As the President sat down and Vane rose to his feet, quite a tumult of mingled applause, “hear, hears,” hissings and hootings rose up from the strangely assorted audience.

Vane faced the half-delighted, half-angry throng with the perfect steadiness of a man who has decided upon a certain course and means to pursue it at all hazards. Curiosity reduced one portion of the audience to silence, and a respectful anticipation the other. In the sea of faces before him, Vane recognised several that were familiar to him. His father, Carol, Dora, Ernshaw and Rayburn were there as a matter of course. Several clerics, high and low, Anglican and Nonconformist, were dotted about the audience, some with folded arms and frowning brows as though they were expecting the worst of hérésies, others smiling in bland and undisguised contempt, believing that they had come to see one of their own cloth, who had already made himself an even more disagreeable subject of reflection to them than even the infidels in whose house the magic of Vane’s sudden fame had brought them together, do that which would make it impossible for him to again commit such an offence in the pulpit of an English church.

For a moment or two there was a hush of intense silence of mental suspense and expectation as Vane faced his audience and looked steadily about him before he began to speak, and when he did begin, the silence changed to an almost inaudible murmur and movement which is always the sign of relaxed tension among a large body of human beings.

His first words were as unconventional as they were unexpected.

“Brother men and sister women; some of you, like myself, believe in God, in the existence of an all-wise, over-ruling Providence, which shapes the destinies of mankind, and yet at the same time allows each man and woman to work out his or her own earthly destinies for good or ill, as he or she chooses by reason or desire, by inclination or passion and we also believe in the efficacy of the sacrifice which was consummated on Calvary. There are others listening to me now to whom these beliefs are merely idle dreams, the inventions of enthusiasts, or the deliberate frauds of those who brought them into being and imposed them by physical force upon those who had no means of resistance, for their own personal and political ends.

“I have not come here to make any attempt to settle these differences between us. As a priest of the Church, I wish, with all my soul, that I could. As a man, I know that I can’t. But there is one ground at least upon which we can meet as friends, whatever our opinions may be as regards religion and theology two terms which, I think every one here will agree with me, are very far from meaning the same thing.”

“As a priest of the Church, I cannot hear that without protest!” cried a tall, high-browed, thin-featured, deep-eyed clergyman, springing to his feet in the middle of the hall. “If theology, the Science of God, does not mean the same thing as religion, the word religion has no meaning. More dangerous, I had almost said more disgraceful, words never fell from the lips of a man calling himself a priest of the Church of God.”

The last sentence was spoken in a high, shrill voice, which rose above the angry murmurs which came from all parts of the hall, but these Vane silenced in a moment, by holding up his hand and smiling as some of the audience had never seen a man smile before.

“I am glad,” he went on, in slow, very distinct tones, “that such an objection has been raised so early by a brother priest. It will help us to understand each other more clearly, and so I will try to answer him at once. The difference between religion and theology is the difference between the whole and the part; but theology is not a science, for there is no science of the Infinite. It is only the study of the many different conceptions which men of all nations and races have formed as to the nature of the over-ruling Power of the universes of all the attempts to solve the insoluble and to answer the unanswerable.

“There are two sayings, one Arabian and one Italian, which I hope I may quote without offence. One is, ’God gives us the outline of the picture, we fill it in. We cannot change the outline, but we are responsible for every stroke of the brush. In the end God judges the picture.’

“The other was the saying of a famous Italian artist, ’Children and fools should not see work half done.’

“Now let us grant for the sake of argument that there is a Creator, and therefore a scheme of creation. How much can we, dwellers upon a world which is but as a grain of sand washed hither and thither by the tide-flow of the ocean of Infinity, know about the workings of the Will in obedience to which, as some of us believe, that tide ebbs and flows through the uncounted ages of Eternity, and over the measureless expanse of Infinity? Faced with such a colossal problem as this, must we not all confess ourselves to be but as children and fools, since we do not and cannot see even half of the work, but only an immeasurably tiny fragment of it? For this reason I feel justified in saying that those who deny the existence of the Divine Architect of the universe and those who claim to know all about His plans, are, at least, equally mistaken.

