CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 30
Soon after this, the bishop and Dr. Bruce invited Henry Maxwell of Raymond to come to Chicago to speak to a remarkable gathering at the hall of the Settlement. He brought several people from the First Church with him. It is doubtful if Mr. Maxwell ever faced such an audience in his life. It is quite certain that the city of Raymond did not contain such a variety of humanity.
The audience was respectfully attentive as he told in the simplest language he could command some of the results of obedience to the pledge as it had been taken in Raymond. As Mr. Maxwell went on, faces all over the hall leaned forward in a way seldom seen in church audiences or anywhere except among workingmen or the people of the street when once they are thoroughly aroused.
The bishop and Dr. Bruce, looking on, saw many faces that represented scorn of creeds, hatred of the social order, desperate narrowness, and selfishness. They marveled that so soon under the influence of the Settlement life, the softening process already lightened the hearts of many who had grown bitter from neglect and indifference.
It was the custom at the Settlement for a free discussion to follow any open meeting of this kind. So when Mr. Maxwell finished and sat down, the bishop rose and made the announcement that any man in the hall was at liberty to ask questions, to speak out his feelings, or to declare his convictions, always with the understanding that whoever took part was to observe the simple rules that governed parliamentary bodies and obey the three-minute rule, which would be enforced on account of the numbers present.
As soon as the bishop sat down, two men began to talk at once. The bishop called them to order and indicated which was entitled to the floor. The man who remained standing began eagerly.
“This is the first time I was ever in here, and maybe it’ll be the last. Fact is, I am about at the end of my string. I’ve tramped this city for work till I’m sick. I’d like to ask a question of the minister if it’s fair. May I?”
“By all means,” replied Mr. Maxwell quickly.
“This is my question.” The man leaned forward and stretched out a long arm. “I want to know what Jesus would do in my case. I haven’t had a stroke of work for two months. I’ve got a wife and three children, and I love them as much as if I was worth a million dollars. I’ve been living off a little earnings I saved up during the World’s Fair jobs I got. I’m a carpenter by trade, and I’ve tried every way I know to get a job. I want to work. I’ve got to live, and my wife and my children have got to live. But how? What would Jesus do?”
Mr. Maxwell sat there staring at the great sea of faces all intent on his, and no answer to this man’s question seemed possible. “O God!” his heart prayed. “What would Jesus do?”
At length Mr. Maxwell spoke. “Is there any man in the room, who is a Christian disciple, who has been in this condition and has tried to do as Jesus would do? If so, such a man can answer this question better than I can.”
There was a moment’s hush over the room, and then a man near the front of the hall slowly rose. He was an old man, and the hand he laid on the back of the bench in front of him shook as he spoke.
“I think I can safely say that I have many times been in just such a condition. I don’t know as I have always asked this question, ‘What would Jesus do?’ when I have been out of work, but I do know I have tried to be His disciple at all times. Yes,” the man went on, with a sad smile that was more pathetic than the younger man’s grim despair, “yes, I have begged, and I have been to charity institutions, and I have done everything when out of a job except steal and lie in order to get food and fuel. I don’t know as Jesus would have done some of the things I have been obliged to do for a living, but I know I have never knowingly done wrong when out of work.”
A silence followed, broken by a fierce voice from a large, black-haired, heavily bearded man who sat three seats from the bishop. The minute he spoke nearly every man in the hall leaned forward eagerly, anxious to hear what Carlsen, the Socialist leader, had to say.
“This is all bosh, to my mind,” began Carlsen. His great bristling beard shook with the deep inward anger of the man. “The whole of our system is at fault. What we call civilization is rotten to the core. We live in an age of trusts and combines and capitalistic greed that means death to thousands of innocent men, women, and children. Yet this city, and every other big city in this country, has its thousands of professed Christians who have all the luxuries and comforts, and who go to church Sundays and sing their hymns about giving all to Jesus and bearing the cross and following Him all the way and being saved! I don’t say that there aren’t good men and women among them, but let the minister who has spoken to us here tonight go into any one of a dozen aristocratic churches I could name and propose to the members to take any such pledge as the one he’s mentioned here tonight, and see how quick the people would laugh at him for a fool or a crank or a fanatic. I don’t look for any reform worth anything to come out of the churches. What we need is a system that starts from the common basis of socialism, founded on the rights of the common people—”
Carlsen was launching himself into a regular oration, when the man just behind him pulled him down unceremoniously. Carlsen subsided with several mutterings in his beard, while the next several speakers gave their opinions as to the cause of and solutions to the social ills in the city.
Finally, the bishop called time on the free-for-all and asked Rachel to sing.
When Rachel Winslow began to sing tonight at this Settlement meeting, she never prayed more deeply for results to come from her voice.
She chose the words, “Hark! The voice of Jesus calling, follow Me, follow Me!”
Henry Maxwell remembered his first night at the Rectangle in the tent when Rachel sang the people quiet. The effect was the same here. Surely this audience had never heard such a melody. How could it? The men who had drifted in from the street sat entranced by a voice that “back in the world” never could be heard by the common people because the owner of it would charge two or three dollars for the privilege. The song poured out through the hall as free and glad as if it were a foretaste of salvation itself.