The rigid submission of generations of the Calvinistic conscience which presumed to ask no justice from its God and gave praise as for mercy shown for all things which were not damnation, and which against damnation's self dared not lift its voice in rebellion, had so far influenced the very building of his being that the revolt of reason in his brain filled him with gloomy terror. There was the appeal of despair on his face as he looked at Baird.

"Your life, your temperament have given you a wider horizon than mine,"

he said. "I have never been in touch with human beings. I have only read religious books--stern, pitiless things. Since my boyhood I have lived in terror of the just God--the just God--who visits the sins of the fathers upon the children even to the third and fourth generation. I--Baird--"

his voice dropping, his face pallid, "I have _hated_ Him. I keep His laws, it is my fate to preach His word--and I cower before Him as a slave before a tyrant, with hatred in my heart."

"Good God!" Baird broke forth, involuntarily. The force of the man's desperate feeling, his horror of himself, his tragic truthfulness, were strange things to stand face to face with. He had never confronted such a thing before, and it shook him.

Latimer's face relaxed into a singular, rather pathetic smile.

"Good God!" he repeated; "we all say that--I say it myself. It seems the natural human cry. I wonder what it means? It surely means something--something."

John Baird looked at him desperately.

"You are a more exalted creature than I could ever be," he said. "I am a poor thing by comparison; but life struck the wrong note for you. It was too harsh. You have lived among the hideous cruelties of old doctrines until they have wrought evil in your brain."

He stood up and threw out his arms with an involuntary gesture, as if he were flinging off chains.

"Ah, they are not true! They are not true!" he exclaimed. "They belong to the dark ages. They are relics of the days when the upholders of one religion believed that they saved souls by the stake and the rack and thumbscrew. There were men and women who did believe it with rigid honesty. There were men and women who, believing in other forms, died in torture for their belief. There _is_ no God Who would ask such demoniac sacrifice. We have come to clearer days. Somewhere--somewhere there is light."

"You were born with the temperament to see its far-off glimmer even in your darkest hour," Latimer said. "It is for such as you to point it out to such as I am. Show it to me--show it to me every moment if you can!"

Baird put his hand on the man's shoulder again.

"The world is surging away from it--the chained mind, the cruelty, the groping in the dark," he said, "as it surged away from the revengeful Israelitish creed of 'eye for eye and tooth for tooth' when Christ came.

It has taken centuries to reach, even thus far; but, as each century passed, each human creature who yearned over and suffered with his fellow has been creeping on dragging, bleeding knees towards the light. But the century will never come which will surge away from the Man who died in man's agony for men. In thought of Him one may use reason and needs no faith."

The germ of one of the most moving and frequently quoted of Baird's much-discussed discourses sprang--he told his friends afterwards--from one such conversation, and was the outcome of speech of the dead girl Margery. On a black and wet December day he came into his study, on his return from some parish visits, to find Latimer sitting before the fire, staring miserably at something he held in his hand. It was a little daguerrotype of Margery at fifteen.

"I found it in an old desk of mine," he said, holding it out to Baird, who took it and slightly turned away to lean against the mantel, as he examined it.

The child's large eyes seemed to light up the ugly shadows of the old-fashioned mushroom hat she wore, the soft bow of her mouth was like a little Love's, she bloomed with an angelic innocence, and in her straight sweet look was the unconscious question of a child-woman creature at the dawn of life.

John Baird stood looking down at the heavenly, tender little face.

There was a rather long silence. During its passing he was far away. He was still far away when at length an exclamation left his lips. He did not hear his words himself--he did not remember Latimer, or notice his quick movement of surprise.

"How sweet she was!" he broke forth. "How sweet she was! How sweet!"

He put his hand up and touched his forehead with the action of a man in a dream.

"Sometimes," he said, low and passionately, "sometimes I am sick with longing for her--_sick_!"

"You!" Latimer exclaimed. "_You_ are heart-sick for her!"

Baird came back. The startled sound in the voice awoke him. He felt himself, as it were, dragged back from another world, breathless, as by a giant's hand. He looked up, dazed, the hand holding the daguerrotype dropping helplessly by his side.

"It is not so strange that it should come to that," he said. "I seem to know her so well. I think," there was a look of sharp pain on his face--"I think I know the pitiful childlike suffering her dying eyes held." And the man actually shuddered a little.

"I know it--I know it!" Latimer cried, and he let his forehead drop upon his hands and sat staring at the carpet.

