a bitterer cup than this ever been held to the lips of any minister of that Christ who alone had felt the extreme bitterness of ingratitude?
And yet he scarcely knew the half of what these toilers thought of him to-day. He had no conception of the strong resentment—resentment without cause that burned in their hearts against him. He had preached fairly enough indeed; but what had he actually done for them? He had declaimed against the power of capital, but capital had not loosened its grip on them by so much as the breadth of a hair. He had been charitable to them, oh, yes! and had visited their sick with pious consolation, and had lured them into unwitting friendship for him and his church, and had opened his parish hall to them on a March day, and what had been the purpose of it all? Only that he might betray them, at the last, into the hands of those tyrannical masters who had hired him, and whom they had repudiated once and for all. For had he not, when the hour came to strike the final blow for victory, thrown himself across their path, besought them to surrender to their oppressors, and when they would not, called them to their faces fools and cowards and murderers? One brick against his pious skull? He should have had a thousand. Curses on him and his sinister religion with its meaningless sop to socialism, and its cloven hoof hidden under its clerical robes!
Ah! but the denunciation of the poor was as nothing to the condemnation of the rich. By the teaching of his social heresies he had led the ignorant and the thoughtless into an attitude toward society that was bound to result in violence and bloodshed, as it had resulted. He had disgraced the religion he was supposed to preach. He had degraded his Church, and debased his high calling. He had opened their sacred buildings to a profane and howling crowd. The walls of their parish hall had echoed with incendiary speeches, with appeals to the worst passions of the heart, with