“But that, although I have been glad of the opportunity of saying it, is not quite what I came here to say, and, therefore, we will drop that part of the subject. Last Sunday I preached a sermon which I say it both with wonder and gladness has produced a very much wider and deeper effect than I could have hoped it would do. That was a sermon preached in a Christian church to a congregation, which, at least, professed and called itself Christian. To-night I am going to ask you to listen to a secular sermon preached from the same text. It will be very brief, because I know that you have a custom, and a very good one, of following discourses with discussion, and as I am going to raise a few distinctly controversial subjects, I want to leave plenty of our available time over for the discussion.

“The theme of my sermon last Sunday at St. Chrysostom’s may be summed up in one word Honesty. The essence of the Sermon on the Mount is just honesty. I suppose everyone here has read it, and therefore you will remember that from beginning to end there is not a word of dogma in it. In other words it is absolutely untheological. Perhaps this fact, a very important one, has never struck some of you before. When the Master preached that sermon, he, as I believe, deliberately left out every reference to dogma or doctrine, creed or church, so that men, whatever their belief, their nation or their race, could equally accept it as a universal rule of life and conduct.

“Some of us here believe in miracles, some do not. I do, and, so believing, I think that the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest of all miracles. It is a greater thing to preach a doctrine to which all honest men, coming whithersoever they may from the ends of the earth, will and must subscribe if they are honest a doctrine which is true for all time and for all men, than to cleanse the leper or to raise the dead to life.

“I will ask you to let me put this point in another way, and in a certainly more attractive form. Let me read you the expression of this universal truth in the words of two English poets separated from each other by more than two hundred years of time and many mountain ridges and deep valleys of changing thought and opinion:

“Father of all! in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jéhovah, Jove, or Lord!

“Thou great First Cause, least understood,
Who all my sense confined
To know but this, that Thou art good,
And that myself am blind.

“Yet gave me, in this dark estate,
To see the good from ill;
And, binding nature fast in fate,
Left free the human will.

“Those lines are from Pope’s immortal poem ‘The Universal Prayer’; these are from Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Hymn Before Action.’

“High lust and froward bearing,
Proud heart, rebellious brow
Deaf ear and soul uncaring,
We seek Thy mercy now!
The sinner that forswore Thee,
The fool that passed Thee by,
Our times are known before Thee
Lord, grant us strength to die!

“For those who kneel beside us
At altars not Thine own,
Who lack the lights that guide us,
Lord, let their faith atone!
If wrong we did to call them,
By honour bound they came;
Let not Thy wrath befall them,
But deal to us the blame!

“Those, perhaps, are the most solemn and deep-meaning words that have been written or spoken since Jesus of Nazareth preached the Sermon on the Mount, and the inner sense, as I read it, is the same. In life, in death, be honest with yourself, with your brother-man and your sister-woman, and with your God if you believe in one.

“Last Sunday in the pulpit I quoted the words of Colonel Ingersoll, ’God cannot afford to damn an honest man.’ That phrase has always seemed to me a marvellous mixture of blasphemy, ignorance, and sound common sense. From my point of view it is blasphemous, because it is the utterance of the atom trying to understand the universe. It is ignorant, because it is impossible for that human atom who uttered it to form any adequate conception of the infinitely great whole of which he was an infinitely small part. And yet, humanly speaking, it is the soundest and hardest of common sense. If God is honest He must respect honesty, no matter whether it is the honesty of belief, or of disbelief, always supposing that the belief and the disbelief are honest.

“The man who calls himself a Christian and does not conduct his daily life in accordance with the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, is one of two things a fool who cannot understand the meaning of plain words, or a knave, who, for many reasons, which most of my hearers will understand, pretends to be that which he is not. I may remind you here that knavery is not by any means confined to the limits of what is conventionally termed criminality. For every crime that puts a man or a woman into prison, there are a hundred others committed in every-day life with absolute impunity, and yet they are just as serious, and they merit a similar if not a heavier punishment than those which the law punishes with social degradation and the miseries of penal servitude.

