e rough wind helped him by driving away all other folk afoot.
Northward he went, feeling, but seeing nothing, of the rolling waters.
Jack Shives with his caustic words came back to mind: "It's their
'fore-God duty to steal if their babies are hungry and they can't feed
them any other way." Jim had never seen these things before; now they
were the whole world; he had seen nothing else these slumming days. His
spiritual ferment was such that, one by one, all the texts he had read
came back as commentaries on this new world of terror. He recalled the
words of the Master: "Your Heavenly Father knoweth ye have need of these
things"; the fearful doom of those that "offend these little ones"; the
strict injunction to divide with the needy and care for the helpless;
and again, the words, "The Kingdom of heaven is within you"--not in a
vague, unplaced world after death, but here, now--and those who thought
that, by placating the custodians of costly edifices, they were laying
up "treasure in heaven" were blindly going to destruction.

He strode in the night with his brain awhirl. The old texts held for him
some new power: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,
and all these things shall be added into you"; and again, "The kingdom
of heaven is within you"; "Sell all that thou hast and give to the
poor." In vain he sought for inspired words that would reestablish the
happy land beyond the grave that his teachers had ever pictured in set
phrase. Yet every word of the Master pointed the other way. "_Here_";
"_now_"; and "_first within_" was the kingdom. And the hollowness of all
the rich man's preachment--that the poor must suffer patiently in hope
of a reward beyond the grave--was more and more a hideous stratagem as
in his mind arose together two portrait types: the pinched, sullen,
suffering face of the slums and the bloated, evil face to be found on
the boulevard.

The mockery of it horrified as the immensity of it all swamped him. He
had no mind, no equipment, for the subtleties of theology, and his head
was a whirl of maddening contradictions, till the memory of his mother's
simple devotion came like a cooling drink in his fever: "Never mind
trying to reason it all out; you can't do it; no one can. Only ask what
would the Master have done?" Yes, that was easy. "Feed the hungry,
clothe the naked, visit the sick"; and turning, he wheeled homeward. The
upheaval of all foundations seemed less dreadful. He could n