still remembered the effect which it had produced upon me. He was a tall man with a flowing red beard and a voice which enabled him to make himself heard to huge audiences in the open air. He repelled me by the cloudiness of his utterances--I hate loose thinking--and also by the touch of fanaticism which clung to his discourses; for I instinctively detest a fanatic. Yet in spite of this I felt strangely attracted by him. He had the gift of gripping his hearers; and I could see how he played upon them as a great musician plays upon a favourite instrument. Remotely he reminded me of Nordenholt in the way in which he seemed to know by instinct the points to which his rhetorical attacks should be directed; but the resemblance between the two men ended at this. It was always reason to which Nordenholt appealed in the end; whilst emotional chords were the ones which the Reverend John fingered with success. “Now you’ve told me, I believe you’re right,” I said. “I _have_ seen signs of something like a revival. The crowds seem to be taking a greater interest in religion.” “I wish they would,” Nordenholt returned, abruptly. “They won’t get it from the Reverend John. He’s out for something quite different. It’s just what I feared would happen, sooner or later. It always crops up under conditions like those we are in just now. We’ve strained the human machine to its utmost in all this work; and we’re on the edge of possibilities in the way of collective hysteria. “Now that man Wester is at the root of half the trouble we are having just now. I don’t mean that he is creating it; nothing of that sort: but his personality forms a centre round which the thing collects. The thing itself is there anyway: but if it weren’t for him and some others, it would remain fluid; it wouldn’t become really dangerous. But Wester is a fanatic and with his oratorical powers he carries the weaker people off their feet, especially the women. He’s got a following. What worries me is, where he’s going to lead them. He’s got a kink in him. Still, I’m trusting that we may be able to weather the thing without using force even now. But if he goes too far, I’ll break him like _that_.” He tapped a stick of sealing wax on his desk and broke it in two. Again I reflected how unlike this was to the Nordenholt I had known at first, the man who could unfold huge plans without so much as a gesture to help out his meaning. He must have read the thought in my eyes, for he laughed, half at himself, I think.