“I wonder whether it has occurred to any of you who are listening to me now whether you are Christians, professed or real, atheists or agnostics to ask yourselves if, under the present conditions of what we are pleased to call civilization, an honest world would be possible, and that, I may say, is just the same thing as asking whether Christians can or cannot live their lives in accordance with the teachings of Him who went about doing good? Of course we all call ourselves honest, and some of us really believe that we are. At any rate, most of us would feel very much insulted if any one else told us that we were not. But are we? Let us put our pride in our pockets for a moment and try to answer that pregnant question. Honesty, like many other terms, of which immorality is one, has, through its conventional use, acquired a very restricted and therefore a quite unreal meaning. We have, by some vicious process of thought, got accustomed to call a man or a woman who transgresses the social law in a certain direction immoral, and in the same way we have come to apply the word dishonesty to practices which mean stealing or the attempt to steal property of a concrete form.

“But I think you will all agree with me that both these words have come to be used in a sense which is so narrow, that it destroys their original meaning. For every man or woman who transgresses the social law and is therefore called immoral of course after being found out there are a hundred or more who break the moral law every hour of their waking lives. All of you, no doubt, possess bibles. Read the 27th and 28th verses of the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew, and you will understand what I mean.

“But there is another immorality than this, and, as I believe, a greater immorality, for this, so far as it concerns our sister women, is often not immorality at all. It is the surrender of a feeble nature to a pitiless necessity, the necessity to live, the only alternative, in too many cases, to self-murder. There is another immorality infinitely worse than this, which when, as we Christians believe, the hosts of men are ranged before the Bar of Eternal Justice will spell damnation, hopeless and irrevocable, and that is the immorality which means a dishonesty that deliberately deceives not always for the purpose of gain, for this kind of dishonesty is generally practised by those whom, to put it plainly, it would not pay to steal.

“A French philosopher once said that there is that within the heart of every man which, if known, would make his dearest friend hate him. That, I am afraid, is true, not only of men but of women. It is not the fault of the men or the women; it is due simply to artificial conditions of life and to the individual ignorance and stupidity which make reform impossible. Until what we call civilised and Christian Society can make up its mind to conduct its personal, its national, and its international affairs on the broad and simple lines laid down in the Sermon on the Mount, no man can afford to be quite honest. In other words, if Christendom would be really Christian, it would also be honest; honest with itself and with its God, with the God whom it now only pretends to worship, saying loudly, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and doing not the things which He saith!

“It would not matter and this I say with all reverence and with a full sense of my responsibilities as a Priest of the Church it would not matter whether Society called itself Christian or not, as long as it was honest.”

“That is absolute atheism and blasphemy!” exclaimed a well-known Nonconformist preacher, springing up and holding his hands out towards the platform. “The man who could speak those words cannot be either a Christian or a minister of the Gospel. I call upon the speaker to be honest now, honest with himself and us, and confess that he is not a Christian, and therefore unworthy to be a preacher of any Christian creed.”

A storm of mingled expressions of approval and assent burst out from every part of the crowded hall. Vane stood immovable and listened to it with a smile hovering round his lips. The President rose at once and said:

“I must remind the reverend gentleman who has made this interruption an interruption which, if made in a church or a chapel, would render him liable to imprisonment is entirely out of order. We welcome discussion, but it must come in its proper place. We cannot tolerate interruption, and we won’t.”

The rebuke was too just and too pointed not to be felt, even by the bigot who had deserved it. He sat down, and when the thunder of applause which greeted the President’s brief but pregnant interlude had died away, Vane went on without a trace of emotion in his voice:

“I cannot say that I am sorry that that interruption was made, because it makes it possible for me to ask whether there is really any difference between Christianity and honesty?”

