"That is not true; no one person is responsible for any spiritual
decision that another makes," I answered hotly with an awful sense of
having had a burden placed on my shoulders that they could not carry.
"The old 'brother's keeper' question will never be settled in any but
the right way," he answered me straight from the shoulder. "You are
responsible for the attitude of this whole town towards the cause I
represent and they'll have to wait for your eyes to be opened and for
you to make them see."
"You minimize yourself," I answered quickly, for in some curious way it
hurt me to see that great strong man sit at my feet baffled by a force
that he declared to be in me but which I did not acknowledge or
understand.
"They were listening to me--from a distance, as it were--and I might
have made them hear if you had not come home and thrown them back into
the old pleasant groove of non-action and non-belief. In a week you had
swept away all I had builded in six months." He spoke with simple
conviction and not a trace of the bitterness that might have been in the
arraignment.
"Everybody in this town adores you," were the words that gushed out of
my heart for his comforting before I could stop them. "That is one
reason I have acted as I have. I do not, I cannot believe that the
religion which is great enough to bring the redemption of the whole race
into a desirable immortality can be composed of nine-tenths emotion,
with which all of them were following your beautiful voice and beautiful
eyes and beautiful church and beautiful words. If I am to be saved it
will be by something sterner than that; it will be something that makes
me sweat drops of blood from my mind, take up a hard cross of duty and
work, work to make the fibre of my soul strong enough to enjoy the
robust kind of immortality that alone seems worth while to me. Your Son
of Man walked from town to town in the hot sun and taught the people,
healed the multitude and yet had not where to lay his head to rest. His
church has lost His vigor. Your whole scheme hasn't enough action in it.
Your organization is too easy and too full of surface observances. It is
conducted with slipshod business methods and there is no force in it to
help me. If I join any church ever it will have to be a new one that can
compare with modern business in its efficiency. Your scheme of
redemption to immortality through an efficient mediation is perfectly
sound, but you don't back it up."
"The Church of Christ has stood, endured and done business for almost
two thousand years," he answered quietly. "It is in some ways all you
say of it, but it has at least proved its vitality. Why seek to found a
new organization with a new head and a new scheme of immortality if you
recognize this scheme as good? The place to reorganize a business is
from the inside, not the outside. These people must get their vision
now. Will you come and help me?" As he spoke he looked again down into
the depths from which I had been trying to translate some of the
hieroglyphics to him and he held out his long powerful hand to me in an
entreaty that shook my very foundations.