Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/163

 *cast? How much good did it do to me? By the operation of the same law which brought that vagrant back to Jones's side with all the money, I with my distrust, might have been treated far differently.

Or so, at least, it seems to me, and I tell this incident as one which proves the reverence Jones had for the great natural law of love. For the chief count in the indictment respectability brought against him was that he had no reverence for law. To see and hear them when they said this, one would have supposed that a council or legislature had never been corrupted in the land. It used to amuse Jones to reflect that his literal acceptance of the fundamental principle of Christianity should have been such a novel and unprecedented thing that it instantly marked him out from all the other Christians and made him famous in Christendom.

XXVI

I say famous, and perhaps I mean only notorious, for in the beginning many of his townsmen meant it as a reflection, and not a tribute. Some of them said it was but an advertising dodge, a bit of demagogism, but as Jones applied the rule to everybody, other explanations had soon to be adopted, and after he had employed it about the City Hall for two years the situation became so desperate that something had to be done. Controversy was provoked, and for almost a decade, Toledo presented