She stood silent, her face illumined, as Vance had seen it when she looked up to the sky from the porch at Crampton. She was certainly a beautiful old woman, he thought; and he felt that the people about him thought so too. But what did they make of her exordium? They were silent; he felt that their judgment was suspended. But there was the hideous slur of her pronunciation, blurring and soiling every word. …
She was hurrying on now, swept along on the full flood of revelation, pleading with them to see what to her was so plain, so divinely visible. The point was, she argued, that God wasn’t just here or there, in lecture halls, in churches, and on the lips of preachers. He wasn’t even just up in the sky, as holy people used to think. They knew now that the marvellous star-jewelled heavens were just atoms, like all the rest of the universe … all those wonderful stars that people in old times used to believe were the crowns of the angels! They knew now that God was a million times greater and bigger than all that, because He was in men’s souls; He was always creating, but also He was always being created. The quaint old idea of the Mass, of the priest turning bread into God, that seemed to enlightened modern minds so ignorant and barbarous, had something in it after all, if you looked at it as the symbol of the wonderful fact that man is always creating God; that wherever a great thought is born, or a noble act performed, there God is created. That is the real Eucharist, the real remaking of Divinity. If you knew God, you knew that: you knew you had in your soul the power to make Him … that every one of us, in the old Bible phrase, may be a priest after the Order of Melchizedek. … Talk of the equality of man with man! Why, we’d got way past that. The new Revelation wasn’t going to rest till it had taught the equality of man with God. …
But how, she pressed on, was this wonderful equality, this God-making, to be achieved? Why, in the simplest way in the world: just by loving enough. Love was Christ’s law; and Christ was just one of the great God-makers. And what she wanted of everybody was to be like Christ: to be Christ. What the world needed was Christs by the million—for the millions. What it needed was a standardized God. No caste religions any more! No limited God for the privileged and cultured, no priesthood, no preaching for rich pew-owners. Why, you could all of you go home now and be your own Christ, and make your own God, just by the simple recipe of loving enough. You didn’t even have to …
The flood of words poured on and on over Vance’s bent head. He did not want to look at her now: her prophetic gestures, her persuasive smiles, repelled him. Her intonations were unctuous, benedictory; she had become identified with her apostolic role. Behind the swaying surging prophetess he still felt the rich-hearted woman in whose warmth his childhood had unfolded; it was bitter to him that the people about him would never know her as she really was. He was already prepared to hate them for smiling at her rambling periods. He could have smiled at them himself if his heart had been less sore; but no one else should do so. He looked about him suspiciously, trembling to detect derision; but he saw only a somewhat blank expectancy. It was all very well, the faces about him seemed to say; but they had heard that kind of thing before. Something else must surely be coming. This inspired teacher was going to tell them the secret they yearned for. But apparently there was no other secret; nothing came but a crescendo of adjurations to love everybody and everything, to be all love, all Christ-likeness, all God-creativeness. …
Mrs. Scrimser paused. The room was pervaded by the peculiar sense of uncertainty of an audience which has lost touch with the speaker. The silence seemed to ask: What next? Vance knew. Though he had never before heard his grandmother speak in public he had often gone with her to the meetings which she frequented in her incessant quest for new religious sensations, and he knew the exact moment at which the orator’s appeal, having reached its culmination, held itself ready for an emotional response. It was the moment when here and there someone stood up and gasped out devout ejaculations; when a hymn burst spontaneously from hundreds of throats; when the listeners fell on their knees in audible prayer.
Nothing of all this happened. Mrs. Scrimser stood motionless. The weight of her heavy body bearing on her outspread palms, as she rested them on the table before her, she watched for the tide of emotion to rise. It did not rise, but the audience did. There was an uncomfortable lull, followed by a discreet rustling of chairs. A “very beautiful,” launched by Mrs. Spear from the platform, drifted languidly down the room. A very few of the more determined “Seekers” pressed back against the tide to Mrs. Scrimser; the others, somewhat too hastily, poured through the doors of the dining room toward the glimpse of a buffet supper. … As Vance passed out, he caught sight of Mr. Spear’s alert head between two retreating backs, and heard him say in his thin crackling voice: “Isn’t there some mistake about this? Seems to me I’ve met Mrs. Scrimser’s God before—and Mrs. Scrimser too.”
XXXVIII
The next morning Vance went early to Mrs. Mennenkoop’s. He wanted to see his grandmother before she began to be besieged by the prophets and seers who had been such a trial to Mrs. Weston when the Scrimsers came to live under
