made that
silent protest against the iniquitous cruelty of his preachment. She had
dragged him backward into the living presence of his past.

She had not forgotten. She had been faithful to Drury Boldin while he
was working in a distant city. She was faithful to him still in that
Farthest Country. She had the genius of remembrance.

These were Doctor Crosson's ulterior thoughts while he harangued his
flock visibly and audibly. His thoughts had not needed the time their
telling requires. They gave him back his scenes in pictures, not in
words; in heartaches and heartbreaks and terrors and longings, not in
limping syllables that mock the vision with their ineptitude.

He felt anew what he had felt and seen, and he could not give any verve
to the peroration of his sermon. He could not even change it. It had
been effective when he had preached it previously. But now he parroted
with unconscious irony the phrases he had once so admired. He came to
the last word.

"And so, to repeat: How much more bitter, dearly beloved, are the
anguishes of the soul than any mere bodily distress! What are the
fleeting torments of this tenement of clay, mere bone and flesh, to the
soul's despair? Nothing, nothing."

His congregation felt a lack of warmth in his tone. His hand fell limply
on the Bible and the sermon was done. The only stir was one of relief at
its conclusion.

He gave out the final hymn, and he sat through it while the people
dragged it to the end. He gave forth the benediction "in the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost," and he made short work of
the dawdlers who waited to exchange stupidities with him. He took refuge
from his congregation in his study, locked the door, and gave himself up
to meditation.

Somehow pain had suddenly come to mean more to him than it had yet
meant. He had known it, groaned under it, lived it down, and let it go.
He had felt sorry for other people and got rid of their woes as best as
he could with the trite expressions in use, and had forgotten whether
they were hushed by health or by death.

And so he had let the old-fashioned hell go by with other dogmas out of
style. He had fashioned a new Hades to frighten people with, that they
might not find sin too attractive and imperilous.

Now he was suddenly convinced that if there must be hell, it must be
such as Dante set to rhyme and the old hard-shell preachers preached: a
region where flames sear and demons pluck at