Page:Held to Answer (1916).pdf/496



the Monday morning papers played up the "Address to the People", in the evening John noticed that his name had slipped off the front page. This was at once a relief and a bitterness. It told him that he was done for; that, as a matter of news, he was only a corpse waiting for the funeral pyre. That pyre was a matter to which Elder Burbeck was attending, assisted by a committee of fellow zealots—male and female—who were industriously conducting a house-to-house canvass of the entire membership of All People's during the hours between Sunday at one and Monday night at eight. Despite the lofty mood of self-sacrifice into which the man had worked himself, the knowledge of all this busy bell-ringing and its sinister purpose operated irritatingly on the skin of Hampstead. It made his flesh creep with annoyance that grew toward anger.

But in the midst of these creepings, a significant thing happened. The Reverend William Dudley Rohan, pastor of the largest, the richest, and by material standards the most influential protestant congregation in the city, came in person to call on Hampstead, to shake him by the hand and say: "Your address had an apostolic ring to it. I believe in you sincerely."

In John's mail that afternoon there came from Father Ansley, an influential priest of the Roman Catholic communion, a letter to similar effect.

Moreover, as the activity of Elder Burbeck developed,