in a seat well back in the church. Good was beside her.
Imrie's task had suddenly become far harder, yet even more imperative.
He hesitated no longer.

He cleared his throat and his eyes wandered, raptly, as of old, into
the dim vastness of the rafters. "_Think not that I am come to send
peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword_," he said
impressively. "Text taken from the Gospel according to St. Matthew,
tenth chapter, thirty-fourth verse."

He paused at that point, as he had paused Sundays without end, and the
congregation, as if at a signal, seemed to settle back and make itself
resignedly comfortable against the duty it faced. There was a subdued
but general coughing, and the whispering rustle of silks: then a calm
hush.

But the preacher had not uttered a dozen words before the expectant
quiet changed sensibly. It was not his words which caused the change,
but his tone. And it was not that his tone was dramatic, but that it was
not. The very fact that he spoke with a complete freedom from anything
histrionic presented a contrast which amazed.

But as the significance of the lesson he was drawing from the text
became clear to them, astonishment gave place to an almost ominous,
certainly an unsympathetic, attention.

Never in his career had he had more heedful listeners. As if magically,
the news seemed to have percolated to the most obtuse intelligences that
grave matters were transpiring. Once or twice there was a sibilant
inrush of breath from some auditor too dumfounded for control. But for
the rest there was utter silence. There was not a rustle nor a cough.
The congregation of St. Viateur's had changed its character. It was
playing a different role. It was as if an epicure had bitten caviar and
tasted quinine. It waited.

Meanwhile, the Reverend Arnold Imrie was recording his new-found belief
that the peace of Christ was not a complacent acceptance of earthly
misery, but a dynamic struggle against the few who dispossessed--or
would dispossess--the many; that the Man of Sorrows was a rebel,
seeking, not to bring men to heaven, but heaven to men; that he brought
a sword, sharp-pointed for the blood of injustice, for which, injustice,
terrified, crucified him; and he was asking, very simply but very
clearly, whether the charge of heretics that time had brought about a
change between preaching Christ and preaching dogma, was true.

He went calmly on, opening, though they never suspected it, the