Again he was interrupted, this time by half the audience getting on to its feet and cheering. The other portion sat still, and the units of it began to look at each other very seriously. Vane was, in fact, bringing the matter down to a most uncomfortably fine point. He made a slight motion with his hand, and his hearers, having already recognised the true missionary, or bringer of messages to the souls of men, instantly became silent and expectant.

“If Christianity is not honest, or if honesty is not, for all practical purposes, the same thing as Christianity, then so much the worse for Christianity or for honesty as the case may be. A religion which is not honest is not a religion. Honesty which is not a religion that is to say a tie between man and man is not honest. That, I think, is a dilemma from which there is no escape.”

There was another burst of applause, this time almost universal, which the President did not attempt to check. A few members of the audience looked even more uncomfortable than before, but by the time Vane was able to make himself heard again it was quite plain that the great majority of his audience, believers and unbelievers, were heart and soul with him.

“That,” he went on, with a laughing note in his voice, “shows me that we have got on to friendly territory at last, on to the ground of our common humanity. I said just now, before my friend in the audience diverted my attention to another and very important point, most of us would feel very much insulted if anyone told us that we were not honest. We should jump to the conclusion that such a statement was the same thing as calling us thieves or swindlers; but that is not the question. Honesty is not by any means confined to commercial dealings. It has a social meaning and a very far reaching one too, for, as a matter of fact, the man or woman who deceives another in the smallest detail of life is not strictly honest, because it is impossible to be strictly honest without at the same time being strictly truthful.

“It has been said that half the truth is worse than a lie. It is, I think, a greater sin to tell half the truth than a deliberate and comprehensive lie, for it is possible to tell a lie with an honest, if mistaken purpose; and yet the business of the modern world is mainly conducted by half-truths. Everyone tries to deceive the person he is doing business with to some extent. It is not altogether his fault, for he knows that if he didn’t do so, the other man would deceive him, and so get the better of the bargain. That is the way of the world, as it is called, and a very bad way, and, as we believe, a very unchristian way it is.

“Still, it is impossible to blame the trader and the man of commerce for this. The real fault, the real sin, is not individual, it is collective the guilt properly belongs to Society. Men do not descend to these mean subterfuges and these despicable trickeries merely to make money, to pile on hundreds on hundreds and thousands on thousands. In their hearts all the best of them despise the methods by which they are forced to earn their incomes and make their fortunes; but the penalties which the laws of Society place on honesty are so tremendous that a really honest man will deliberately sacrifice his own honour rather than incur them. That is a very serious thing to say, and yet it is the literal truth, and the most pitiable part of the matter is that he commits these sins of unscrupulousness and dishonesty chiefly for the sake of his wife and children. The social penalties of honesty would fall most heavily on them. Their houses and their luxurious furniture, their carriages and their horses, their costly clothing and precious jewels would be theirs no longer; in a word, they would become poor, and Society has no place for people if they are poor, whatever else they may be.

“To put the question in another way, a tiger seeking for its prey and slaying it ruthlessly when it has found it is not a pleasant subject for contemplation, but before we blame the tiger we must remember that somewhere at home in the jungle there is a Mrs. Tiger and some little tigers who have to be fed somehow. The tiger’s methods of killing for food are merciful in comparison with the methods of many men who already possess enough to give the ordinary comforts of decent life to those who are depending upon them, and yet go on deceiving and swindling, for deception in commerce is swindling, in order to obtain those superfluities of life which are absolutely necessary to keep up what is called position in Society.

“I do not say that wealth and comfort would be impossible in an honest world; there is no reason why they should be, but they would be gained in greater moderation and by different methods. For instance, if Society could and would change its standards of honesty and morality, the force of public opinion would soon make crime impossible, save among the mentally and morally diseased, who would, of course, be treated in the same merciful but relentless fashion as we now treat what we call our criminal lunatics.

“It will of course be quite impossible for me to treat this vast subject in anything like detail in a single address, and therefore I shall content myself with having thrown out these few suggestions, and leave the development of it to those who will, I hope, take part in the discussion.

