Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/212

 *stand these people better, for, after all, the message of the Carpenter who came out of Nazareth was for the workers and the poor, and He had passionately thrown Himself on their side. It might have been suggested to that pastor who complained bitterly that his own pews were empty on Sunday evenings while the streets outside his church were crowded with people who for one evening at least were joyous and free from care, that the Master whom he served would have asked no better congregation than they and no better auditorium than the street.

But this pastor was used to making suggestions, not to receiving them; he was not of a mind as open as that one who actually came to me once to ask me how he could get the working men to hear him preach. He had not failed, he said, to go to them; he had advertised on a placard hung at the entrance of a factory where two thousand men were working that on a Monday at noon he would speak to them. They had known of him, for he had recently been celebrated in the newspapers as having inaugurated a crusade to close the cheap theaters, whose lurid melodramas,—I believe lurid is the word in that connection unless the melodramas are "novelized" and sold for a dollar and a half,—he said, were detrimental to morals, as no doubt they were. And so when he appeared, punctually, on that Monday noon, at the rendezvous appointed by his poster, the working men were ready and, when he stood up to preach to them, they received him with a deafening din, made by pounding on pieces of metal they had brought from the shop, so that the poor fel