Shall I go over the history of the hours of that night?how the man wandered from one to another of his old haunts,with a half-consciousness of bidding them farewell,--lanes and alleys and back-yards where the mill-hands lodged,--noting,with a new eagerness,the filth and drunkenness,the pig-pens,the ash-heaps covered with potato-skins,the bloated,pimpled women at the doors,with a new disgust,a new sense of sudden triumph,and,under all,a new,vague dread,unknown before,smothered down,kept under,but still there?It left him but once during the night,when,for the second time in his life,he entered a church.It was a sombre Gothic pile,where the stained light lost itself in far-retreating arches;built to meet the requirements and sympathies of a far other class than Wolfe's.
Yet it touched,moved him uncontrollably.The distances,the shadows,the still,marble figures,the mass of silent kneeling worshippers,the mysterious music,thrilled,lifted his soul with a wonderful pain.Wolfe forgot himself,forgot the new life he was going to live,the mean terror gnawing underneath.
The voice of the speaker strengthened the charm;it was clear,feeling,full,strong.An old man,who had lived much,suffered much;whose brain was keenly alive,dominant;whose heart was summer-warm with charity.He taught it to-night.He held up Humanity in its grand total;showed the great world-cancer to his people.Who could show it better?He was a Christian reformer;he had studied the age thoroughly;his outlook at man had been free,world-wide,over all time.His faith stood sublime upon the Rock of Ages;his fiery zeal guided vast schemes by which the Gospel was to be preached to all nations.
How did he preach it to-night?In burning,light-laden words he painted Jesus,the incarnate Life,Love,the universal Man:words that became reality in the lives of these people,--that lived again in beautiful words and actions,trifling,but heroic.Sin,as he defined it,was a real foe to them;their trials,temptations,were his.His words passed far over the furnace-tender's grasp,toned to suit another class of culture;they sounded in his ears a very pleasant song in an unknown tongue.He meant to cure this world-cancer with a steady eye that had never glared with hunger,and a hand that neither poverty nor strychnine-whiskey had taught to shake.In this morbid,distorted heart of the Welsh puddler he had failed.