"I have heard and thought of her until she has become a living creature,"

John Baird said. "I hear of her from others than yourself. Miss Starkweather--that poor girl from the mills, Susan Chapman--you yourself--keep her before me, alive. I seem to know the very deeps of her lovingness--and understand her. Oh, that she should have _died_!" He turned his face away and spoke his next words slowly and in a lowered voice. "If I had found her when I came back free--if I had found her here, living--we two might have been brothers."

"No, no!" Latimer cried, rising. "You--it could not----"

He drew his hand across his forehead and eyes.

"What are we saying?" he exclaimed, stammeringly. "What are we thinking of? For a moment it seemed as if she were alive again. Poor little Margery, with her eyes like blue flowers, she has been dead years and years and years."

It was not long after this that the Reverend John Baird startled a Boston audience one night by his lecture, "Repentance." In it he unfolded a new passionate creed which produced the effect of an electric shock.

Newspapers reported it, editorials discussed it, articles were written upon it in monthly magazines. "Repentance is too late," was the note his deepest fervour struck with virile, almost terrible, intensity. "Repent before your wrong is done."

"Repentance comes too late," he cried. "We say a man saves his soul by it--_his_ soul! We are a base, cowardly lot. Our own souls are saved--yes! And we hug ourselves and are comforted. But what of the thing we have hurt--for no man ever lost his soul unless he lost it by the wound he gave another--by inflicting in some other an agony? What of the one who has suffered--who has wept blood? I repent and save _myself_; but repentance cannot undo. The torture has been endured--the tears of blood shed. It is not to God I must kneel and pray for pardon, but to that one whose helplessness I slew, and, though he grant it me, he still has been slain."

The people who sat before him stirred in their seats; some leaned forward, breathing quickly. There were those who turned pale; here and there a man bent his head and a woman choked back a sob, or sat motionless with streaming eyes. "Repentance is too late--except for him who buys hope and peace with it. A lifetime of it cannot _undo_." The old comfortable convention seemed to cease to be supporting. It seemed to cease to be true that one may wound and crush and kill, and then be admirable in escaping by smug repentance. It seemed to cease to be true that humanity need count only with an abstract, far-off Deity Who can easily afford to pardon--that one of his poor myriads has been done to death. It was all new--strange--direct--and each word fell like a blow from a hammer, because a strong, dramatic, reasoning creature spoke from the depths of his own life and soul. In him Humanity rose up an awful reality, which must itself be counted with--not because it could punish and revenge, but because the laws of nature cried aloud as a murdered man's blood cries from the ground.

As Baird crossed the pavement to reach his cab, the first night he delivered this lecture, a man he knew but slightly stepped to his side and spoke to him.

"Mr. Baird," he said, "will you drive me to the station?"

Baird turned and looked at him in some surprise. There were cabs enough within hailing distance. The man was well known as a journalist, rather celebrated for his good looks and masculine charm. He was of the square-shouldered, easy-moving, rich-coloured type; just now his handsome eye looked perturbed.

"I am going away suddenly," he said, in answer to Baird's questioning expression. "I want to catch the next train. I want you to see me off--_you_."

"Let us get in," was Baird's brief reply. He had an instant revelation that the circumstance was not trivial or accidental.

As the door closed and the cab rolled away his companion leaned back, folding his arms.

"I had an hour to pass before keeping an appointment," he said. "And I dropped in to hear you. You put things before a man in a new way. You are appallingly vivid. I am not going to keep my appointment. It is not easy _not_ to keep it! I shall take the train to New York and catch to-morrow's steamer to Liverpool. Don't leave me until you have seen me off. I want to put the Atlantic Ocean and a year of time between myself and----"

"Temptation," said Baird, though he scarcely realised that he spoke.

"Oh, the devil!" exclaimed the other man savagely. "Call her that if you like--call me that--call the whole thing that! She does not realise where we are drifting. She's a lovely dreamer and has not realised that we are human. I did not allow myself to realise it until the passion of your words brought me face to face with myself. I am repenting in time. Don't leave me! I can't carry it through to-night alone."

John Baird leaned back in the corner of the carriage and folded his arms also. His heart was leaping beneath them.

"Great God!" he said, out of the darkness. "I wish someone had said such words to me--years ago--and not left me afterwards! Years ago!"

"I thought so," his companion answered, briefly. "You could not have painted it with such flaming power--otherwise."

They did not speak again during the drive. They scarcely exchanged a dozen words before they parted. The train was in the station when they entered it.

Five minutes later John Baird stood upon the platform, looking after the carriages as they rolled out noisily behind trailing puffs of smoke and steam.

He had asked no questions, and, so far as his own knowledge was concerned, this was the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story.

But he knew that there had been a story, and there might have been a tragedy. It seemed that the intensity of his own cry for justice and mercy had arrested at least one of the actors in it before the curtain fell.