“But one word more in conclusion. Your President has called me a missionary, a missionary to the rich. That is the mission which I have taken on myself, and therefore I gladly accept the title, all the more gladly because it comes from one who, while he differs from me absolutely on every theological point which I believe essential to salvation, has proved his faith by giving me that title and by uttering a prayer which has, I hope, already been heard by Him to whom all hearts are open, and from whom no secrets are hid.”

When Vane sat down there burst out a storm of applause, through which not a few hisses, mostly from clerical lips, pierced shrilly. Yet, few and simple as his words had been, it was quite evident that they had gone straight to the hearts of the majority of his audience.

The President rose when the applause subsided, and, after a brief speech, in which he frankly admitted that if all teachers of the Christian faith were like Vane Maxwell, and if there were no other sort of Christianity than his, there would be very little of what too many Christians call infidelity in the world, gave the usual notice that the meeting was now open for discussion.

Then the storm burst over Vane’s devoted head. By a sort of tacit agreement the Secularists left the attack to the clergy. As a matter of fact they had practically no cause for dispute with Vane. On the contrary they delighted in the frankness of his expression of his belief, and the uncompromising fashion in which he had denounced and repudiated that unchristian form of Christianity which, as the President had put it, was responsible through its hypocrisy and double-dealing with God and man for all the honest unbelief, and all the scoffing and scepticism, which it pretended to deplore. So the Secularists sat still and silent, enjoying hugely the series of bitter attacks that were made on Vane by cleric after cleric, Anglican and Nonconformist, for close on a couple of hours. Vane took it all very quietly, now smiling and now looking grave almost to sadness, and when the last speaker had exhausted his passion and his eloquence, and the President asked him to reply, he got up and said in slow but grave and very clear tones:

“I have no reply to make to what I have heard, save to say that I have heard with infinite sorrow from the lips of clergymen of every denomination and shade of opinion a series of statements which not one of them could justify from the teachings of Him who preached the Sermon on the Mount. There is no other criterion of Christian faith and doctrine than is to be found in the New Testament, and from the first verse in the Gospel according to St. Matthew to the last in Revelations there is not one word which contradicts what I have spoken, or which supports what they have said.

“That is a serious thing to say, but I say it with full knowledge and with perfect faith. I mean no personal offence. That would of course be impossible under the circumstances; but it is also quite impossible for me, after saying what I have said here and elsewhere, to argue seriously with those who are by profession teachers and preachers of the revelation of Jesus Christ of the message of God to man by God incarnate in the flesh and who are yet able to reconcile in their own souls the sayings of Jesus of Nazareth and the doings of twentieth century Christianity. We have heard the words infidel and infidelity used many times to-night. There is no infidelity in honest unbelief; and, sorrowfully as I say it, I still feel it my duty to say it, that there is more real infidelity inside the churches than there is outside, for the worst and most damnable of all infidelities is that which says with its lips ‘Lord, Lord,’ and does not with its heart and its hands do that which He saith.”

There was a little silence, a silence of astonishment on the one part of the audience and of absolute stupefaction on the part of the other. Then the storm of applause broke out once more, but there was no hissing mingled with it this time. About a score of black-clad figures rose pale and silent amidst the cheering throng and walked out. Their example was followed by most of the West End Christians, including her ladyship of Canore and her husband and daughters, whose curiosity had been more than amply satisfied. The cheers changed from enthusiasm to irony as the irregular procession moved towards the doors, and an irreverent Secularist at the back of the hall jumped on his seat and shouted, with an unmistakable Old Street accent:

“Got a bit more than you came for, eh? Hope you’ve enjoyed your lordly selves. Don’t forget to say your prayers to-night. You want a lot of converting before you’ll be Christians. I’ve ’alf a mind to put up one for you to-night myself, blowed if I ’aven’t.”

Then the applause changed to laughter, hearty and good-humoured, and when the President had proposed the usual vote of thanks to the lecturer, and Vane had accepted his invitation to give a series of addresses at the halls of the Society throughout the country, the most memorable meeting on record at the Hall of Science came to an end.