With the greatest skill he contrived to use the old expressions while inflecting them with a fresh intention. At last, however, there could be no doubt as to his meaning. It was no longer Christianity that he preached, but a kind of bastard Buddhism. Up to that point in his career he had spoken of earthly affairs as a trial through which we must pass in order to attain to bliss in the Hereafter; but in his newer phase the things of the material world became entirely secondary.
Eternal rest, eternal joy, eternal peace: these were his main themes; and to the exhausted and nerve-racked population they had an attraction of the most subtle kind. The Reverend John was a psychologist like Nordenholt, though he worked in a narrower groove; and he well knew how to utilise the levers of the human consciousness. Eternal rest! What more attractive prospect could be held out to that toil-worn race?
Slowly, with the most gradual of transitions, he began to assume the mantle of a prophet; and with that phase new names began to emerge in his discourses. The Four Truths, the Middle Path, the Five Hindrances, Arahatship, Karma: these cropped up from time to time in sermons which were daily becoming wilder in their phraseology.
I have no wish to be unfair to the Reverend John. He was a fanatic; and no fanatic is entirely sane. I am sure, also, that in the earlier stages of his campaign he strove merely for the spiritual good of the people as he understood it. But it is necessary to say also that I believe he became crazed in the end; and that the ultimate effect of his preaching led us to the very edge of disaster. It is not for me to weigh or judge him; he preferred his visions to material safety; whilst my own mind is concerned more with the things of this earth than with what may come later.
His preaching now passed into a stage where even I could appreciate its dangerous character. More and more, his sermons took the form of belittlings of the material world; while the joys of eternal life were held up in comparison. It was not long until he was openly questioning whether our human existence was worth prolonging at all. Would it not be better, he asked, to throw off these shackles of the Flesh at once rather than live for a few years longer amid the sorrows and temptations of this world? Why not discard this earthly mantle and enter at once into Nirvana?
This appeared to me a mere preaching of suicide; but if his followers chose to adopt his suggestions, it seemed to me a matter for themselves. I had always regarded suicide as the backdoor out of life; though I had never underestimated the courage of those who turn its handle. Yet it seemed to me evidence of a certain want of toughness of fibre, a lack of fitness to survive; and, personally, I had no desire to retain in the world anyone who seemed unable to bear its strains.
His next phase of development, however, opened my eyes. By this time he had become a great power among the people. Many a king has been treated with less reverence than his followers showed to him. Crowds flocked to his meetings, standing thickly even when they stretched far beyond the reach of that magnificent voice. In the streets he was saluted as though he were a superhuman agent. There were attempts made to get him to touch the sick in the hope that he might heal them.
From afar, Nordenholt watched all this rising surge of emotion. In some ways, the two men resembled each other; but their motives were wide apart as the Poles. Both had their ideals, higher than the normal; but these ideals were in deadly antagonism to each other. Both, it is possible, were right; but the clash of right with right is the highest form of tragedy; and collision between them was inevitable.
“The Reverend John has been a great disappointment to me, Jack,” Nordenholt admitted to me one day. “That man has the makings of a great demagogue or a great saint in him; and it seems to me that the spin of the coin has gone against me, for I thought the saint would come uppermost. He isn’t as big as I thought he was. His head has been turned by all this adulation; and unless I am mistaken again we shall find him becoming a public danger before very long. He thinks he has his own work to do, preparing for the Kingdom of Heaven; and in doing that he seems to sweep aside all earthly affairs as trifles. He despises them. I don’t. To me, he seems to be like a child in a game who won’t abide by the rules. His heaven may be all right; but if it is to be attained by shirking one’s work on earth—not striving to live—it seems to me a poor business. I think life is important, or it wouldn’t exist; and I’m working to keep it in existence. He seems to believe it is of no value, if he really means what he says. We can’t agree, that’s evident.”
It was not long before the Reverend John’s campaign filled even my mind with apprehension. His style of preaching changed and grew more incoherent; his phraseology became wilder; and a minatory tone crept into his sermons. And the tremendous personality of the speaker, coupled with all the art of the orator, made even these obscure ravings powerful to influence the minds of his hearers.
He began to speak of curses from heaven upon a generation which had forgotten the right path. The Famine was a sign that all life was to be swept from the earth’s face. And thence he passed to the proposition that any struggling against the Famine was a hindrance to the
